Category Archives: Lands

Egypt: Morsi’s final hours in power?

Reuters reports: President Mohamed Mursi clung to office on Tuesday after rebuffing an army ultimatum to force a resolution to Egypt’s political crisis, and the ruling Muslim Brotherhood sought to mass its supporters to defend him.

But the Islamist leader looked increasingly isolated, with ministers resigning, the liberal opposition refusing to talk to him and the armed forces, backed by millions of protesters in the street, giving him until Wednesday to agree to share power.

In a defiant 2 a.m. statement, Mursi’s office said the president had not been consulted before the armed forces chief-of-staff set a 48-hour deadline for a power-sharing deal and would pursue his own plan for national reconciliation.

Newspapers across the political spectrum saw the military ultimatum as a turning point. “Last 48 hours of Muslim Brotherhood rule,” the opposition daily El Watan declared. “Egypt awaits the army,” said the state-owned El Akhbar.

Al-Masry Al-Youm reports: Sovereign bodies have given instructions to security authorities at Cairo International Airport to prevent Muslim Brotherhood and Wasat Party leaders, as well as former members of the People’s Assembly and the Freedom and Justice Party, from traveling until they are given the green light, private news agency ONA reports.

The ban was imposed due to reports filed against them.

Sovereign bodies is a term that usually refers to senior security authorities, such as members of the Egyptian intelligence service.

Meanwhile, security authorities at the airport have said that no orders were given to seize the presidential plane or to prevent President Mohamed Morsy from traveling abroad.

Christopher Dickey reports: Many on the ground in Cairo regard this drama as little more than a military coup with well-orchestrated protests giving the army the pretext to make a move. But neither the anti-government demonstrators calling for the army to intervene nor the officers in the high command itself actually want the military to rule. The army’s interests have always been to maintain its independence, its prestige, and its highly profitable industries while avoiding the dirty business of running a nearly ungovernable country with an economy on the verge of implosion.

Robert Springborg at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, an authority on the Egyptian military, says the situation is further complicated by the disarray of the opposition, which has now proved, once again, it can gather people in the street but lacks the organization able to run a government. Springborg believes the military would like the Brotherhood-dominated government to make a host of concessions, including liberalization of the Constitution and opening the way to new elections. “I think Morsi himself is expendable,” says Springborg. “Morsi is now dead weight for them.”

But adding to the complications are possible divisions within the military itself, where al-Sisi is tainted by his past close cooperation with the once-fearsome and now feckless Islamist party. [Continue reading…]

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Egypt: Army threatens to oust Morsi in 48 hours

The Washington Post reports: Egypt’s powerful military issued an ultimatum to the government of President Mohamed Morsi on Monday: resolve the crisis that has pitted hundreds of thousands of Morsi’s opponents against his supporters and ground this country to a political standstill — or the military will intervene.

Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, commander of Egypt’s armed forces, said the military may soon take action to enforce the demands of the masses of Egyptians who took to the streets on Sunday calling for the president’s ouster.

“The armed forces reiterates its call to meet the demands of the people, and it gives everyone 48 hours as a last chance to carry the burden of the ongoing historic circumstances that the country is going through,” Sissi said in a statement broadcast on national television.

“If the demands of the people are not met within the given period of time, [the military] will be compelled by its national and historic responsibilities, and in respect for the demands of Egypt’s great people, to announce a roadmap for the future, and procedures that it will supervise involving the participation of all the factions and groups.”

Anti-government activists have called repeatedly on the military in recent days to back them in their struggle against Morsi and his supporters in the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. Many interpreted Sissi’s remarks on Monday as a victory for their cause.

“I think it’s highly unlikely that Morsi will be able to make a deal with the opposition in 48 hours. I don’t think anyone wants to deal with Morsi anymore,” said Wael Nawara, a longtime political activist, and the co-founder of the liberal Dustour party.

“So that effectively means that the military will basically appoint some kind of transition government,” he said.

The military had repeatedly signaled that it does not want to return to the helm of politics, which it commanded — turbulently — in the first year and a half after the ouster of longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak in February, 2011. But Sissi also said earlier this month that the army would step in if Egypt’s political crisis worsened.

