NEWS: Qaeda link suspected in Pakistan blasts

Qaeda link suspected in Pakistan blasts
By Carlotta Gall, New York Times, October 23, 2007

The explosions aimed at the opposition leader Benazir Bhutto last week resembled attacks by Al Qaeda and their allied Pakistani militants and were the work of two suicide bombers, the provincial governor said in an interview.

Ishrat ul Ebad Khan, the governor of Sindh Province, said investigators have found the heads of two men that were not claimed by relatives and almost certainly belong to the bombers.

The explosions, detonated close to Ms. Bhutto’s fortified truck as supporters flocked to welcome her home after eight years of self-imposed exile, were the deadliest of more than 50 suicide attacks in Pakistan in recent years. [complete article]

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FEATURE: The U.S. has been gearing up for a war with Iran for years

The secret history of the impending war with Iran that the White House doesn’t want you to know
By John H. Richardson, Esquire, October , 2007

This is what Leverett and Mann fear will happen: The diplomatic effort in the United Nations will fail when it becomes clear that Russia’s and China’s geopolitical ambitions will not accommodate the inconvenience of energy sanctions against Iran. Without any meaningful incentive from the U.S. to be friendly, Iran will keep meddling in Iraq and installing nuclear centrifuges. This will trigger a response from the hard-liners in the White House, who feel that it is their moral duty to deal with Iran before the Democrats take over American foreign policy. “If you get all those elements coming together, say in the first half of ’08,” says Leverett, “what is this president going to do? I think there is a serious risk he would decide to order an attack on the Iranian nuclear installations and probably a wider target zone.”

This would result in a dramatic increase in attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq, attacks by proxy forces like Hezbollah, and an unknown reaction from the wobbly states of Afghanistan and Pakistan, where millions admire Iran’s resistance to the Great Satan. “As disastrous as Iraq has been,” says Mann, “an attack on Iran could engulf America in a war with the entire Muslim world.”

Mann and Leverett believe that none of this had to be. [complete article]

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OPINION: The invention of a global threat

Stalin, Mao and … Ahmadinejad?
By Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek, October 20, 2007

At a meeting with reporters last week, President Bush said that “if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.” These were not the barbs of some neoconservative crank or sidelined politician looking for publicity. This was the president of the United States, invoking the specter of World War III if Iran gained even the knowledge needed to make a nuclear weapon.

The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality. Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative ideologist whom Bush has consulted on this topic, has written that Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is “like Hitler … a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it in the fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism.” For this staggering proposition Podhoretz provides not a scintilla of evidence.

Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland’s and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on? [complete article]

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NEWS & OPINION: Cheney’s effort to emulate Stalin

Cheney, like president, has a warning for Iran
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg, New York Times, October 22, 2007

“The Iranian regime needs to know that if it stays on its present course, the international community is prepared to impose serious consequences,” Mr. Cheney said, without specifying what those might be. “The United States joins other nations in sending a clear message: We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”

Mr. Cheney delivered his warnings during a wide-ranging foreign policy speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a research organization. During the 35-minute talk, he also took aim at Syria, accusing Damascus of using “bribery and intimidation” to influence the coming elections in Lebanon, and he presented the case for the administration’s muscular approach to investigating suspected terrorists.

But Mr. Cheney reserved his harshest language for Iran. Calling it “the world’s most active state sponsor of terrorism,” he said, “our country, and the entire international community, cannot stand by as a terror-supporting state fulfills its most aggressive ambitions.” [complete article]

Serious consequences
By Gregory Djerejian, Belgravia Dispatch, October 21, 2007

As time passed, the terrorists believed they’d exposed a certain weakness and lack of confidence in the West, particularly in America. Dr. Bernard Lewis explained the terrorists’ reasoning this way: “During the Cold War,” Dr. Lewis wrote, “two things came to be known and generally recognized in the Middle East concerning the two rival superpowers. If you did anything to annoy the Russians, punishment would be swift and dire. If you said or did anything against the Americans, not only would there be no punishment; there might even be some possibility of reward, as the usual anxious procession of diplomats and politicians, journalists and scholars and miscellaneous others came with their usual pleading inquiries: ‘What have we done to offend you? What can we do to put it right?'” End quote.

