If you thought Bin Laden was able to recruit for Al Qaeda after we went into Iraq --- just imagine what our unconditinal support of Israel is doing for recruitment and Iran's credibility in the Islamic world now...

It's Disproportionate. . .

By Eugene Robinson
Tuesday, July 25, 2006; A15

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...2400810_pf.html

Just my luck. I go away on vacation and it happens to be the week when George W. Bush's strategic view of the current world situation is revealed: Russia big. China big, too. World leaders boring. Lady world leaders need neck rub. Terrorism bad. Elections good (when the right people get elected). Israel good. Time to go home yet?

I felt better when I thought the Decider didn't have a worldview, just a set of instincts about freedom and democracy. But even if you set aside the president's embarrassing open-mike performance at the Group of Eight summit, which is hard to do, events of the past week show that this administration actually thinks it knows what it's doing. Bush and his folks haven't just blundered around and created this dangerous mess, they've done it on purpose. And they intend to make it worse.

Bush's endorsement of the violence that Israel is inflicting on Lebanon -- a sustained bombing campaign that has killed hundreds of civilians and can only be seen as collective punishment -- is truly astonishing. Of course Israel has the right to defend itself against Hezbollah's rocket attacks. But how can this utterly disproportionate, seemingly indiscriminate carnage be anything but counterproductive?

Destroying the Beirut airport, blasting communications towers into oblivion and cleansing southern Lebanon of its civilian population are not measures the world will see as an attack on Hezbollah terrorists. The Israeli campaign is so intense and widespread that it is creating more terrorists than it kills. Proportionate military action might have enhanced Israel's security, but video footage of grandmothers weeping amid the rubble of their homes and bloodied children lying in hospital beds won't make Israel more secure. Hezbollah's stature in the Arab world is growing, and its patrons in Damascus and Tehran must be smugly satisfied.

The role of any American president and secretary of state should have been to move quickly to bring hostilities to an end. Instead, Bush all but egged the Israelis on, and Condoleezza Rice went so far as to reject the idea of a cease-fire. Belatedly, she has flown to the region with no real credibility as an honest broker. Her words of concern about the "humanitarian crisis" in Lebanon ring hollow.

But this administration doesn't want to be an honest broker in the Middle East. Bush and Rice have staked their Middle East policy on a single incontrovertible idea -- that terrorism is bad -- and it has led them to the mistaken notion that Israel can achieve long-term security by creating a kind of scorched-earth buffer zone in southern Lebanon.

It's hard to imagine a more unpromising course of action. Even Rice (who is an expert on Russia, not the Middle East) and Bush (who knows that Russia and China are big) must recall that a full-fledged military occupation of southern Lebanon didn't work, which should lead them to question whether a few weeks of bombing will do the trick. Even the Israelis, who boasted at first that they were out to destroy Hezbollah, now speak only of severely weakening the enemy and are leaving the door open to some sort of international force on the border.

Perhaps that will be the resolution. Perhaps Israel will get its buffer zone and Hezbollah rockets will stop falling on Haifa for the time being. But ultimately Israel will be less secure, and so will the rest of us.

Bush, Rice et al. refuse to see that their crusade against terrorism can never be won by military action alone, because a victory in the war of arms can also be a defeat in the war of ideas. Lebanon was moving -- imperfectly but unmistakably -- toward becoming the kind of society we paint as a model for the Arab world, a secular democracy with a modernizing economy. Now billions of dollars' worth of infrastructure are in ruins and the country's most promising industry, tourism, has effectively been obliterated. It will be some time before Beirut is anyone's first choice for a holiday of sun and fun.

Hezbollah started this with its rockets, but the unrestrained Israeli response threatens to make an iconic hero of Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah. Hezbollah's new prominence enhances Iranian influence in the region, which creates problems for pro-Western governments in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Iraq, meanwhile, is in the midst of a brutal civil war, and American troops are bogged down in a long-term occupation. This is winning a war on terrorism?

The next time you hear someone praise the simplicity of George W. Bush's worldview, keep in mind that what you don't know can indeed hurt you.

The writer will take questions today at 1 p.m. on www.washingtonpost.com. His e-mail address iseugenerobinson@washpost.com.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14035942/
U.S., EU, Arab leaders fail to reach truce deal
Rice says Mideast region can't return to ‘status quo’ prior to clashes

Alberto Pizzoli / AFP - Getty Images
Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan attend a news conference at Rome's foreign ministry Wednesday.
View related photos

NBC Video: Violence in Middle East

Today show• Rice in Rome for meeting on Mideast
July 26: After two days of diplomatic shuffling between Beirut, Israel and Palestinian areas, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrives in Rome to attend an international meeting on the Lebanon crisis. NBC's Andrea Mitchell reports.
Updated: 45 minutes ago
ROME - U.S., European and Arab officials holding crisis talks on Lebanon failed to agree Wednesday on details for a cease-fire to end the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah guerrillas.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the United States favored urgently ending the fighting but said there cannot be a return to a “status quo” of political uncertainty and instability in Lebanon.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the solution to the Mideast crisis should involve Iran and Syria. He also called for the formation of a multinational force to help Lebanon assert its authority and implement U.N. resolutions that would disarm Hezbollah.

