Israelis will all pay on doomsday

Nehemia Shtrasler writes: The Second Lebanon War taught us something new about the Israeli economy. In 2006, we were sure that the economy would get caught up in a crisis and deep recession following the barrage of rockets on the north, which we feared would hit Tel Aviv. But it turned out we were wrong. The economy was unusually strong and stable. It did shift down a gear for one quarter, but it returned to its previous pace of growth immediately afterward, as though nothing had happened. So maybe our economy will be able to survive an attack on Iran intact?

This time around, the Bank of Israel and the Finance Ministry are predicting that an attack on Iran would cause serious economic damage. They are concerned that the economy will ground to a long-term halt; they worry about bankruptcies and mass layoffs. The Bank of Israel is preparing to launch a program protecting the banks from a possible panic manifested by a mass withdrawal of money, which could put the banking system at risk of bankruptcy.

An attack on Iran would be condemned around the world. There are already countries, companies, labor associations and consumer groups that boycott Israel because of its occupation of the territories. An attack on Iran would broaden and intensify the boycott. There are also European companies that won’t trade with Israeli companies because of the risk they say Israel poses. And when that threat is actualized – when rockets fall on Tel Aviv – the rest of the world’s investors will also flee. So we should expect stocks and government bonds to drop sharply, and the deficit to rise in the wake of an increase in security expenses as tax revenue drops.

A military assault on Iran will also spell a sharp rise in oil prices, which will intensify the global recession and make us even less popular in Europe and the United States than we already are. Because if there’s anything that unemployed Spaniards or Greek demonstrators really don’t want right now, it’s a gas hike.

Iran’s response to an attack is expected to be far more significant than Iraq’s late and relatively minor response to the bombing of its nuclear facility in 1981: dozens, and perhaps hundreds, of rockets fired on Israel as an initial reaction, boosted by a drizzle of rockets over the long term. A few Shahab-4 missiles a day will be enough to cause immense damage to morale and to the economy. You can’t live a normal life under a daily threat like that. People will be scared to go shopping and the malls will be empty. Demand for goods and services will drop and factories will go bankrupt. Tourists will stop coming, investors will flee, the ports will be paralyzed and international airlines will stop landing here.

As a result, the shekel will drop sharply, inflation will rise, interest rates will be sky-high and unemployment will go up. One blow will follow another. At least housing prices will drop, though.

Under such a scenario, we will have no choice but to ask our only friend for help. But given the state of relations with U.S. President Barack Obama, there’s no reason for him to rush in to assist Israel. After all, he opposes an attack in the first place, and particularly doesn’t want one now, on the eve of presidential elections. It is this undermining of the alliance with the United States that is the most dangerous step of all.

In both his first and second terms of office, Benjamin Netanyahu has managed to make himself hated by the U.S. administration because of his manipulative approach toward the Palestinian issue. Now he, along with the rest of us, is reaping the fruit of that approach.

It appears that the Israeli public understands full well the degree to which we are dependent on the United States. It’s not just the $3 billion a year or the new military aircraft. Without a source of more weapons during wartime and without diplomatic protection, our situation will be frightfully dangerous. All it takes is for a U.S. president to imply that he’s reconsidering his country’s ties with Israel and we will become a pariah country to which no one will want to lend even a single dollar. Under such conditions, even international corporate giants like Teva won’t be able to get credit abroad.

But wait, isn’t it possible this whole doomsday scenario won’t take place and the dour predictions will turn out to be just as mistaken this time around as they were in 2006?

In light of the massive differences between the war in Lebanon and a military assault on Iran, one would have to be an incurable optimist to believe that’s the case. The doomsday scenario seems to be the most likely.

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Israel appoints new home security minister amid fears over strike on Iran

The Guardian reports: A former intelligence chief has been appointed as Israel’s new minister for homeland security, as speculation about a military strike targeting Iran’s nuclear programme intensifies.

Avi Dichter, 59, who headed Israel’s internal security agency, Shin Bet, from 2000-05, will be confirmed in the new post at a special parliamentary session this week. Dichter has previously indicated a cautious approach to military action against Iran. In February, he said Israel should not act unilaterally: “Israel is not a superpower. We cannot lead the world offensive against Iran … We need to prepare, just in case nobody plans to do anything, but to lead it will be a total mistake.”

Two months ago, he said he was glad the former Mossad chief Meir Dagan had spoken out against a military strike.

Febrile speculation over whether the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, and defence minister, Ehud Barak, are close to ordering military action in the coming weeks has dominated the Israeli media in recent days. In an article on Friday in Israel’s biggest-selling daily, Yedioth Ahronoth, commentators Nahum Barnea and Shimon Shiffer wrote: “Insofar as it depends on Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, an Israeli military strike on the nuclear facilities in Iran will take place in the autumn before the US elections in November.”

Barnea later wrote that he and Shiffer had since been “bombarded with phone calls from people who asked if it was time to hide in the bomb shelters”. [Continue reading…]

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Hamas and the Arab uprisings

The International Crisis Group reports:

Hamas never has faced such large challenges and opportunities as presented by the Arab uprisings. It abandoned its headquarters in Damascus, at much cost to ties with its largest state supporter, Iran, while improving those with such U.S. allies as Egypt, Qatar and Turkey. Asked to pick sides in an escalating regional contest, it has sought to choose neither. Internal tensions are at new heights, centring on how to respond to regional changes in the short run. Leaders in the West Bank and exile tend to believe that with the rise to power of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in particular and the West’s rapprochement with Islamists in general, it is time for bolder steps toward Palestinian unity, thereby facilitating Hamas’s regional and wider international integration. The Gaza leadership by contrast is wary of large strategic steps amid a still uncertain regional future. These new dynamics – Islamists’ regional ascent; shifting U.S. and EU postures toward them; vacillation within their Palestinian offshoot – offer both Hamas and the West opportunities. But seizing them will take far greater pragmatism and realism than either has yet shown.