It’s really an appallingly strange time in our country. We have a singularly powerful Vice-President (compared to any of his predecessors)–openly quite enamored by the tactics employed by the Soviet Union–our former arch-foe whose human rights standards we derided. Indeed, we fought a decades-long Cold War so that Western style constitutional freedoms would trump Soviet authoritarianism. But yes, from this Sovietophile posture, use of torture and black-sites and detention without habeas corpus protections makes all the sense in the world, doesn’t it? Because we have a Vice-President all but openly emulating and cheer-leading the tactics of the KGB, not in the wilds of Wyoming, but to a soi disant sophisticated audience in Washington DC. Put differently, he is very proud of his world-view, indeed eager to share it with Beltway ‘elites’. Who will clear this dangerous rot out of Washington and help us restore our good name? [complete article]

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FEATURE: Bush’s return to the imperial strategy of the great powers of Europe

Bush’s neo-imperialist war
By John B. Judis, The American Prospect, October 22, 2007

In 1882 the British occupied Egypt. Although they claimed they would withdraw their troops, the British remained, they said, at the request of the khedive, the ruler they had installed. The U.S. Army Area Handbook aptly describes the British decision to stay:

At the outset of the occupation, the British government declared its intention to withdraw its troops as soon as possible. This could not be done, however, until the authority of the khedive was restored. Eventually, the British realized that these two aims were incompatible because the military intervention, which Khedive Tawfiq supported and which prevented his overthrow, had undermined the authority of the ruler. Without the British presence, the khedival government would probably have collapsed.

The British would remain in Egypt for 70 years until Gamel Abdel Nasser’s nationalist revolt tossed them out. They would grant Egypt nominal independence in 1922, but in order to maintain their hold over the Suez Canal, the gateway to British India and Asia, they would retain control over Egypt’s finances and foreign policy.

On Sept. 13, 2007, George W. Bush issued his report to the nation on the progress of “the surge” in Iraq. Echoing the British in Egypt, he promised “a reduced American presence” in Iraq, but he added ominously that “Iraqi leaders from all communities … understand that their success will require U.S. political, economic, and security engagement that extends beyond my presidency. These Iraqi leaders have asked for an enduring relationship with America. And we are ready to begin building that relationship — in a way that protects our interests in the region and requires many fewer American troops.” (Emphasis mine.) In other words, Iraqi leaders who owe their positions to the U.S. occupation want the Americans to stay indefinitely, and Bush is ready to oblige them, albeit with a smaller force. [complete article]

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NEWS: Turkey’s president: “If Iraq keeps harboring terrorists, Turkey has the right to destroy this.”

Kurds from Iraq kill 17 soldiers in Turkey
By Amit R. Paley, Washington Post, October 22, 2007

An audacious cross-border ambush by Kurdish rebels based in northern Iraq killed at least 17 Turkish soldiers Sunday, ratcheting up pressure on the Turkish government to launch a military offensive into Iraq. The Turkish military said Monday that eight of its soldiers were also missing after the raid, as scattered protests broke out around the country among groups demanding retaliation.

The pre-dawn attack took place as the U.S. military said its troops killed 49 fighters in Baghdad’s Sadr City neighborhood, one of the highest death tolls for a military operation since President Bush declared an end to active combat in 2003.

But Iraqi officials and residents of the vast Shiite enclave, loyal to powerful anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, said 13 people were killed and all of the victims were innocent civilians, including children. They warned that the attack could lead Sadr to rescind a suspension of his militia’s operations. [complete article]

See also, Iraq says Kurdish rebels will announce ceasefire (The Guardian).

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NEWS: U.S. planners see Shiite militias as rising threat

U.S. planners see Shiite militias as rising threat
By Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post, October 22, 2007

Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker have concluded that Shiite extremists pose a rising threat to the U.S. effort in Iraq, as the relative influence of Sunni insurgent groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq has diminished drastically because of ongoing U.S. operations.

This judgment forms part of the changes that Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, approved last week to their classified campaign strategy for the country, which covers the period through summer 2009. The updated plan anticipates shifting the U.S. military effort to focus more on countering Shiite militias — some backed by Iran — that have generated new violence as they battle for power in the south and elsewhere in Iraq, said senior military and diplomatic officials familiar with the plan.

“As the Sunni insurgents quit fighting us, the problems we have with criminality and other militia, many of them Shia, become relatively more important,” said a U.S. Embassy official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because the plan is not finalized. [complete article]

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FEATURE: Rising oceans on a drying planet

At the poles, melting occurring at alarming rate
By Doug Struck, Washington Post, October 22, 2007

For scientists, global warming is a disaster movie, its opening scenes set at the poles of Earth. The epic already has started. And it’s not fiction.

