Pope Benedict’s point man for justice and peace issues on Wednesday issued the Vatican’s toughest criticism of Israel since the latest Mideast crisis began, calling Gaza a “big concentration camp.”
Cardinal Renato Martino, president of the Vatican’s Council for Justice and Peace, made his comments in an interview in the Italian online newspaper Il Sussidiario.net.
“Defenceless populations are always the ones who pay. Look at the conditions in Gaza: more and more, it resembles a big concentration camp,” Martino, whose informal title is Vatican “justice minister,” was quoted as saying. [continued…]
Israel’s three top cabinet ministers cannot agree on the best way to end the military operation in the Gaza Strip. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Ehud Barak want to reach a deal, with the help of the United States and Egypt, that will guarantee long-term quiet in the south and keep Hamas from getting stronger. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni prefers to end the operation now, without an agreement.
Meanwhile, Barak ordered the Israel Defense Forces yesterday to get ready for a significant expansion of its activities in Gaza, which would focus on bringing reserve forces into the enclave. The preparations for the next phase of Operation Cast Lead are underway as the government considers Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s cease-fire proposal.
The decision about whether to expand the Gaza operation will be made over the next few days, political sources in Jerusalem said. In the meantime, the political-security cabinet decided yesterday that military activity will remain at its current level and humanitarian aid to Gaza residents will be expanded. [continued…]
When thousands of heavily armed Israeli soldiers poured into the Gaza Strip on Saturday night, Hamas pulled back.
Rather than stand and fight against the Middle East’s strongest army, the Islamist movement opted for a tactical withdrawal, with its fighters melting away into the strip’s sprawling cities and refugee camps, according to Gaza residents and Israeli military analysts and officers.
Now, Hamas appears to be daring the Israeli troops to follow.
“They’re hitting here and there with antitank missiles and mortars. Overall, though, they’re not confronting the Israeli presence in Gaza,” said retired Gen. Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces. “They’re challenging the Israeli military to enter the built-up areas.” [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — No doubt the IDF would like its opponents to come out into the open and present themselves as easy targets. But as Hamas is denounced for using “human shields” it is likewise following the classic Maoist principle of guerilla warfare: The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue. And lest we forget — this is a defensive form of warfare; it really only works for those defending their own turf.
Israel has killed and wounded almost four thousand men, women and children so far in its assault on Gaza; it has entombed whole families together in the ruins of their homes. As I write these words, news is breaking that Israeli bombs have killed at least 40 civilians huddling in a UN school which they mistakenly thought would be safer than the homes from which Israel’s relentless barrage—and its deliberately terrorizing “warning” leaflets and prerecorded phone calls—had already driven them. (I still have one of the leaflets the Israelis dropped on besieged Beirut in 1982 and the language is exactly the same—“flee, flee for your lives!”). Mosques, schools, houses, apartment buildings, have all been brought down on the heads of those inside.
All this death and destruction comes supposedly in retaliation for rocket attacks that had not inflicted a single fatality inside Israel in over a year. What happened to “an eye for an eye?”
As horrific as the toll of dead and injured already is, the scale of Israel’s bombing, and its targeting of ambulances and medical and rescue crews—several doctors and paramedics have been killed or wounded so far—means that the true totals are actually unknown. Countless numbers of victims have bled to death in the streets or in the ruins of their smashed homes. Calls for help aren’t getting through Gaza’s phone networks, battered to pieces along with the rest of the civilian infrastructure—its water, sewage, electricity systems, all already crumbling as a result of the years of siege. The victims that are evacuated—as often, these days, in civilian cars as in the remaining ambulances—make it to hospitals that are overwhelmed; many will die that might have otherwise been saved. [continued…]
At least three rockets fired from Lebanon exploded in northern Israel today in the first such attack since Israel launched an assault in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip nearly two weeks ago.
Israel fired artillery shells into Lebanon to retaliate for the rockets, which landed after daybreak around the town of Nahariya. Israeli medical workers said one of the rockets from Lebanon caused light shrapnel wounds to two women in a home for the elderly.
The Israeli military had been on alert for rocket attacks by Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia, a Hamas ally, since starting the Gaza offensive Dec. 27. Police said the rockets were Katyushas, the kind Hezbollah used during its 34-day war with Israel in mid-2006.
No group claimed responsibility for today’s rocket attacks. Small Palestinian groups unaffiliated with Hezbollah also possess Katyushas. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — Is this the opening of the infamous “second front”? Highly improbable, I would say. Most likely a few guys who couldn’t stand it any more. In a somewhat meaningless act of defiance, they decided they would try and rattle Israeli nerves, though as a result there are probably now as many jangling nerves in Beirut as there are south of the border.
I know from personal involvement that the devastating invasion of Gaza by Israel could easily have been avoided.
After visiting Sderot last April and seeing the serious psychological damage caused by the rockets that had fallen in that area, my wife, Rosalynn, and I declared their launching from Gaza to be inexcusable and an act of terrorism. Although casualties were rare (three deaths in seven years), the town was traumatized by the unpredictable explosions. About 3,000 residents had moved to other communities, and the streets, playgrounds and shopping centers were almost empty. Mayor Eli Moyal assembled a group of citizens in his office to meet us and complained that the government of Israel was not stopping the rockets, either through diplomacy or military action.
Knowing that we would soon be seeing Hamas leaders from Gaza and also in Damascus, we promised to assess prospects for a cease-fire. From Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, who was negotiating between the Israelis and Hamas, we learned that there was a fundamental difference between the two sides. Hamas wanted a comprehensive cease-fire in both the West Bank and Gaza, and the Israelis refused to discuss anything other than Gaza.
We knew that the 1.5 million inhabitants of Gaza were being starved, as the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food had found that acute malnutrition in Gaza was on the same scale as in the poorest nations in the southern Sahara, with more than half of all Palestinian families eating only one meal a day. [continued…]
Dennis Ross, a former top diplomat for the George H W Bush and Clinton administrations, will become the Obama administration’s top envoy on the Middle East, an internal email from Mr Ross’s current employer has revealed.
Mr Ross, who previously served as the US envoy for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is set to take a wider role as Hillary Clinton’s top adviser for the Middle East as a whole. Ms Clinton herself is due to appear before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for her confirmation hearing for Secretary of State next Tuesday. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — As Augustus Norton said: “Dennis Ross who was a dead-hand on the wheel as peacemaker in the Clinton [and Bush senior administrations]. His chief accomplishment the Hebron agreement –enough said.”
Many Americans who voted for Barack Hussein Obama are hoping that his administration will at last break with America’s traditional, and invariably harmful, behaviour in the Middle East.
That would mean letting American oil companies fend for themselves in the free-for-all to control Mideast oil, leaving Israel’s colonists on the West Bank to pay their own way and abandoning the dictatorships in Egypt and Saudi Arabia to face the wrath of their populations without protection from American weapons and spies. And that is as likely as President Obama naming Ralph Nader to head the Securities and Exchange Commission and Patrick Fitzgerald, the US Attorney now prosecuting Obama’s Democratic Party comrades in Illinois, to be Attorney General.
Obama has improved the rhetoric, but no one who asked Hillary (“annihilate Iran”) Clinton to preside over the State Department or the failed Clinton-era hatchet man Dennis Ross to advise on Palestine has any intention of making the Middle East safe for democracy. [continued…]
Israel briefly paused its military operations in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday and said it planned to do so for three hours each day to allow for deliveries of humanitarian aid, as the Israeli cabinet met to consider how to respond to an Egyptian proposal for a more lasting ceasefire.
Military officials said operations would stop for three hours, between 1 pm and 4 pm local time each day, to give besieged Gaza residents an opportunity to emerge from their homes to seek food, fuel and other emergency supplies. Israel has allowed some aid deliveries since it began airstrikes Dec. 27 but relief workers said they have been unable to reach much of the population because of heavy fighting.
The opening of “humanitarian corridors” each day is meant to relieve a situation that international aid agencies say has reached crisis proportions.
The militant group Hamas, which is in charge of the Gaza Strip, said it would not launch any missiles during the three-hour pause. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — Let’s be absolutely clear: this is not about providing relief; it’s about prolonging the agony. As Neve Gordon pointed out, Israeli television reporters have been quite explicit in explaining to their viewers that the purpose of providing humanitarian assistance is to provide a counterbalance to international pressure for an immediate ceasefire. “Not unlike raising animals for slaughter on a farm, the Israeli government maintains that it is providing Palestinians with assistance so that it can have a free hand in attacking them,” the Ben-Gurion University professor wrote.
So once again, Israel has opened the gates of hell to the Palestinians. Forty civilian refugees dead in a United Nations school, three more in another. Not bad for a night’s work in Gaza by the army that believes in “purity of arms”. But why should we be surprised?
Have we forgotten the 17,500 dead – almost all civilians, most of them children and women – in Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon; the 1,700 Palestinian civilian dead in the Sabra-Chatila massacre; the 1996 Qana massacre of 106 Lebanese civilian refugees, more than half of them children, at a UN base; the massacre of the Marwahin refugees who were ordered from their homes by the Israelis in 2006 then slaughtered by an Israeli helicopter crew; the 1,000 dead of that same 2006 bombardment and Lebanese invasion, almost all of them civilians?
What is amazing is that so many Western leaders, so many presidents and prime ministers and, I fear, so many editors and journalists, bought the old lie; that Israelis take such great care to avoid civilian casualties. “Israel makes every possible effort to avoid civilian casualties,” yet another Israeli ambassador said only hours before the Gaza massacre. And every president and prime minister who repeated this mendacity as an excuse to avoid a ceasefire has the blood of last night’s butchery on their hands. Had George Bush had the courage to demand an immediate ceasefire 48 hours earlier, those 40 civilians, the old and the women and children, would be alive. [continued…]
I often visited Nizar Rayan, who was killed Thursday in a targeted assassination by Israel, at his house in the Jabaliya refugee camp when I was in Gaza. The house is now rubble. It was hit by two missiles fired by Israeli F-16 fighter jets. Rayan, who would meet me in his book-lined study, was decapitated in the blast. His body was thrown into the street by the explosions. His four wives and 11 children also were killed.
Rayan supported tactics, including suicide bombings, which are morally repugnant. His hatred of Israel ran deep. His fundamentalist brand of Islam was distasteful. But as he and I were students of theology our discussions frequently veered off into the nature of belief, Islam, the Koran, the Bible and the religious life. He was a serious, thoughtful man who had suffered deeply under the occupation and dedicated his life to resistance. He could have fled his home and gone underground with other Hamas leaders. Knowing him, I suspect he could not leave his children. Like him or not, he had tremendous courage.
Hamas, he constantly reminded me, began to target Israeli civilians in 1994 only after Palestinian worshipers were gunned down in a Hebron mosque by a Jewish settler, Baruch Goldstein. Goldstein was a resident of the nearby Kiryat Arba settlement. He entered the mosque dressed in his army uniform, carrying an IMI Galil assault rifle and four magazines of ammunition. He opened fire on those in prayer, killing 29 people and injuring 125. He was rushed and beaten to death by the survivors.
“Before the massacre we targeted only the Israeli military,” Rayan said. “We can’t sit by and watch Palestinian civilians killed year after year and do nothing. When Israel stops killing our civilians we will stop killing their civilians.” [continued…]
I srael’s defiance of international opinion in refusing to countenance a ceasefire in Gaza contrasts sharply with its growing need for international assistance to extricate itself. Even if the Israeli forces break Hamas’s grip on power, officials admit any such “victory” may be temporary and will bring more difficulties in its wake. Behind the bombs and bitter-end bluster, Israel’s private message is: help wanted.
Previous Israeli governments resisted “internationalisation” of the country’s disputes but that stance is changing. The current prime minister, Ehud Olmert, was glad to accept a strengthened UN force in southern Lebanon after his punitive expedition against Hezbollah in 2006 ran into the sand.
Israeli diplomats argue endlessly that the Iranian leadership’s threats, weapons programmes, and spreading regional influence are an international, not solely an Israeli problem. Foreign minister Tzipi Livni pressed home the point, face to face with Arab leaders, at a Qatar conference in April.
Now Israeli officials are pressing for an “international presence” along the Egyptian-Gaza border to ensure supply tunnels used by Hamas are not reopened. In short, they require foreign help to reduce the chances that Islamists will politically regroup and militarily re-arm. They cannot do it alone. [continued…]
Israel Defense Forces tank fire killed up to 40 Palestinians at a United Nations school in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, medical sources at two hospitals said.
The attack brought the Palestinian death toll to nearly 600 in Israel’s 11-day offensive on the Hamas-ruled coastal territory.
Two tank shells exploded outside the Gaza school, spraying shrapnel on people inside and outside the building, where hundreds of Palestinians had sought refuge from fighting between Israeli soldiers and Hamas militants. In addition to the dead, several dozen people were wounded, the officials said.
