Jewish groups have hissy fit after Christian leaders challenge U.S. military support for Israel

The New York Times reports: A letter signed by 15 leaders of Christian churches that calls for Congress to reconsider giving aid to Israel because of accusations of human rights violations has outraged Jewish leaders and threatened to derail longstanding efforts to build interfaith relations.

The Christian leaders say their intention was to put the Palestinian plight and the stalled peace negotiations back in the spotlight at a time when all of the attention to Middle East policy seems to be focused on Syria, the Arab Spring and the Iranian nuclear threat.

“We asked Congress to treat Israel like it would any other country,” said the Rev. Gradye Parsons, the top official of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), “to make sure our military aid is going to a country espousing the values we would as Americans — that it’s not being used to continually violate the human rights of other people.”

The Jewish leaders responded to the action as a momentous betrayal and announced their withdrawal from a regularly scheduled Jewish-Christian dialogue meeting planned for Monday. In a statement, the Jewish leaders called the letter by the Christian groups “a step too far” and an indication of “the vicious anti-Zionism that has gone virtually unchecked in several of these denominations.”

“Something is deeply broken, badly broken,” said Ethan Felson, vice president and general counsel of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, an umbrella group that helped to convene the meeting. “We’re certainly not getting anywhere now.”

The Jewish groups have called for the Christian churches to send their top officials to a “summit” meeting to discuss the situation, an invitation the Christian leaders say they are considering.

The Christian leaders involved are mostly from the historically mainline Protestant churches. Many of these same churches have taken up contentious resolutions to divest their stock holdings from companies that sell military and security equipment to Israel. Meanwhile, successive Israeli governments have found stalwart support in conservative evangelical American churches.

The breach is all the more bitter because it involves Jewish groups known for cultivating strong interfaith relationships, including the Reform and Conservative movements, the American Jewish Committee and B’nai B’rith International.

The controversy began on Oct. 5, when the Christian groups sent a letter urging Congress to hold hearings into whether Israel was violating the terms for foreign aid recipients. The Christian leaders wrote that they had “witnessed widespread Israeli human rights violations against the Palestinians, including killing of civilians, home demolitions and forced displacement, and restrictions on Palestinian movement.”

The letter said that Israel had continued expanding settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem despite American calls to stop “claiming territory that under international law and United States policy should belong to a future Palestinian state.”

The signers, besides the Presbyterians, included leaders of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the United Methodist Church, the National Council of Churches, the United Church of Christ, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the American Friends Service Committee (a Quaker agency) and the Mennonite Central Committee. Two Catholic leaders also signed, one with the Conference of Major Superiors of Men, an umbrella group of men’s religious orders.

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Chomsky: Academic boycott ‘will strengthen support for Israel’

During a visit to the Gaza Strip, Noam Chomsky was interviewed by Electronic Intifada’s Rami Almeghari who asked whether he supports calls to boycott Israel academically and economically.

Noam Chomsky: If you call for an academic boycott of say Tel Aviv University you have to ask yourself, what the consequences are of that call for the Palestinians and there’s an indirect answer. When you carry out an act in the United States, you are trying to reach the American population and you’re trying to bring the American population to be more supportive of Palestinian rights and opposed to Israeli and US policies.

So you therefore ask yourself, will an academic boycott of Tel Aviv University have – you ask yourself what the effect would be on the American audience in the United States that you are trying to reach. Now, that depends on the amount of organization and education that has taken place in the United States.

Today, if you look at the people’s understandings and beliefs, a call for an academic boycott on Tel Aviv University will strengthen support for Israel and US policy because it’s not understood. There is no point of talking to people in Swahili if they don’t understand what you are saying. There could be circumstances in which a boycott of Tel Aviv would be helpful, but first you have to do the educational and organizational work.

Same with South Africa. The equivalent of BDS, the boycott and sanctions programs, they began really around 1980. There were a few before, but mainly around then. That was after twenty years of serious organizing and activism which had led to a situation in which there was almost universal opposition to apartheid. Corporations were pulling out following the Sullivan law, the [US] Congress was passing sanctions and the UN had already declared embargo. We’re nowhere near that in the case of Palestine. We are not even close.

Rami Almeghari: Do you agree or not agree, do you agree partially… ?