The Arab uprisings hardly could have caused a more stark reversal of Hamas’s fortunes. In the stagnant years preceding them, it had been at an impasse: isolated diplomatically; caged in economically by Egypt and Israel; crushed by Israeli and Palestinian Authority security forces in the West Bank; warily managing an unstable ceasefire with a far more powerful adversary; incapable of fulfilling popular demands for reconciliation with Fatah; and more or less treading water in Gaza, where some supporters saw it as having sullied itself with the contradictions of being an Islamist movement constricted by secular governance and a resistance movement actively opposing Gaza-based attacks against Israel.

Facing reduced popularity since the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections that brought it to power, Hamas had to contend with criticism from without and within, the latter accompanied by defections from a small but important group of militants who left to join groups more committed to upholding Islamic law and to engaging in attacks against Israel. All in all, the movement could take comfort in little other than that Fatah was doing no better. Continue reading →

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Egypt’s president considering amending Camp David Accords

Al-Masry Al-Youm reports: President Mohamed Morsy is studying whether to amend the Camp David Accords to ensure Egypt’s full sovereignty and control over every inch of Sinai, said Mohamed Gadallah, legal adviser to the president.

Calls for amending the peace treaty with Israel, which also governs the security presence in the Sinai Peninsula, have been on the rise since last week’s attack on a military checkpoint at the border left 16 Egyptian security officers dead.

Former presidential candidate Hamdeen Sabbahi called for the amendments Saturday. The Revolutionary Youth Union has filed a lawsuit before an administrative court demanding that the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel be amended.

Morsy has vowed several times since he took office to preserve international treaties that Egypt has signed.

Gadallah didn’t give more details on the issue while speaking to Al-Masry Al-Youm Monday. He added that Morsy would soon order the release of another batch of military detainees.

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Assad has used the sectarian card to obscure the nature of the war

Luke Harding writes: It was 5am, and Mohamad Baree was hiding with his fighters behind a large rock. Some 300 metres away, a column of Syrian army tanks was advancing towards Aleppo through the countryside. The group of rebels were waiting for it. Baree watched. He then set off a powerful roadside bomb. It blew two of the tanks up. The others staged a panicky retreat to their base in the northern city of Idlib.

“From a military point of view the operation was successful,” Baree tells me a week later, as we bump along in the back of his unit’s battle-scarred minivan. Baree, 27, is dressed in khaki fatigues. He carries a Kalashnikov and a pistol. Despite his appearance, he explains that he is actually a pharmacist who has spent seven years living in Odessa; his brother, another fighter in Syria’s revolution, a lawyer.

Syria’s grinding 17-month war has typically been portrayed as a sectarian conflict. In this version, Bashar al-Assad’s embattled Shia Alawite sect – about 10% of the population – is pitted against the country’s Sunni majority. To an extent, this is true. But the reality is more complex. Some of Baree’s co-fighters are members of what could loosely be called the rustic poor – carpenters, decorators, farmers. Others are educated. Baree says that a professor of chemistry has been giving the rebels tips on bomb-making, helping their military effectiveness. There are army defectors, medics, video activists, even information officers.

The sectarian faultlines are blurred as well. Baree acknowledges that his own group of around 150 rebels, from the village of Korkanaya, near Idlib, is predominantly Sunni. But he says many of his friends are Alawite. “We talk over the internet. They don’t like what Bashar is doing either,” he says. Baree says he has broken off with one childhood friend, a Sunni and a local teacher; the teacher had implacably supported the regime ever since Syria’s uprising began in spring 2011.

The situation in Aleppo, Syria’s largest metropolis, engulfed by fighting since July, meanwhile, is also many-layered. Aleppo is one of the most ancient cities on the planet, home to various Christian denominations, historically a large Jewish population, now all fled, as well as wealthy Sunni traders, many favourably disposed to the regime.

In the mountains just outside Aleppo you find the ghostly ruins of Byzantine churches. There are poor Kurdish hamlets. I find the frontline town of Anadan semi-wrecked and abandoned.

One Aleppo resident I speak to, an engineer living in a regime-controlled district, says he supports the revolution. But he admits many of his neighbours don’t. “If I were to generalise I would say the middle class and upper class don’t want the rebels. They want everything to be how it was,” he says. Many poorer Aleppines had welcomed the rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA); others viewed it as a bunch of dangerous extremists; almost all were terrified of what the fighting would bring.

According to Baree, Syria’s revolution has little to do with external forces, or Islamist radicalism. It is, he tells me, the product of Syria’s own domestic dynamic and a logical reaction to the brutal behaviour of Assad. Assad had responded to the Arab spring and demands for political reform by arresting, torturing, and shelling his opponents, thus turning a few isolated demonstrations into a mass armed insurrection. “We tried to persuade him through peaceful means. But this didn’t work. So we took up weapons,” Baree says. Some guns from outside were arriving in Syria. But none have reached his unit, he adds. [Continue reading…]

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Syrian regime is on brink of collapse, says former PM Riyad Hijab

The Guardian reports: Syria’s former prime minister, Riyad Hijab, has claimed Bashar al-Asssad’s regime is on the point of collapse, having lost control of two-thirds of the country, as he called on other top officials to follow his example and defect.

In his first public appearance since he fled Damascus with his family a week ago, Hijab told a press conference in the Jordanian capital, Amman, the Syrian army needed to “take the side of the people”.