Medical officials said all the dead were either people sheltering in the school or local residents. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — Is this enough dead bodies to force Obama to speak? No need to make a pre-presidential statement — just provide some evidence that we elected a man with a core sense of humanity.
For 18 months my people in Gaza have been under siege, incarcerated inside the world’s biggest prison, sealed off from land, air and sea, caged and starved, denied even medication for our sick. After the slow death policy came the bombardment. In this most densely populated of places, nothing has been spared Israel’s warplanes, from government buildings to homes, mosques, hospitals, schools and markets. More than 540 have been killed and thousands permanently maimed. A third are women and children. Whole families have been massacred, some while they slept.
This river of blood is being shed under lies and false pretexts. For six months we in Hamas observed the ceasefire. Israel broke it repeatedly from the start. Israel was required to open crossings to Gaza, and extend the truce to the West Bank. It proceeded to tighten its deadly siege of Gaza, repeatedly cutting electricity and water supplies. The collective punishment did not halt, but accelerated – as did the assassinations and killings. Thirty Gazans were killed by Israeli fire and hundreds of patients died as a direct effect of the siege during the so-called ceasefire. Israel enjoyed a period of calm. Our people did not.
When this broken truce neared its end, we expressed our readiness for a new comprehensive truce in return for lifting the blockade and opening all Gaza border crossings, including Rafah. Our calls fell on deaf ears. Yet still we would be willing to begin a new truce on these terms following the complete withdrawal of the invading forces from Gaza.
No rockets have ever been fired from the West Bank. But 50 died and hundreds more were injured there last year at Israel’s hands, while its expansionism proceeded relentlessly. We are meant to be content with shrinking scraps of territory, a handful of cantons at Israel’s mercy, enclosed by it from all sides.The truth is Israel seeks a one-sided ceasefire, observed by my people alone, in return for siege, starvation, bombardment, assassinations, incursions and colonial settlement. What Israel wants is a gratuitous ceasefire.
The logic of those who demand that we stop our resistance is absurd. They absolve the aggressor and occupier – armed with the deadliest weapons of death and destruction – of responsibility, while blaming the victim, prisoner and occupied. Our modest, home-made rockets are our cry of protest to the world. Israel and its American and European sponsors want us to be killed in silence. But die in silence we will not.
What is being visited on Gaza today was visited on Yasser Arafat before. When he refused to bow to Israel’s dictates, he was imprisoned in his Ramallah headquarters, surrounded by tanks for two years. When this failed to break his resolve, he was murdered by poisoning.
Gaza enters 2009 just as it did 2008: under Israeli fire. Between January and February of last year 140 Gazans died in air strikes. And just before it embarked on its failed military assault on Lebanon in July 2006, Israel rained thousands of shells on Gaza, killing 240. From Deir Yassin in 1948 to Gaza today, the list of Israel’s crimes is long. The justifications change, but the reality is the same: colonial occupation, oppression, and never-ending injustice. If this is the “free world” whose “values” Israel is defending, as its foreign minister Tzipi Livni alleges, then we want nothing to do with it.
Israel’s leaders remain in the grip of confusion, unable to set clear goals for the attacks – from ousting the legitimately elected Hamas government and destroying its infrastructure, to stopping the rockets. As they fail to break Gaza’s resistance the benchmark has been lowered. Now they speak of weakening Hamas and limiting the resistance. But they will achieve neither. Gaza’s people are more united than ever, determined not to be terrorised into submission. Our fighters, armed with the justice of their cause, have already caused many casualties among the occupation army and will fight on to defend their land and people. Nothing can defeat our will to be free.
Once again, Washington and Europe have opted to aid and abet the jailer, occupier and aggressor, and to condemn its victims. We hoped Barack Obama would break with George Bush’s disastrous legacy but his start is not encouraging. While he swiftly moved to denounce the Mumbai attacks, he remains tongue-tied after 10 days of slaughter in Gaza. But my people are not alone. Millions of freedom-loving men and women stand by its struggle for justice and liberation – witness daily protests against Israeli aggression, not only in the Arab and Islamic region, but worldwide.
Israel will no doubt wreak untold destruction, death and suffering in Gaza. But it will meet the same fate in Gaza as it did in Lebanon. We will not be broken by siege and bombardment, and will never surrender to occupation. [continued…]
Inside Gaza City, windows are blown out, electricity is cut and drinking water scarce. While phones rang with the recorded threats against Hamas, leaflets dropped from airplanes littered the streets, saying: “Hamas is getting a taste of the power of the Israeli military after more than a week and we have other methods that are still harsher to deal with Hamas. They will prove very painful. For your safety, please evacuate your neighborhood.”
Israeli officials hope an eventual deal will be struck without engaging directly with Hamas, but Mark Regev, the spokesman for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said Israel would not exclude a tacit understanding with Hamas.
“The endgame for us is threefold: that Hamas’s military machine would be substantially destroyed; two, Hamas understands that shooting rockets means paying a price they don’t want to pay; and three, there are mechanisms in place to prevent Hamas from rearming,” Mr. Regev said.
But as the offensive unfolds, so, too, evidence is mounting of a severe humanitarian crisis.
Maxwell Gaylard, United Nations humanitarian affairs coordinator, said at a Jerusalem news briefing on Monday that because of the attacks, people could not reach available food.
Children are hungry, cold, without electricity and running water, he said, “and above all, they’re terrified. That by any measure is a humanitarian crisis.” [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — Are you paying attention Mr President-elect? Still “monitoring the situation” closely? Still calm? Or is that calm merely a cloak, hiding cowardice and calousness? Who would want to ruffle any feathers over a little spilt blood?
And here’s a question for all Israel apologists: Where is the much trumpeted Iranian threat? If the frequently and breathlessly repeated warnings were to be believed, by the time Israel relinquished its position of great restraint, Gaza was brissling with a massive arsenal of Iranian-supplied Katyusha and Grad rockets. For the past two years, right under the noses of Egypt’s Iran-hostile security forces, a steady flow of weaponry has been pouring through tunnels that run under the Egyptian border. But if that’s really true, how is that we now witness a mere 20 rockets a day being fired at Israel, mostly home-made Qassams and during ten days of war a mere handful of Grad rockets? Is Hamas keeping the bulk of its arsenal in reserve? Or is it possible that the whole “Iran-proxy”, “Iranian-armed Hamas” argument has been vastly overstated? Is it possible that the primary function of the so-called weapons pipeline, was instead a pipeline for everyday commodities that now fetch a premium in a siege-crippled economy?
“I keep the children away from the windows because the F-16s are in the air; I forbid them to play below because it’s dangerous. They’re bombing us from the sea and from the east, they’re bombing us from the air. When the telephone works, people tell us about relatives or friends who were killed. My wife cries all the time. At night she hugs the children and cries. It’s cold and the windows are open; there’s fire and smoke in open areas; at home there’s no water, no electricity, no heating gas. And you [the Israelis] say there’s no humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Tell me, are you normal?”
The question came from a resident of Gaza speaking by phone to the Israeli journalist Amira Hass. Like most of the foreign media she has been barred from entering Gaza by Israeli authorities in spite of the fact that Israeli Supreme Court ruled last week that eight foreign correspondents, from among the hundreds now struggling to report on this war, should be allowed to enter the Palestinian territory. [continued…]
While Americans may believe that the current violence in Gaza began Dec. 27, in fact Palestinians have been dying from bombardments for many weeks. On Nov. 4, when the Israeli-Palestinian truce was still in effect but global attention was turned to the U.S. elections, Israel launched a “preemptive” airstrike on Gaza, alleging intelligence about an imminent operation to capture Israeli soldiers; more assaults took place throughout the month.
The truce thus shattered, any incentive by Palestinian leaders to enforce the moratorium on rocket fire was gone. Any extension of the agreement or improvement of its implementation at that point would have required Israel to engage Hamas, to agree to additional trust-building measures and negotiation with our movement — a political impossibility for Israel, with its own elections only weeks away.
Not that the truce had been easy on Palestinians. In the six-month period preceding this week’s bombardment, one Israeli was killed, while dozens of Palestinians lost their lives to Israeli military and police actions, and numerous others died for want of medical care.
The war on Gaza should not be mistaken for an Israeli triumph. Rather, Israel’s failure to make the truce work, and its inevitable resort to bloodshed, demonstrate again that it cannot permit a future built on Palestinian political self-determination. The truce failed because Israel will not open Gaza’s borders, because Israel would rather be a jailer than a neighbor, and because its intransigent leadership forestalls Palestinian destiny and will not make peace with history. [continued…]
The IDF now faces two main military alternatives. The first is to step up the confrontation with Hamas in Gaza City and its environs. That will entail greater casualties among our soldiers, increase the hardships of the Palestinian population and lead to more calls from the international community to stop the fighting.
The second option is to expand the theater of operations and strive for a target that has not yet been set, which has been concealed or even denied: to bring down the Hamas government. Southern Command is capable of achieving this goal but is not enthusiastic about it, lest the Jabalya refugee camp turn into Somalia. In this context the IDF is afraid of being too successful.
In both cases it will take days before the cabinet that sent in the IDF is able to claim a lasting victory.
In these circumstances, with the IDF attempting to maneuver between two prohibitions − against bringing down Hamas on the one hand, and reaching an agreement with it on the other − Israel is dependent on the mercy of Hamas to allow it to declare victory. [continued…]
Israeli intelligence and military officials are increasingly pushing for the assault on Gaza to continue until it assures the eventual downfall of Hamas amid assertions that the 10 days of military bombardment have crippled the Islamist party’s ability to govern.
As the onslaught progresses, officials are more confident of “changing the equation” in Gaza and are predicting the collapse of the Hamas administration.
Last night, Israeli forces bombed the centre of Gaza, and there were reports of intense clashes with Hamas fighters on the edge of the city. But the fighting and the occupation of parts of the north and centre of the Gaza Strip did not stop Hamas from firing more than 40 rockets into Israel.
The death toll from 10 days of fighting has risen above 550. Those killed yesterday included 13 members of the same family killed in their house by Israeli tank fire east of Gaza city. [continued…]
Many analogies are being made between the ongoing Israeli attack against Hamas in Gaza and the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Here are the most important ones, in my view.
The first is about provenance: Hamas and Hezbollah did not exist before around 1982. They are the ideological step-children of the Likud Party and especially Ariel Sharon, whose embrace of violence, racism and colonization as the primary means of dealing with occupied Arab populations ultimately generated a will to resist. The trio currently carrying on Sharon’s legacy – Ehud Olmert, Ehud Barak and Tzipi Livni – seem blind to the fact that the more force and brutality Israel uses against Arabs, the greater is the response in the form of more effective resistance movements that have wider public support.
The second analogy is about technical proficiency. Hezbollah and Hamas have both consistently increased their determination and ability to use assorted rockets and missiles to harass and attack Israel. More importantly, they are better able to protect their rocket launchers from Israeli attacks.
The number of Israeli dead in recent years is in the low hundreds, compared to the thousands of Palestinians that Israel has killed. But destruction and dead body counts are not the most useful criteria to use in this analysis. The real measures of what matters politically are the nagging Israeli sense of vulnerability and the Palestinian sense of empowerment, defiance and capacity to fight back. [continued…]
If there is one issue separating Israel from its role models in the West, it is the perceived legitimacy of using force. In Europe, and in many parts of American public opinion, military power is seen as an option of last resort; a primitive, old-fashioned and often counterproductive tool of policy. To us, hitting our enemies once in a while feels like a necessary behavior in a tough neighborhood. It may backfire, as it often does, but still, most Israelis believe it’s impossible to survive in the Middle East without resorting to occasional aggression.
That is why in Washington, London or Paris, governments must sweat to build political consensus for going to war, while in Jerusalem, war resolutions enjoy wide parliamentary support. Israeli governments find it hard to pass peace treaties through the Knesset. That’s where political difficulty lies.
Israel’s military operation against Hamas in Gaza, now in its 10th day, is an excellent example of this rule. The war enjoys strong public support among Israel’s Jewish majority. Only Israel’s Arabs, identifying with their Palestinian brothers, and the far political left, which is all but pacifist, have protested against it. All the rest have united behind the government, including the more established left. The novelist Amos Oz, a moral compass for Israel’s peace camp (and an eventual critic of the 2006 war in Lebanon), gave his blessing to the war. [continued…]
A war neither Israel nor Hamas truly wanted turned into a war both are willing to wage. The six-month ceasefire that expired on 19 December was far from ideal. Israel suffered through periodic rocket fire and the knowledge that its foe was amassing lethal firepower. Hamas endured a punishing economic blockade, undermining its hopes of ruling Gaza. A sensible compromise, entailing an end to rocket launches and an opening of the crossings should have been available. But without bilateral engagement, effective third party mediation or mutual trust, it inexorably came to this: a brutal military operation in which both feel they have something to gain.