NC: You can’t agree or disagree, it’s meaningless. In the case of any tactic, you ask yourself, what are its consequences, ultimately for the victims, and indirectly for the audience you are trying to reach. So you ask, do the people I am trying to reach see this as a step towards undercutting US policy and freeing the Palestinians or do they see this tactic as a reason to strengthen their support for US policy and attacking the Palestinians. That’s the question you ask when you carry out any tactic, whether it is disobedience, breaking bank windows, demonstrations, whatever it is. Those are the questions you ask if you care about the victims, if you don’t care about the victims, you won’t bother with these questions and you just do what makes you feel good.

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A vanishing chronicle of climates past

The world's oldest living trees, bristlecone pines each stand on their own pedestal of dolomite rock, high in the Californian mountains.

At Aeon Magazine, Ross Andersen writes: No event, however momentous, leaves an everlasting imprint on the world. Take the cosmic background radiation, the faint electromagnetic afterglow of the Big Bang. It hangs, reassuringly, in every corner of our skies, the firmest evidence we have for the giant explosion that created our universe. But it won’t be there forever. In a trillion years’ time it is going to slip beyond what astronomers call the cosmic light horizon, the outer edge of the observable universe. The universe’s expansion will have stretched its wavelength so wide that it will be undetectable to any observer, anywhere. Time will have erased its own beginning.

On Earth, the past is even quicker to vanish. To study geology is to be astonished at how hastily time reorders our planet’s surface, filling its craters, smoothing its mountains and covering its continents in seawater. Life is often the fastest to disintegrate in this constant churn of water and rock. The speed of biological decomposition ensures that only the most geologically fortunate of organisms freeze into stone and become fossils. The rest dissolve into sediment, leaving the thinnest of molecular traces behind.

Part of what separates humans from nature is our striving to preserve the past, but we too have proved adept at its erasure. It was humans, after all, who set fire to the ancient Library of Alexandria, whose hundreds of thousands of scrolls contained a sizable fraction of classical learning. The loss of knowledge at Alexandria was said to be so profound that it set Western civilisation back 1,000 years. Indeed, some have described the library’s burning as an event horizon, a boundary in time across which information cannot flow.

The burning of books and libraries has perhaps fallen out of fashion, but if you look closely, you will find its spirit survives in another distinctly human activity, one as old as civilisation itself: the destruction of forests. Trees and forests are repositories of time; to destroy them is to destroy an irreplaceable record of the Earth’s past. Over this past century of unprecendented deforestation, a tiny cadre of scientists has roamed the world’s remaining woodlands, searching for trees with long memories, trees that promise science a new window into antiquity. To find a tree’s memories, you have to look past its leaves and even its bark; you have to go deep into its trunk, where the chronicles of its long life lie, secreted away like a library’s lost scrolls. This spring, I journeyed to the high, dry mountains of California to visit an ancient forest, a place as dense with history as Alexandria. A place where the heat of a dangerous fire is starting to rise. [Continue reading…]

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The evolution of running

With the civilizational bias that skews most people’s perceptions of human history, we have come to regard the notion of ‘primitive’ through its connotations, crude, unsophisticated, and poorly developed. Yet what is primitive is primary. It is the origin from which we have strayed and the essential we have largely forgotten.

Daniel Lieberman: [I]ncreases in brain size were not really an early event in human evolution, and in fact, they didn’t occur until after hunting and after the invention of hunting and gathering, and not even until cooking and various other technological inventions, which gave us the energy necessary to have really large brains.

Brains are very costly. Right now, just sitting here, my brain (even though I’m not doing much other than talking) is consuming about 20- 25 percent of my resting metabolic rate. That’s an enormous amount of energy, and to pay for that, I need to eat quite a lot of calories a day, maybe about 600 calories a day, which back in the Paleolithic was quite a difficult amount of energy to acquire. So having a brain of 1,400 cubic centimeters, about the size of my brain, is a fairly recent event and very costly.

The idea then is at what point did our brains become so important that we got the idea that brain size and intelligence really mattered more than our bodies? I contend that the answer was never, and certainly not until the Industrial Revolution.