After listening to a dramatic appeal from Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Saniora for them to stop the killing, the officials said they had agreed on the need to deploy an international force under the aegis of the United Nations in southern Lebanon.

“Participants expressed their determination to work immediately to reach, with utmost urgency, a cease-fire that puts an end to the current violence and hostilities. The cease-fire must be lasting, permanent and sustainable,” Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D’Alema said.

He said many of the participants in the meeting appealed for an immediate and unconditional truce.

Opposition to a cease-fire
The United States and Britain opposed the push for a quick cease-fire, saying any truce should ensure that Hezbollah no longer is a threat to Israel and should ensure a durable peace.

Despite the failure to reach a common position on the details of how to pursue a cease-fire, the conference participants agreed to humanitarian aid for the country and to hold a donors’ conference.

The foreign ministers and other senior officials from 15 nations, as well as Annan and representatives from the European Union and the World Bank, agreed on a declaration expressing “deep concern” for the high number of civilian casualties in Lebanon, where government officials say hundreds of people have been killed.

The officials called on Israel to exercise “utmost restraint” and deplored the destruction of infrastructure in the country.

Time for a new Middle East?
Rice arrived in Rome late Tuesday for meetings with European and moderate Arab officials about the fighting along the border between Lebanon and Israel as well as the ongoing crisis between Israel and the Palestinians.

Palestinian officials said after their private meeting with Rice that she presented nothing new on their dispute with Israel. Separately, Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, whose Hamas party was not present at the session, said from what he heard about Rice’s conversation with President Mahmoud Abbas, it “doesn’t augur well” for a solution to the Middle East crisis.

But standing beside Olmert in Israel, Rice said the time had come for a new Middle East.

“It is time to say to those that don’t want a different kind of Middle East that we will prevail. They will not,” she said.

“I have no doubt there are those who wish to strangle a democratic and sovereign Lebanon in its crib,” Rice said. “We, of course, also urgently want to end the violence.”

Olmert welcomed his ally warmly, vowing that “Israel is determined to carry on this fight against Hezbollah.” He said his government “will not hesitate to take severe measures against those who are aiming thousands of rockets and missiles against innocent civilians for the sole purpose of killing them.”

A senior Israeli official present at the talks said the two countries were in full agreement about Israel’s military actions.

© 2006 MSNBC Interactive

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/07/25/D8J3579G0.html
Israel Would Prefer NATO-Led Coalition
Jul 25 1:22 PM US/Eastern

By SLOBODAN LEKIC
Associated Press Writer

BRUSSELS, Belgium

As world leaders scramble to secure a cease-fire in Lebanon, a crucial question arises: Who will ensure the peace? Israel has suggested it prefers a NATO-led coalition _ not the traditional U.N. peacekeeping force that has tried but failed to bring peace to Lebanon the last three decades.

But the alliance's member states are already stretched in missions elsewhere, including full-scale combat in Afghanistan. Precedents in Kosovo and Bosnia also raise questions about the ability of a NATO-led force to impose its will.

And cobbling together a coalition would be difficult, especially considering the traumatic history of peacekeeping in Lebanon: American and French troops stepped into a bloody quaqmire when they joined a multinational force there in 1982.

There are also competing initiatives, including a proposal Tuesday by European Union security and foreign affairs chief Javier Solana for a new kind of international force that would include troops from Europe, Turkey and Arab states.

NATO officials insist it's premature to discuss a NATO role _ an idea first aired by Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz on Saturday and which Washington has indicated it would support _ until the current round of diplomacy runs its course.

"No request has been made to NATO," alliance spokesman James Appathurai said Tuesday. "The international community is still discussing ... the possibility of a force, its mandate, and the duration of the mission. All these issues remain open."

Still, momentum is building to end the fighting, and there is broad sympathy for Israel's demand that Hezbollah not be allowed to return to its border. But few believe the weak Lebanese government can achieve this as Israel demands, and the U.N. force that has been in Lebanon since 1978 is discredited. That leaves many turning to NATO.

One NATO country that may have troops available for a mission in Lebanon is Turkey. As the only Muslim member of the alliance, Turkey might have considerable clout if it were persuaded to lead a multinational force _ helping to deflect the perception that troops are being sent in solely to defend Israel's interests against Hezbollah.

Turkey enjoys close ties with both Israel and Arab countries and has wide-ranging experience in international peacekeeping, bolstering its credentials. Its colonial rule during the Ottoman Empire, however, may make some Arabs bridle at the thought of a Turkish presence.

On Tuesday, a Turkish Foreign Ministry official said the country would consider playing a major role in peacekeeping _ but only if it had a strong U.N. mandate that would define its role and the rules of engagement.

That appears to be the crux of the problem: Any international force without the power to react to renewed outbursts of violence or to strike back if it found itself under threat would be as impotent as the current U.N. peacekeepers and unlikely to succeed at keeping Hezbollah away from the Israeli border.

NATO officials said it would be difficult for the alliance to enlist the estimated 10,000 troops needed initially to secure a cease-fire. They pointed to the alliance's existing commitments, such as Afghanistan and Kosovo, which will soon draw more than 40,000 troops from member countries.