As each day goes by, Israel hopes to further degrade Hamas’s military capacity and reduce the rocket risk; Hamas banks on boosting its domestic and regional prestige. Only urgent international action by parties viewed as credible and trustworthy by both sides can end this before the human and political toll escalates or before Israel’s land incursion – which was launched as this briefing went to press – turns into a venture of uncertain scope, undetermined consequence and all-too-familiar human cost.
From Hamas’s perspective, prolonging the ceasefire was appealing but only if that arrangement was modified. Relative calm had enabled it to consolidate power and cripple potential foes. But the siege never was lifted. Increasingly, Hamas leaders were in the uncomfortable position of appearing to want the truce for personal safety at the price of collective hardship. As the expiration date approached, rocket fire intensified, an unsubtle message that Hamas would use violence to force Israel to open the crossings. In the first days, Israel’s retaliatory air campaign shook Hamas’s Qassam fighters by its timing, intensity and scale. But it did not catch them unprepared. [continued…]
In an appeal to Arab leaders to hold an emergency summit and take a stance to stop Israel’s assault on Gaza, the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani said: “Once again, we see that the international community is not willing to listen to us and will not unless we assert our common will. Before asking the international community to listen to us, we should start by listening to the voices of our own Arab people.”
On Sunday, The Israeli president Shimon Peres ruled out the possibility of a ceasefire with Hamas as the French president Nicolas Sarkozy headed for the region on a renewed diplomatic push for a truce.
“We don’t intend neither to occupy Gaza nor to crush Hamas, but to crush terror. And Hamas needs a real and serious lesson. They are now getting it,” Mr Peres said in an American television interview. [continued…]
Egyptian officials said Monday that Cairo was set to demand an immediate cease-fire from Hamas in the Gaza Strip, as Israeli forces moved into their 10th day of a military offensive on the coastal territory.
Hamas plans to send a delegation to Egypt on Monday for the first diplomatic talks since the launch of a 10-day-old Israel Defense Forces offensive in the Gaza Strip, an official of the Islamist group has said.
Hamas official Ayman Taha said a Hamas delegation would head to Cairo “answering an Egyptian invitation to hold discussions.” A senior Palestinian official said on Friday that Egypt had launched contacts with Hamas to achieve a truce. [continued…]
Israel wants Operation Cast Lead to end in a political agreement based on a new monitoring system and the prevention of smuggling along the Egypt-Gaza border. The system would rely on an existing security committee comprising representatives from Israel, Egypt, the Palestinian Authority and the United States. Hamas would not be represented, nor would it be a party to understandings or agreements, though it is expected to continue to control the Gaza Strip.
That is the political process being advanced by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, in conjunction with the ground incursion in Gaza. The idea was discussed at the meeting during which Olmert, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni approved the ground operation, and is being handled by the Prime Minister’s Bureau, together with officials from the defense and foreign ministries. The Bush administration is maintaining contact with Israel through phone calls and e-mails, and for the moment is holding off on sending even low-level envoys to the region. [continued…]
Those who believe in the peace process tooth fairy may hope that, after Israel gives Hamas a good whack, the prospects for serious negotiations will improve, particularly under a more committed Obama administration. This isn’t likely in the near term.
Israel’s prerequisite for ending the conflict with the Palestinians — a reformed or weakened Hamas or an emboldened Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, ready to meet Israel’s needs and requirements — is now more elusive than ever. As long as the Palestinian house remains divided, with Hamas strong and Abbas weak, the chances of a conflict-ending Israeli-Palestinian agreement are slim to none. Should Hamas survive its war with Israel in Gaza, such an agreement will remain more elusive than ever.
Beyond the tick tock of the current fighting lies an undeniable reality: only a political deal will end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And right now there are many obstacles standing in the way, including divisions within Israel and big gaps between the parties on the conflict’s core issues: borders, refugees, and the future of Jerusalem, among others.
But looming largest is the crisis that confronts the Palestinian national movement. It is a badly shattered humpty-dumpty — two polities, two armies, two ideologies, two sets of patrons — and putting it back together again does not look hopeful. Nor do the prospects for fostering the unity Palestinians require to negotiate with Israel, monopolize the use of violence in their society, or even struggle successfully for a Palestinian state. [continued…]
Barack Obama’s chances of making a fresh start in US relations with the Muslim world, and the Middle East in particular, appear to diminish with each new wave of Israeli attacks on Palestinian targets in Gaza. That seems hardly fair, given the president-elect does not take office until January 20. But foreign wars don’t wait for Washington inaugurations.
Obama has remained wholly silent during the Gaza crisis. His aides say he is following established protocol that the US has only one president at a time. Hillary Clinton, his designated secretary of state, and Joe Biden, the vice-president-elect and foreign policy expert, have also been uncharacteristically taciturn on the subject.
But evidence is mounting that Obama is already losing ground among key Arab and Muslim audiences that cannot understand why, given his promise of change, he has not spoken out. Arab commentators and editorialists say there is growing disappointment at Obama’s detachment – and that his failure to distance himself from George Bush’s strongly pro-Israeli stance is encouraging the belief that he either shares Bush’s bias or simply does not care. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — I have previously voiced my criticism of Obama’s silence and I’m not holding my breath in anticipation of him making some bold move on Day One. There is however one tiny glimmer of hope. The Wall Street Journal reported that “Mr Obama and his senior aides have declined briefings from the Israeli government on the current crisis, said two people familiar with the Israeli outreach.” That might amount to nothing more an exercise in self-protection — an effort to avoid being seen as having given a behind-closed-doors green light to the Israeli operation on the unstated but implicit understanding that it gets wrapped up before Obama takes office. But it could also mean that Obama wants the Israelis to know that they should not make any assumptions about how he will act once the Bush administration has finally been disposed of in the trashcan of history.
Still, Obama is definitely being perceived as a man who in a time of crisis chooses to look the other way. Since he has done nothing to challenge that perception, at this point it’s hard to avoid concluding that it is valid.
President-elect Barack Obama’s silence on the weeklong conflict in Gaza is drawing criticism among Arabs who have grown skeptical about hopes that his administration will break with the Mideast policies of the Bush era.
Obama, who is moving to Washington this weekend, was on vacation in Hawaii when the crisis erupted and has made no statements, either about Israel’s bombing of Gaza or Palestinian rocket attacks against Israel. His aides say that he does not wish to address foreign-policy issues in any way that could send “confusing signals” about U.S. policy as long as President George W. Bush is in office.
“President-elect Obama is closely monitoring global events, including the situation in Gaza, but there is one president at a time,” said Brooke Anderson, chief national security spokeswoman for the Obama transition team.
Arab commentators maintain, however, that Obama did comment on foreign affairs when he issued a statement condemning the terrorist attacks in Mumbai and that he has given several news conferences outlining his economic proposals. They suggest that his refusal to speak out on Gaza—where more than 400 Palestinians have died in the Israeli airstrikes, compared with four Israeli deaths from the rockets—implies indifference to the plight of Palestinians or even complicity with Israel’s bombing campaign. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — Readers of The Huffington Post are apparently much more concerned about George Bush’s lack of leadership during his last three weeks in office than they are about Obama’s silence. As for the American blogosphere as a whole, the snapshot provided by Memeorandum suggests that a war that garnered lukewarm interest in its first week has now as it enters its second week virtually fallen off the radar.
One aspect of this “conflict” — I hesitate to call it a conflict because the Hamas counterattack at this point is little more than symbolic — is that a key component of the Israeli-US narrative on Hamas has failed to be proven.
Those who were skeptical about the viability of Israel entering into a truce with Hamas repeatedly argued that the lull would simply afford the “Iran-proxy” an opportunity to re-arm with a much more deadly arsenal of missiles.
Where are they? Are we to believe that they are being held in reserve for the right moment?
(Ashdod and Ashkelon have been struck by a handful of Grad rockets but this can hardly be compared with the fusillades of Katyushas that Hezbollah rained down on Israel in 2006.)
Israel’s YouTube “smoking gun” — “Grad rockets” being loaded into the back of a truck just before being blown up by a preemptive strike — turns out to have been bogus.
The tunnels from Egypt through which all the Iranian missiles were supposedly being funneled, appear to have really been what the residents of Gaza claimed: the supply line for everyday goods required inside a territory under economic siege.
As Obama continues to “monitor the situation” in Gaza, he should also listen to what the Organization of the Islamic Conference, meeting in Saudi Arabia, said today:
We call on the US administration, namely the US President-elect Barack Obama, to pay the utmost attention to the possible repercussions of the ongoing Israeli war and its implications on the future of peace efforts in the Middle East and establishing lasting peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. And to pay the utmost attention to the war’s consequences on the new administration’s efforts to enhance the image of the United States within the Muslim world.
Interestingly and perhaps surprisingly the most charitable view about what the president-elect can do before he takes office comes from Hamas’ Beirut representative, Osama Hamden:
“If he talks against the Palestinians he will lose any chance before he has even started,” he told the Chicago Tribune. “And if he talks against the Israelis, this will not help him.”
Israeli air strikes claimed a Hamas military commander and destroyed a Gaza school on Saturday as an assault on Gaza which has so far killed more than 440 Palestinians entered its second week.
Troops and tanks massed at the border remained on alert to advance into Gaza after seven days that have seen more than 750 air raids launched against Hamas leaders and military targets. [continued…]
The Israeli propaganda effort is being directed to achieve two main aims.
The first is to justify the air attacks. The second is to show that there is no humanitarian calamity in Gaza.
Both these aims are intended to place Israel in a strong position internationally and to enable its diplomacy to act as an umbrella to fend off calls for a ceasefire while the military operation unfolds.
Israel has pursued the first aim by being very active in getting its story across that Hamas is to blame. The sight of Hamas rockets streaking into Israel has been helpful in this respect.
It has also allowed trucks in with food aid and has stressed that it will not let people starve, even if they go short.
Israel appears to think its efforts are working.
One of its spokespeople, who has regularly appeared on the international media, Major Avital Leibovich, said: “Quite a few outlets are very favourable to Israel.”
Israel has bolstered its approach by banning foreign correspondents from Gaza, despite a ruling from the Israeli Supreme Court. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — It’s curious that the BBC, on the one hand provides in text the evidence that Israel mischaracterized a strike — evidence documented by the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem — yet they only include the IDF’s video of the aerial view of the attack. This is what they left out:
Foreign and domestic television crews are lined up along Herzl Street in Sderot on a cold Thursday afternoon. A siren sounds and the crews run into crowded bomb shelter doorways as three booming thumps are heard in the distance. Kassams have just struck the Negev town.
This first-hand experience of life under rocket fire may be one of the reasons Israeli diplomats and spokesmen feel Israel is finally getting a hearing in the international media.
“We’re talking to families who have lived under this for eight years,” said a journalist from a major European outlet who asked to remain anonymous. “It’s an important part of what’s happening here,” he said.
IDF officials, too, feel the coverage has been mostly fair.
“I’m surprised for the better. The coverage has been balanced on most channels, even on some outlets not known for being pro-Israel,” said Maj. Avital Leibovich, head of the foreign press department in the IDF Spokesman’s Unit. [continued…]
Some were troubled by pictures of children and women among the casualties, others voiced trepidation about a ground invasion, but the overwhelming view among Israelis on the streets of Jerusalem yesterday was that their government was right to attack Gaza and the offensive should go on for as long as it takes.
Israel’s relentless air strikes on the Palestinian enclave may be drawing strong criticism and calls for a ceasefire in much of the rest of the world, but a common reaction of Israelis is that outsiders simply don’t understand what they have been going through.
Domestic opposition has been much more muted than in some past wars, and even in those areas deemed to be Jerusalem’s most liberal, the mood was generally uncompromising. [continued…]
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has informed the Palestinian organizations that he plans to release hundreds of Hamas prisoners jailed in prisons in the West Bank, sources in Hamas claimed Saturday.
Abbas’ office has yet to respond to the report.
According to the report, Abbas is interested in making a goodwill gesture ahead of a possible renewal of the talks between the Palestinian factions and on the backdrop of the Israel Defense Forces’ offensive against the terror organizations in Gaza. [continued…]
A new Rasmussen Reports poll — the first to survey American public opinion specifically regarding the Israeli attack on Gaza — strongly bolsters the severe disconnect between American public opinion on U.S. policy toward Israel and the consensus views expressed by America’s political leadership.
Not only does Rasmussen find that Americans generally “are closely divided over whether the Jewish state should be taking military action against militants in the Gaza Strip” (44 percent to 41 percent, with 15 percent undecided), but Democratic voters overwhelmingly oppose the Israeli offensive — by a 24-point margin. By stark contrast, Republicans, as one would expect (in light of their history of supporting virtually any proposed attack on Arabs and Muslims), overwhelmingly support the Israeli bombing campaign (62 percent to 27 percent).