Why did brains get so big? There are a number of obvious reasons. One of them, of course, is for culture and for cooperation and language and various other means by which we can interact with each other, and certainly those are enormous advantages. If you think about other early humans like Neanderthals, their brains are as large or even larger than the typical brain size of human beings today. Surely those brains are so costly that there would have had to be a strong benefit to outweigh the costs. So cognition and intelligence and language and all of those important tasks that we do must have been very important.

We mustn’t forget that those individuals were also hunter-gatherers. They worked extremely hard every day to get a living. A typical hunter-gatherer has to walk between nine and 15 kilometers a day. A typical female might walk 9 kilometers a day, a typical male hunter-gatherer might walk 15 kilometers a day, and that’s every single day. That’s day-in, day-out, there’s no weekend, there’s no retirement, and you do that for your whole life. It’s about the distance if you walk from Washington, DC to LA every year. That’s how much walking hunter-gatherers did every single year.

In addition, they’re constantly digging, they’re climbing trees, and they’re using their bodies intensely. I would argue that cognition was an extremely important factor in human evolution, along with language, theory of mind — all those cognitive developments that make us so sophisticated. But they weren’t a triumph of cognition over brute force; it was a combination. It was not brains over brawn, it was brains plus brawn, and that made possible the hunter-gatherer way of life.

What hunter-gatherers really do is they use division of labor, they have intense cooperation, they have intense social interactions, and they have group memory. All of those behaviors enable hunter-gatherers to interact in ways such that they can increase the rate at which they can acquire energy and have offspring at a higher rate than chimpanzees. It’s a very energetically intensive way of life that’s made possible by a combination of extraordinary intelligence, inventiveness, creativity, language, but also daily physical exercise.

The other reason we often discount the importance of brawn in our lives is that we have a very strange idea of what constitutes athleticism. Think about the events that we care about most in the Olympics. They’re the power sports. They’re the 100-meter dash, the 100-meter freestyle events. Most athletes, the ones we really value the most, are physically very powerful. But if you think about it this way, most humans are wimps.

Usain Bolt, who is the world’s fastest human being today, can run about 10.4 meters a second, and he can do so for about ten or 20 seconds. My dog, any goat, any sheep I can study in my lab, can run about twice as fast as Usain Bolt without any training, without any practice, any special technology, any drugs or whatever. Humans, the very fastest human beings, are incredibly slow compared to most mammals. Not only in terms of brute speed, but also in terms of how long they can go at a given speed. Usain Bolt can go 10.4 meters a second for about ten to 20 seconds. My dog or a goat or a lion or a gazelle or some antelope in Africa can run 20 meters a second for about four minutes. So there’s no way Usain Bolt could ever outrun any lion or for that matter run down any animal.

A typical chimpanzee is between about two and five times more powerful than a human being. A chimpanzee, who weighs less than a human, can just rip somebody’s arm off or rip their face off (as recently happened in Connecticut). It’s not that the chimpanzee is remarkably strong, it’s that we are remarkably weak. We have this notion that humans are terrible natural athletes. But we’ve been looking at the wrong kind of athleticism. What we’re really good at is not power, what we’re really phenomenal at is endurance. We’re the tortoises of the animal world, not the hares of the animal world. Humans can actually outrun most animals over very, very long distances.

David Attenborough follows the San people of the Kalahari desert, the last tribe on earth to use persistence hunting.

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Americans are waking up to the reality of global warming

These are the highlights from a newly-released report from Yale’s Project on Climate Change Communication, “Americans’ Global Warming Beliefs and Attitudes in September 2012“:

  • Americans’ belief in the reality of global warming has increased by 13 percentage points over the past two and a half years, from 57 percent in January 2010 to 70 percent in September 2012. At the same time, the number of Americans who say global warming is not happening has declined nearly by half, from 20 percent in January 2010 to only 12 percent today.


  • For the first time since 2008, more than half of Americans (54%) believe global warming is caused mostly by human activities, an increase of 8 points since March 2012. Americans who say it is caused mostly by natural changes in the environment have declined to 30 percent (from 37% in March).


  • A growing number of Americans believe global warming is already harming people both at home and abroad. Four in ten say people around the world are being harmed right now by climate change (40%, up 8 percentage points since March 2012), while 36 percent say global warming is currently harming people in the United States (up six points since March).