“I assure you, from my experience and former position, that the regime is collapsing, spiritually and financially, as it escalates militarily,” Hijab said. “It no longer controls more than 30% of Syrian territory.”

Hijab said that while he was prime minister he had been unable to stop the regime’s policy of using heavy artillery against Syrian cities considered by the regime as being opposition strongholds. He said he had felt “pain in my soul” of the shelling of civilian areas.

“I was powerless to stop the injustice,” he said, urging other senior figures to defect. “Syria is full of honourable officials and military leaders who are waiting for the chance to join the revolution. I urge the army to follow the example of Egypt’s and Tunisia’s armies take the side of people.”

Sounds like Hijab stopped following the news from Egypt as soon as Mubarak stepped down. Moreover, given the level of destruction the Syrian army has already inflicted on so many cities, the idea that they might now “take the side of [the] people” and stop slaughtering them sounds less like a vision of the future than the rhetoric of a man whose first priority is to reinvent himself.

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Libyan fighters join Syrian revolt

From Beirut, Mariam Karouny reports: Veteran fighters of last year’s civil war in Libya have come to the front-line in Syria, helping to train and organize rebels under conditions far more dire than those in the battle against Muammar Gaddafi, a Libyan-Irish fighter has told Reuters.

Hussam Najjar hails from Dublin, has a Libyan father and Irish mother and goes by the name of Sam. A trained sniper, he was part of the rebel unit that stormed Gaddafi’s compound in Tripoli a year ago, led by Mahdi al-Harati, a powerful militia chief from Libya’s western mountains.

Harati now leads a unit in Syria, made up mainly of Syrians but also including some foreign fighters, including 20 senior members of his own Libyan rebel unit. He asked Najjar to join him from Dublin a few months ago, Najjar said.

The Libyans aiding the Syrian rebels include specialists in communications, logistics, humanitarian issues and heavy weapons, he said. They operate training bases, teaching fitness and battlefield tactics.

Najjar said he was surprised to find how poorly armed and disorganized the Syrian rebels were, describing Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority as far more repressed and downtrodden under Assad than Libyans were under Gaddafi.

“I was shocked. There is nothing you are told that can prepare you for what you see. The state of the Sunni Muslims there – their state of mind, their fate – all of those things have been slowly corroded over time by the regime.”

“I nearly cried for them when I saw the weapons. The guns are absolutely useless. We are being sold leftovers from the Iraqi war, leftovers from this and that,” he said. “Luckily these are things that we can do for them: we know how to fix weapons, how to maintain them, find problems and fix them.”

Strangely, Reuters bills this as an “exclusive” report. It would more accurately be described as a footnote for a much more detailed report that Mary Fitzgerald did for Foreign Policy and the Irish Times a few days ago. It would appear that Karouny didn’t bother asking how it was that Najjar came to be invited to travel from Dublin to Libya to fight under Mahdi al-Harati’s command. Apparently she doesn’t know that Harati himself also comes from Dublin and that Najjar is Harati’s brother-in-law. (If on the other hand she did establish these details, it seems strange to have left them out of her report.)

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Saudi Arabia’s women-only cities are no blueprint for liberation

Homa Khaleeli writes: Are radical feminist separatists infiltrating Saudi Arabia’s ruling elite? Have the women of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia undergone a wild revolution, read Love Your Enemy? and decided to eschew all male company to create their own political systems and free themselves from the patriarchy? I hope so, because otherwise it’s hard to imagine the convoluted logic behind a decision to build all-female cities to boost women’s employment.

The country already has separate schools, segregated universities (and the biggest all-female university in the world) not to mention offices, restaurants and even separate entrances for public buildings. Now industrial hubs are to be built so that women can be hidden away even further than their current dresscode of abaya, headscarf and niqab allows.

The country’s segregation is so extreme the plans bring to mind the US’s racial divide under the Jim Crow laws, ensuring “separate but equal” institutions for black and white people. And like the legalised discrimination in the US, “equal” in this context means no such thing. The female half of the adult population of Saudi Arabia is considered unfit to control their own lives. Women cannot decide whether to leave the house, whether or who to marry, whether to work or study, whether to travel, what to wear, or even whether to have major surgery – without the consent of a male guardian.

In a country of such startling misogyny, which treats women like children, it is hardly surprising there are few women in work and that it is becoming a crises the ruling elite is being forced to take notice of. Almost 60% of the country’s college graduates are women, but 78% of female university graduates are apparently unemployed – despite the fact more than 1,000 hold a doctorate degree. In total only 15% of Saudi Arabia’s workforce are women. And unlike in many recession-hit countries, there are more than enough jobs to go around – the economy apparently booming. [Continue reading…]

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Mohamed Morsi is changing the balance of power in Egypt

David Hearst writes: While Syria’s civil war dominates the world’s attention, less dramatic and telegenic events in Egypt retain the power to decide if popular uprisings will succeed in establishing a democratic alternative to tyranny in the Arab world.

Something of that magnitude has just happened in Cairo. Arguably it is just as significant as the ousting of Hosni Mubarak in February last year. The system was decapitated but continued in the form of the military council, which assumed transitional rule. On Sunday the heads of that system, which has dominated Egypt for decades, were toppled – apparently with its acquiescence.

In forcing the departure of his defence minister and Hussein Tantawi, the head of Scaf (the Supreme Council of Armed Forces), President Mohamed Morsi was not just getting rid of an ageing field marshall who had been central to the Mubarak era, and replacing him with the youngest member of Scaf, establishing the continuity of the system. He was changing the balance of power.