It’s not at all surprising that Republican leaders — from Dick Cheney and John Bolton to virtually all appendages of the right-wing noise machine — are unquestioning supporters of the Israeli attack. After all, they’re expressing the core ideology of the overwhelming majority of their voters and audience.
Much more notable is the fact that Democratic leaders — including Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi — are just as lock step in their blind, uncritical support for the Israeli attack, in their absolute refusal to utter a word of criticism of, or even reservations about, Israeli actions. [continued…]
Not one of the nearly 450 presidents of American colleges and universities who prominently denounced an effort by British academics to boycott Israeli universities in September 2007 have raised their voice in opposition to Israel’s bombardment of the Islamic University of Gaza earlier this week. Lee C. Bollinger, president of Columbia University, who organized the petition, has been silent, as have his co-signatories from Princeton, Northwestern, and Cornell Universities, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Most others who signed similar petitions, like the 11,000 professors from nearly 1,000 universities around the world, have also refrained from expressing their outrage at Israel’s attack on the leading university in Gaza. The artfully named Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, which organized the latter appeal, has said nothing about the assault.
While the extent of the damage to the Islamic University, which was hit in six separate airstrikes, is still unknown, recent reports indicate that at least two major buildings were targeted, a science laboratory and the Ladies’ Building, where female students attended classes. There were no casualties, as the university was evacuated when the Israeli assault began on Saturday.
Virtually all the commentators agree that the Islamic University was attacked, in part, because it is a cultural symbol of Hamas, the ruling party in the elected Palestinian government, which Israel has targeted in its continuing attacks in Gaza. Mysteriously, hardly any of the news coverage has emphasized the educational significance of the university, which far exceeds its cultural or political symbolism. [continued…]
There are so many words written about the “root causes” of the Arab-Israeli conflict, you might think the underlying issue is difficult to understand. But you’d be wrong. For all the mythology that interested parties want to wrap this conflict in, it’s really not difficult at all to understand the confrontation that has been going on in Palestine for more than a century now. All you have to do is try to imagine that what happened to Palestine happened instead here in the U.S. Then ask yourself, “What would Americans do in this position?”. And at that point, you find it miraculously stops being difficult to understand.
The problem with this approach is that American Exceptionalism has left us barely able to imagine being in other people’s shoes. So we explain the world to ourselves through ridiculous platitudes like we’re good and they’re evil, that actually explain nothing and leave us as confused as when we started. We just don’t do empathy very well.
But let’s try anyway. Let’s try imagining that what has been going on in Palestine for the last 100 years is going on instead here in the U.S., right now. [continued…]
Israel has no viable political endgame here: There’s just no clear route from bombardment to a sustainable peace. But the damage caused by this new conflagration won’t be limited to the Israelis and Palestinians. Israel’s military offensive already has sparked outrage and protests throughout the Arab world. The current crisis also may destabilize some of the more moderate Arab governments in the region — in Egypt, for instance — where leaders now face popular backlash if they don’t repudiate Israel.
And if you think that none of this really matters for us here in the U.S., you’re kidding yourself. Arab and Islamic anger over Palestine continues to fuel anti-Western and anti-U.S. terrorism around the globe.
It’s time for the United States to wake up from its long slumber and reengage — forcefully — with the Middle East peace process. Only the U.S. — Israel’s primary supporter and main financial sponsor — can push it to make the hard choices necessary for its own long-term security, as well as the region’s. In January 2001, the Taba talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority came achingly close to a final settlement, but talks broke down after Likud’s Ariel Sharon was elected prime minister on Feb. 6, 2001. Sharon refused to meet with Yasser Arafat, and newly inaugurated President George W. Bush had no interest in pushing Israel toward peace.
Eight years later, Israel faces another election, and we’re about to swear in a new president. When he takes office, Obama needs to push both Israelis and Palestinians to sit back down, with the abandoned Taba agreements as the starting point. Here’s to a less bloody 2009. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — It’s good that there’s at least one American columnist willing to speak about what’s happening in Gaza without being an apologist for Israel. Yet in terms of the broader political perspective, calls for renewed US engagement in the Middle East peace process beg the most important question: engagement with whom?
When the dust finally settles in Gaza, Hamas will re-emerge politically strengthened while Fatah and the Palestinian Authority will be seen by most Palestinians as having been at best, ineffectual, and at worst, quislings serving the Israeli government.
What Israel’s latest war is doing is further unmasking the chasm between Arab leaders and the people they claim to represent.
The code word “moderate” means nothing more than an Arab leader with whom a Western leader is willing to be seen shaking hands. But what these hand shakes are capable of accomplishing politically has been vastly overestimated for the simple reason that the will of the people continues being left out of the equation.
If the Obama administration wants to make a radical break with the past, it might consider not a re-engagement with what has become a hollow “peace process.” It might in fact disengage from an issue that Israel has to solve for itself. Instead, it should look across the political landscape, become better acquainted with the real locuses of emerging political power and then deliver a message of bitter political realism to its regional allies: Look hard and fast for ways to accommodate your political foes, because if you don’t they will destroy you and in the chaos that ensues the whole world will suffer.
Three days into Operation Cast Lead, Israel is proposing a diplomatic exit. A ground operation likely looms in an effort to increase the pressure on Hamas. At the same time, however, others argue that the air force is close to exhausting its target bank, so if Hamas can be brought to accept a cease-fire on terms convenient to Israel in the near future it would be better to do so.
Hamas intensified its rocket and mortar fire at Israel Monday. It is starting to recover from the initial shock of the assault, and the bad weather is helping to protect its launching crews from Israeli aircraft.
By 8 P.M., Hamas had fired more than 80 rockets and mortars at Israel, including a Grad Katyusha strike on Ashkelon that killed an Israeli construction worker and wounded 10 others. At 9:30 P.M., a Katyusha hit Ashdod, seriously wounding another two civilians . The Home Front Command says some of the civilian casualties of the last few days could have been prevented had people obeyed its orders and entered shelters when they heard the warning sirens.
Israel has thus far refused to officially discuss a cease-fire, but in practice it is conducting an indirect and hesitant dialogue with Hamas. As of yet, however, there is no official mediator.
Khaled Meshal, the Damascus-based head of Hamas’ political bureau, has been calling for a cease-fire for two days now. However, communications with the organization’s leadership in Gaza are hampered because all its leaders have gone underground for fear of Israeli assassination attempts, while Israel’s air strikes have disrupted the Strip’s communications networks. Paradoxically, the same measures that have hampered Hamas’ military response are also impeding efforts to end the fighting.
Israel will insist that any truce include a complete, long-term halt to the rocket fire from Gaza. In exchange, it will apparently agree to reopen the border crossings at some point, though no final decisions have been made. Some ministers want to continue the military operation, but Defense Minister Ehud Barak and the chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, Gabi Ashkenazi, are more cautious. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — The war so meticulously planned not to be a re-run of Lebanon 2006 is turning into a re-run of Lebanon 2006. Hesitant to enter into a ground war in which Israel justifiably fears it would get bogged down, suffer unacceptably high casualties and ultimately face humiliation, the choice at this point is to move over to an “expanded target list.” In other words, having trumpeted the claim that this is all about “precision” strikes on Hamas (disingenuous as that claim had to be since those targets were situated in the heart of densely populated urban areas) Israel is now widening its scope to a point where its flimsy facade of discrimination falls away. The Washington Post reports:
Israeli military officials said Monday that their target lists have expanded to include the vast support network that the Islamist movement relies on to stay in power in the strip. The choice of targets suggests that Israel intends to weaken all the various facets of Hamas rather than just its armed wing.
It’s only a couple of weeks ago that 200,000 people crammed into the center of Gaza City to celebrate Hamas’ 21st anniversary. In the minds of Israeli commanders one can only assume that everyone in Gaza is now a legitimate target. “Everything is connected.”
As for the level ground on which Hamas is prepared to meet its adversary, the fact that Israel has amassed its forces on the border means it either has to advance and risk getting stuck both figuratively and literally in the Gaza mud, or it backs away. Either way, the likelihood is that Israel will once again have demonstrated the limitations of its own military power.
How easy it is to snap off the history of the Palestinians, to delete the narrative of their tragedy, to avoid a grotesque irony about Gaza which – in any other conflict – journalists would be writing about in their first reports: that the original, legal owners of the Israeli land on which Hamas rockets are detonating live in Gaza.
That is why Gaza exists: because the Palestinians who lived in Ashkelon and the fields around it – Askalaan in Arabic – were dispossessed from their lands in 1948 when Israel was created and ended up on the beaches of Gaza. They – or their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren – are among the one and a half million Palestinian refugees crammed into the cesspool of Gaza, 80 per cent of whose families once lived in what is now Israel. This, historically, is the real story: most of the people of Gaza don’t come from Gaza.
But watching the news shows, you’d think that history began yesterday, that a bunch of bearded anti-Semitic Islamist lunatics suddenly popped up in the slums of Gaza – a rubbish dump of destitute people of no origin – and began firing missiles into peace-loving, democratic Israel, only to meet with the righteous vengeance of the Israeli air force. The fact that the five sisters killed in Jabalya camp had grandparents who came from the very land whose more recent owners have now bombed them to death simply does not appear in the story. [continued…]
… in Ramallah, anti-Israeli and American sentiment was high among a small crowd of protesters gathered, incongruously, beneath a Stars and Bucks Cafe. Even here, in Fatah’s heartland, people said they admired Hamas for its willingness to take on a regional superpower.
Challenged on the point that firing highly inaccurate rockets from Gaza into Israel carried a huge cost in retaliation, one 30-year-old Palestinian who refused to give his name compared the attacks to the impotent yet defiant gesture of the Iraqi journalist Muntader al-Zaidi, who became a folk hero across the Arab world for throwing his shoes at President Bush.
Mustafa Saleh, 37, said: “I am originally Fatah and my voice will always be Fatah. But Hamas is resisting and we are a nation under occupation. I support the resistance, even here in the West Bank.”
Hamas hopes such sentiments will bring it new supporters.
But as he watched the protesters go by, Mohanad Salah, 42, said that emotions would calm down. Palestinians were quite capable of wanting Hamas-style “resistance” with their hearts but peace talks with their heads, he said.
“The more military operations by Israel either here or in Gaza, the more it will make people go away from wanting agreements,” he said.
“But you should know that even after Israel carried out this operation yesterday, if today it says ‘We want a political solution, let’s reach an agreement,’ it would be completely accepted by the majority of the Palestinian people,” Mr. Salah added. [continued…]
Barack Obama’s aides, in explaining the US president-elect’s silence, are meanwhile sticking to their mantra that the US only has one president at a time. But as the carnage and the outrage mount, this hands-off stance begins to look less like tact and more like a sign of a man who, confronted by a raw conflict that has defeated many more experienced statesmen before him, lacks new ideas.
Obama and his replacement for Rice, Hillary Clinton, have closely followed the Bush line on the ostracism of Hamas as an illegitimate terrorist organisation. He condemned Hamas rocket attacks in emotive, personalised terms during a visit to Sderot in southern Israel earlier this year.
“If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing,” Obama said. Arab critics suggested at the time that a balancing line or two about the impact of the Israeli army on Palestinian family life in besieged Gaza would have been welcome. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — The balancing line is utterly obvious (even if it’s impossible to imagine Obama using it): “If somebody was sending rockets into my house in Gaza where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Palestinians to do the same thing.”
Terrorism is a normative term and not a descriptive concept. An empty word that means everything and nothing, it is used to describe what the Other does, not what we do. The powerful – whether Israel, America, Russia or China – will always describe their victims’ struggle as terrorism, but the destruction of Chechnya, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the slow slaughter of the remaining Palestinians, the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan – with the tens of thousands of civilians it has killed … these will never earn the title of terrorism, though civilians were the target and terrorising them was the purpose.
Counterinsurgency, now popular again among in the Pentagon, is another way of saying the suppression of national liberation struggles. Terror and intimidation are as essential to it as is winning hearts and minds.
Normative rules are determined by power relations. Those with power determine what is legal and illegal. They besiege the weak in legal prohibitions to prevent the weak from resisting. For the weak to resist is illegal by definition. Concepts like terrorism are invented and used normatively as if a neutral court had produced them, instead of the oppressors. The danger in this excessive use of legality actually undermines legality, diminishing the credibility of international institutions such as the United Nations. It becomes apparent that the powerful, those who make the rules, insist on legality merely to preserve the power relations that serve them or to maintain their occupation and colonialism. [continued…]
Israeli F-16 bombers have launched a series of air strikes against key targets in the Gaza Strip, killing at least 155 people, medical chiefs say.
Gaza officials and the Hamas militant group said about 200 others were hurt as missiles hit security compounds and militant bases across the territory.
The strikes, the most intense Israeli attacks on Gaza for decades, come days after a truce with Hamas expired. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — What will Obama have to say? I expect that as a matter of political convenience he’ll rattle off the “Israel has the right to defend itself” line — yet again — and beyond that, it’ll be back to the one-president-at-a-time barricade.
