Video: Is Egypt’s football tragedy a conspiracy?
Israel’s military leaders warn against Iran attack
The Independent reports: Almost the entire senior hierarchy of Israel’s military and security establishment is worried about a premature attack on Iran and apprehensive about the possible repercussions, a former chief of the country’s defence forces told The Independent yesterday.
Lt-Gen Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, who is close to Defence Minister Ehud Barak, said there had been little analysis of what happens the “day after” when the Tehran regime and its paramilitary allies retaliate. He warned that an assault may lead to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad benefiting from popular anger against foreign aggression.
General Lipkin-Shahak stressed that Iran with a nuclear arsenal would be a hugely destabilising factor in the region. But, he said: “It is quite clear that much if not all of the IDF [Israeli Defence Forces] leadership do not support military action at this point.”
The risks of military action underlined by the highly decorated former commander show the apparent divisions within the establishment over the best way to combat Iran’s nuclear programme. The Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Mr Barak are reported to be veering towards military action while fellow ministers as well as the defence and intelligence communities have reservations about this path.
Video: Is Pakistan backing the Taliban?
Music: Habib Koite & Bamada — Woulaba
For the U.S., sanctions have become an alternative to policy on Iran
M.J. Rosenberg writes: News on the Iran front is getting more and more complicated. I am not referring to the situation at Iran’s nuclear facilities but to the one here in Washington, where Congress, deep into election-year fundraising and thinking about the March AIPAC policy conference, is crafting yet another sanctions bill. There is no reason to go into the details. But suffice it to say, this new set of sanctions, like the rest, will primarily hurt ordinary Iranians, not the government. As one Iranian citizen, writing under a pseudonym, described the situation this week in the New York Daily News:
These days, ordinary Iranians like my mother are becoming increasingly aware of a new economic reality in their lives. Sanctions already in place have plunged the country’s economy into a crisis; more robust sanctions that will be enacted come spring on our financial system and oil trade will cause even more pain for an already-suffering populace.
Isn’t life in Iran difficult enough under the regime of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei? Why punish ordinary people more?
Did we punish the Poles or the Bulgarians for living under communism? Did we punish the people of the Soviet Union because their government had a nuclear arsenal primed to destroy us? No. In fact, we gave the people of those countries food. As President Richard Nixon (like President Ronald Reagan later) liked to remind us, our adversary was the leadership of the Soviet Union, not the average citizens in the different Soviet republics.
But that is not how we have been approaching the Iran. Not by a long shot.
In A Single Roll of the Dice, a comprehensive new book about U.S.-Iran relations since President Obama came to office, Iran expert Trita Parsi examines the effect that the purely punitive approach (i.e., sanctions) can have on changing the Iranian government’s behavior.
Specifically, Parsi points out that “sanctions have become an alternative to policy” rather than an instrument of policy. He explains that “if diplomacy is pursued again” it must be “for the sake of resolving the conflict, not for the sake of creating an impetus for more sanctions.”
Abandoning a sole reliance on sanctions is Parsi’s first of six recommendations for establishing a diplomacy track with Iran that will succeed. [Continue reading…]
Music: Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin
Israel and the American elections
Obama ready to signal U.S. may stay out of conflict if Israel launches unilateral strike on Iran
The Washington Post columnist, David Ignatius, often serves as an unofficial mouthpiece for the White House, CIA, State Department, or Pentagon. His column today should probably be read in this way.
While funneling the chatter that with increasing volume in recent weeks has suggested that an Israeli attack on Iran is imminent, Ignatius adds some important details on the way the Obama administration is responding.
The Obama administration is conducting intense discussions about what an Israeli attack would mean for the United States: whether Iran would target U.S. ships in the region or try to close the Strait of Hormuz, and what effect the conflict and a likely spike in oil prices would have on the fragile global economy.
The administration appears to favor a policy of staying out of the conflict, unless Iran hits U.S. assets, which would trigger a strong U.S. response.
This U.S. policy — signaling that Israel is acting on its own — might open a breach like the one in 1956, when President Eisenhower condemned an Israeli-European attack on the Suez Canal. Complicating matters is the 2012 presidential campaign, which has Republicans candidates clamoring for stronger U.S. support of Israel.