AFP adds: In Tahrir Square, anti-Morsi protesters erupted in joy after the army’s statement.

“Come down Sisi, Morsi is not my president,” the protesters chanted, urging the country’s army chief, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, to intervene.

An official from Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood said the powerful movement was “studying” the army’s statement.

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Egypt on the brink: How did we get here?

Evan Hill writes: Families have stockpiled food and water, drivers have slept nights in petrol lines that snaked for city block after city block, and power cuts have rippled across the governorates and major cities. Half a dozen people have died in a spasm of violence that threatens to become a full-blown seizure when mass protests against President Mohamed Morsi break out today. Headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party have been attacked and burned throughout the Nile Delta, and his supporters’ rallies assaulted. Brotherhood toughs have banded together outside their offices wearing hard hats and makeshift shields and carrying homemade guns, ready to bludgeon or blow away what they fear is a coming wave of paid street thugs, the very embodiment of the counter-revolution.

Morsi’s opponents, sometimes backed by police, have also taken to the streets with firearms. Longtime revolutionaries uneasy with the violent omens and new, questionable allies have swallowed their hesitation and prepare to march on the presidential palace. As protesters sacked a Brotherhood office in Alexandria on Friday, someone in the crowd stabbed to death a young American teacher filming with his camera. In beleaguered Port Said, already subject to gun battles between citizens and police that killed dozens in March, a gas tank exploded at an anti-Morsi rally, reportedly killing one man and horribly maiming many more. Rumors flew that the protest had been bombed.

The country is gripped by expectant hysteria, like a Twilight Zone version of the hours before a World Cup final: nearly 90 million penned-in bystanders waiting on the opening whistle of a match to be played for keeps with guns and knives by partisans they hardly recognize as their own. One online commentator described the impending movement to oust Morsi on the one-year anniversary of his election as the birth of a new political order that may kill its mother. A journalist said it was as if Egypt’s body politic were rejecting a transplant and killing the nation in the process, a fledgling democracy’s auto-immune system gone haywire.

How did the country get here? How did the January 2011 uprising and its young, made-for-TV activists spin out into another zero-sum game for control? The story is complicated, and the strategic and tactical failures by both the secularist opposition and the Brotherhood so profoundly, majestically short-sighted and self-defeating that some have retreated into that most time-tested of rationales, the conspiracy, to explain how things could have gone so wrong, so fast. In their narrative, the crisis has been stage managed by the military, Egypt’s eminence grise and ultimate power-broker, beginning on the day in February 2011 when the generals opportunistically seized on the mass protests to quietly but forcefully escort Hosni Mubarak, his family and his cronies from the stage. [Continue reading…]

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Foreign media portrayals of the conflict in Syria are dangerously inaccurate

Patrick Cockburn writes: It is difficult to prove the truth or falsehood of any generalisation about Syria. But, going by my experience this month travelling in central Syria between Damascus, Homs and the Mediterranean coast, it is possible to show how far media reports differ markedly what is really happening. Only by understanding and dealing with the actual balance of forces on the ground can any progress be made towards a cessation of violence.

On Tuesday I travelled to Tal Kalakh, a town of 55,000 people just north of the border with Lebanon, which was once an opposition bastion. Three days previously, government troops had taken over the town and 39 Free Syrian Army (FSA) leaders had laid down their weapons. Talking to Syrian army commanders, an FSA defector and local people, it was evident there was no straight switch from war to peace. It was rather that there had been a series of truces and ceasefires arranged by leading citizens of Tal Kalakh over the previous year.

But at the very time I was in the town, Al Jazeera Arabic was reporting fighting there between the Syrian army and the opposition. Smoke was supposedly rising from Tal Kalakh as the rebels fought to defend their stronghold. Fortunately, this appears to have been fantasy and, during the several hours I was in the town, there was no shooting, no sign that fighting had taken place and no smoke.