The scenes are playing, at the start, in slow motion: The relentless grip of the Arctic Ocean that defied man for centuries is melting away. The sea ice reaches only half as far as it did 50 years ago. In the summer of 2006, it shrank to a record low; this summer the ice pulled back even more, by an area nearly the size of Alaska. Where explorer Robert Peary just 102 years ago saw “a great white disk stretching away apparently infinitely” from Ellesmere Island, there is often nothing now but open water. Glaciers race into the sea from the island of Greenland, beginning an inevitable rise in the oceans. [complete article]

The future is drying up
By Jon Gertner, New York Times, October 21, 2007

Scientists sometimes refer to the effect a hotter world will have on this country’s fresh water as the other water problem, because global warming more commonly evokes the specter of rising oceans submerging our great coastal cities. By comparison, the steady decrease in mountain snowpack — the loss of the deep accumulation of high-altitude winter snow that melts each spring to provide the American West with most of its water — seems to be a more modest worry. But not all researchers agree with this ranking of dangers. Last May, for instance, Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one of the United States government’s pre-eminent research facilities, remarked that diminished supplies of fresh water might prove a far more serious problem than slowly rising seas. [complete article]

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NEWS: Hezbollah warns U.S. not to set up base

Hezbollah warns U.S. not to set up base
AP, October 22, 2007

Hezbollah’s deputy leader warned the U.S. on Sunday against setting up a military base in Lebanon, saying the guerrilla group would consider such a move “a hostile act.”

Sheik Naim Kassem’s warning came days after a senior Pentagon official said the U.S. military would like to see a “strategic partnership” with Lebanon’s army to strengthen the country’s forces so that Hezbollah would have no excuse to bear arms.

Eric Edelman, undersecretary of defense for policy, spoke on Lebanese television Thursday after holding talks on military cooperation with Prime Minister Fuad Saniora. He did not say the U.S. government wants to build a military base in Lebanon.

But Hezbollah and Lebanon’s opposition seized on Edelman’s comments as subtle confirmation of a pro-opposition newspaper’s claim that Washington was offering a treaty that provides for bases and training in the country. [complete article]

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NEWS: Israeli tales of brutality

Israel shaken by troops’ tales of brutality against Palestinians
By Conal Urquhart, The Observer, October 21, 2007

A study by an Israeli psychologist into the violent behaviour of the country’s soldiers is provoking bitter controversy and has awakened urgent questions about the way the army conducts itself in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.

Nufar Yishai-Karin, a clinical psychologist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, interviewed 21 Israeli soldiers and heard confessions of frequent brutal assaults against Palestinians, aggravated by poor training and discipline. In her recently published report, co-authored by Professor Yoel Elizur, Yishai-Karin details a series of violent incidents, including the beating of a four-year-old boy by an officer.

The report, although dealing with the experience of soldiers in the 1990s, has triggered an impassioned debate in Israel, where it was published in an abbreviated form in the newspaper Haaretz last month. According to Yishai Karin: ‘At one point or another of their service, the majority of the interviewees enjoyed violence. They enjoyed the violence because it broke the routine and they liked the destruction and the chaos. They also enjoyed the feeling of power in the violence and the sense of danger.’

In the words of one soldier: ‘The truth? When there is chaos, I like it. That’s when I enjoy it. It’s like a drug. If I don’t go into Rafah, and if there isn’t some kind of riot once in some weeks, I go nuts.’

Another explained: ‘The most important thing is that it removes the burden of the law from you. You feel that you are the law. You are the law. You are the one who decides… As though from the moment you leave the place that is called Eretz Yisrael [the Land of Israel] and go through the Erez checkpoint into the Gaza Strip, you are the law. You are God.’ [complete article]

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ANALYSIS: Condi prepares the way for Hamas’ return

Annapolis summit will bring Hamas back into the fold
By Zvi Bar’el, Haaretz, October 21, 2007

The Hamas chief in the Gaza Strip, Ismail Haniyeh, may not have been invited to attend the Annapolis peace conference, but the group’s presence there will be felt precisely because of its absence. The low expectations on the outcome of the conference, and its failure, may serve as a platform for renewed negotiations between Fatah and Hamas. Once the summit is over, it will be impossible to continue ignoring Hamas. Hamas and Fatah are still clashing on the ground, but Egypt is preparing for a meeting of representatives of the two Palestinian factions, with Saudi Arabia’s blessing.