Administration officials caution that Tehran shouldn’t misunderstand: The United States has a 60-year commitment to Israeli security, and if Israel’s population centers were hit, the United States could feel obligated to come to Israel’s defense.
Israelis are said to believe that a military strike could be limited and contained. They would bomb the uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz and other targets; an attack on the buried enrichment facility at Qom would be harder from the air. Iranians would retaliate, but Israelis doubt the action would be an overwhelming barrage, with rockets from Hezbollah forces in Lebanon. One Israeli estimate is that the Jewish state might have to absorb 500 casualties.
Israelis point to Syria’s lack of response to an Israeli attack on a nuclear reactor there in 2007. Iranians might show similar restraint, because of fear the regime would be endangered by all-out war. Some Israelis have also likened a strike on Iran to the 1976 hostage-rescue raid on Entebbe, Uganda, which was followed by a change of regime in that country.
Israeli leaders are said to accept, and even welcome, the prospect of going it alone and demonstrating their resolve at a time when their security is undermined by the “Arab Spring.”
Assuming that Ignatius has not misconstrued the messaging from the administration, there are several ways in which it can be read:
- That this is in effect, yet a further escalation in the war-making rhetoric — that Iran is being told that if the U.S ever had the capacity to restrain Israel, that capacity has been relinquished. Mad dog Israel is now being let off the leash;
- or, that Israel is being warned that it may suffer the consequences of its own bravado and won’t get bailed out by the U.S. in the event that Iran strikes back in a proportionate and appropriate way — perhaps through missile attacks on the Dimona nuclear facility;
- and that Washington wants Tehran to understand that the United States draws a clear distinction between its own interests and those of Israel and that the Iranians should keep this in mind when making their own strategic calculations.
How the GOP is resegregating the South
The Nation reports: North Carolina State Senator Eric Mansfield was born in 1964, a year before the passage of the Voting Rights Act, which guaranteed the right to vote for African-Americans. He grew up in Columbus, Georgia, and moved to North Carolina when he was stationed at Fort Bragg. He became an Army doctor, opening a practice in Fayetteville after leaving the service. Mansfield says he was always “very cynical about politics” but decided to run for office in 2010 after being inspired by Barack Obama’s presidential run.
He ran a grassroots campaign in the Obama mold, easily winning the election with 67 percent of the vote. He represented a compact section of northwest Fayetteville that included Fort Bragg and the most populous areas of the city. It was a socioeconomically diverse district, comprising white and black and rich and poor sections of the city. Though his district had a black voting age population (BVAP) of 45 percent, Mansfield, who is African-American, lives in an old, affluent part of town that he estimates is 90 percent white. Many of his neighbors are also his patients.
But after the 2010 census and North Carolina’s once-per-decade redistricting process—which Republicans control by virtue of winning the state’s General Assembly for the first time since the McKinley administration—Mansfield’s district looks radically different. It resembles a fat squid, its large head in an adjoining rural county with little in common with Mansfield’s previously urban district, and its long tentacles reaching exclusively into the black neighborhoods of Fayetteville. The BVAP has increased from 45 to 51 percent, as white voters were surgically removed from the district and placed in a neighboring Senate district represented by a white Republican whom GOP leaders want to protect in 2012. Mansfield’s own street was divided in half, and he no longer represents most of the people in his neighborhood. His new district spans 350 square miles, roughly the distance from Fayetteville to Atlanta. Thirty-three voting precincts in his district have been divided to accommodate the influx of new black voters. “My district has never elected a nonminority state senator, even though minorities were never more than 45 percent of the vote,” Mansfield says. “I didn’t need the help. I was doing OK.”
Egyptian football riot anger focuses on military rulers
The Associated Press reports: Egyptians ranging from football fans to MPs have blamed the military rulers for the bloody post-match riot that left scores of people dead.
Police were criticised for failing to stop the violence on Wednesday night which led to a crush in a narrow exit at the stadium in Port Said, north of the capital, Cairo.
A network of football fans known as Ultras vowed to exact revenge, accusing the police of intentionally letting rival fans attack them because they have been at the forefront of pro-democracry protests over the past year, first against Hosni Mubarak and now the military.