Of course, all sides in a war pretend that no position is lost without a heroic defence against overwhelming numbers of the enemy. But obscured in the media’s accounts of what happened in Tal Kalakh was an important point: the opposition in Syria is fluid in its allegiances. The US, Britain and the so-called 11-member “Friends of Syria”, who met in Doha last weekend, are to arm non-Islamic fundamentalist rebels, but there is no great chasm between them and those not linked to al-Qa’ida. One fighter with the al-Qa’ida-affiliated al-Nusra Front was reported to have defected to a more moderate group because he could not do without cigarettes. The fundamentalists pay more and, given the total impoverishment of so many Syrian families, the rebels will always be able to win more recruits. “Money counts for more than ideology,” a diplomat in Damascus told me. [Continue reading…]

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Syrian army launches offensive in Homs

The Washington Post reports: Syrian fighter jets and heavy-artillery units pounded rebel-held areas of the central city of Homs on Saturday, in what activists described as the fiercest push to take full control of the city in more than a year.

The bombardment of districts including al-Qusoor, Khalidiya, Jouret al-Shiya and the ancient Old City began about 9 a.m. and continued for three hours before the army deployed ground troops, activists said.

The government has been pressing a campaign against pockets of resistance in central Syria since taking control earlier this month of the town of Qusair, which lies between Homs and the Lebanese border. Once known as the capital of the revolution for its early role in the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, Homs is divided between government-controlled and rebel-held areas, which have been under siege for the past year.

“It’s the worst day since the beginning of the siege,” said Abu Rami, a spokesman for the opposition Syrian Revolution General Commission and a resident of al-Qusoor who uses a pseudonym. “Civilians can’t leave. We are trapped.” [Continue reading…]

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Taking outsize role in Syria, Qatar funnels arms to rebels

The New York Times reports: As an intermittent supply of arms to the Syrian opposition gathered momentum last year, the Obama administration repeatedly implored its Arab allies to keep one type of powerful weapon out of the rebels’ hands: heat-seeking shoulder-fired missiles.

The missiles, American officials warned, could one day be used by terrorist groups, some of them affiliated with Al Qaeda, to shoot down civilian aircraft.

But one country ignored this admonition: Qatar, the tiny, oil- and gas-rich emirate that has made itself the indispensable nation to rebel forces battling calcified Arab governments and that has been shipping arms to the Syrian rebels fighting the government of President Bashar al-Assad since 2011.

Since the beginning of the year, according to four American and Middle Eastern officials with knowledge of intelligence reports on the weapons, Qatar has used a shadowy arms network to move at least two shipments of shoulder-fired missiles, one of them a batch of Chinese-made FN-6s, to Syrian rebels who have used them against Mr. Assad’s air force. Deployment of the missiles comes at a time when American officials expect that President Obama’s decision to begin a limited effort to arm the Syrian rebels might be interpreted by Qatar, along with other Arab countries supporting the rebels, as a green light to drastically expand arms shipments.

Qatar’s aggressive effort to bolster the embattled Syrian opposition is the latest brash move by a country that has been using its wealth to elbow its way to the forefront of Middle Eastern statecraft, confounding both its allies in the region and in the West. The strategy is expected to continue even though Qatar’s longtime leader, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, stepped down last week, allowing his 33-year-old son to succeed him. [Continue reading…]

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Egypt’s Salafists are hoping to capitalize on Morsi’s failure

Al-Monitor reports: In a statement issued June 21 addressing the upcoming June 30 nationwide opposition protests, the Salafist al-Nour Party illustrated its guarded, line-straddling position in the conflict between the Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt’s liberal opposition forces.

While the Nour Party expressed support for the controversial constitution and recognition of the legitimacy of the embattled president, it inconspicuously rallied behind efforts to destabilize the current regime. It called on protesters to adopt peaceful measures to change the balance of power, criticized the partisanship of the president and rejected attempts to portray Egypt’s political stalemate as an Islamist-secular struggle.

“They want to say they are not against secular parties,” Khaled Dawoud, a spokesperson for the National Salvation Front (NSF), told Al-Monitor. “The point that continues to cause problems between us is the constitution.” Opposition groups hold that various articles in Egypt’s constitution challenge religious and social freedoms, whereas al-Nour staunchly opposes removing the debated articles.