  • In addition, they increasingly perceive global warming as a threat to themselves (42%, up 13 points since March 2012), their families (46%, up 13 points), and/or people in their communities (48%, up 14 points). Americans also perceive global warming as a growing threat to people in the United States (57%, up 11 points since March 2012), in other modern industrialized countries (57%, up 8 points since March), and in developing countries (64%, up 12 points since March).


  • Today over half of Americans (58%) say they are “somewhat” or “very worried” – now at its highest level since November 2008.


  • For the first time since 2008, Americans are more likely to believe most scientists agree that global warming is happening than believe there is widespread disagreement on the subject (44% versus 36%, respectively). This is an increase of 9 percentage points since March 2012.
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Video: Gaza-bound ship ‘attacked by Israel forces’

The Associated Press reports: Israeli troops on Saturday commandeered a Gaza-bound ship that tried to break through Israel’s blockade of the Hamas-ruled seaside strip, the military said. European lawmakers and other pro-Palestinian activists aboard did not resist, and the Finnish-flagged vessel was diverted to an Israeli port.

The voyage by the ship, Estelle, marked the latest challenge to the air, land and sea embargo of Gaza that Israel imposed after the Islamic militant Hamas group seized the territory in 2007. Israeli officials say they need to enforce the blockade to prevent weapons smuggling.

Hamas called for more attempts to break the sea blockade.

Six Israeli naval vessels stopped the Estelle when it was about 30 nautical miles from Gaza, and masked soldiers boarder the ship and ordered it to sail to Israel’s Ashdod port, said Victoria Strand, a spokeswoman for the activists.

The Swedish-owned Estelle left Naples, Italy, on Oct. 7 with about 30 people from eight countries, including lawmakers from Norway, Sweden, Greece and Spain, as well as Israeli activists and a 79-year-old former legislator from Canada.

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Syrian crisis stabs at heart of Lebanese capital

The Daily Star reports: The assassination of a high-ranking Lebanese security official opposed to Syrian President Bashar Assad in a car bomb in Beirut signals that the Syrian crisis has begun to explode in Lebanon, political analysts said Friday. The powerful blast that killed Brig. Gen. Wissam al-Hasan, the head of the police’s Information Branch, and at least four others Friday in the Beirut neighborhood of Ashrafieh, has also revived memories of the wave of car bombings that engulfed Lebanon during the devastating 1975-90 Civil War.

“The Ashrafieh blast sets the beginning for the Syrian crisis to explode in Lebanon. Lebanon has entered the Syrian melee,” Simon Haddad, professor of political science at the American University of Beirut, told The Daily Star. “The regime in Syria has entered a dangerous stage. Therefore, it will use all means in order to prolong its life.”

Blaming the Assad regime for the explosion, Haddad said: “The Syrian regime is sending messages to the March 14 parties as well as to America and Europe to stop their support for the Syrian opposition.

“The Syrian regime is trying to send a clear message to the international community saying: ‘Supporting the rebels [in Syria] will threaten security and stability in Lebanon,’” he added.

A similar view was echoed by Samir Franjieh, a former Maronite MP, who said that the Ashrafieh explosion and Hasan’s killing were clearly linked to the 19-month-old bloody conflict in Syria.

“The Syrian regime has begun playing with Lebanon’s stability as a card to negotiate with the international community over the future of Syria, including reducing the international sanctions on it,” Franjieh, a member of the opposition March 14 Secretariat General, told The Daily Star.

“The explosion was a clear attempt by Syria to undermine stability in Lebanon in order to exert pressure on the international community. Syria wants to tell the international community: ‘If you want to maintain stability in Lebanon, you must talk to us.’”

Friday’s explosion, the most serious blast the Lebanese capital has seen in more than four years, comes at a time when Lebanon has increasingly felt the repercussions of the crisis in neighboring Syria with the country’s March 8 and March 14 parties sharply split over the conflict next door.

Arab and Western countries have repeatedly voiced concerns over Lebanon’s stability, warning against the reverberations of the turmoil in Syria on the country’s security.

Politicians and analysts have long held the view that Lebanon’s security and stability are intertwined with that of Syria.

Violence in Syria has often spilled over into Lebanon, jolting the country’s already fragile security situation, with cross-border shootings, shelling by the Syrian army, tit-for-tat kidnappings, sectarian clashes and fighting between armed supporters and opponents of Assad in the northern city of Tripoli. Several Lebanese have been killed and wounded by Syrian gunfire in a series of deadly incidents on the Lebanese-Syrian border in recent months.