At the same time, one message will go out for the millionth time across the Middle East: the political leadership across the region is impotent and their Western allies largely indifferent when it comes to the misery inflicted on Palestinians. Europeans will frown and say that the Israeli response is disproporationate, while Americans won’t even go that far. Another few thousand young men will be radicalized and the foundation of their conviction will be that institutionalized political power is indifferent to their plight.
Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas said on Saturday that he was in “urgent contact” with numerous countries over the deadly Israeli air strikes on the Gaza Strip.
“We have carried out urgent contacts with numerous Arab countries and other nations to stop the cowardly aggressions and massacres in the Gaza Strip,” Abbas told AFP from Saudi Arabia which he is currently visiting. [continued…]
Palestinians in the West Bank have demonstrated for unity between the rival factions, Fatah and Hamas, after Israeli air attacks on the Gaza Strip killed more than 155 people and wounded 200 others.
Hundreds of Palestinians gathered in the centre of Ramallah in the West Bank on Saturday, some carrying banners reading: “We will not forget you, Gaza.”
The Israeli bombardment also sparked rallies across the Arab world, including in Amman, the capital of Jordan, and Damascus in Syria. [continued…]
If reporting is, as I suspect, a record of mankind’s folly, then the end of 2008 is proving my point.
Let’s kick off with the man who is not going to change the Middle East, Barack Obama, who last week, with infinite predictability, became Time’s “person of the year”. But buried in a long and immensely tedious interview inside the magazine, Obama devotes just one sentence to the Arab-Israeli conflict: “And seeing if we can build on some of the progress, at least in conversation, that’s been made around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be a priority.”
What is this man talking about? “Building on progress?” What progress? On the verge of another civil war between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, with Benjamin Netanyahu a contender for Israeli prime minister, with Israel’s monstrous wall and its Jewish colonies still taking more Arab land, and Palestinians still firing rockets at Sderot, and Obama thinks there’s “progress” to build on? [continued…]
President-elect Barack Obama is about to inherit not just a nation entrenched in two wars but a world of instability and an entire Middle East that is sick with discord. While disputes in this region may seem eternal, there are reasons to be optimistic. If Obama joins with forces for peace and stability and acts boldly, his presidency could have a marked impact on world affairs.
The best medicine yet formulated for the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is the Arab peace initiative of 2002. One must consider the prospect of “peace” in context.
In May, Israel celebrated the 60th anniversary of its creation. For Palestinians and their Arab and Muslim brethren, Israel’s founding is “al-Naqba,” or “the Catastrophe.” It is the day the dream of an independent, Arab-Palestinian state was shattered; a day when the idea of a world built on equality, freedom and self-determination died. [continued…]
Pakistan has begun moving some troops away from its western border with Afghanistan and has stopped soldiers from going on leave amid rising tensions with India, Pakistani officials said Friday.
Two of the officials said the troops were headed to the border with India in the east.
The move is likely to frustrate the United States, which has been pressing Pakistan to battle militants in its lawless northwest territories and working hard to cool tempers in the two nuclear-armed countries, following terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, last month. Indian officials have blamed a Pakistani militant group for the attacks.
By late Friday there was little to indicate that the troop movements constituted a major redeployment. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — It’s a bit early for the planners of the Mumbai attacks to start unfurling banners that say “Mission Accomplished”, but events are clearly moving in the direction that they wanted.
Every time a government engages in a military response to terrorism, the message rings out across the world: terrorism works. It accomplishes its intended strategic goals — ironically, with much greater frequency than armies do!
The Afghan chieftain looked older than his 60-odd years, and his bearded face bore the creases of a man burdened with duties as tribal patriarch and husband to four younger women. His visitor, a CIA officer, saw an opportunity, and reached into his bag for a small gift.
Four blue pills. Viagra.
“Take one of these. You’ll love it,” the officer said. Compliments of Uncle Sam.
The enticement worked. The officer, who described the encounter, returned four days later to an enthusiastic reception. The grinning chief offered up a bonanza of information about Taliban movements and supply routes — followed by a request for more pills. [continued…]
Iraqis go to the polls next month in provincial elections that promise to be the most fiercely contested thus far, as the post-Saddam era moves to open a post-U.S. chapter. And one major issue will undoubtedly be case of shoe-tossing journalist Muntader al-Zaidi, who became a hero on the streets of Iraq and much of the Arab world after his failed attempt to bean President Bush at a press conference. Zaidi is to stand trial on New Year’s Eve, Abdul Satar Birqadr, the spokesman for Iraq’s High Judicial Council said Monday, on charges of “assaulting a foreign head of state visiting Iraq.” Even if putting Zaidi on trial appears to risk igniting public hostility, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki may yet seek to make the case work to his a political advantage ahead of next month’s poll, for which some 17.5 million are registered to vote. [continued…]
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni vowed on Sunday to end Hamas’s rule in the Gaza Strip if she is elected prime minister in a February election.
“The state of Israel, and a government under me, will make it a strategic objective to topple the Hamas regime in Gaza,” Livni told members of her centrist Kadima party. “The means for doing this should be military, economic and diplomatic.” [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — Did Tzipi Livni make this announcement in front of a crowd of 200,000 supporters (the size of the crowd in Gaza City that came to celebrate Hamas’ 21st anniversary)? Will her Kadima party even be around for 21 years?
The fact that Hamas is still in power is not due to a lack of effort on the part of Israel and its allies to apply a massive amount of pressure to bring the group down. Indeed, not only has Hamas demonstrated its resilience but it has also benefited politically from the pressure.
Having won parliamentary elections in 2006, had Hamas been allowed to govern, its merits and failings as a political organization and governing entity would subsequently have been judged by the Palestinian electorate. But neither Fatah, the Israelis or The Quartet were interested in finding out whether Hamas could pass this democratic test.
But let’s entertain some of Livni’s wishful thinking and suppose that a couple more years of siege and periodic bombardment might do the trick and lead to the collapse of the Hamas government. What then? Is liberal democracy going to rise from the ashes? Probably not. A much more probable course would be something parallel to what’s happened in Somalia. With the ousting of the Islamic Courts Union, taking its place as a political force has been the strengthening and expansion of the more radical Shabaab.
Those who dream of the end of Hamas should fear what the fulfillment of their dreams might bring.
Tony Blair, the dolt with a part-time job as envoy for The Quartet (a job to which he devotes just one week a month) told Haaretz: “I can’t see any basis for an agreement between the international community and Hamas. How do you negotiate the two-state solution with people if they don’t accept your right to exist? That’s the problem. Some people tell me, ‘You spoke with the IRA,’ and I tell them we only did that once they accepted that the solution will only be through peaceful means.”
Is Blair telling a pure, unadulterated lie, or has his political seasoning left incapable of discriminating between deceit and truthfulness?
The British government — as Blair surely knows — started talking to the IRA long before it renounced violence. The Good Friday Agreement enshrined that commitment. The end of violence, as everyone understood, would be among the fruits of successful negotiations — not a pre-condition for entering into talks.
If all sides were willing to simultaneously renounce violence, that would be a fine thing. Language after all is a far more constructive tool than explosives. But of course neither side believes it would benefit from unilateral disarmament. Instead, we can only have a much more ugly process that involves a mix of words and violence. The most practical and immediate goal should be for both sides to explore ways of adjusting the proportions of that mix. Right now, they’re both heading in the wrong direction.
Talk to Hamas By Gideon Levy, Haaretz, December 21, 2008
Politicians, generals and the public all know that any substantial incursion into the Gaza Strip will be a catastrophe. Still, no one dares ask why, for heaven’s sake, not try to talk directly with Hamas?
Gaza has an established authority that seized power democratically and then forcibly, and proved it has the power to control the territory. That, in itself, isn’t bad news after a period of anarchy. But Israel and the world don’t like Hamas. They want to overthrow it, but their diabolical scheme isn’t working out. The two-year siege and boycott that included starvation, blackouts and bombardments have produced no sign that Hamas is weaker. On the contrary: The ceasefire was violated first by Israel with its unnecessary operation of blowing up a tunnel.
What everybody already knew to be false – that the political choice of a people could be changed through violence, that the Gazans could be made into Zionists by being abused – was tried anyway. Now we have to finally change direction, to do what nobody has tried before, if only because we have no other choice.
Any excuse against such an attempt does not hold water. Hamas doesn’t recognize Israel; what does it matter? Hamas is a fundamentalist movement? That’s irrelevant. Hamas will decline holding talks? Let’s challenge it. Direct talks with Hamas will weaken Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas? He’s weak anyway.
What does Israel have to lose besides its much-anticipated wide-scale operation that it can carry out anytime? Why not try the diplomatic option before the military one, and not the other way around like we’re used to? [continued…]
President-elect Barack Obama’s decision to name two of the nation’s most prominent scientists to crucial roles in his administration was being heralded in the scientific community as a signal that the new president is serious about taking on the challenges of climate change and creating a new energy policy for the nation.
Obama is expected today to name John P. Holdren, 64, a former professor of energy and natural resources at UC Berkeley who is now at Harvard, as his science adviser and executive director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
He also reportedly has settled on Jane Lubchenco, 61, a world-renowned marine biologist and expert on the ocean environment at Oregon State University, to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The influential agency measures the pace of global warming, tracks hurricanes, predicts the weather and monitors the health of the world’s seas.
Their impending selection, along with the naming last week of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu to head the Department of Energy, is seen as the surest sign yet that Obama will reverse Bush administration policies on energy and global warming. [continued…]
John Holdren’s selection] is an even stronger signal than the terrific choice of Steven Chu for Energy Secretary that Obama is dead serious about the strongest possible action on global warming. After all, the science adviser works out of the White House and oversees science and technology funding, analysis, and messaging for all federal agencies. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — With all due respect to everyone who was offended by Obama’s choice of Rick Warren to serve God’s middleman on Inauguration Day, it’s important to highlight the difference between those choices that Obama makes that matter and those that don’t. I doubt that even among those who found the Warren pick offensive that many imagined that this ominously marked top of a slippery slope.
What Obama did was toss a symbolic bone to evangelicals who can now savor it and feel respected. It has no policy implications and it also pays the dividend of making it clear that Obama is not afraid of offending progressives (again).
Contrast this with his choice of John Holdren. Most Americans have never heard of him, but to put his voice in a pivotal position in policymaking is of vital importance for the future of the planet.
Note that Obama made the announcement through his YouTube address on the weekend that most Americans are out lost in shopping psychosis.
Perhaps this will be the signature of his presidency: that he makes his most important moves with the least amount of noise.
In a war that has been punctuated by iconic moments, the shoe will be the symbol that most likely endures longest in connecting George Bush to Iraq. In 2003, the sight of a statue of Saddam Hussein being assaulted with footwear highlighted the moment in which, at Mr Bush’s instigation Saddam’s regime had visibly lost power. In 2008, the sight of the US president ducking to avoid flying shoes conveyed the eagerness among many Iraqis to witness Mr Bush’s exit from power.
While Muntader al-Zaidi may have been simply been venting a spontaneous outburst of anger as he hurled both his shoes at the president of the United States of America, his act of defiance struck a chord with many Iraqis along with fellow Arabs across the region.
As Hazim Edress, a resident of Mosul, told The New York Times: “He has done what the whole world could not.” [continued…]
This is a case where one would have thought that out of pure self-interest and political expediency, the White House would be pushing for Zaidi’s prompt release simply to serve its own public relations interests. The longer that takes to happen, the more potent a symbol Zaidi will become.
… the claim by the hawks that Iran has enough material for one nuclear bomb is a little misleading: if it spent another year or so feeding its low-enriched uranium through its centrifuges to attain weapons-grade enrichment, it would have enough material for a bomb – but it could only do this by breaking with the NPT, kicking out the IAEA inspectors and unsealing the stored uranium, thereby alerting the world to its intentions. Nothing like this has happened, of course, despite Iran’s defying the demand of the UN Security Council that it halt all uranium enrichment to satisfy concerns over the transparency of its programme: even the enrichment in defiance of UN demands is taking place under the monitoring of the IAEA.
The standoff, then, isn’t so much about what Iran is doing now, as about what Iran could do if it maintains a uranium-enrichment capability on its soil. Iran insists that enrichment is its right under the NPT; the Western response is that Iran can’t be trusted to exercise all the rights it enjoys under the NPT, because this would give its leaders the option of breaking out of the NPT and moving very quickly to assemble a bomb. Amid the deadlock, Iranian negotiators seek mechanisms for reassuring the West of its intentions, and Western negotiators seek to coax the Iranians into refraining from exercising all of its NPT rights in exchange for various economic carrots. But neither side is moving.