Although the alliance has a substantial command structure, which would lead any expeditionary force in the region, it depends almost entirely on voluntary contributions of troops and equipment from member states.

Major contributors to past NATO deployments have been noncommittal on whether they would participate in any mission in Lebanon, perhaps as a reaction to the escalating guerrilla war in Afghanistan.

"At the moment, I can't see it," said German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

German Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung said Tuesday after meeting with his French and Polish counterparts that a cease-fire must first be in place. "With or without German troops, the question of whether there is a peace mission will only come once there is a cease-fire," Jung said.

Washington already has ruled out participating in a multinational force, since a U.S. presence would likely serve as a lightning rod for attacks by militants of all stripes.

Dutch and Austrian officials have also balked at sending troops.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair's official spokesman expressed hope that the Middle East conference opening Wednesday in Rome will produce an agreement in principle on setting up a stabilization force.

But he said questions such as the force's composition and mandate could be worked out later.

If NATO governments agree to a role for the alliance in Lebanon, military planners would have to take into account that it is ill- equipped to engage irregular forces such as the Hezbollah militants.

In Afghanistan, for example, the Taliban-led insurgency is now said to be as active as at any time since the 2002 invasion of that country, despite the deployment of upward of 12,000 NATO troops in the country.

In Bosnia and Kosovo, where the alliance deployed over 100,000 soldiers in the 1990s, strict adherence by the warring sides to the peace accords ensured the success of those missions. Still, NATO failed to act when violence did erupt, such as the mass riots by ethnic Albanians in 2004 in which 19 minority Serbs died.

Thanks Snuffy. I've quoted the concluding paragraphs from this article. Take a look at what our future will look like if Isreali and US foreign policy doesn't figure out a way to bring Hezbollah and other Islamic militant groups "asymetricals" to the table. Read it and weap.

The asymmetricals never sleep

"So this is the way the "war on terror" ends - not with a single bang but with the multi-sonic bangs of asymmetrical actors getting re-energized in their fight against the US-Israel axis. The Israeli army could not put down a Shi'ite guerrilla outfit in southern Lebanon - nor a bunch of stone-throwing Palestinian kids, for that matter. The US Army could not cope with a bunch of scruffy Sunni Arabs armed with fake Kalashnikovs. Sunnis or Shi'ites, stateless or in failed states, freedom fighters or "terrorists", they simply will not go away.

Pursuing their own logic, equally impatient Washington neo-cons and Israeli Likudniks would cherish nothing better than the wholesale destruction of civilian infrastructure in Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon, and then in Syria and Iran.

What happened in Iraq, and is still happening in Gaza and now in Lebanon, spells that the world will have to get used to a new reality. But against this, the asymmetricals will not only be lurking in the shadows; they will retaliate."

http://www.forbes.com/home/feeds/ap/2006/0.../ap2905676.html

Associated Press
U.S., Allies Divided Over Cease-Fire Terms
By KATHERINE SHRADER , 07.26.2006, 10:23 AM


Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urged the international community on Wednesday to work quickly to end the "spasms of violence" rocking the Middle East, but the U.S. remained isolated from most of its allies by insisting that any cease fire address the region's long-term problems.

"There is much work to do and everyone has a role to play," said Rice, joined by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and diplomats from European and moderate Arab countries attending a daylong conference on the Mideast crisis.

The policy conference came after two weeks of fighting between Israel and the Hezbollah militia in which hundreds of Lebanese have been killed and more than half a million more have become refugees. Hezbollah has inflicted dozens of Israeli casualties by firing hundreds of rockets into northern Israel and in firefights with Israeli troops.

"We all committed to dedicated and urgent action to try to bring about an end to violence that would be sustainable" and leave the Lebanese government in full control of its territory, Rice told reporters. South Lebanon has been controlled by Hezbollah guerrillas for years.

Rice said participants in the meeting agreed on the need for an international force in south Lebanon under a U.N. mandate that would have "a strong and robust capability to help bring about peace, to help provide the ability for humanitarian efforts to go forward and to bring an end to the violence."

But Rice conceded that it would take further meetings for countries to agree on details on precisely how that force would operate and what its mission would be. And as Wednesday's session ended, it was clear that differences also remained over how, and under what conditions, a cease-fire could be imposed on Israel and Hezbollah.

In Washington, the White House worked put a positive face on the meeting.

"If the talks broke down, they wouldn't have come out with a joint statement that showed that they are knitted up on the key items," said Press Secretary Tony Snow.

He said the statement released there tracks with the G-8 statement and the diplomacy the U.S. has been conducting and said that two U.S. envoys to the Middle East, Elliot Abrams and David Welch, will remain in the region while Rice travels on to Malaysia.

Before the session ended, a diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity said the international diplomats gathered here had been struggling to reach a consensus on a formal statement about the violence. That caused the briefing by Rice, Annan and others to be delayed by more than 90 minutes.

The diplomat said the sticking point was language about the terms under which fighting would end. The source insisted on anonymity because discussions on a conference resolution were still ongoing.

Earlier, Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora gave an impassioned speech that prodded the international leaders to continue working, Rice said, saying he put "a human face" on the crisis.