Morsi got rid of the man who was expected to replace Tantawi – the army chief of staff, Sami Enan – as well as the leader of every service of the armed forces. Tantawi’s replacement, the head of military intelligence Abdel-Fatah el-Sissi, will now report to Morsi himself, not to Scaf. Further, Morsi annulled the constitutional power grab that Scaf made on the second day of the presidential election in June, which gave the military a right of veto over the new constitution that is in the process of being drawn up.

Accused by the left and liberals of political weakness, of cohabiting with the military, the Muslim Brotherhood president today stands accused of the opposite contention – accruing too much power. And it is true, that in assuming for himself the power Scaf had to appoint a new constituent assembly should the current one writing the constitution fail to agree, the Egyptian president now has the powers of a Russian one. But Morsi is no Vladimir Putin. [Continue reading…]

Issandr El Amrani argues that it is too soon to determine where the new balance of power now lies: It is hard to believe that the timing of moves by Egypt’s president, Mohamed Morsi, to purge senior officers from the military and impose his power was purely coincidental. It was the 23rd day of Ramadan, the evening of the Night of Power, during which the Qur’an was first revealed to the Prophet Muhammad.

The Qur’an states that the Night of Power “is better than a thousand months” – this seems apt considering that these changes seemingly put an end to many months of confusion about where power lies in the new Egypt.

But is it for the better? And where does power lie now?

Within the military, it is clear that the new figure of power is Abdel-Fatah el-Sissi, formerly head of military intelligence and now the minister of defence.

Considerably younger that Hussein Tantawi, the ageing general he replaced who was first appointed by Hosni Mubarak in 1992, Sissi brings with him several younger officers. His ascension puts an end to a months-long power struggle over who is in control of the military.

The lack of an immediate challenge to Sunday’s moves suggests that, essentially, there has been a successful coup within the military, in alliance with Morsi. We also know this new military leadership is willing to give Morsi the powers their predecessors had refused him – Morsi could not have regained control without their help. This speaks not of a triumphant civilian president getting the generals in line, but of a confluence of interests. It does not tell us whether it will last, or where the balance of power lies. [Continue reading…]

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Video showing bodies being thrown off the roof of a post office in Al Bab, near Aleppo

If bodies are thrown off the rooftop of a post office, can we infer that because it was a post office the dead men must have been postal workers?

That logical leap is apparently not a leap too far for some observers of events in Syria — especially those who regard the Kremlin’s propaganda outlet, Russia Today, as a reliable news source. RT provided its audience with this usefully descriptive headline: “Syrian atrocity: Bodies of postal workers thrown from roof (GRAPHIC VIDEO)”

The RT report begins:

A horrific amateur video appeared on YouTube, apparently showing an atrocity against public service workers in Syria. The footage displays a crowd of people callously throwing the bodies of slain postal workers from a post office rooftop.

The report provides no explanation on how it could be determined that the bodies were those of postal workers. The video can be viewed here.

As with most videos coming out of Syria, it’s rarely possible to establish the facts about what the images reveal, but in this case we can make a number of fairly strong inferences and observations.

Most observers seem in agreement that the men being thrown off the roof were already dead. Although it’s possible that they could have been killed somewhere else in the building and then hauled to the rooftop, it seems more likely that the bodies were being cast down from relatively close to where they died.

The act of throwing bodies off a building and the way onlookers on the street respond, gives the impression that these were vengeance killings of some kind.

Was this vengeance against the willingness of many Syrians to be complicit in supporting the state by working as civil servants, or — and I think this seems somewhat more likely — does this have something to do with actions these individuals were engaged in immediately prior to their deaths?

Municipal buildings like post offices are generally in central locations providing easy access to the populations they serve. In the current conditions in Syria, the rooftops of such locations now also often serve as positions for government snipers.

What seems more likely? That the bodies in this video were postal workers, or that they were snipers?

It seems to me more likely that they were snipers.

Does that mean that their bodies deserved to be treated in this way? No.

Still, if the residents of a town have been unable to walk through their own streets without either getting shot or risking getting shot by a group of snipers, if the threat then gets eliminated it’s not hard to understand that there might be a brutal display of vengeance of the type this video appears to depict.

According to the following account, this is exactly what happened.

The Los Angeles Times reports: A Syrian media activist and member of the Al-Bab Coordinating Committee said via Skype that the incident occurred about three weeks ago as rebels battled government forces for control of the city.

“There were snipers on the roof of the post office,” said the activist, who asked to be identified as Barry for security’s sake. “Several of them surrendered and left the building. Five remained, killing at least seven fighters.

“There was a lot of anger,” he said. “Finally the rebels managed to storm the post office and threw explosive devices and the five snipers were killed. Then the rebels threw the bodies from the roof.”

“What happened was really bad. We should respect the dead even if they were our enemies,” he added, saying that later the bodies were buried according to Muslim customs.

In June 2007, during a U.S.-backed attempted coup aimed at toppling the Hamas-run government in Gaza, there were reports of both Hamas and Fatah engaging in violations of international law including throwing prisoners off high-rise buildings. Human Rights Watch described these actions as war crimes.

Did this lead Western pro-Palestinian activists to denounce the Palestinian cause? I don’t believe so.

The reality is that in armed conflicts, atrocities are committed. Should they be condemned? Of course. But even if these kinds of incident are shocking, they should not be surprising.

War unleashes the ugliest features of human behavior and the idea that those in the midst of the fighting will always conduct themselves in a dignified way is an illusion that can only be entertained by those able to observe from a comfortable distance.

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Why do Israeli media keep predicting war with Iran?