Nor is this policy likely to be any more effective in the hands of Mr Obama than it was in the hands of Bush. That is because it is obsessively focused on preventing Iran from obtaining a particular weapons capability, without addressing the circumstances that might provoke it into doing so. The primary problem is not the weapons themselves – after all, the US enjoyed a nuclear monopoly for only three years, and has since learnt to live with at least eight other countries, among them friend and foe, having attained strategic nuclear capability. The problem is the strategic conflict between Iran and the US and its allies, in which such a weapons capability would change the balance of power.
Nations typically pursue nuclear capability as the ultimate guarantor of their survival, because they deter any enemy from using conventional or nuclear military superiority to eliminate a regime. And if Iran were to seek nuclear weapons capability, a sober analysis suggests that its aim would be to assure its own survival rather than to initiate a suicidal exchange with any other nation. [continued…]
LAT: What should they have done, what could they have done, to build trust instead of build suspicion?
Ali Asghar Soltanieh: They should have studied Iranian culture. We have maybe five or six types of phrases to tell somebody to sit down. One of them is very friendly. The other one is something unacceptable. . . .
There is a confidence deficit from our side too. We have suspicions too. They should have sat down at the negotiation table, and just reviewed both sides in a very pragmatic, realistic and equal footing.
As soon as they use the notion of preconditions, it’s destined to failure, because we would never accept such preconditions. This is again part of our culture, because it is humiliation. I will never accept the Americans as a superpower. We made a revolution in order not to accept anybody as a superpower; this is the crux of the matter. [continued…]
An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.
The history, the first official account of its kind, is circulating in draft form here and in Washington among a tight circle of technical reviewers, policy experts and senior officials. It also concludes that when the reconstruction began to lag — particularly in the critical area of rebuilding the Iraqi police and army — the Pentagon simply put out inflated measures of progress to cover up the failures.
In one passage, for example, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is quoted as saying that in the months after the 2003 invasion, the Defense Department “kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces — the number would jump 20,000 a week! ‘We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000.’ ”
Mr. Powell’s assertion that the Pentagon inflated the number of competent Iraqi security forces is backed up by Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former commander of ground troops in Iraq, and L. Paul Bremer III, the top civilian administrator until an Iraqi government took over in June 2004.
Among the overarching conclusions of the history is that five years after embarking on its largest foreign reconstruction project since the Marshall Plan in Europe after World War II, the United States government has in place neither the policies and technical capacity nor the organizational structure that would be needed to undertake such a program on anything approaching this scale. [continued…]
The other front By Sarah Chayes, Washington Post, December 14, 2008
I arrived in Kandahar in December 2001, just days after Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar was chased out. After a moment of holding its breath, the city erupted in joy. Kites danced on the air for the first time in six years. Buyers flocked to stalls selling music cassettes. I listened to opium dealers discuss which of them would donate the roof of his house for use as a neighborhood school. I, a barefaced American woman, encountered no hostility at all. Curiosity, plenty. But no hostility. Enthusiasm for the nascent government of Hamid Karzai and its international backers was absolutely universal.
Since then, the hopes expressed by every Afghan I have encountered — to be ruled by a responsive and respectful government run by educated people — have been dashed. Now, Afghans are suffering so acutely that they hardly feel the difference between Taliban depredations and those of their own government. “We’re like a man trying to stand on two watermelons,” one of the women in my cooperative complains. “The Taliban shake us down at night, and the government shakes us down in the daytime.”
I hear from Westerners that corruption is intrinsic to Afghan culture, that we should not hold Afghans up to our standards. I hear that Afghanistan is a tribal place, that it has never been, and can’t be, governed.
But that’s not what I hear from Afghans. [continued…]
After reporting for National Public Radio in the Balkans, North Africa, and the Middle East, as well as nearer her base in Paris, Sarah Chayes left journalism in 2002 to help rebuild Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban regime. She has launched a cooperative in the former Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, producing fine skin-care products from local fruits, nuts, and botanicals. (www.arghand.org) The aim is to discourage opium production by helping farmers earn a living from licit crops, as well as to encourage collective decision-making. From this position, deeply embedded in Kandahar’s everyday life, Ms. Chayes has gained unparalleled insights into a troubled region.
Beginning in 2002, Ms. Chayes served in Kandahar as Field Director for Afghans for Civil Society, a non-profit group founded by Qayum Karzai, President Hamid Karzai’s older brother. Under Ms. Chayes’s leadership, ACS rebuilt a village destroyed during the anti-Taliban conflict, launched a successful income-generation project for Kandahar women, launched the most popular radio station in southern Afghanistan, and conducted a number of policy studies. Later, she ran a dairy cooperative. [continued…]
On a normal Friday afternoon the line of cars and red Honda motorbikes outside the Qadssiya mosque stretches to a gas station a half mile away. Eight thousand worshipers typically come to hear Hafiz Muhammad Saeed preach at the headquarters of the organization he leads, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the charity that fronts for the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba. The two-tiered mosque can accommodate only a portion of the crowd, so the remainder spill out onto a broad concrete courtyard.
But this Friday the road outside was clear, and the few thousand who showed up were all able to fit inside. The day before, the Pakistani authorities had put Mr. Saeed under house arrest and closed dozens of the group’s offices across the country. Many followers were unnerved.
“The government has created a panic,” said Mohammed Nawaz, 35, one of the mosque administrators, who estimated that only one in four people came to this week’s services. “Our leader has been arrested, so what happens if they come to prayers? Not a lot of people have come today. People are not certain what will happen next.” [continued…]
9 is not 11 By Arundhati Roy, TomDispatch, December 12, 2008
We’ve forfeited the rights to our own tragedies. As the carnage in Mumbai raged on, day after horrible day, our 24-hour news channels informed us that we were watching “India’s 9/11.” And like actors in a Bollywood rip-off of an old Hollywood film, we’re expected to play our parts and say our lines, even though we know it’s all been said and done before.
As tension in the region builds, U.S. Senator John McCain has warned Pakistan that, if it didn’t act fast to arrest the “bad guys,” he had personal information that India would launch air strikes on “terrorist camps” in Pakistan and that Washington could do nothing because Mumbai was India’s 9/11.
But November isn’t September, 2008 isn’t 2001, Pakistan isn’t Afghanistan, and India isn’t America. So perhaps we should reclaim our tragedy and pick through the debris with our own brains and our own broken hearts so that we can arrive at our own conclusions. [continued…]
To anyone who lived through the media feeding frenzy of the 1990s, during which the nation’s leading news organizations spent the better part of a decade destroying their own credibility by relentlessly hyping a series of non-scandals, the past few days, in which the media have tried to shoehorn Barack Obama into the Rod Blagojevich scandal, have been sickeningly familiar.
Whenever reporters think — or want you to think — they’ve uncovered a presidential scandal, they waste little time in comparing it to previous controversies. Yesterday, CNN’s Rick Sanchez tried desperately to get the phrase “Blagogate” to stick — the latest in a long and overwhelmingly annoying post-Watergate pattern of ham-handed efforts to hype a scandal by appending the suffix “-gate” to the end of a word.
Sanchez’s efforts to create a catchphrase aside, the criminal complaint filed against Blagojevich this week isn’t the Watergate of the 21st century — though it shows signs that it may become this decade’s Whitewater. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — The difference between now and eight years ago is that now the media has a powerful co-conspirator in its relentless effort to trivialize public life: the blogosphere. But while journalists are like ticks encourging themselves on the back of the pig of capitalism, bloggers — who by and large gain no personal profit from their petty fascinations — are like rats who enjoy nothing more than breathing in the sweet aroma that wafts out of the pigs’ pen…
I hope I didn’t offend anyone! (Of course I’m not talking about all bloggers and all journalists — just making a point.)
In front of a capacity crowd in the largest hall available at this year’s UN climate change conference, Al Gore gave a dramatic address on the possibilities and the hurdles before the climate change community. The biggest, longest applause line by far (complete with hoots and whoops) went to his indirect endorsement of Bill McKibben’s 350 campaign inaugurated on the instigation of an argument first floated by NASA’s James Hansen in a paper released shortly after last year’s UN climate change meeting in Bali. According to Hansen, “We need to reduce from today’s atmospheric CO2, about 385 parts per million, to 350ppm. We are already too high to maintain the climate to which humanity, wildlife, and the rest of the biosphere are adapted. (. . .) This target must be pursued on a timescale of decades.” [continued…]
By the time the UN climate conference in Poland wound up on Saturday, expectations that under the incoming Obama administration America will rise to the challenge of tackling climate change, were not as strong as they had been. A prediction that next December’s meeting in Copenhagen might merely lay the groundwork for further talks and not a ratifiable treaty, was met with dismay by many of the conference participants.
Betsy Taylor, an NGO observer at Poznan wrote: “Over the past few days, several US opinion leaders have adopted a very pessimistic stance on the prospects of achieving meaningful federal climate policy in the United States or a deal in Copenhagen. These political insiders allegedly want to help manage expectations for the incoming Obama administration but their ‘we can’t’ attitude is grabbing the headlines here and at home and causing a growing sense of resignation just as hopes had risen with the promise of a new American president.” [continued…]
Despite all appearances, the United States only has one president at a time. Come Jan. 9, however, the enigmatic entity known as the Palestinian Authority could have two rival presidents — one in the besieged non-state of Gaza, the other in the fragmented Israeli protectorate in the West Bank. Each will claim to be the sole legitimate leader of the Palestinians. The mutually destructive rift between the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip and the Fatah-governed territory in the West Bank will deepen and be harder to bridge.
If Barack Obama entertains the notion of pushing for Palestinian-Israeli peace — as I hope he does — he’ll find that the challenge has become even more daunting. George W. Bush, the fading presence still in the White House, won’t do anything to solve the latest Palestinian political crisis. To the extent that the United States has an influence, Obama will need to act — shall we say, pre-presidentially. [continued…]
Avraham Burg obviously believes that the occupation has had a deeply corrupting effect on Israel. But there is something else going on inside Israel that worries him greatly: the changing nature of that society. He says, for example, that “Israeli society is split to its core,” and although he does not detail the specifics of that divide, it is apparent that it has a political and a religious dimension. He believes that the political center of gravity in Israel has shifted markedly to the right. Indeed, he believes that the left has “decreased in numbers and become marginal.” He also sees the balance between secular and religious Israelis shifting in favor of the latter, which is why he writes that “the establishment of a state run by rabbis and generals is not an impossible nightmare.”
I would like to try to buttress Burg’s analysis by pointing out some trends in Israeli society that are having and will continue to have a profound effect on the Jewish state over time, but which are hardly talked about in the mainstream media here in America. Specifically, I would like to focus on the growth of the ultra-Orthodox or Haredi in Israel, and emigration out of Israel, or what one might call “reverse Aliyah.” [continued…]
President-elect Barack Obama has chosen Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who heads the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, to be the next energy secretary, and he has picked veteran regulators from diverse backgrounds to fill three other key jobs on his environmental and climate-change team, Democratic sources said yesterday.
Obama plans to name Carol M. Browner, Environmental Protection Agency administrator for eight years under President Bill Clinton, to fill a new White House post overseeing energy, environmental and climate policies, the sources said. Browner, a member of Obama’s transition team, is a principal at the Albright Group.
Obama has also settled on Lisa P. Jackson, recently appointed chief of staff to New Jersey Gov. Jon S. Corzine (D) and former head of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, to head the EPA. Nancy Sutley, a deputy mayor of Los Angeles for energy and environment, will chair the White House Council on Environmental Quality. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — Last year, Steven Chu said that energy research and development needs a massive infusion of public investment: “We need money on the magnitude of what the U.S. invested in the Apollo program,” he said.
Since he is now about to become the leading advocate for this amount of investment, he needs to be well-armed if he’s going to have any chance of winning the public debate during a period of deep economic recession.
Unemployment won’t be slashed by putting scientists back to work. In fact, Chu might be able to better plead his case if he argued that the mission he’s pushing is so important that it will require a few scientists being forced to sacrifice their pet projects.
That possibility might be what has pushed the NASA chief, Mike Griffin, into a bunker mentality as he apparently now views members of the Obama transition team as the enemy.
But if Chu wants to make a powerful pitch for an Apollo mission that America needs far more than it needed the actual Apollo mission, part of his argument could be that in order to save the planet we need to stop wasting money on catapulting human beings into space.
Let’s repeat that: THE WHOLE MANNED SPACEFLIGHT PROGRAM, WHICH IS SO ENORMOUSLY EXPENSIVE, HAS PRODUCED NOTHING OF SCIENTIFIC VALUE.
As the idiot-in-chief is about to leave office, maybe now is the time to draw up a list of some of the most wasteful and ill-conceived projects he has cherished and say, enough is enough. Now is the time to invest in what matters.
No more big budget, high-tech Viagra projects: Goodbye mission to Mars; goodbye the Vision for Space Exploration; goodbye missile defense.
Let’s stop acting like we’re dying to be part of the biggest suicide cult in human history and instead start doing whatever it takes to develop a sustainable way of living.