The split between the Hezbollah-led March 8 alliance and the opposition March 14 coalition over the Syrian crisis has raised fears of the turmoil in Syria spilling over to Lebanon.

Ahmad Moussali, professor of Islamic studies at AUB, also said Hasan’s assassination signaled the beginning of grave repercussions of the Syrian crisis on Lebanon.

“The Ashrafieh explosion and Hasan’s assassination sent political messages both at home and abroad. But the most important message is that the situation in Syria will not remain confined to Syrian territory and will plunge Lebanon into conflicts of high-level tension,” Moussali told The Daily Star.

“No doubt, the crisis in Syria will reflect on the political conflict in Lebanon because the Lebanese have joined the conflict in Syria by financing, arming and training the Syrian opposition,” he said.

Moussali added that Hasan’s assassination deep in the Lebanese capital showed that the repercussions of the Syrian crisis directly struck the heart of Lebanon. “The assassination of Hasan, who is linked to the U.N. investigation [into former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s killing], has sent a strong message to all parties in Lebanon.”

“The one who assassinated Hasan wants to turn the conflict in Syria into an inter-Lebanese conflict. Hasan’s assassination is a trap to play the Lebanese against each other,” Moussali said. “The assassination could be the beginning to justify an exchange of assassinations between the feuding parties in Lebanon.” [Continue reading…]

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Looking back on life under the Assad dynasty

Ahed Al-Hendi writes: They came for me on December 14, 2006. Plainclothes police carrying automatic weapons stormed into an Internet café in Damascus and grabbed me and a friend. They brought us in a car to the headquarters of the Syrian secret police. Around midnight they dragged me from my holding cell to the man I would come to know only as “Captain Wissam.” He was a tall, dark-skinned officer. He looked at me and smiled. “We will release you in just a few minutes,” he said. “You should be a good citizen.” He then called a guard, whom he ordered to “take good care” of me.

Both men spoke with the distinctive accent of the Alawites; in fact, every single person in the prison did. The Alawite minority has effectively ruled Syria since 1963, and especially since President Hafez al-Assad took power in 1970. So when you hear this accent, you pay attention. Ever since I can remember, this has been the way that the people with real power in our country speak.

They did not keep me for a few minutes. They threw me into a cell they called “the Suite.” Measuring five feet by one and a half feet, it had no windows. There was a hole in the floor for a toilet and a hose attached to a faucet in the wall. The hose had two purposes: to keep the toilet clean and to provide me with drinking water. They told me I’d be staying for two years.

As it turned out, they let me go in 40 days. But that was more than enough. During that period, which I spent entirely in solitary confinement, I was interrogated constantly. I was tortured repeatedly, both psychologically and physically. (Forgive me, but I would prefer not to go into the details.) Every single day I feared death. When they released me, I staggered out onto the street, bearded and unkempt, wearing the same clothing I had on at the time of my arrest (though now everything was in tatters). Outside, everything seemed to be normal. People in the streets were walking around and enjoying their lives, smiling and laughing.

This was Syria under the Assads. I had drawn the attention of the secret police because of my membership in a student group that set out to publicize the human rights abuses of the regime. To engage in opposition meant questioning not only the government, but the entire version of reality that it had imposed upon us for decades. [Continue reading…]

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Lebanon’s great divide exposed by assassination of security chief

The Guardian reports: Wissam al-Hassan knew he was a marked man. Last week, as he briefed Lebanon’s opposition leaders on the case on which he had staked his career, the spy chief told them that assassins were again stalking the country.

Virtually besieged in their homes since the early summer, his hosts hardly needed the warning.

Hassan brought with him evidence that he said strengthened the case against his highest profile target, Lebanon’s former information minister, Michel Samaha, who he alleged had collaborated with Syrian officials to plot bombings – like the very one that killed the veteran major general on Friday.

He died when a bomb in east Beirut blew up the car he was in during the rush hour, killing at least seven others and injuring scores more.

A feared spillover of the violence in Syria into deeply fragile and sectarian Lebanon had been edging ever closer to inevitable. The melting pot of the region has barely been holding together as Syria boiled, its fragmented sects increasingly drawn into a conflict that the Lebanese had dreaded but could do little to stop.