Tony Karon writes: If the White House believes November will arrive without any nasty surprises in the Iran nuclear standoff, it is not taking seriously the feverish chatter throughout Israel‘s media positing an imminent Israeli attack on the Islamic Republic. The front pages of the four main Israeli dailies last Friday reflected what appeared to be a concerted campaign to create the impression that Israel is preparing itself to start a hot war with Iran sometime over the next 12 weeks, notwithstanding objections by the U.S. and other Western powers — and, indeed, by much of Israel’s security establishment. “[Benjamin] Netanyahu and [Ehud] Barak determined to strike Iran in the fall,” proclaimed Yedioth Ahronoth. Haaretz offered: “Senior Israeli official — The Iranian sword at our throat is sharper than the run-up to the war in 1967.” Maariv informed us in its banner headline that 37% of the Israeli public believes that “If Iran gets the bomb, it might result in a second Holocaust.” And Yisrael Hayom said: “Iran significantly speeds up its progress toward the bomb.” The following day, the latter paper included a headline claiming that, according to Israeli TV, a “Decision by Netanyahu and Barak to strike Iran is almost final.”

Haaretz seemed to suggest that part of the renewed urgency was a claim that new intelligence allegedly received by the U.S. ostensibly showed Iran making accelerated progress toward a capability to build nuclear warheads, although there was no U.S. confirmation of those claims. And others in the Israeli media were skeptical. One of Israel’s most senior columnists, Maariv’s Ben Caspit, sought to calm the media frenzy. “You can all relax,” wrote Caspit. “In the last two weeks, nothing new has happened with regards to an attack on Iran. The Cabinet hasn’t convened, the Defense Minister hasn’t summoned the IDF general staff, and no new information has been received. Everything that is known today was also known two weeks and two months ago.

Caspit suggested that the new “bomb Iran” talk wasn’t based on any qualitative shift in the nature of Iran’s nuclear work. The U.S. intelligence assessment until now has been that despite steadily accumulating the means to build nuclear weapons, Iran has not thus far moved to enrich uranium to weapons grade or to begin the process of actually building a bomb. Nor has it taken a strategic decision to do so as yet. The problem is that the “red lines” adopted by Israel and the U.S. for triggering a military response are different: President Obama has vowed to take military action to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, whereas Israel has insisted that Iran can’t be allowed to maintain the capability to build such weapons — a technological capacity it essentially already has. [Continue reading…]

It’s not really correct to say that Israel insists Iran can’t “maintain” the capability to build nuclear weapons. In one of his most recent statements, Netanyahu said: “I think it’s important to do everything in our power to prevent the Ayatollahs from possessing that capability.” Clearly, that wouldn’t be possible if in his view Iran already possessed this capability.

The problem is, there is no consensus on what nuclear capability means. As Mark Donig Jaclyn Tandler write:

In reality, possessing a nuclear capability could mean anything from having the infrastructure and know-how of a civilian nuclear program (like Japan) to possessing a dedicated nuclear weapons program just short of testing a nuclear weapon (like Pakistan before 1998). “Capability” is a spectrum, not a clear line that is either crossed or not.

Indeed, capability is a rhetorical red line imposed by those who want to sound emphatic but prefer not to be clear about what they mean.

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Egypt’s president asserts authority over military

Al-Masry Al-Youm reports: “Breaking: Mohamed Morsy is the president of the Egyptian Republic,” said activists on social media websites jokingly as an expression of Morsy’s assertion of power after catching the country off guard by sending the head of the Supreme Council of Armed Forces Mohamed Hussein Tantawi and Chief of Staff Sami Anan to retirement Sunday.

In an unprecedented reshuffle of the 19-member SCAF, Morsy replaced Tantawi, who has been defense minister for 22 years, with current Military Intelligence Chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi who was promoted two ranks and now heads the ministry and the armed forces, the presidency’s spokesperson Yasser Ali announced on Sunday. The president also promoted Sidqy Sobhy, the third field army leader to be the military chief of staff, while Mohamed al-Assar was appointed as deputy defense minister. Additionally, Head of Naval Forces Mohab Mamish was assigned as leader of the Suez Canal Authority.

Political and military experts say that Morsy’s radical decision to cast aside Tantawi and Anan, who remained on top of the military institution for decades, indicates that the president is consolidating his power over the military establishment in a tactful manner, without necessarily ending the legacy of the military state. For one, the promotion of second rank military officers is considered a tactical move to preempt any possible opposition from the army, they argue.

“It’s a takeover of military rule rather than the end of military rule. This is another phase of authoritarian rule,” says Robert Springborg, a professor at the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School and an expert on the Egyptian military institution.

“The military is now serving as an instrument for the Muslim Brotherhood. Morsy’s move institutionalizes normal civilian control over the military,” he added.

Springborg argues that “the way it was done indicates that the Brothers have a plan from before” and that last week’s attack on Egypt’s border with Gaza and Israel in Sinai paved the way for the move.

Sixteen Egyptian soldiers were killed by armed men on 6 August at the Egyptian border with Gaza and Israel. The attack fueled criticism of the lack of military readiness and a failing state in the strategic peninsula.

As a result, Morsy replaced intelligence chief Mourad Mowafy with Abdel Wahed Shehata and appointed Hamed Zaki as head of the presidential guard, while North Sinai Governor Abdel Wahab Mabrouk has been sacked from his post along with the head of the Central Security Forces. Furthermore, Hamdi Badin, commander of the military police, was also removed from his position.

Morsy had to first guarantee authority over the Presidential Guard and Central Security Forces to defend the president against any street riots that might take place as a reaction to the military leaders shuffle, Springborg told Egypt Independent. “They [Muslim Brothers] prepared the ground.”