Rice told reporters: "What we agreed upon is that there should be an international force under a U.N. mandate that will have a strong and robust capability to help bring about peace, to help provide the ability for humanitarian efforts to go forward and to bring an end to the violence."

She stressed that Saniora himself has said "there must be one authority over military force" and the international community will support the Lebanese government and work with it achieving that element of a U.N. resolution.

Rice said she had had private discussions with Saniora here - and separately with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert - but declined to reveal the details.

"The goal here is to see how the United States can contribute to end this violence so the Lebanese people and the Israeli people can live in peace," she said.

In a statement at the start of the conference, Annan called for an immediate cessation of hostilities, exhorting Hezbollah to stop its "deliberate targeting of Israeli population centers" and for Israel to end all bombing, blockades and ground operations.

The Bush administration has called for a framework that can lead to a long-term peace, and Annan said the cession of hostilities could lead to that, cautioning against getting too caught up in the sequence of how a cessation of hostilities would happen.

Soon after Rice arrived in Rome late Tuesday, word came that an Israeli airstrike had hit a U.N. observation post in south Lebanon, killing at least two U.N. personnel. Two others were feared dead. The attack prompted Annan to demand an Israeli investigation into the incident, which he called "apparently deliberate." It could further fuel international demands for a quick end to the fighting.

Olmert expressed "deep regret" over the deaths of the peacekeepers in a telephone call to Annan on Wednesday, according to a statement from Olmert's office. Olmert said the peacekeepers were killed mistakenly, expressed dismay over accusation and promised a thorough investigation, the statement said.



Copyright 2006 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/26/world/mi...artner=homepage

Diplomats Back Troops, but Not Cease-fire, for Mideast

By HELENE COOPER and JOHN O’NEIL
Published: July 26, 2006
ROME, July 26 — American, European and Arab diplomats called today for an international force to be deployed in along the border between Lebanon and Israel and for a regional peace conference including Syria and Iran. But they stopped short of calling for an immediate cease-fire in the two-week old crisis.

The foreign ministers, meeting in a hastily convened conference here, issued a joint statement calling for “urgent efforts’’ toward a cease-fire. Most of the countries attending the conference made clear beforeit began that they favored an immediate halt.

But Secretary of State Condolezza Rice told reporters at the conference’s conclusion that the United States continues to oppose trying to arrange a cease-fire before the conditions have been created for a “sustainable’’ peace.

“This is a region that has had too many broken cease-fires,’’ she said.

Lebanon’s prime minister, Fouad Siniora, repeated his call for an immediate end to the fighting, saying, “the more we delay the cease-fire, the more people are being killed.’’

He also said that as part of any negotiations, he would press several conditions first put forward by Hezbollah: that Israel withdraw from a disputed slice of border territory it continues to occupy, that it release Lebanese prisoners, and that it turn over a map showing the locations of land mines it placed in southern Lebanon.

Besides Mr. Siniora, the conference was attended by diplomats from Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, all of which have been critical of Hezbollah while calling for an immediate cease-fire.

No details were announced about the makeup of the proposed international force or when it might be deployed. Mr. Annan said that it would operate under a United Nations mandate, and that discussions at the Security Council on its formation would begin quickly.

Ms. Rice made clear that a central part of its mandate would be assisting the weak Lebanese government to disarm Hezbollah, an aim that Mr. Siniora said he supported.

Ms. Rice also said that Mr. Annan would “use his good offices’’ in reaching out to Syria and Iran, which the United States has accused of failing to do enough to restrain Hezbollah.

Mr. Annan said that it was crucial to include Syria and Iran in discussions on security. “Any lasting solution to Mideast tensions must be regional,” he said.

The discussions came two weeks after Israel began its military assault on Lebanon in response to a Hezbollah raid in which two Israeli soldiers were captured and eight killed, and as officials in Jerusalem raised the prospect of a more protracted offensive, saying Tuesday that Israeili forces would occupy a strip inside southern Lebanon with ground troops until an international force could take its place.

. Israeli officials have talked about limited raids into Lebanon, but now they seem ready to commit ground forces for at least weeks, if not months.Heavy fighting continued in southern Lebanon today, with reports that eight Israeli soldiers had been killed in new clashes with Hezbollah. Arab television claimed that 12 had been killed, news agencies reported. And 12 Palestinians died in fighting across the Gaza Strip today, according to Reuters, which said that seven of the dead were militants and one was a 3-year-old girl.Also hanging over the discussions here were the deaths on Tuesday of four unarmed United Nations observers who were killed when an Israeli airstrike hit their observation post near the Israeli border. After learning of the deaths on Tuesday night, Mr. Annan denounced the “apparently deliberate targeting’’ of the post.

Asked about that remark today, he said that the post was “long established and clearly marked,’’ and that the shelling had begun in the early morning and continued into the evening despite numerous warnings from United Nations commanders to the Israeli army. He called for a joint investigation by the United Nations and Israel, and said that Ehud Olmert, Israel’s prime minister, had called him today to apologize for what Israel says was an accident.