Ten days ago, Haniyeh announced that mediation efforts were being carried out by an Arab country he did not specify. That same day, Nabil Amr, political adviser to Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, denied the existence of such talks. But behind the scenes, the Yemeni foreign minister won the support of Saudi Arabia and Egypt to try to mediate between the two groups. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak instructed Omar Suleiman, the head of Egyptian intelligence, to ask Fatah and Hamas to present a list of demands so that an agreed framework for negotiations could be prepared. [complete article]

See also, Senior Hamas figure criticises takeover of Gaza (Reuters) and Three die in heavy Gaza fighting (BBC).

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OPINION: Western values were imported

A lesson in humility for the smug West
By William Dalrymple, The Sunday Times, October 14, 2007

About 100 miles south of Delhi, where I live, lie the ruins of the Mughal capital, Fateh-pur Sikri. This was built by the Emperor Akbar at the end of the 16th century. Here Akbar would listen carefully as philosophers, mystics and holy men of different faiths debated the merits of their different beliefs in what is the earliest known experiment in formal inter-religious dialogue.

Representatives of Muslims (Sunni and Shi’ite as well as Sufi), Hindus (followers of Shiva and Vishnu as well as Hindu atheists), Christians, Jains, Jews, Buddhists and Zoroastrians came together to discuss where they differed and how they could live together.

Muslim rulers are not usually thought of in the West as standard-bearers of freedom of thought; but Akbar was obsessed with exploring the issues of religious truth, and with as open a mind as possible, declaring: “No man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone is to be allowed to go over to any religion that pleases him.” He also argued for what he called “the pursuit of reason” rather than “reliance on the marshy land of tradition”.

All this took place when in London, Jesuits were being hung, drawn and quartered outside Tyburn, in Spain and Portugal the Inquisition was torturing anyone who defied the dogmas of the Catholic church, and in Rome Giordano Bruno was being burnt at the stake in Campo de’Fiori. [complete article]

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OPINION: The mission that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars

Suicide is not painless
By Frank Rich, New York Times, October 21, 2007

It was one of those stories lost in the newspaper’s inside pages. Last week a man you’ve never heard of — Charles D. Riechers, 47, the second-highest-ranking procurement officer in the United States Air Force — killed himself by running his car’s engine in his suburban Virginia garage.

Mr. Riechers’s suicide occurred just two weeks after his appearance in a front-page exposé in The Washington Post. The Post reported that the Air Force had asked a defense contractor, Commonwealth Research Institute, to give him a job with no known duties while he waited for official clearance for his new Pentagon assignment. Mr. Riechers, a decorated Air Force officer earlier in his career, told The Post: “I really didn’t do anything for C.R.I. I got a paycheck from them.” The question, of course, was whether the contractor might expect favors in return once he arrived at the Pentagon last January.

Set against the epic corruption that has defined the war in Iraq, Mr. Riechers’s tragic tale is but a passing anecdote, his infraction at most a misdemeanor. The $26,788 he received for two months in a non-job doesn’t rise even to a rounding error in the Iraq-Afghanistan money pit. So far some $6 billion worth of contracts are being investigated for waste and fraud, however slowly, by the Pentagon and the Justice Department. That doesn’t include the unaccounted-for piles of cash, some $9 billion in Iraqi funds, that vanished during L. Paul Bremer’s short but disastrous reign in the Green Zone. Yet Mr. Riechers, not the first suicide connected to the war’s corruption scandals, is a window into the culture of the whole debacle. [complete article]

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NEWS: The damning photos we don’t get to see

The case for Israel’s strike on Syria
By Martha Raddatz, ABC News, October 19, 2007

…as ABC News reported in July, the Israelis made the decision to take the facility out themselves, though the U.S. urged them not to. The Bush administration, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates leading the way, said the Israelis and the U.S. should “confront not attack.”

The official said the facility had been there at least eight months before the strike, but because of the lack of fissionable material, the United States hesitated on the attack because it couldn’t be absolutely proved that it was a nuclear site.

But the official told ABC News, “It was unmistakable what it was going to be. There is no doubt in my mind.” [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — Hmmm… “A senior U.S. official” has no doubt in his mind — sounds like Cheney or someone who spends too much time in his company. And of course there’s no reason why we would need to see the compelling photographic evidence when we can see such excellent computer graphics.

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NEWS: British raiders enter Iran to kill gunrunners

SAS raiders enter Iran to kill gunrunners
By Michael Smith, The Sunday Times, October 21, 2007

British special forces have crossed into Iran several times in recent months as part of a secret border war against the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s Al-Quds special forces, defence sources have disclosed.