Professor Emad Shahin, who teaches political science at the American University in Cairo and who specializes in Islamist movements, also thought the reshuffling was well calculated by Morsy. “The reshuffling is very smart, as it avoids escalation and ensures the loyalty of the military establishment. Now the military institution is under the authority of the elected president,” said Shahin. He agreed with Springborg that the Sinai attacks “served Morsy” as he is viewed as reacting strongly by holding security officials accountable. [Continue reading…]

After a period in which the possibility of civilian rule in Egypt appeared to be severely constrained by the military’s unwillingness to yield power, Morsi’s move looks like a major step in Egypt’s transition towards full-fledged democracy — unless, that is, you’re an Islamophobic Israeli. Barry Rubin, who seems convinced that this time the sky really is falling, writes: “This is a coup. Mursi is bound by no constitution. He can do as he pleases unless someone is going to stop him. And the only candidate — the military — is fading fast, far faster than even we pessimists would have predicted.”

Marc Lynch writes: After long weeks of political gridlock and stagnation, Egypt’s elected President Mohammed el-Morsi suddenly hit the gas over the weekend. Over the span of a few days, Morsi removed the head of General Intelligence, the head of the Military Police, the top two senior leaders of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, and the heads of all the military services. In addition to this SCAF-Quake, Morsi also canceled the controversial Constitutional amendments promulgated by the SCAF just before he took office and issued a new, equally controversial amendment and roadmap of his own. What’s more, this all came after he replaced the editors of major state-owned newspapers with people viewed as sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood and cracked down on several other critical papers. Zero to 180 in three days — even Usain Bolt would be impressed by that acceleration. Swirv.

What does it all mean? It’s a bit of a cop-out, but really it’s too soon to tell. As always in Egypt, information is both scarce and abundant. Nobody really knows what’s going on, rumors of every variety fly fast and furious, and everyone has pieced together plausible-sounding theories based on their fears or analytical predispositions. (Remember, though, as a rule it’s almost never as bad as it seems on Twitter.) It will take a while for the full implications to become clear. Eventually, more reliable information will trickle out about what really happened: were Tantawi and Anan consulted, or did they find out on TV? did junior officers collude with the Presidents office, or were they equally surprised? And the behavior of key actors in the coming weeks will shed light on their intentions this weekend: does Morsi move to impose an Islamist vision or reach out to create a broadly based constitutional convention? does the military strike back in some form? Until then, just about everyone — in Cairo, in Washington, and everywhere else — is struggling to pierce through the haze and make out what they can.

Taking that uncertainty into account, I can see at least three dominant takes on what’s going on. Those who believe the SCAF remains fully in control see a clever scheme to cement long-term military rule in alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood by gently dumping the unpopular figureheads while retaining an institutional hold on power. Those who fear the Muslim Brotherhood see the makings of a full-scale Ikhwanization of Egypt, with Morsi seizing dictatorial powers, brushing aside the secular bastion of the SCAF, and putting himself in place to shape the new constitution. And those who still see the prospect for some kind of real democratic transition can find some comfort in an elected President removing the senior leaders of the outgoing military junta without a bloody fight and asserting the principle of political control by an elected President. None of these three strikes me as completely right and all probably have some elements of truth.

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Paul Seabright on evolution and human cooperation

Paul Seabright author of The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life, interviewed at The Browser.

You have turned to evolutionary biology and anthropology to help understand the development of economic institutions and behaviour. Why are they important in helping us get to grips with today’s complex and fast-moving world?

They are important because we are a species like any other and have this wonderful construction, which is the society we’ve built. It’s as wonderful, or more so even, as the extraordinary nests built by ants and termites or the incredible song and other behavioural patterns of birds. I’ve always thought that if we take animals seriously as producing behaviour and not just bodies, then we should do the same for ourselves. We should see our behaviour as coming out of the constraints of our environment and the adaptations that have developed in the history of our species.

It used to be fashionable to think that genes, and indeed the process of natural selection, affected our bodies but not our minds. We’ve come to realise that that’s untrue and that our minds are profoundly shaped by natural selection – even if the environment we now live in is massively different from the one in which most of that evolution took place. So you can learn a lot from the fact that our minds are not just any old general purpose computer. They are actually shaped by evolution, though we have to remember that the circumstances in which we evolved are startlingly different from the circumstances in which we now have to navigate.

The world has got a lot more complex in the last 100 years or so and human minds have to process ever larger amounts of information. Are they evolving fast enough to deal with it?

No, in some ways they aren’t. A very good example is the way in which we process a lot more digital information now than we used to – we read a lot more text. People sometimes say we are completely overwhelmed with incoming information in the modern world, and that’s true. But in a certain sense our hunter-gatherer ancestors were also overwhelmed with incoming information – they would be sitting around their fires with their senses very carefully tuned for predators, for example. They would also take in information about their environment with a tremendously high bandwidth, in terms of how they judged their fellow human beings as being hostile or friendly, reliable or untrustworthy. Natural selection produced a number of mechanisms that helped them deal with that bandwidth. For example, we know we have these abilities to size up people’s faces with extraordinary speed and sophistication – we can tell just from the location of the white of somebody’s eyes who they are looking at, and whether their relationship with people around them is dominant or submissive, aggressive or defensive, competitive or collaborative.