Thousands of protesters converged on Cairo’s Tahrir Square – the epicentre of the uprising that ousted the Egyptian president last year – carrying the red flag of the city’s Al Ahly football club and the national banner. They then marched to the nearby interior ministry to protest against the police inaction and call for retribution for the 74 people who died in the world’s most deadly football violence in 15 years.
The protesters raised flags of Al Ahly and Zamalek, a rival Cairo club, and Egyptian flags. Some held black banners reading: “Mourning.”
Is Israel a failed state?
Noah Millman reviews The Unmaking of Israel:Gershom Gorenberg is an exception to the rule — more than one rule. He’s an Orthodox Jewish Israeli of American origin, a group that generally tilts sharply to the right in an Israeli context. But he’s decidedly on the political left, an advocate of not only freezing settlement construction but of initiating evacuations “without waiting for a signature on a peace agreement,” of negotiating a two-state solution based on the Green Line (the armistice lines of 1949, the de facto borders prior to the 1967 war), of the separation of synagogue and state, and of true civic equality between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel. More than this, he has a realistic understanding of how the Zionist project must have been perceived by the Arab population of the Levant from the beginning: when he talks about the Palestinian Nakba — “catastrophe,” which is how the Palestinian Arabs refer to the events Israeli Jews call the War of Independence — he doesn’t put the word in scare quotes. But though Gorenberg is a man of the left, he also describes himself as a Zionist, rather than a non-, anti-, or post-Zionist. That is to say, he describes himself as a Jewish nationalist.
The State of Israel is also an exception to the rule — more than one rule. Like Greece and Algeria, India and Vietnam, Kenya and Lithuania, and numerous other states today, it is the fruit of a movement for national liberation, of a struggle, in the words of the Israeli national anthem, to be “a free people in our own land.” Unlike any other movement for national liberation, however, Zionism did not seek an independent state for an already existing nation living in a territory but rather to create a nation and a state out of a people scattered across the globe that had lived nearly two millennia in diaspora from its ancestral home. Like the United States and Canada, Brazil and Argentina, Australia and South Africa, Israel is also a settler state, created by a European population that came not merely to rule but to occupy and to substantially displace the indigenous people. Unlike any other settler state, however, the settlers of Israel understood themselves not to be venturing forth but to be coming home — and though individually any Israeli could make a home in any number of places, as could anyone from anywhere, in aggregate there is no other place on earth that they could call home.
This exceptional man has written a book, The Unmaking of Israel, about that exceptional state and its protracted and deepening crisis. And it is, appropriately enough, an exceptional contribution to the genre.
What is exceptional about the book is the frame within which Gorenberg chooses to tell a mostly familiar story — familiar, anyway, to anyone conversant with the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Gorenberg is not the first person to write a book decrying the human consequences of Israel’s settlement enterprise in the West Bank, and indeed, though he does decry them forcefully it is not the purpose of his book either to document them or to persuade anyone who does not already agree that the occupation has had frightful ramifications for the Palestinians. Nor is he the first person to make the “demographic argument” for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — the argument that Israel cannot remain both a democratic state and a Jewish state if it does not retain a substantial and stable Jewish majority, which would not be the case if the West Bank were incorporated into Israel proper. Indeed, this latter point is now part of the Israeli conventional wisdom—every party to the left of Likud formally endorses it, Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nominally accepts it as well, and even the platform of Avigdor Liberman’s far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party depends on the same premise (which is why that platform proposes trading the heavily Arab areas within the Green Line for the Israeli settlement blocs in the West Bank as part of a hypothetical agreement). But this is also not the primary thrust of Gorenberg’s book; he takes it for granted that everyone understands the basic arithmetic.
Rather, the thrust of the book, as the title states, is to demonstrate that the series of decisions made during and after the 1967 War that resulted in the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza set in motion a process that has progressively “unmade” the State of Israel. Indeed, the progressive expansion of the settlement enterprise has so eroded the foundations of the signature achievement of political Zionism—Israel as we now know it—that not merely a “Jewish democratic state” but the state as such is now imperiled.
Telepathy machine reconstructs speech from brainwaves
New Scientist reports: When you read this sentence to yourself, it’s likely that you hear the words in your head. Now, in what amounts to technological telepathy, others are on the verge of being able to hear your inner dialogue too. By peering inside the brain, it is possible to reconstruct speech from the activity that takes place when we hear someone talking.