The case Hassan had built against Samaha was highly unusual in Lebanon, where bigwigs are rarely taken on. Those such as Samaha with powerful connections are virtually untouchable.

This case was different, Hassan said. Not just because of the weight of evidence against the accused, who had allegedly been taped by an aide acknowledging that he had been given explosives by the Syrian national intelligence chief, Ali Mamlouk.

Added to that were the former minister’s allegedly incriminating phone calls: he had apparently recorded his key conversations, then downloaded them to his computer. Prosecution briefs rarely come stronger.

Syrian officials made no secret of their demand for Samaha to be freed and the case against him dropped. But Hassan defied them, a move deemed crazy by his detractors and seen as an act of nation-building by his supporters, who saw the crumbling of power in Syria as an overdue chance for Lebanon to assert its sovereignty against its interfering neighbour. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey calls on major powers to intervene in Syria

The Guardian reports: Turkey has called on the US, Britain and other leading countries to take immediate action to intervene in Syria to prevent a looming humanitarian “disaster” that it says threatens the lives of millions of internally displaced people and refugees as winter approaches and could soon ignite a region-wide conflagration.

Appealing to the major powers to set aside their differences over how to end the 20-month-old civil war in which an estimated 32,000 people have died, Ahmet Davutoglu, Turkey’s foreign minister, said the crisis had gone on for long enough. The Syrian people were crying out for help and their pleas could no longer be ignored.

“How long can this situation continue? I mean in Bosnia, now we have Ban Ki-moon [the UN secretary general] apologising 20 years after. Who will apologise for Syria in 20 years’ time? How can we stay idle?” Davutoglu told the Guardian in an exclusive interview in Istanbul.

“We [Turkey] are doing all we can to help these people, using all diplomatic capacity to stop this bloodshed. But there should be a much more concerted effort by the international community. The best way we can see now is direct humanitarian intervention.” [Continue reading…]

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The target of today’s bombing in Beirut

Elias Muhanna writes: The news is still trickling out about the bombing today in Beirut, but all media outlets are now confirming that the target was Brigadier-General Wissam al-Hassan, the head of the Information Branch of the Internal Security Forces.

I’ve written a great deal about Wissam al-Hassan over the past few years and will have more to say about him this evening, but for the time being, here’s a quick backgrounder, followed by several links to my blog posts about the most important events in which al-Hassan played a major role.

Wissam al-Hassan was one of the most important security figures in Lebanon. He headed up the Information Branch of the Lebanese Internal Security Forces (fir` al-ma`lumat), and was recently responsible for arresting Michel Samaha, a former minister with close ties to Syria, for allegedly conspiring to have explosives blown up all around Lebanon in a bid to create havoc. The move was seen as very destabilizing in Lebanon because Wissam al-Hassan is very close to the March 14th coalition while Samaha had long been regarded as “untouchable” because of his connections to Damascus. And yet, none of Samaha’s Lebanese allies demanded his release. Many people were shocked at the ISF’s boldness and concluded that the evidence against Samaha (which allegedly included video and audio footage) was so compelling that he became politically radioactive to his allies.

Wissam al-Hassan has long been the target of March 8th ire. His branch of the police has been described as an independent fiefdom that is not under any real civilian control. Al-Hassan was a key security chief for former Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri, and was accused by some of having played a suspicious role in the build-up to the assassination in 2005. From March 14th’s perspective, the loss of al-Hassan is a major blow.

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Syrian forces’ improvised arms: desperate measures, or deliberate aid?

C.J. Chivers writes: As the war in Syria escalated this year, fighters opposed to President Bashar al-Assad reached for arms from many sources, including weapons manufactured by their own hands: Molotov cocktails, roadside bombs and locally made mortars and rockets. These are the familiar tools of modern insurgencies — weapons of choice or necessity for fighters who begin conflicts with limited means.

But a more surprising phenomenon is also present on Syria’s battlefields: pro-government forces are using makeshift weapons, too.

The development of improvised ordnance for both the Syrian military and loyalist militias, or shabiha, is at this point beyond dispute. Since this summer, evidence has surfaced showing the remains of so-called “barrel bombs,” which have been dropped from government aircraft, and the presence of a particular type of improvised rocket that has a history of use against American forces in Iraq. Both have been dropped or fired repeatedly into rebel-controlled territory. And both summon intriguing questions, for which answers remain elusive.