In the modern world we can still do all that sort of thing rather quickly, but a much larger part of the information comes in the form of text, some of which we deal with using a part of the brain called “working memory”, which has a much lower bandwidth. For example, the standard idea is that you can hold about seven to nine items of information in working memory at one time. That’s enough to remember somebody’s telephone number, but if you try to remember somebody’s telephone number and try to do something else that requires textual manipulation at the same time, you are very quickly overwhelmed. That’s a good example of how natural selection shaped the brain for the kind of tasks that we needed to do in the Pleistocene but didn’t – for obvious reasons – foresee the kinds of tasks we would have to do in the 21st century. [Continue reading…]

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Paul Ryan — Koch ally and ‘right-wing social engineer’

Adele M. Stan writes: It’s official: The Republican Party is now officially a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Koch brothers’ political enterprise. How else to explain Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s pick of Rep. Paul Ryan, Wis., as his running mate. Yes, that Paul Ryan — chairman of the House Budget Committee and author of the infamous Ryan roadmap budget plan, which promises to turn Medicare into a privatized voucher system, and yank health care from millions of children whose parents happen to be poor. And that’s just the beginning. In addition to a raft of cuts, the Ryan plan would end the Earned Income Tax Credit, which millions of parents count on.

It’s a plan that even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich deemed too “radical.” Asked by NBC’s David Gregory to respond to Ryan’s proposal, Gingrich famously said (video): “I don’t think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering. I don’t think imposing radical change from the right or the left is a very good way for a free society to operate.” (Of course that was before Gingrich walked back those remarks, apparently reminded by some savvy operative that he might not want to anger the Kochs, to whom Ryan, 42, is something of a youthful ward, having been the beneficiary of years of support from the Koch-founded Americans For Prosperity.)

In case anyone should miss the point that Ryan is a very Kochy guy, Romney did his big reveal of running-mate Ryan this morning aboard the U.S.S. Wisconsin, a decommisioned ship docked in the all-important swing state of Virginia. However important Virginia is to the electoral math, Wisconsin is a highly symbolic icon for the Tea Party. It’s not only Ryan’s home state; it’s the poster state of right-wing triumph, the place where Gov. Scott Walker successfully fended off a recall attempt made by progressives in response to a bill he rammed through the state legislature that all but ended collective bargaining for the state’s public employees. Much of the credit for Wisconsin’s right turn goes to Americans For Prosperity, which boasts a particularly aggressive Wisconsin chapter, which began building a network of activists there in 2005.

Ryan’s association with the group goes back almost that far. In 2008, he was granted the Wisconsin AFP chapter’s “Defending the American Dream” award, handed to him by a young county executive who served as emcee for those festivities — a guy named Scott Walker. Since then, he has made countless appearances on the group’s behalf, at anti-health-care reform rallies on Capitol Hill, on conference town halls across the country and at Americans For Prosperity and Americans For Prosperity Foundation events. (Just enter Ryan’s name into the search engine on the Amerians For Prosperity Web site, and you’ll come up with eight pages of citations.) In fact, Ryan was due to speak at last week’s conference sponsored by the AFP Foundation in Washington, D.C., forcing increased speculation about his running-mate prospects when he failed to show.

For Romney, the pluses in picking Ryan are these: the Tea Partiers, who are less than wild about Mittens, really love them some Paul Ryan — as does David Koch, who will be seated as a Romney delegate at the Republican National Convention in Tampa. Koch and his brother, Charles — the mbillionaire owners of Koch Industries, the second largest privately held corporation in the U.S. — are major donors, not only to political candidates, but to a range of right-wing think tanks and groups. In the post-Citizens United world, those donations add up to millions in political advertisements by all manner of non-profit groups. Already, Americans For Prosperity has made a $27 million air-time buy for running anti-Obama ads. [Continue reading…]

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Paul Ryan reading guide: reporting on the VP candidate

ProPublica, August 11, 2012

Aug. 12: This post has been corrected.

Want help going beyond the horse race? We’re gathering the best stories out there on Congressman Paul Ryan, his positions, and his background. Have other stories to share? Add them in comments.

Background

Fussbudget, The New Yorker, August 2012 This sweeping profile is a great introduction to Paul Ryan and his politics. Starting in his hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin, it lays out the evolution of Ryan’s economic beliefs, and his rise through the G.O.P – from his early affinity to Ayn Rand to failed attempts at privatizing Social Security, to his Path to Prosperity budget plan, which would make radical changes in Medicaid and other social programs. The article also looks at the ways that federal-funded projects have helped Ryan’s hometown–and notes that Ryan’s plan “would drastically reduce the parts of the budget” that are funding exactly these kinds of projects.

Ryan shines as GOP seeks vision, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, April 2009 A broad look at Ryan from his home-state paper at a time when Ryan’s national profile was on the rise. Ryan discusses, among other things, how having gay friends led him to break with his party on a gay rights bill in Congress and his “real passion” — bowhunting.

The Legendary Paul Ryan, New York Magazine, April 2012 A look at how the Republican party rallied around Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity,” putting the newcomer’s fiscal agenda at the center of the 2012 presidential campaign well before voters had even chosen Romney as their Republican nominee.

On the paradox of Paul Ryan, The American Conservative, April 2012 What does Mitt Romney gain from Paul Ryan? Romney may be betting on a boost from conservatives who view Ryan as a hero for his aggressive stance on entitlements and federal spending, but as W. James Antle III points out, that may not be enough to win over grassroots conservatives. Antle writes that despite his anti-entitlements campaign, Ryan’s voting record “more closely resembles that of the Republicans who have lost to Tea Party primary challengers than that of a ruthless government-cutter.”

Man with a Plan, Weekly Standard, July 2012 The Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes wrote a favorable profileof Ryan in July in the midst of veep buzz. The piece traces his entire career with a particular focus on how, in recent years, Ryan became “the intellectual leader of the Republican party.”