Because this brain activity is thought to be similar whether we hear a sentence or think the same sentence, the discovery brings us a step closer to broadcasting our inner thoughts to the world without speaking. The implications are enormous – people made mute through paralysis or locked-in syndrome could regain their voice. It might even be possible to read someone’s mind.
Imagine a musician watching a piano being played with no sound, says Brian Pasley at the University of California, Berkeley. “If a pianist were watching a piano being played on TV with the sound off, they would still be able to work out what the music sounded like because they know what key plays what note,” Pasley says. His team has done something analogous with brain waves, matching neural areas to their corresponding noises.
How the brain converts speech into meaningful information is a bit of a puzzle. The basic idea is that sound activates sensory neurons, which then pass this information to different areas of the brain where various aspects of the sound are extracted and eventually perceived as language. Pasley and colleagues wondered whether they could identify where some of the most vital aspects of speech are extracted by the brain.
The team presented spoken words and sentences to 15 people having surgery for epilepsy or a brain tumour. Electrodes recorded neural activity from the surface of the superior and middle temporal gyri – an area of the brain near the ear that is involved in processing sound. From these recordings, Pasley’s team set about decoding which aspects of speech were related to what kind of brain activity. [Continue reading…]
Music: Pieter Nooten & Michael Brook — ‘Several Times I’
Before the gold rush: Burma braces for march of the multinationals
The Guardian reports: In the single street of Rangoon’s crowded Bothun San neighbourhood, attention is focused on the daily afternoon lottery. Hugely popular among the near-destitute labourers and their families, and played between neighbours on the flattened earth, it offers the prospect of a square meal rather than immediate life-changing wealth.
Stakes are small but wins are big, enough to feed a family for a day or so. “If I win then we get fish or even chicken,” said Myat Soe, a 50-year-old labourer who lives with seven relatives in a makeshift bamboo house without power or sanitation. “If I win 100 times maybe I’ll get rich.”
Myat Soe is not the only one thinking about making large amounts of money in Burma. Hundreds of the world’s biggest companies are making plans to move into the country if political progress towards democracy continues. They hope to make millions as the repressive regime seeks to reintegrate in the international community.
The EU, the US and Canada are considering how and when they will ease sanctions imposed over the past 20 years on the brutal military authorities that ruled – and some say still rule – the country. Any change will send a signal to potential investors that Burma is no longer considered a pariah state.
A week ago, travel restrictions on senior Burmese officials were lifted by the EU. A full review of the sanctions is scheduled for April.
One businessman staying at a five-star hotel in Rangoon spoke this month of a “gold rush” in Asia’s second-poorest country. “It is when, not if, for most of us. I think there’s a bit of a Klondike feel,” said the businessman, who did not want to be named, said.
Prompting the change has been a series of reforms implemented by the nominally civilian government that took power last year. President Thein Sein has met key opposition leaders including the democracy campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi, eased censorship, legalised trade unions and released hundreds of political prisoners.
U.S. plans to end Afghan combat mission in 2013
The Guardian reports: The US plans to wind down its war in Afghanistan a year or more earlier than scheduled by ending its combat role in the second half of 2013.
Defence secretary Leon Panetta said no decision has been made on how quickly to draw down American and other Nato forces, but that the shift away from fighting is being brought forward. At the same time, Nato is considering reducing the planned size of the Afghan army because of the cost involved.
“Hopefully by mid to the latter part of 2013 we’ll be able to make a transition from a combat role to a training, advise and assist role,” Panetta said on his way to Brussels for a Nato meeting about Afghanistan. “It’s still a pretty robust role that we’ll be engaged in. It’s not going to be a kind of formal combat role that we are [in] now.”
The US has about 90,000 soldiers in Afghanistan. Nearly one quarter of the contingent is due to be pulled out by the autumn. The rest were to have been withdrawn by the end of 2014.
Panetta said some Nato forces will remain in Afghanistan until then but in what Washington calls a training and support role.
Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports: The Taliban dismissed reports they are preparing to talk peace with the Afghan government, and a NATO report leaked Wednesday shows captured insurgents full of confidence they will seize power after international troops leave.