Al-Nour has long been wary of attempts by the Muslim Brotherhood to amass power and marginalize its competition. After leaving the Brotherhood-dominated Democratic Alliance for Egypt ahead of the parliamentary elections, the former head of al-Nour told Reuters that the group would not operate in the shadow of the Muslim Brotherhood, and spoke of the acrimonious experience of other parties in the alliance.

Al-Nour, the largest of several Salafist parties, boasts more than 180,000 registered members, and, as an organized political body, is second to the Muslim Brotherhood in size and political strength. “They have ambition to govern, banking on their wide popular base,” said Ahmad Ban, head of the Social and Political Movements Unit at the Nile Center for Political and Strategic Studies. [Continue reading…]

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Is a second revolution really what Egypt needs?

Shadi Hamid writes: Supporters of the Tamarod (“rebel”) movement are taking to streets on June 30th in what is likely to be a massive show of force. Their goals are deceptively simple — pushing President Mohamed Morsi out of power and holding early presidential elections. When asked, however, how they plan to do this, the answers acquire a certain vagueness. Egyptians have every right to call for Morsi to resign — and that right must be protected — but he is obviously under no obligation to heed their calls. So, then what?

There is no legal or constitutional mechanism through which Morsi, who was elected with 51.7 percent of the vote just a year ago, can be ousted. Realistically, there is only one way he falls – if mass violence and a total collapse of public order provoke the military to step in. In this sense, for Tamarod to “succeed,” Egypt must fail. For some in the opposition, this short-term cost — as devastating as it might be — is justified because the alternative of continued Muslim Brotherhood rule will fundamentally alter the very nature of Egypt.

Opposition figures have been flirting with the possibility of various kinds of coups against an incompetent, unpopular — though democratically elected — president. Some, like April 6th’s Tarek al-Khouli and human rights activist Dalia Ziada, have explicitly called for military intervention. Others, like Mohamed ElBaradei and Ahmed el-Borai have taken to issuing what the journalist Evan Hill calls “non-request requests” for the army to step in. Still others, including leaders of Tamarod, have called for the judiciary to intervene and “annul” Morsi’s presidency. [Continue reading…]

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Renewed violence in Egypt

The Guardian reports: Egypt suffered renewed outbreaks of violence on Friday as Muslim Brotherhood offices were attacked in at least four provinces two days before the scheduled start of mass protests against the president and Brotherhood associate Mohamed Morsi.

Two people were killed in Alexandria on Friday – one an American bystander who was watching an attack on local Brotherhood offices – and 70 were injured. Clashes were reported in several other cities between Morsi’s often secular-minded critics – who seek his immediate resignation – and his allies in the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups, who defend his democratic legitimacy.

Six people have now been killed in the renewed violence this week. According to Brotherhood officials, a former MP from their political wing was among the dead on Thursday.

Egypt Daily News reports: On Friday thousands of protesters vowed to remain in Tahrir Square in their call for the ouster of President Mohammed Morsi, and many started erecting tents in preparation for mass demonstrations on 30 June.

Marches from various locations in Cairo, including Talaat Harb Street, Mostafa Mahmoud and Sayeda Zeinab, brought in thousands of protesters into the square in the afternoon.

“We are staying for the long run, we are not leaving before [Morsi] does,” yelled one protester in the square.

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Syria’s oilfields create surreal battle lines amid chaos and tribal loyalties

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad writes: A northern wind had been blowing since early morning, lifting a veil of dust that had blocked the sun and turned the sky the colour of ash. Abu Zayed was sitting on the porch of his unfinished concrete home, watching the storm build. He loved sandstorms. They reminded him of Dubai, where he had lived before the war. He admired the people there for turning a desert into a paradise. They had vision, he told his followers.

Six months ago, he left the Gulf emirate to join the Syrian revolution, attending opposition conferences in Istanbul and Cairo, jostling for position on behalf of his father, the leading sheikh of a powerful tribe in eastern Syria.