How Important is Altas Shrugged author Ayn Rand to Paul’s political philosophy?  The Atlas Society, April  2012 In a 2005 speech to the Atlas Society, Paul said, “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand…you can’t find another thinker or writer who did a better job of describing and laying out the moral case for capitalism.” According to the excerpts and audio of his speech posted on the society’s website, he also said that Rand was “required reading” for his interns and staff.  But recently, Ryan has said while he had read Rand’s novels when he was young, his supposed obsession with her was “an urban legend.” “I reject her philosophy,” Ryan told Robert Costa at National Review in April. “It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview.”

Policy

A Closer Look at Ryan’s Budget Roadmaps, The New York Times, August 2012 As part of an in-depth look at Ryan’s polarizing House Republican budget plan, the New York Times highlights two studies of how the plan would affect Americans.  One, a long-term analysis by the Congressional Budget Office of some of Ryan’s suggested changes to Medicare and Medicaid, found that, “Under the proposal, most elderly people who would be entitled to premium support payments would pay more for their health carethan they would pay under the current Medicare system.” The other, a study by the Tax Policy Centerof the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, found that “the tax cuts in Paul Ryan’s 2013 budget plan would result in huge benefits for high-income peopleand very modest—or no— benefits for low income working households.”

What’s Paul Ryan’s foreign policy?  Foreign Policy, April 2012 While Ryan has a limited record on international affairs, he has spoken about everything from how to handle China (less hawkishly than Romney)  to getting cosier with rising powers India and Brazil. Foreign Policy’s helpful overview says the overall picture that emerges is “a bit of a Rorschach test.”  Ryan says the U.S. should stay deeply engaged– “America is the greatest force for human freedom the world has ever seen” — while he has also called for cutting funding for U.S. international aid.

Ryan’s personal finances and connections

Ryan is wealthy–but not by Romney standards. The congressman reported 2011 assets valued at between $2.4 and $9.3 million, according to an Associated Press report looking at his recently filed financial disclosure form. The money is spread in small chunks over various stock investments and in business interests in Wisconsin and his wife’s home state of Oklahoma. You can browse his assets here(.pdf). Ryan also filed an amendmentto his disclosure noting that his wife’s mother died in 2010 and the family gained interest in a trust worth between $1 and $5 million.

Paul Ryan’s Shrewd Budget Payday, Daily Beast, June 2011 The website takes a closer look at mining, mineral, and energy holdings owned by Ryan — primarily in his wife’s home state of Oklahoma — and how they would be positively affected by Ryan’s proposed tax policies. A Ryan spokesman told the Daily Beast: “These are properties that Congressman Ryan married into. It’s not something he has a lot of control over.” The piece also reports that relatives of Ryan have received federal farming subsidies.

Paul Ryan has got plenty of friends on K Street, Politico, August 2012 A brief look at the friends Ryan his wife Janna have made on K Street in their years in Washington, among them former Ohio congressman Mike Oxley (of Sarbanes-Oxley fame), who is now a lobbyist for the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). Janna Ryan, a tax attorney, herself worked as a lobbyist for PriceWaterhouseCooper, the article reports.  

Ryan’s Unlikely Alliance with Organized Labor  Mother Jones, May 2011 Ryan’s family construction business relies on union labor. “I grew up in organized labor,” Ryan told the Milwaukee Magazine in 2005. “I have a lot of constituents who are in organized labor. I really do not have this ‘us against them’ mentality.” As a congressman, Paul has worked closely with local union leaders and fought to protect the wages of construction workers. While many of his policy plans are directly opposed to what unions want, some unions have continued to support him. Over the course of his career, the Carpenters & Joiners Union has given him $57,500—only slightly less than he has received from Koch Industries, according to The Center for Responsive Politics.

Correction: This post originally said that the Mother Jones article was published in November 2012. It was actually published in May 2011.


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U.S. attorneys refuse to assure judge that they are not already detaining citizens under NDAA

Tangerine Bolen writes: The US government seems determined to have the power to do away with due process and Americans’ right to a trial.

I am one of the lead plaintiffs in the civil lawsuit against the National Defense Authorization Act, which gives the President the power to hold any US citizen anywhere for as long as he wants, without charge or trial. In May, following a March hearing, Judge Katherine Forrest issued an injunction against it; this week, in a final hearing in New York City, US government lawyers essentially asserted even more extreme powers – the power to entirely disregard the Judge and the law. Indeed, on Monday, August 6, Obama’s lawyers filed an appeal to the injunction – a profoundly important development that as of this writing has been scarcely reported.

In the March hearing, the US lawyers had confirmed that yes, the NDAA does give the President the power to lock up people like journalist Chris Hedges and peaceful activists like myself and other plaintiffs. Government attorneys have stated on record that even war correspondents could be locked up indefinitely under the NDAA. Judge Katherine Forrest had ruled for a temporary injunction against an unconstitutional provision in this law – after government attorneys refused to provide assurances to the court that plaintiffs and others would not be indefinitely detained for engaging in first amendment activities. Twice the government has refused to define what it means to be an “associated force”, and it claimed the right to refrain from offering any clear definition of this term, or clear boundaries of power under this law. This past week’s hearing was even more terrifying: incredibly, in this hearing, Obama’s attorneys refused to assure the court, when questioned, that the NDAA’s provision – one that permits reporters and others who have not committed crimes to be detained without trial — has not been applied by the US government anywhere in the world — AFTER Judge Forrest’s injunction. In other words, they were saying to a US judge that they could not or would not state whether Obama’s government had complied with the legal injunction that she had lain down before them.

To this, Judge Forrest responded that if the provision has indeed been applied, the United States government itself will be in contempt of court. [Continue reading…]

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