While both were setbacks to President Hamid Karzai’s quest to broker peace with the Taliban, his government got a big boost from Pakistan’s top diplomat who declared her nation’s support for an Afghan-led reconciliation process.
Still, steps toward finding a political resolution to the 10-year-old war continue to be bogged down in discussions among the U.S. and its partners over venues, agendas and conflicting interests.
Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar said she was visiting Kabul to deliver the strong message that Pakistan would stand behind any peace initiative that was widely supported by all ethnic groups in Afghanistan.
Tourists visiting the U.S. advised not to use figurative language
BBC News reports: Holidaymakers have been warned to watch their words after two friends were refused entry to the US on security grounds after a tweet.
Before his trip, Leigh Van Bryan wrote that he was going to “destroy America”.
He insisted he was referring to simply having a good time – but was sent home.
Trade association Abta told the BBC that the case highlighted that holidaymakers should never do anything to raise “concern or suspicion in any way”.
The US Department for Homeland Security picked up Mr Bryan’s messages ahead of his holiday in Los Angeles.
The 26-year-old bar manager wrote a message to a friend on the micro-blogging service, saying: “Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America.”
The Irish national told the Sun newspaper that he and his friend Emily Bunting were apprehended on arrival at Los Angeles International Airport before being sent home.
“The Homeland Security agents were treating me like some kind of terrorist,” Mr Bryan said.
“I kept saying they had got the wrong meaning from my tweet.”
Turns out Hamas isn’t really an Iran proxy
Paul Scham writes: One of the most enduring epithets for Hamas, right up there with “terrorist,” is “proxy.” If you Google “Hamas Iran proxy,” you get 1,750,000 hits. The idea that the relationship between Sunni Hamas, the Gaza affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Shia Iran was merely a marriage of convenience and not a true love match is rejected by those who forget that most enduring maxim of Middle East politics: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” And implicit in that maxim are two more words: “for now.”
This conventional wisdom is due for a makeover. On January 17, a Ha’aretz headline announced “Hamas brutally assaults Shi’a worshippers in Gaza.” The article reported that Hamas fears “growing Iranian influence in Gaza.” But for years, we have been told that it is Hamas itself that represents Iranian influence in Gaza. What gives?
Further down in the article, the picture begins to make sense when we read that Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) members in Gaza are “converting” to Shiism. For Hamas, the “Arab spring” does not lead to a “summer of roses and wine” (with apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan). A day later Khaled Meshal, the head of the organization, still based in Damascus, unexpectedly announced his resignation. The regional picture is changing, and Hamas is trying to catch up.
With its deadly drones, the U.S. is fighting a coward’s war
George Monbiot writes: The ancient Greeks, unlike the Jews or the Christians, invested their gods with human failings. Divine judgment, they believed, was neither flawless nor dispassionate; it was warped by lust, vengeance and self-interest. In the hands of Zeus, the thunderbolt was both an instrument of justice and a weapon of jealousy and revenge.
Those now dispensing judgment from on high are not gods, though they must feel like it. The people striking mortals down with drones are doubtless as capable as anyone else of self-deception, denial and cognitive illusions. More so, perhaps, as the eminent fictions of the Bush years and the growing delusions of the current president suggest.
Barack Obama began last week’s state of the union address by claiming that the troops who had fought the Iraq war had “made the United States safer and more respected around the world”. Like Bush, like the gods, he has begun to create the world he wants to inhabit.
These power-damaged people have been granted the chance to fulfil one of humankind’s abiding fantasies: to vaporise their enemies, as if with a curse or a prayer, effortlessly and from a safe distance. That these powers are already being abused is suggested by the mendacity of those who are deploying them. The CIA, which is running the undeclared and unacknowledged drone war in Pakistan, insists that there have been no recent civilian casualties. So does Obama’s chief counter-terrorism adviser, John Brennan. It is a blatant whitewash.
As a report last year by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism showed, of some 2,300 people killed by US drone strikes in Pakistan from 2004 until August 2011, between 392 and 781 appear to have been civilians; 175 were children. In the period about which the CIA and Brennan made their claims, at least 45 civilians have been killed. As soon as an agency claims “we never make mistakes”, you know that it has lost its moorings, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn suggested in his story of that title. Feeling no obligation to apologise or explain, count bodies or answer for its crimes, it becomes a danger to humanity.