The observers were from Austria, Canada, Finland and China. In Beijing today, officials said that President Hu Jintao had condemned the killings and demanded an investigation and an immediate cease-fire, Reuters reported.

In the run-up to the meeting, the United States and Britain stood virtually along in opposing an immediate cease-fire.

Before the meeting began, Mr. Annan called on Hezbollah to stop its rocket attacks on civilians in northern Israel and on Israel to stop its “bombardments, blockades and ground operations.’’

The chairman of today’s conference, Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D’Alema, said that a donors conference would be convened soon to arrange for large-scale aid to Lebanon as it rebuilds.

The first shipments of humanitarian assistance arrived in Lebanon today, news services reported, with a United Nations truck convoy rolling into the south and a Jordanian jet landing at the damaged airport in Beirut. The plane was the first of three carrying doctors and medical supplies for a field hospital that will be set up there, according to Agence France-Presse.On Tuesday, Israel said it had killed the Hezbollah leader in the part of southern Lebanon where fighting has been concentrated, who was known as Abu Jaafer, as well as 20 to 30 other Hezbollah fighters in a 24-hour period. At least six people were killed in two neighboring houses in a predawn raid on the southern town of Nabatiye.

Hezbollah continued to strike at Israel, firing nearly 100 rockets as of Tuesday night, the Israeli military said. The group’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, threatened missile strikes “beyond Haifa.” Hezbollah is believed to have missiles able to reach Tel Aviv.

Forum: The Middle EastAnother Hezbollah leader, Mahmoud Komati, deputy chief of the group’s political arm, told The Associated Press that Hezbollah was surprised by the force of Israel’s reaction to its capture of two Israeli soldiers. He said Hezbollah had expected “the usual, limited” response such as commando raids or limited attacks on Hezbollah strongholds.

Israel’s defense minister, Amir Peretz, said Israel’s plan for a buffer zone inside Lebanon was being worked out and did not provide details. “We will have to build a new security strip, a security strip that will be a cover for our forces until international forces arrive,” he said.

“We are shaping it, but you can’t draw a single line that will become a permanent line along the entire zone,” Mr. Peretz said on Israeli radio. “Unless there is a multinational force that will enter and take control, a multinational force with the ability to act, we will continue to fire against anyone who enters the designated strip.”

Israeli officials, mindful of the Israeli public’s reluctance to repeat its long occupation of southern Lebanon, say they do not plan a major ground invasion, and do not intend to hold large areas of territory for extended periods. Israeli leaders say they want the Lebanese Army to assume control of the border eventually.

Israeli troops do not yet have control over the border strip. A senior government official said Israeli forces intended to clear out Hezbollah strongholds in border villages as the military is already doing in Bint Jbail and Marun al Ras.

The military plans to move into other villages as well, but “this will not be the re-establishment of the old security zone,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. “It is not remotely similar.”

Saudi Arabia on Tuesday pledged a financial package of $1.5 billion to aid the Lebanese economy and help rebuild the country, the official Saudi news agency reported.

International support is building for a multinational force in southern Lebanon, but many issues are unclear. An American official traveling with Ms. Rice said he believed that those matters would be worked out.

“I think you will hear about the impossibility of deploying an international force until the day it is deployed,” the official told reporters, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the issue. “But there will be an international force, because all the key players want it.”France is perhaps the most likely European country to contribute troops, given its history with Lebanon. France administered Lebanon as a protectorate from 1920 to 1943, and the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri, who was killed in a car bombing last year that many believe was linked to Syria, was a close friend of the French president, Jacques Chirac.

But France is resisting the American idea of moving a force in quickly, insisting on a cease-fire first, followed by a political agreement between Israel and Lebanon that would also be accepted by Hezbollah, said Jean-Baptiste Mattéi, the French Foreign Ministry spokesman.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/26/opinion/..._r=1&oref=login

Opinion
Editorials Columnists Contributors Letters N.Y./Region Opinions Readers' Opinions Published: July 26, 2006
To the Editor:

Re “No More Foot-Dragging” (editorial, July 25):

You rightly deplore the loss of innocent lives in Lebanon and Israel and urge establishment of a cease-fire but caution “that must be accompanied by an international guarantee that Hezbollah will be forced to halt its attacks on Israel permanently and disband its militia.”

How exactly is that supposed to happen? Do you expect Hezbollah to voluntarily disarm and disband? Since its entire raison d’être is the destruction of Israel, the probability of such an occurrence is zero.

Do you expect an international force to disarm Hezbollah? The probability of that is virtually zero since such an entity would have neither the will, wherewithal nor experience to accomplish same.

Do you expect Iran and Syria to agree to stop supplying Hezbollah with rockets or, if they don’t agree, for the international community to isolate them? Hardly likely, since such provocation has been going on for years without anyone doing anything about it.

Israel is caught between a rock and a hard place. Its first and foremost responsibility is to ensure the safety of its citizens, especially within its borders. Israel’s approach is the only realistic option, at present, to try and achieve this goal.

Jerry Rapp
New York, July 25, 2006

•

To the Editor:

President Bush has now seen two Arab capitals laid waste in his term in office, and the transparent hypocrisy of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s kind words in Lebanon is matched no less by the president’s swagger as he mistakenly pushes geopolitical calculations above human suffering in American foreign policy.