Until five weeks ago, I literally never heard anyone claim — in either party — that it was irrelevant who the President appointed to his Cabinet and other high-level positions. I never heard anyone depict people like the Defense Secretary and CIA Director as nothing more than impotent little functionaries — the equivalent of entry-level clerical workers — who exert no power and do nothing other than obediently carry out the President’s orders.
In fact, I seem to recall pretty vividly all sorts of confirmation fights led by Democrats over the last eight years (John Aschroft, John Bolton, Alberto Gonzales, Michael Hayden, Steven Bradbury) — to say nothing of the efforts to force the resignation or dismissal of people such as Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Gonzales — that was based on exactly the opposite premise: namely, that it does matter who is empowered to lead these agencies and departments, and specifically, that their ideology not only matters, but can, by itself, warrant rejection. Nobody ever claimed that Ashcroft, Bolton or Hayden were “unqualified.” It was their beliefs and ideology that rendered them unfit for those positions, argued Democrats.
When and why did everyone suddenly decide to change their minds about this and start repeating the mantra of some Obama supporters that high-level appointments are irrelevant because only the President counts? For the people who now make this claim to justify Obama’s appointments, were any of them objecting during any of the above-listed confirmation fights that those fights were wasteful and unjustified because presidential appointments are irrelevant? [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — To suspend judgment on Obama’s cabinet appointments before either he or they have taken office is not exactly giving anyone a free ride. And the idea that Obama’s choices have been driven by a false dichotomy drawn between competance and ideology seems bogus.
Two issues are really at play:
1. A real tension between ideology and pragmatism, and
2. The leadership skills of the incoming president.
1. Now more than ever, governance requires evidence-based decision making. If there is reason to think that any of Obama’s picks have ideological fixations that compromise their ability to engage in nimble adaptation, he’s choosing the wrong people.
2. Obama has said: “Understand where the vision for change comes from, first and foremost. It comes from me. That’s my job, to provide a vision in terms of where we are going and to make sure then that my team is implementing [that vision].”
That doesn’t mean that we should now mindlessly express support for all his cabinet choice. What it does mean is that once he’s in office we need to pay attention to whether his vision really is molding the decision-making process, or whether his subordinates are off pursuing their own agendas.
At this point I’m willing to make what might sound like a naive assumption: it is that those who have accepted plum positions do not see these simply as servings from the pie of political power; they see themselves as having a unique opportunity to play a part in the Obama presidency. In other words, they see that Obama brings with him an exceptional political resource. It’s not political capital with a mandate to impose an agenda; it’s political goodwill that will allow Obama to soften opposition to measures that would otherwise meet stiff resistance.
The question that the success or failure of the next administration hinges upon is this: will Obama’s flexibility turn out to be his greatest strength or his greatest weakness?
Naturally, as someone who tends to view the world through a loosely Taoist prism, my expectation is that we’ll see flexible strength. We’ll see…
The Taliban are back The International Council on Security and Development, December 8, 2008
While the international community’s prospects in Afghanistan have never been bleaker, the Taliban has been experiencing a renaissance that has gained momentum since 2005. At the end of 2001, uprooted from its strongholds and with its critical mass shattered, it was viewed as a spent force. It was naively assumed by the US and its allies that the factors which propelled the Taliban to prominence in Afghanistan would become moribund in parallel to its expulsion from the country. The logic ran that as ordinary Afghans became aware of the superiority of a western democratic model, and the benefits of that system flowed down to every corner of the country, then the Taliban’s rule would be consigned to the margins of Afghan history.
However, as seven years of missed opportunity have rolled by, the Taliban has rooted itself across increasing swathes of Afghan territory. According to research undertaken by ICOS throughout 2008, the Taliban now has a permanent presence in 72% of the country. Moreover, it is now seen as the de facto governing power in a number of southern towns and villages. This figure is up from 54% in November 2007, as outlined in the ICOS report Stumbling into Chaos: Afghanistan on the Brink. The increase in their geographic spread illustrates that the Taliban’s political, military and economic strategies are now more successful than the West’s in Afghanistan. Confident in their expansion beyond the rural south, the Taliban are at the gates of the capital and infiltrating the city at will.
Of the four doors leading out of Kabul, three are now compromised by Taliban activity. The roads to the west, towards the Afghan National Ring Road through Wardak to Kandahar become unsafe for Afghan or international travel by the time travellers reach the entrance to Wardak province, which is about thirty minutes from the city limits. The road south to Logar is no longer safe for Afghan or international travel. The road east to Jalalabad is not safe for Afghan or international travel once travellers reach the Sarobi Junction which is about an hour outside of the city. Of the two roads leaving the city to the north only one – the road towards the Panjshir valley, Salang tunnel and Mazar – is considered safe for Afghan and international travel. The second road towards the north which leads to the Bagram Air Base is frequently used by foreign and military convoys and subject to insurgent attacks. [continued…]
Risk factors By Geroge Packer, The New Yorker, December 15, 2008
Some commentators have simply demanded that Pakistan rid itself of the virus of extremism that threatens its own security as well as its neighbors’. But which Pakistan is going to do it? The weak civilian government of President Asif Zardari? The two-faced security services? The tribal leaders along the Afghanistan border? The huge, overwhelmingly poor, tumultuous population? The core problem is that Pakistan is no longer really a country, if it ever was. [continued…]
Nato countries are scrambling for alternative routes as far afield as Belarus and Ukraine to supply their forces in Afghanistan, which are increasingly vulnerable to a resurgent Taliban, the Guardian has learned.
Four serious attacks on US and Nato supplies in Pakistan during the past month, including two in the past three days, have added to the sense of urgency to conclude pacts with former Soviet republics bordering Afghanistan to the north.
Nato is negotiating with Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to allow supplies for Nato forces, including fuel, to cross borders into Afghanistan from the north. The deal, which officials said was close to being agreed, follows an agreement with Moscow this year allowing Nato supplies to be transported by rail or road through Russia. [continued…]
Pakistani officials offered contradictory statements Monday as to whether an accused mastermind of the Mumbai attacks was among those arrested when Pakistani troops swooped down a day earlier on an alleged militant camp.
A terse statement from the military late Monday acknowledged an unspecified number of arrests in Sunday’s operation in the Pakistani-controlled slice of Kashmir, but it did not address whether Zaki-ur Rehman Lakhvi, a senior figure in the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group, was in custody.
Witnesses said troops sealed off the camp, outside the regional capital, Muzaffarabad, and briefly battled those holed up within.
Two senior Pakistani officials said early Monday that they believed Lakhvi was among those arrested, but two others said later in the day that, to their knowledge, Lakhvi was not one of more than a dozen suspected militants detained. All four officials spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the issue. [continued…]
It is unusual for an incoming Cabinet officer to spell out a precise agenda or to define the standards by which his performance should be judged before the president has even been sworn in. But that’s exactly what now-and-future Defense Secretary Robert Gates has just done with an article in the upcoming issue of Foreign Affairs.
Gates probably didn’t set out to do that when he wrote the article, which was based on a speech he delivered at the National Defense University in September, before the election had taken place.
Somalia’s transitional government looks as if it is about to flatline. The Ethiopians who have been keeping it alive for two years say they are leaving the country, essentially pulling the plug.
For the past 17 years, Somalia has been ripped apart by anarchy, violence, famine and greed. It seems as though things there can never get worse. But then they do.
The pirates off Somalia’s coast are getting bolder, wilier and somehow richer, despite an armada of Western naval ships hot on their trail. Shipments of emergency food aid are barely keeping much of Somalia’s population of nine million from starving. The most fanatical wing of Somalia’s Islamist insurgency is gobbling up territory and imposing its own harsh brand of Islamic law, like whipping dancers and stoning a 13-year-old girl to death.
And now, with the government on the brink and the Islamists seeming ready to seize control for the second time, the operative question inside and outside Somalia seems to be: Now what? [continued…]
Barack Obama’s pledge to make the United States a leader in confronting global warming raised hopes that his election would rapidly end the long impasse in international negotiations over climate change, but the timing of the presidential transition has severely dimmed those expectations as the current round of talks comes to a head this week in Poland.
The U.S. delegates still report to President Bush, and they made it clear last week that they will not commit to specific reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that would bind the incoming administration. Obama, meanwhile, has hewed to his one-president-at-a-time policy and declined to send his representatives to the Poznan meeting, as many had expected.
The result, a number of negotiators say, is that the world will have a hard time meeting the long-standing 2009 target for reaching a binding agreement on carbon emissions reductions to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
The delicate state of the global climate talks — weighted down by the worldwide financial crisis — highlights the challenges the negotiators face. The Bush administration and its allies successfully resisted setting specific climate goals during the past few negotiating rounds, and there are doubts that Obama can get Congress to approve a sufficiently ambitious national carbon cap by the time delegates meet again next December in Copenhagen. And without a U.S. commitment in place, other nations will be reluctant to sign a deal. [continued…]
Capitalist fools By Joseph Stiglitz, Vanity Fair, December, 2008
There will come a moment when the most urgent threats posed by the credit crisis have eased and the larger task before us will be to chart a direction for the economic steps ahead. This will be a dangerous moment. Behind the debates over future policy is a debate over history—a debate over the causes of our current situation. The battle for the past will determine the battle for the present. So it’s crucial to get the history straight.
What were the critical decisions that led to the crisis? Mistakes were made at every fork in the road—we had what engineers call a “system failure,” when not a single decision but a cascade of decisions produce a tragic result. Let’s look at five key moments. [continued…]
Obama vs. Osama By Michael Crowley, The New Republic, December 24, 2008
Around the time of the November election, John Nagl, a retired Army Colonel, took a helicopter ride across Afghanistan. What he saw below worried him. Nagl, who is 42 with trim brown hair and academic eyeglasses, spent three years in Iraq, including as part of a tank battalion in the Sunni Triangle, where he witnessed brutal combat in the war’s worst years. A West Point graduate and Rhodes Scholar, Nagl applied the lessons of his Iraq experience to the Army-Marine Counterinsurgency Field Manual, which he helped write and which was published last year. He currently specializes in the study of war and counterinsurgency at the Center for a New American Security, a center-left Washington think tank, and it is in this capacity that he recently traveled to the Afghan war zone. As his military chopper swooped over high mountain ridges and plunging valleys, he grimly surveyed the size and the inhospitality of the Afghan terrain. Winning in Afghanistan, he realized, would take more than “a little tweak,” as he put it to me from back in Washington a few weeks later, when he was still shaking off the gritty “Kabul crud” that afflicts traveler’s lungs. It would take time, money, and blood. “It’s a doubling of the U.S. commitment,” Nagl said. “It’s a doubling of the Afghan army, maybe a tripling. It’s going to require a tax increase and a bigger army.”
For the left in the Bush era, America’s two wars have long been divided into the good and the bad. Iraq was the moral and strategic catastrophe, while Afghanistan–home base for the September 11 attacks–was a righteous fight. This dichotomy was especially appealing to liberals because it allowed them to pair their call for withdrawal from Iraq with a call for escalation in Afghanistan. Leaving Iraq wasn’t about retreating; it was about bolstering another front, one where our true strategic interests lie. The left could meet conservative charges of defeatism with the rhetoric of victory. Barack Obama is now getting ready to turn this idea into policy. He has already called for sending an additional two U.S. brigades, or roughly 10,000 troops, to the country and may wind up proposing a much larger escalation in what candidate Obama has called “the war we need to win.”
But, as Nagl understands at the ground level, winning in Afghanistan will take more than just shifting a couple of brigades from the bad war to the good one. Securing Afghanistan–and preserving a government and society we can be proud of–is vastly more challenging than the rhetoric of the campaign has suggested. Taliban fighters are bolder and crueler than ever–beheading dozens of men at a time, blasting the capital with car bombs, killing NATO troops with sniper fire and roadside explosives. Meanwhile, the recent savagery in Mumbai has India and Pakistan at each other’s throats again, a development that indirectly benefits Afghan insurgents. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — The Taliban seem to have picked up a trick from native American Indians: they’re sending smoke signals. They come out of Peshawar. The smoke rises up and the message goes out: here are your precious tax dollars going up in smoke. Send us a few more dozen Humvees; we’ll happily burn them up too. After 100 military trucks went up in smoke on Sunday, a US military spokesman assured reporters, “It’s a very insignificant loss in terms of everything transported into Afghanistan.” Within 24 hours another 50 containers had been torched. How many more statements can Col. Greg Julian come out with before he starts being called “Kabul Bob”?
America’s failure in Afghanistan seems no less certain than that of the Soviet Union. The only unanswered question is whether in the aftermath we can avoid experiencing similar economic ruin. The signs are not good.
“How badly do we want to win this war to ensure that nobody can use this territory to kill three thousand Americans again?” John Nagl asks. “I’m willing to pay an extra dollar a gallon of gas for that to happen–who’s with me?”