But Abu Zayed soon became disgusted with the bickering among the rebel leadership. “There is an opposition council in every hotel lobby in Istanbul,” he said. “You can’t distinguish them from the regime.”

Instead, like other disaffected tribal leaders, Abu Zayed returned home to his ancestral land and put his energy into building up his clan, taking control of his energy-rich ancestral lands.

Most of the oil and gas fields in eastern Syria lie idle or pump meagre quantities that are refined using primitive techniques to generate a pittance, but Abu Zayed’s land has a huge gas plant. It stands less than a mile from his home.

His father had chosen him out his 40 brothers to look after the plant because he was seen as a man of vision. The war had given him a chance to realise his dream: to build an oil-fuelled emirate.

The hard edges of Syria’s frontlines – dogmatic, revolutionary, Islamist or pure murderously sectarian – almost melt away outside the oilfields. New lines emerge pitting tribesmen against battalions, Islamists against everyone else, and creating sometimes surreal lines of engagement, where rebels help maintain government oil supplies in return for their villages being spared from bombardment and being allowed to siphon oil for themselves.

“There is chaos now,” Abu Zayed said. “The Free Syrian Army is chasing loot, and they don’t care about civilians. The military councils are stealing the aid and then selling it. There are dozens of battalions here, we don’t even know who is manning a checkpoint at the end of the street. Some people are saying the days of Bashar [al-Assad] were better, that the opposition has betrayed the people.

“But we can organise this situation,” he said. “Look at this gas plant, it’s under our control. Things are organised here and we can do the same for other oil and gas fields.

“Most of the people who control the oilfields around here are making about 5m Syrian pounds [£32,000] a day. They exploit a field for a few weeks, but because of the chaos, another powerful cousin or battalion soon arrives to fight for it and take control of it.

“I tell these people to lease me the field for S£10m a month. I collect all the fields under my control, bring in companies to exploit them properly and organise truck convoys to sell the gas to Turkey. Then we’ll buy Patriot [missile] batteries and drones to protect the fields against the regime.”

His ambition did not stop there. “Once you have economic power you can convene a council for the tribes here inside the country, and organise all the military units in one military council,” he said.

Using the old definition of tribal land from the French colonial era, before the Syrian republic and its socialist laws that smashed feudal property, each tribe is now claiming ownership of the fields that lie in its wajeh (tribal territory). As the Syrian regime has crumbled, society in the desert east has fallen back on the tribes. “Even [al-Qaida affiliate] Jabhat al-Nusra can’t do anything against us,” said Abu Zayed. “They try to get fields but they can’t. Not Nusra, not even the Americans could take these fields from us with all the weapons we have now.” [Continue reading…]

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Myanmar’s government-backed Buddhist extremists

Reuters reports: The Buddhist extremist movement in Myanmar, known as 969, portrays itself as a grassroots creed.

Its chief proponent, a monk named Wirathu, was once jailed by the former military junta for anti-Muslim violence and once called himself the “Burmese bin Laden.”

But a Reuters examination traces 969’s origins to an official in the dictatorship that once ran Myanmar, and which is the direct predecessor of today’s reformist government. The 969 movement now enjoys support from senior government officials, establishment monks and even some members of the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD), the political party of Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.

Wirathu urges Buddhists to boycott Muslim shops and shun interfaith marriages. He calls mosques “enemy bases.”

Among his admirers: Myanmar’s minister of religious affairs.

“Wirathu’s sermons are about promoting love and understanding between religions,” Sann Sint, minister of religious affairs, told Reuters in his first interview with the international media. “It is impossible he is inciting religious violence.”

Sann Sint, a former lieutenant general in Myanmar’s army, also sees nothing wrong with the boycott of Muslim businesses being led by the 969 monks. “We are now practicing market economics,” he said. “Nobody can stop that. It is up to the consumers.”

President Thein Sein is signaling a benign view of 969, too. His office declined to comment for this story. But in response to growing controversy over the movement, it issued a statement Sunday, saying 969 “is just a symbol of peace” and Wirathu is “a son of Lord Buddha.”