S. Izaz Haque
Westford, Mass., July 25, 2006

•

To the Editor:

A cease-fire on the Israel-Lebanon border at this point would only allow Hezbollah to rehabilitate and rearm itself for another wave of cross-border attacks in the future.

The current Hezbollah aggression is proof that Israel cannot rely on any international guarantees or Security Council resolutions that call for Hezbollah to be disbanded.

The only solution at this point is total elimination of that terrorist organization through military force.

Josh Hasten
Jerusalem, July 25, 2006

•

To the Editor:

For 50 years, the great powers have failed to enforce agreements in the Middle East, where the parties seem unable to keep any agreement. The powers should have done so by force if necessary.

In that context, the invasion of Iraq was an expensive and disastrous diversion. Look at the cost and sacrifice involved. “Nation-building” has not worked. In fact, it seems to have made the problem of terrorism worse.

A cease-fire in Lebanon would be a step toward establishing the stability that is necessary for the development of national cohesion and indeed democracy.

John Wilson
New York, July 25, 2006

•

To the Editor:

Your editorial emphasizes a cease-fire based on disbanding Hezbollah. You say nothing about Israel’s occupation of Arab lands. Unless this occupation is ended, war and conflict in the Middle East will continue to threaten world peace.

Ending the occupation has been thwarted by our longstanding policy that Israel must be strong enough to defeat the combined forces of all the Arab states. This has encouraged Israel to continue its occupation.

Hezbollah’s shelling of Israeli towns and cities, in retaliation for Israel’s shelling and destruction of Lebanese towns and cities, portends a change in the balance of power in the region. It challenges our policy of maintaining Israel’s military superiority.

The call for disbanding Hezbollah will therefore inevitably be viewed by most Arabs as implicit support for Israel’s continuing military occupation of Arab lands.

Shaw J. Dallal
New Hartford, N.Y., July 25, 2006

http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/07/26/....volunteers.ap/

Iranians volunteer to fight Israel
Group heads for 'holy war' in Lebanon
Manage alerts | What Is This? TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Surrounded by yellow Hezbollah flags, more than 60 Iranian volunteers set off Wednesday to join what they called a holy war against Israeli forces in Lebanon.

The group -- ranging from teenagers to grandfathers -- plans to join about 200 other volunteers on the way to the Turkish border, which they hope to cross Thursday. They plan to reach Lebanon via Syria on the weekend.

Organizers said the volunteers are carrying no weapons, and it was not clear whether Turkey would allow them to pass.

A Turkish Foreign Ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity, would not say Wednesday if Turkey would allow them to cross. Iranians, however, can enter Turkey without a visa and stay for three months.

Iran says it will not send regular forces to aid Hezbollah, but apparently it will not attempt to stop volunteer guerrillas. Iran and Syria are Hezbollah's main sponsors.

"We are just the first wave of Islamic warriors from Iran," said Amir Jalilinejad, chairman of the Student Justice Movement, a nongovernment group that helped recruit the fighters. "More will come from here and other Muslim nations around the world. Hezbollah needs our help."

Military service is mandatory in Iran, and nearly every man has at least some basic training. Some hard-liners have more extensive drills as members of the Basiji corps, a paramilitary network linked to the powerful Revolutionary Guard.

Other volunteers, such as 72-year-old Hasan Honavi, have combat experience from the 1980-88 war with Iraq.

"God made this decision for me," said Honavi, a grandfather and one of the oldest volunteers. "I still have fight left in me for a holy war."

The group, chanting and marching in military-style formation, assembled Wednesday in a part of Tehran's main cemetery that is reserved for war dead and other "martyrs."

They prayed on Persian carpets and linked hands, with their shoes and bags piled alongside. Few had any battle-type gear and some arrived in dress shoes or plastic sandals.

Some bowed before a memorial to Hezbollah-linked suicide bombers who carried out the 1983 blast at Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 U.S. servicemen. An almost simultaneous bombing killed 56 French peacekeepers.

Speakers praised Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah and laid scorn on Muslim leaders -- including their own government -- for not sending battlefield assistance to Hezbollah since the battles erupted two weeks ago.

Even if the volunteers fail to reach Lebanon, their mobilization is an example of how Iranians are rallying to Hezbollah through organizations outside official circles.

Iran insists it is not directly involved in the conflict on the military side, but it remains the group's key pipeline for money. Iran has dismissed Israel's claims that Hezbollah has been supplied with upgraded Iranian missiles that have reached Haifa and other points across northern Israel.

"We cannot stand by and watch out Hezbollah brothers fight alone," said Komeil Baradaran, a 21-year-old Basiji member. "If we are to die in Lebanon, then we will go to heaven. It is our duty as Muslims to fight."

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/352...1C1F40907A1.htm

Hezbollah chief threatens a wider war

Wednesday 26 July 2006, 4:56 Makka Time, 1:56 GMT

Nasrallah: No humiliating conditions for a ceasefire
The leader of Hezbollah has threatened a new phase in the war with Israel and said his fighters will not accept any "humiliating" conditions for a ceasefire.