According to conventional wisdom, pro-government forces should be well equipped by weapons from Russia and China and, to a lesser extent, Iran. But for some reason they have resorted to crafting weapons to complement, or perhaps even replace, their standard arms. We are not sure why, though theories abound. [Continue reading…]

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Iran: How to avoid repeating the Iraq debacle

Rolf Ekéus and Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer write: The Iraq War might seem a thing of the past. But nearly ten years after combat began, the United States and its allies are using policies to address the Iranian nuclear challenge that are eerily similar to those it pursued in the run-up to Operation Enduring Freedom. Just as they did with Saddam Hussein, concerned governments have implemented economic sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and low-level violence to weaken the Iranian regime and prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons, with the long-term objective of regime change. In Iraq, and seemingly now in Iran, diplomacy and inspections became a means to an end: building up a casus belli. The strategy failed miserably in Iraq a decade ago. It probably will in Iran, too.

This is not to suggest that Iran poses no threat. Tehran has reached the threshold of having a nuclear weapons capability. In August, an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report stated that the country has 2,100 centrifuges in an underground site and has intensified production of nuclear fuel. To curb the Iranian nuclear program, concerned states have applied increasingly severe economic sanctions on the Iranian central bank and its crude oil sector, carried out cyber attacks on Iranian centrifuges, and attempted targeted assassinations of Iranian scientists and engineers. Meanwhile, in Jerusalem and Washington, decision-makers appear to be aligning their time frames for a preventive attack [http://nyti.ms/QphdvD]. At the United Nations in early October, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu argued for instituting a redline on Iran’s nuclear proliferation: Should Iran enrich uranium beyond a certain point, he urged, the world would agree to attack. European diplomats characterized his speech as reminiscent of former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s to the United Nations in 2003, albeit with lower-quality graphics.

But calling for war while intensifying pressure on Iran, without also clearly defining steps Tehran could take to defuse the tension, removes any incentives for Iran to change its behavior. In the short term, the hostility of Western nations is likely to make it more difficult for Iranian moderates to rein in the nuclear program. And in the longer term, Tehran will increasingly question whether Iran ought to remain within the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in the face of economic sanctions, violence, and isolation. Without eyes on the ground, moreover, it will grow ever more difficult to assess Tehran’s actual progress toward the nuclear weapons threshold. The world could miss the emergence of an Iranian breakout capability, or else blunder into another unjustified war. [Continue reading…]

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Obama’s strategic drift

Rosa Brooks offers President Obama some tips on what to do if he gets re-elected:

1. Get a Strategy. No, really. We don’t currently seem to have one, grand or otherwise. We’ve got “the long war” — but we don’t seem to have a long game. Instead of a strategy, we have aspirations (“We want a stable Middle East”) and we have laundry lists (check out the 2010 National Security Strategy). But as I have written in a previous column, there’s no clear sense of what animates our foreign policy. And without a clear strategic vision of the world, there’s no way to evaluate the success or failure of different initiatives, and no way to distinguish the important from the marginal.

What does President Obama see as the one or two gravest threats to the United States? What are our one or two biggest opportunities? Is terrorism an existential threat to the United States, or a marginal threat, overshadowed by the long-term dangers posed by climate change, pandemics, and a highly manipulable global financial system? Should we focus on increasing ties in Asia, or focus on our neighbors in Central and South America? Is the United States trying to maintain global preeminence, even if it comes at the expense of other states — or are we trying to foster a global order in which the United States is but one of many strong countries, all constrained by a robust international network of laws and institutions?

If President Obama lacks a clear strategic foreign policy vision, it’s partly because the strategic planning shops within the White House’s National Security Staff (NSS) and the State Department have been marginalized and disempowered. Within the NSS, the Strategic Planning Directorate has been reduced to a speech-writing shop, without the clout to bring senior officials to the table for longer-term strategy discussions. At the State Department, the Policy Planning office — once run by such legendary figures as George Kennan and Paul Nitze — was handed off, after Anne-Marie Slaughter’s departure, to a young lawyer whose credentials include ample brains and a stint as a Clinton campaign aide, but no prior foreign policy experience.