Wirathu and other monks have been closely linked to the sectarian violence spreading across Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. Anti-Muslim unrest simmered under the junta that ran the country for nearly half a century. But the worst fighting has occurred since the quasi-civilian government took power in March 2011.

Two outbursts in Rakhine State last year killed at least 192 people and left 140,000 homeless, mostly stateless Rohingya Muslims. A Reuters investigation found that organized attacks on Muslims last October were led by Rakhine nationalists incited by Buddhist monks and sometimes abetted by local security forces. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. begins shipping arms for Syrian rebels

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Central Intelligence Agency has begun moving weapons to Jordan from a network of secret warehouses and plans to start arming small groups of vetted Syrian rebels within a month, expanding U.S. support of moderate forces battling President Bashar al-Assad, according to diplomats and U.S. officials briefed on the plans.

The shipments, related training and a parallel push to mobilize arms deliveries from European and Arab allies are being timed to allow a concerted push by the rebels starting by early August, the diplomats and officials said, revealing details of a new covert plan authorized by President Barack Obama and disclosed earlier this month.

The CIA is expected to spend up to three weeks bringing light arms and possibly antitank missiles to Jordan. The agency plans to spend roughly two weeks more vetting an initial group of fighters and making sure they know how to use the weapons that they are given, clearing the way for the first U.S.-armed rebels to enter the fight, diplomats briefed on the CIA’s plans said.

Talks are under way with other countries, including France, about pre-positioning European-procured weapons in Jordan. Saudi Arabia is expected to provide shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles, known as Manpads, to a small number of handpicked fighters, as few as 20 at first, officials and diplomats said. The U.S. would monitor this effort, too, to try to reduce the risk that the Manpads could fall into the hands of Islamists.

Up to a few hundred of the fighters will enter Syria under the program each month, starting in August, according to diplomats briefed on CIA plans. [Continue reading…]

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Qatar remains committed to Palestine

Shibley Telhami writes: Nothing was trivial about the moment: Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani gave up his post as emir of Qatar to his son at the pinnacle of his influence, in an act as rare and surprising as his ascending to power through a bloodless coup against his own father in 1995.

The very brevity of the emir’s abdication speech and the remarkable absence of boasting about his transformation of Qatar was itself a rarity in an Arab world accustomed to long, windy addresses on even trivial matters.

What drove the policies of the outgoing emir? What will come next?

The fact that the world is paying attention is a testament to the central role that this small, previously sleepy nation now plays on the world stage. The story of what drove the outgoing emir — and his key partner, Foreign and Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani (HBJ) — tells much about the driving forces in the Arab world. One hint appeared in the announcement’s sparse wording: “We believe that the Arab world is one human body, one coherent structure, that draws its strength from all its constituent parts.”

The outgoing emir, who grew up in the Pan-Arab era of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, once described himself to me as a “Nasserist.” He described his Prime Minister HBJ as a “Sadatist” — or admirer of the pragmatic, pro-Western Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who succeeded Nasser and made peace with Israel.

From this perspective, one of the emir’s most important contributions to Arab politics, the pan-Arab Al Jazeera TV, was the modern — and more credible –version of Nasser’s Sawt Al Arab radio, which itself had revolutionary impact on the Arab world in the 1950s and ‘60s.

Indeed, Al Jazeera has played a key role in the Arab world, hosting Arab nationalists as regular commentators, including Mohammad Hassanein Heikal, Nasser’s confidant. But Qatar, and Al Jazeera, also host Islamists, especially Sheikh Yousuf Al Qaradawi, one of the most influential Sunni religious authorities.

Beyond any pan-Arab aspiration, the outgoing emir’s strategy was in the long-term interest of Qatar. Yet at the core of his — and Al Jazeera’s — success is understanding the Arab and Islamic aspirations of the millions of people they tried to reach. Which is why they paid so much attention to Palestine, as the prism of pain through which Arabs viewed the outside world.

Even at the moment of abdication, Al Jazeera went immediately from Qatari commentators to Palestinian commentators in the West Bank and Gaza. Consider, in the new emir’s inaugural speech, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani followed by singling out his commitment to the Palestinian issue — of all the international issues facing Qatar and the Arab world.[Continue reading…]

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Is Israel a legitimate state?