In a televised address on the eve of an international conference in Rome designed to find a solution to the two-week-old conflict, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said Hezbollah would reject any deal that compromised Lebanon's sovereignty.

"We cannot accept any condition humiliating to our country, our people or our resistance," Nasrallah said.

Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, had put forward peace proposals during a visit to the region this week. Lebanon's parliament speaker said these involved Hezbollah's withdrawal from the border and the deployment of an international force.

In the conflict, Hezbollah has hit Haifa, Israel's third-largest city 35km (20 miles) south of the border, with rockets for the first time.

"In the new period, our bombardment will not be limited to Haifa," Nasrallah said. "If matters develop, we will choose the time when we will move beyond, beyond Haifa."

Psychological war

"In the new period, our bombardment will not be limited to Haifa ... If matters develop, we will choose the time when we will move beyond, beyond Haifa"

Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader

Israel has launched an incursion into southern Lebanon against Hezbollah fighters.

"Whatever the incursion, it will not stop rocket fire into Israel," Nasrallah said.

He said that the Shia Muslim group would take back any land Israel occupied.

Nasrallah accused Israel of launching a psychological war to undermine Lebanese morale and of exaggerating casualties inflicted on Hezbollah.

"We do not hide our martyrs. If any of our leaders or ranks were killed, we announce that and take pride in that," he said.

Israel has said it plans to create a security zone in the south that it would keep until international forces arrive.

"Any coming of the Zionist army to our land will more enable us to damage its troops, officers and tanks," Nasrallah said.

Hezbollah attacks on Israeli forces helped to remove the Israeli army from south Lebanon in 2000 after 22 years of occupation.

"It will give us a wider and bigger chance for direct confrontation and to bleed the forces of this enemy," he said.

The US 'project'

"In the view of the Americans, there are barriers to the new Middle East, meaning the area which the US administration controls"

Nasrallah

Nasrallah said Israel had prepared to launch a war on Hezbollah and would have done so regardless of the group's capture of the soldiers. He said the United States wanted to wipe out Hezbollah as part of its plan for a new Middle East.

"The project upon which the war was planned is the return of Lebanon to the sphere of American-Israeli control," he said.

"In the view of the Americans, there are barriers to the new Middle East, meaning the area which the US administration controls.

"The main barriers ... are the resistance movements in Palestine and Lebanon and at the level of governments, Syria and Iran." Both countries back Hezbollah.

"Therefore what is required [by the United States] is work to end these barriers and their removal by way of the historic American project being prepared for this region."


Reuters

A Letter From Chomsky and Others on the Recent Events in the Middle East

Chomskey.info

Wednesday 19 July 2006


The latest chapter of the conflict between Israel and Palestine began when Israeli forces abducted two civilians, a doctor and his brother, from Gaza. An incident scarcely reported anywhere, except in the Turkish press. The following day the Palestinians took an Israeli soldier prisoner - and proposed a negotiated exchange against prisoners taken by the Israelis - there are approximately 10,000 in Israeli jails.

That this "kidnapping" was considered an outrage, whereas the illegal military occupation of the West Bank and the systematic appropriation of its natural resources - most particularly that of water - by the Israeli Defence (!) Forces is considered a regrettable but realistic fact of life, is typical of the double standards repeatedly employed by the West in face of what has befallen the Palestinians, on the land alloted to them by international agreements, during the last seventy years.

Today outrage follows outrage; makeshift missiles cross sophisticated ones. The latter usually find their target situated where the disinherited and crowded poor live, waiting for what was once called Justice. Both categories of missile rip bodies apart horribly - who but field commanders can forget this for a moment?

Each provocation and counter-provocation is contested and preached over. But the subsequent arguments, accusations and vows, all serve as a distraction in order to divert world attention from a long-term military, economic and geographic practice whose political aim is nothing less than the liquidation of the Palestinian nation.

This has to be said loud and clear for the practice, only half declared and often covert, is advancing fast these days, and, in our opinion, it must be unceasingly and eternally recognised for what it is and resisted.

Tariq Ali
John Berger
Noam Chomsky
Eduardo Galeano
Naomi Klein
Harold Pinter
Arundhati Roy
Jose Saramago
Giuliana Sgrena
Howard Zinn


http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/072506R.shtml

The Rome Fiasco
by Chris Toensing, TomPaine.com
The U.S.'s wrongheaded approach toward a "sustainable" Mideast ceasefire has no takers.
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/07/2...rome_fiasco.php

This spells out an American role in the Mideast Conflict that I would like to see:

The Rome Fiasco
Chris Toensing
July 26, 2006



Chris Toensing is editor of  Middle East Report, publication of the Middle East Research and Information Project in Washington, D.C.

Two weeks into the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon, the United States stands with only two other countries—Israel and Britain—in opposing an immediate ceasefire. Even Iraqi Prime Minister Jawad al-Maliki, in Washington for reassurances that the Bush administration will “stay the course” in its Mesopotamian misadventure, demanded that the bombing be halted forthwith.

Today’s Rome gathering of European leaders to discuss a ceasefire is exposing the United States’ isolation in this conflict for all to see. While U.S. officials have begun admitting that a ceasefire is “urgent,” they hasten to add that for such an agreement to be “enduring,” it must address the “root causes” of conflict along Israel’s northern border.