There have been at least half a dozen intense firefights between the SAS and arms smugglers, a mixture of Iranians and Shi’ite militiamen.

The unreported fighting straddles the border between Iran and Iraq and has also involved the Iranian military firing mortars into Iraq. UK commanders are concerned that Iran is using a militia ceasefire to step up arms supplies in preparation for an offensive against their base at Basra airport.

An SAS squadron is carrying out operations along the Iranian border in Maysan and Basra provinces with other special forces, the Australian SAS and American special-operations troops. [complete article]

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ANALYSIS: Larijani’s shock departure

Ali Larijani resigns
By Farideh Farhi, ICGA, October 20, 2007

Ali Larijani, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator and the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, has resigned. This is a big deal!

The fact that Larijani had threatened to resign several times was an open secret in Iran; a fact that was even acknowledged by the government spokesman, Gholam-hossein Elham, in his announcement of Larijani’s resignation (Al Jazeera has good round up of some of Larijani’s conflicts with Ahmadinejad).

What is surprising is Ayatollah Khamenei’s agreement to this resignation and the reported replacement of Larijani by Saeed Jalili, a deputy foreign minister for European affairs who actually has very little diplomatic experience (Jalili’s experience at the foreign Ministry prior to being assigned as deputy minister by Ahmadinejad was in personnel matters). What Jalili does have is a very close relationship with Ahmadinejad. As such, the move, if it is confirmed, reflects yet another enhancement of Ahmadinejad’s fortunes in Iranian politics.

So far the Iranian system seems to be in a state of shock. Larijani was considered a successful handler of the Iranian nuclear file and his agreement with the IAEA regarding a work plan to resolve the remaining outstanding issues over Iran’s nuclear program an important step forward. [complete article]

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ANALYSIS: Musharraf’s friends get increasingly nervous

In Pakistan quandary, U.S. reviews stance
By David E. Sanger and David Rhode, New York Times, October 21, 2007

The scenes of carnage in Pakistan this week conjured what one senior administration official on Friday called “the nightmare scenario” for President Bush’s last 15 months in office: Political meltdown in the one country where Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and nuclear weapons are all in play.

White House officials insisted in interviews that they had confidence that their longtime ally, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president, would maintain enough influence to keep the country stable as he edged toward a power-sharing agreement with his main rival, Benazir Bhutto.

But other current and former officials cautioned that six years after the United States forced General Musharraf to choose sides in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, American leverage over Pakistan is now limited. And General Musharraf is weakened. [complete article]

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NEWS & ANALYSIS: The Turkish cross-border threat

Who’s bluffing on the Turkish-Iraqi border?
By Sami Moubayed, Asia Times, October 20, 2007

The dictionary definition of “terrorist” says: “A person, usually a member or group, who uses or advocates terrorism,” adding that it is a “person who terrorizes or frightens others”.

By all accounts, both definitions apply to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) that is operating against Turkey from northern Iraq, with approximately 3,500 insurgents, under the watchful eye of the United States. The PKK after all “uses” and “advocates” terrorism and it does “terrorize” and “frighten” the people of Turkey. The US seemingly agrees with this terminology, and so does the European Union. Both say that the PKK is a “terrorist group” but are unable – or unwilling – to lift a finger to halt its military operations in Turkey.

Much of the world currently seems fixated on the Turkish-Iraqi border, where 60,000 Turkish troops are mobilized on high-alert, awaiting orders to carry out cross-border operations into Iraqi Kurdistan. On Wednesday, the Turkish Parliament voted in favor of a one-year mandate for the Turkish Army to carry out strikes to root out the PKK from Iraq. Out of 550 deputies, an impressive 526 voted for the military adventure. [complete article]

Iraq president assails Syria’s support for Turkish cross-border threat
By Andrew E. Kramer, New York Times, October 21, 2007

President Jalal Talabani of Iraq has criticized Syria for supporting Turkey’s threat to carry out military attacks against Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq.

Mr. Talabani said in an interview that President Bashar al-Assad of Syria had crossed a “red line” by speaking approvingly of Turkey’s threat of a cross-border offensive against the rebels.

“Usually I refrain from commenting on Syrian positions to maintain our historical good relations,” Mr. Talabani, himself a Kurd, said in the interview, published Saturday in the Saudi-owned newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat. “But this time I cannot support this crossing of a red line.” [complete article]

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