Let’s have a referrendum. If Americans can be assured of the absolute secrecy of the ballot, I suspect most will slyly opt for the cheaper gas.
The Taliban have expanded their footprint in Afghanistan and now have a permanent presence in nearly three-quarters of the country, according to a new report.
The Paris-based International Council on Security and Development, a think tank that maintains full-time offices in Afghanistan, said the Taliban have spread across much of the country and are beginning to encircle the capital, Kabul.
The group said Taliban fighters have advanced out of southern Afghanistan, a region where they often hold de facto governing power, and carry out regular attacks in western and northwestern Afghanistan as well as in and around Kabul. Taliban forces can be found in 72% of Afghanistan, up from 54% a year earlier.
“While the international community’s prospects in Afghanistan have never been bleaker, the Taliban has been experiencing a renaissance that has gained momentum since 2005,” the report said. “The West is in genuine danger of losing Afghanistan.” [continued…]
Asia Times Online has learned that the public faces of the Jamaatut Dawa, such as its chief Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, will be spared. But people such as Zakiur Rahman, the commander-in-chief of the LET, are marked men for interrogation by a joint US Federal Bureau of Investigation-ISI team for their alleged role in the Mumbai attack.
A senior member of the LET confirmed to Asia Times Online that there had been a raid on one of the Jamaatut Dawa’s offices, and warned that if Zakiur Rahman was grilled, it would be tantamount to civil war in Pakistan.
“So far the province of Punjab [the largest Pakistani province] has been spared from all sorts of violence, but if such action is carried out, Punjab will also burn in violence,” he said.
The latest move might go some way to appeasing the US, but militancy cannot be easily stamped out – it has a habit of re-inventing itself. [continued…]
Pakistani security forces have raided a training camp used by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the militant group blamed for last month’s attack on Mumbai, and arrested at least 12 of the group’s activists, government officials said today.
One Pakistani official told The Times that among those arrested was Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, LeT’s operations chief, whom Indian officials have accused of masterminding the Mumbai attack.
The raid last night near Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, was Pakistan’s first attempt to respond to mounting pressure from India and the United States to take action against LeT after the Mumbai strike.
It is unlikely to satisfy either Delhi or Washington unless Islamabad follows up by prosecuting those arrested and taking further action against other militant groups linked to attacks on Indian soil. [continued…]
Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan-based militant group suspected of conducting the Mumbai attacks, has quietly gained strength in recent years with the help of Pakistan’s main spy service, assistance that has allowed the group to train and raise money while other militants have been under siege, American intelligence and counterterrorism officials say.
American officials say there is no hard evidence to link the spy service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, to the Mumbai attacks. But the ISI has shared intelligence with Lashkar and provided protection for it, the officials said, and investigators are focusing on one Lashkar leader they believe is a main liaison with the spy service and a mastermind of the attacks. [continued…]
The Pakistani extremist group suspected in the Mumbai rampage remains a distant shadow for most Americans. But the threat is much nearer than it seems.
For years, Lashkar-e-Taiba has actively recruited Westerners, especially Britons and Americans, serving as a kind of farm team for Islamic militants who have gone on to execute attacks for Al Qaeda, a close ally. The Pakistani network makes its training camps accessible to English speakers, providing crucial skills to an increasingly young and Western-born generation of extremists. [continued…]
By electing Barack Obama, the American people have proved a lot of political clichés wrong: that Americans wouldn’t elect a black man, or a northern Democrat, or a senator, or someone without extensive national security experience in a time of war. But there’s another cliché that has also bitten the dust, even though it hasn’t received much attention. By electing Barack Obama, Americans have showed that you can win the presidency without appearing dumb.
For more than a half-century, anti-intellectualism has had a pretty good run in presidential politics. In fact, Republicans would never have gotten where they are without it. In the 1950s, when the modern conservative movement was born, the right had a problem: It was seen as elitist, a hangover from the depression years, when Thomas Nast-style plutocrats opposed social security, labor unions and federal aid to the poor. Conservatives needed a way to turn the tables, to show that liberals—those self-proclaimed tribunes of the common man—were the real elitists. That’s where anti-intellectualism came in. If FDR had practiced class warfare, the Cold War right turned to brain warfare instead. William F. Buckley, founder of the right’s flagship publication, National Review, began going around saying that “I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.” [continued…]
A proposal to place Pakistan on the US government’s list of state sponsors of terrorism is again being reconsidered long after it was first raised in 1992, according to The Times of India. A decision is not expected until after Barack Obama takes office in January and in the intervening period, Islamabad’s response to the Mumbai attack will determine whether Washington moves forward with such a sanction. [continued…]
Whether the Pakistani military was involved in the Mumbai attacks remains unclear. The Indians certainly think so. “The attackers were trained in four places in Pakistan by men with titles like colonel and major. They used communication channels that are known ISI channels. All this can’t happen without the knowledge of the military,” one Indian official told me. They’re not alone in their suspicions. “This was a three-stage amphibious operation. [The attackers] maintained radio silence, launched diversionary attacks to pull the first responders out of the way, knew their way around the hotels, were equipped with cryptographic communications, credit cards, false IDs,” says David Kilcullen, a counter-insurgency expert who has advised Gen. David Petraeus. “It looks more like a classical special forces or commando operation than a terrorist one. No group linked to Al Qaeda and certainly not Lashkar has ever mounted a maritime attack of this complexity.” Which would be worse: if the Pakistani military knew about this operation in advance, or if they didn’t?
The situation in South Asia is very complicated. But one thing is clear. All roads lead through Rawalpindi, the headquarters of the Pakistani military. For decades it has sponsored militant groups like Lashkar and the Taliban as a low-cost strategy to bleed India and influence Afghanistan. It now faces a choice. Unless Pakistan changes how it conceives of its interests and strategy, the country will remain an unstable place, distrusted by all its neighbors. Even the Chinese, longtime allies, have begun worrying about the spread of Islamic extremism. Pakistan needs to take a civilian, not a military, view of its national interest, one in which good relations with India lead to trade, economic growth and stability. Of course, in such a world Pakistan wouldn’t need a military that swallows up a quarter of the government’s budget and rules the country like a privileged elite.
The one country that could do more than any other to change the military’s mind-set is America. For India to bomb some Lashkar training camps would be to attack the symptoms, not the source of the rot—and would only fuel sympathy for the militants among ordinary Pakistanis. To the contrary, what the world needs is for Pakistan to decide on its own that its prospects are diminished by tolerance of such groups. American diplomacy has been fast and effective so far. But we must keep the pressure on Islamabad, and get countries like China and Saudi Arabia involved as well. President-elect Barack Obama has proposed aid to Pakistan that has sensible conditions attached, meant to help modernize the country. [continued…]
A new strategy is urgently required. It must be a collective effort of Afghans and all their foreign partners. Three sets of questions — yet to be answered properly — should provide the starting point for discussions.
First, what is the Taliban, whom does it represent, how powerful is it and what does does it want? Are Afghans leaving or joining its ranks, and why? How much of the insecurity in Afghanistan can rightfully be attributed to the Taliban?
Second, what will it take to build a strong relationship of mutual confidence between Afghanistan and Pakistan? Such a relationship is indispensable, because it is a geopolitical reality that peace cannot be sustained in Afghanistan if Pakistan is opposed to it.
Third, to what degree are major developments in the region affecting the relationship between Afghanistan and Pakistan and, more generally, shaping the context for progress in Afghanistan?
Seven years ago, the Taliban was routed and vanished from Kabul and other big cities, but it never surrendered to anyone. It stood to reason that its intentions and strength would have a major bearing on the country’s future. The United Nations therefore made two suggestions in early 2002: to reach out to those members of the Taliban potentially willing to join the political process; and to deploy the ISAF outside of Kabul, with significantly increased strength. Both fell on deaf ears. I regret bitterly not having advocated even more forcefully for these proposals at the highest levels. Their pursuit then might have changed the course of events in Afghanistan. [continued…]
Most of the additional American troops arriving in Afghanistan early next year will be deployed near the capital, Kabul, American military commanders here say, in a measure of how precarious the war effort has become.
It will be the first time that American or coalition forces have been deployed in large numbers on the southern flank of the city, a decision that reflects the rising concerns among military officers, diplomats and government officials about the increasing vulnerability of the capital and the surrounding area.
It also underscores the difficult choices confronting American military commanders as they try to apportion a limited number of forces not only within Afghanistan, but also between Afghanistan and Iraq. [continued…]
Today’s employment report, showing that employers cut 533,000 jobs in November, 320,000 in October, and 403,000 in September — for a total of over 1.2 million over the last three months — begs the question of whether the meltdown we’re experiencing should be called a Depression.
We are falling off a cliff. To put these numbers into some perspective, the November losses alone are the worst in 34 years. A significant percentage of Americans are now jobless or underemployed — far higher than the official rate of 6.7 percent. Simply in order to keep up with population growth, employment needs to increase by 125,000 jobs per month.
Note also that the length of the typical workweek dropped to 33.5 hours. That’s the shortest number of hours since the Department of Labor began keeping records on hours worked, back in 1964. A significant number of people are working part-time who’d rather be working full time. Coupled with those who are too discouraged even to look for work, I’d estimate that the percentage of Americans who need work right now is approaching 11 percent of the workforce. And that percent is likely to raise.
When FDR took office in 1933, one out of four American workers was jobless. We’re not there yet, but we’re trending in that direction. [continued…]
In a move to reassert Congressional independence at the start of the new presidential administration, the vice president will be barred from joining weekly internal Senate deliberations, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said in an interview with the Las Vegas Sun.
Reid’s decision to exclude Vice President-elect Joe Biden from the Senate arena where he spent most of his adult life is intended to restore constitutional checks and balances that tilted heavily toward the executive branch during the Bush presidency.
One of the most outward symbols of that power shift in the Bush years has been Vice President Dick Cheney’s attendance at weekly Senate Republican strategy luncheons. Cheney’s access to lawmakers enabled the White House to extend its reach into the legislative branch in ways unmatched in modern presidential history. [continued…]
Editor’s Comment — Joe Biden’s selection as Barack Obama’s running mate was seen by many as a major concession to the Washington establishment, but what we can now see Biden was willingly taking on was something that seems unprecidented in politics: to accept a position of diminished power. This really shows his class as an elder statesman — a man who values the restoration of constitutional power above any personal ambitions he may once have cherished. Let’s not forget that it’s less than a year ago that Biden gave up his bid to become president. Sure, he now gets to be vice-president, but in that role he promises to the antithesis of Dick Cheney in the most selfless of ways.
I recently asked whether the world is poised to enter an Obama-style “trance” on climate policy given the focus on economic turmoil and plunge in oil prices, which have in the past seemed synchronized with concerns about transforming energy policy. (Keep in mind that the chief executive officer of Gulf Oil said Wednesday that oil could drop to $20 a barrel and gasoline $1 a gallon).
Now Maxwell Boykoff, who studies the media and climate change at Oxford University, has come up with an initial snapshot looking at climate stories over the last four years in 50 newspapers in 20 countries and (along with a colleague, Maria Mansfield) finds that the media may be entering a climate trance (or ending a bubble, depending on your view).
He’s presented these data (click on graph at right) in a side event at the Poznan, Poland, climate conference, where the main event — the high-level sessions — begin early next week. What’s your take on this graph?
In an e-mail, Dr. Boykoff said: “Apart from that Oceania blip in mid-2008, it does seem like stagnation or decreasing coverage. I’m curious about links between that and possible interpretations by negotiators of decreased public pressure to put forward a strong agreement leading into Copenhagen.” [continued…]
Brazil’s decision to set a target for reducing deforestation by 70 percent over the next decade to combat climate change was hailed by environmentalists Friday as a significant goal for a major polluting country.
“This is an enormously important step,” Stephan Schwartzman, an Amazon expert with the Environmental Defense Fund, said by telephone from a climate change conference in Poland. “This is the first time that a major developing country, whose greenhouse gas emissions are a substantial part of the problem, has stepped up and made a commitment to bring down its total emissions. Brazil has set the standard. Now we want to see the U.S. and President Obama come up to it.”
The clear-cutting and burning of the Amazon rain forest for cattle and soybean ranches, roads and settlements makes up one of the world’s largest sources of the types of gases that contribute to global warming. Since reaching a recent peak of 10,588 square miles of forest destroyed in the Amazon in 2004, deforestation dropped for the next three years, before rising slightly this year to 4,621 square miles, according to data from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, which monitors deforestation. [continued…]
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or 18 months my people in Gaza have been under siege, incarcerated inside the world’s biggest prison, sealed off from land, air and sea, caged and starved, denied even medication for our sick. After the slow death policy came the bombardment. In this most densely populated of places, nothing has been spared Israel’s warplanes, from government buildings to homes, mosques, hospitals, schools and markets. More than 540 have been killed and thousands permanently maimed. A third are women and children. Whole families have been massacred, some while they slept.