Gideon Levy writes: The provocative (and challenging) question in this headline is irrelevant. With the exception of Israel, such an accusation hasn’t been hurled at any state, and to be honest, Israel isn’t seriously considered illegitimate either – at least not in the sense the nationalist right in the country would have us believe in order to scare the public. When discussing the topic the question is not whether certain states are legitimate or not, but whether certain regimes are. The regimes of Iran, North Korea, Burma and others are considered illegitimate due to their conduct, but no one questions the legitimacy of Iran as a state. Of course there are states that were born in sin – the United States leading the pack – but no one questions the legitimacy of the U.S. That is true concerning Israel as well. It is an existing state, whose existence isn’t in doubt.

When the right screams ‘delegitimization,’ it purposely exaggerates. Even the most heated criticism of Israel is directed at the regime: most of it deals with Israel being a regime of occupation – an overtly illegitimate reality – and some of it is directed at its definition as an ethnic-national state, the Jewish state.

There is no other state that carries out such an occupation, nor another state that defines itself according to its ethnic, religious or national purity. France is not the state of the French, nor is Germany the state of the Germans. They’re both the states of their citizens. Germans and French aren’t defined only by the blood in the veins – whether one’s grandfather had French blood or an Aryan grandmother – but rather by the naturalization processes in these countries. [Continue reading…]

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Obama’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’ Syria strategy

Micah Zenko writes: President Obama’s decision to intervene more directly in Syria’s civil war by providing limited lethal aid to certain members of the Syrian opposition is a significant foreign policy commitment. It is also a very confused one.

Forget for a moment that the case for Syria’s chemical weapons use was based on unverifiable evidence, or that the administration had reportedly decided to arm Syrian rebels before it even had that evidence. Forget that the president himself reportedly does not think arming the rebels will achieve much, that only 11 percent or 20 percent of the American people endorse his decision, that analysts dismiss it as “too little, too late,” and that even Capitol Hill supporters believe the move is insufficient. As Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez stated: “You can’t just simply send them a pea shooter against a blunderbuss.”

What was most troubling about this latest shift in U.S. policy was the absence of a speech or briefing by the president, or a cabinet official, to clearly articulate why America is deepening its involvement in this Middle East conflict, what U.S. interests are at stake in the civil war, and what strategic objective the United States hopes to achieve. When asked directly about his decision to provide lethal assistance, Obama stated: “I cannot and will not comment on specifics around our programs related to the Syrian opposition.”

The cornerstone of holding public officials accountable by evaluating their policy choices is to first understand what those policies are, but since the June 13 announcement, Obama administration officials have offered the following reasons: [Continue reading…]

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Is Iran’s Supreme Leader really so supreme?

Gary Sick writes: With the surprising Iranian election over, and the moderate Hassan Rouhani elected by a clear majority, a new narrative is emerging. It asserts that absolutely nothing has changed, that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, let the election proceed for his own devious reasons, and that only he can make decisions about Iran’s strategic policies, regardless of who is president.

This is a facile and self-serving argument. After Friday’s election, which reversed all predictions, those of us who watch Iran closely should ask ourselves whether the supreme leader is as supreme as he pretends.

Despite witticisms about “one man, one vote — and that one man is Khamenei,” I am willing to bet that the leader’s vote very early last Friday morning was not for the winning candidate. After all, Rouhani had argued for changes in how Iran deals with political prisoners and particularly its treatment of the former Green candidates who are languishing in house arrest. Those are Khamenei’s policies.

But it is not only the election. Just look at the record. Over the past 15 years, Iran has pursued a series of quite different negotiating strategies with the West: from a temporary suspension of enrichment under the new president-elect, to an on-again-off-again offer to compromise on 20 percent enrichment that resulted in a formal offer via Turkey and Brazil, then a full court stall and “resistance” strategy under the stewardship of the now-forgettable Saeed Jalili. The one constant during all these episodes was the unquestioned supremacy of one man. [Continue reading…]

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