If President Obama ekes out a victory on November 6, he should take a strategic pause. He should ensure that influential and credible people are appointed to lead the various strategic planning shops, and insist that his senior officials participate in a process to develop a clear, concise and articulable strategy, one that can guide future U.S. foreign policy and national security decisions.

All of this might be sound advice in the circumstances, but don’t Americans who are being asked to give Obama a second term deserve to already have a clear view of his strategic vision? The implicit promise here is: give me another four years and then I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. That’s not how democracy is supposed to work.

Obama’s lack of strategy is in fact the signature of his presidency — an approach which is far more reactive than directive. Early on he excused his lack of interest in prosecuting anyone for the crimes of the previous administration by claiming that he wanted to look forward, not back, but as a reactive president he is perpetually looking back.

As for why he has not been supplied with the kind of strategic thinking that could have given his first term more direction, this seems to stem from the way he responded differently to finding himself in similar circumstances as George W. Bush.

Both men entered office aware that they needed to come up with a way of handling their individual lack of experience. Bush opted to compensate by surrounding himself with strong-willed political veterans (and thereby created the space for a neoconservative takeover). Obama’s choices on the other hand seem to have been swayed by his own vanity. Rather than risk being outshone by anyone, he has generally opted to surround himself with sycophantic mediocrity.

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The award for not bringing anyone to justice

David Cole writes: On Oct. 17, Eric Holder handed out the Justice Department’s annual awards for distinguished service to a slew of department employees. Featured at the top of the awards announcement were the men and women who successfully prosecuted 10 New Orleans police officers for killing innocent civilians in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and a U.S. marshal who risked his life to protect a victim from a violent fugitive during the fugitive’s capture. But buried at the bottom of the list — the 13th of 14 “distinguished service awards” — was a more unusual awardee: Assistant U.S. Attorney John Durham. Durham and his team received the award not for bringing anyone to justice, but for declining to hold accountable anyone in the CIA for its brutal interrogations of detainees at secret prisons, or “black sites,” in connection with President George W. Bush’s “war on terror.”

“In order to conduct the investigations,” the citation reads, “the team had to review significant amounts of information, much of which was classified, and conduct many interviews in the United States and at overseas locations.”

There’s no question that Durham worked hard for a long time, and that the investigation was complex and substantial. After all, more than 100 men were “disappeared” into the CIA’s black sites for extended incommunicado detention and interrogation. Because the CIA prisons were a secret, everything that happened there is classified, complicating investigation still further. And because the investigation itself is secret, we can’t know precisely what evidence Durham considered, what roadblocks he faced, what judgment calls he made.

But here’s what we do know. Many of those “disappeared” into the CIA’s black sites were tortured and/or illegally subjected to cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, for example, were waterboarded 83 and 183 times, respectively. They and other detainees were stripped naked, doused with water, beaten about the face and stomach, slammed into walls, deprived of sleep for days on end, forced into painful stress positions, and confined in small dark boxes for hours at a time. And these were just the “authorized” torture tactics, given a green light by a secret memo written in August 2002 by John Yoo and Jay Bybee from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, and specifically okayed by President Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, among others. [Continue reading…]

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Pakistanis divided on army offensive after Malala shooting

The Associated Press reports: Despite widespread outrage over the Taliban shooting of a female teenage activist, Pakistani leaders and opinion makers are divided over whether the government should respond by targeting the militants’ last major sanctuary along the Afghan border.

The U.S. has long pressed Pakistan to launch an operation in the remote and mountainous North Waziristan tribal area, home to enemies of Islamabad as well as to militants fighting U.S. troops in Afghanistan. The recent attack on 14-year-old Malala Yousufzai has given new momentum to the debate.

One side argues the government should harness anger over the shooting to build public support for a push into North Waziristan. The other claims more fighting isn’t the answer and would trigger a violent backlash. They recommend peace negotiations and ending Pakistani support for the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

The Associated Press of Pakistan adds: The Foreign Office (FO) spokesperson said on Thursday that it was unfortunate that the attack on Malala Yousafzai was being used to justify the launch of a military operation in North Waziristan.

During a weekly briefing, FO spokesperson Moazzam Ali Khan condemned the attack on the 14-year-old child rights activist and said that it could not be justified in any manner.

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