Those State Department wordsmiths hammered out some thoroughly unobjectionable language. It goes without saying that a ceasefire is inadequate to diffuse the underlying tensions that produced this war. But when the secretary of state explains what the new diplo-speak means, we know Lebanon and the Middle East are still in deep trouble.

First of all, the Israeli offensive in south Lebanon is welcome to proceed indefinitely, despite nearly 400 Lebanese dead and as many as 750,000 Lebanese (one out of every five) displaced and destitute. Second, Condoleezza Rice continues to identify Hezbollah’s weaponry and the threat posed to Israel as the primary, if not exclusive, “root cause.” And lastly, the “enduring” solutions that are being floated address only Hezbollah’s rockets and Israel’s border security, rather than the reasons the Shiite movement has refused to disarm its militia.

The not-so-quick fix du jour discussed today in Rome is an “international stabilization force,” or what some commentators are calling a “peacemaking force.”  The notion originated with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, received Israeli approval, and then was picked up by Rice during her sojourn in Beirut and Jerusalem. Taking its cues, as usual, from on high, the opinion elite is starting to come on board. Cautioned a July 25 New York Times editorial: “Such a force will need to be well-armed and be given a robust mandate so that Hezbollah will have little choice but to retreat.”

What makes the proposed force “robust”? It would have authorization to shoot at Hezbollah guerrillas, either to disarm them or to push them far enough north in Lebanon that most of their rockets cannot reach Israeli towns. In other words, the international community would intervene to impose the terms that Israel’s air force, navy and army so far cannot. Obviously, Hezbollah will not greet that breed of blue-helmeted emissary with candy and flowers. If the Lebanese government were, in its desperation to end the bombing, to assent to the envisioned force on these terms, Hezbollah would regard their compatriots as fully complicit in Israeli and U.S. war aims. Civil war would then be quite conceivable.

These dire scenarios explain why Rice is in no hurry to broker a ceasefire. The U.S. and Israel hope that Hezbollah’s fighting capacity can be sufficiently “degraded” to the point that an international force, when it is finally composed, will be conducting mere mop-up operations. On July 25, Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz declared his country ready to reestablish a “security zone”  in south Lebanon until such time as the robust multi-national cavalry arrives, reviving memories of Israel’s previous 22-year long occupation that ended in 2000.

As Hezbollah fights on, some backers of Israel’s campaign are urging that hope give way to hopeless cynicism, and that Washington promise Syria renewed hegemony in Lebanon in exchange for Syrian help in disarming the Shiite movement. Such a deal would certainly give new meaning to this fine phrase of Rice’s: “I have no doubt there are those who wish to strangle a democratic and sovereign Lebanon in its crib.” But the Bush team is nothing if not stubborn; Syria will remain out in the cold.

If Rice truly wants to tackle “root causes,” of course, she could approach Damascus and its erstwhile Lebanese ally from a different direction. (Now that would be a surprise.) In conjunction with pressure on Israel to stop its offensive and work out a prisoner exchange with Hezbollah to stop the rocketing, the U.S. could offer to jump-start direct talks between Syria and Israel over the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel since 1967. The U.S. could press Syria officially to cede the Shebaa Farms—an Israeli-occupied mountainside along the Syrian-Lebanese border—to Lebanon, so that Israel could then withdraw and satisfy Lebanon’s last territorial claim against it. Particularly if all this happened against the backdrop of reinvigorated negotiations on the Israeli-Palestinian front, Hezbollah’s militia would lose its raison d’etre.

There must be an unconditional ceasefire in Lebanon, Gaza and Israel, followed by an expeditious revival of serious work toward a comprehensive Middle East peace. All of this is urgent for enduring security for all concerned.

BUSH'S DIPLOMACY ALLERGY: AS WAR IN THE MIDDLE EAST RAGES, EVEN SOME CONSERVATIVES ARE CALLING FOR THE U.S. TO START TALKING TO ITS ENEMIES, NOT JUST ITS FRIENDS - LAURA ROZEN (SALON, JULY 25)
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/07/...macy/print.html

Our foreign policy apparatus is so far out of the mainstream it is frightening.

The hawks root on Israel who they hope will vanquish hezboolah with absolutely no regard for the fact that that Hezbollah was created the last time Israel encroached on Lebanese lands.

Friedman aptly points out the failure of the Bush head in the ground policy which fails to engage only our allies in diplomatic efforts.

Bush has an opportunity to enter into an agreement to solve the problems in the Middle East --- deal with Iraq and Iran and Hamas and Hezbollah at one time --- but he refuses --- sticking to his guns -- pun intended --- and hoping that a military response will win the day.

Pure foolishness.

July 26, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Talking Turkey With Syria
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Damascus, Syria
NEW YORK TIMES

One wonders what planet Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice landed from, thinking she can build an international force to take charge in south Lebanon without going to Damascus and trying to bring the Syrians on board.

Two Syrian officials made no bones about it when I asked their reaction to deploying such a force, without Syrian backing: Do you remember what happened in 1983, each asked, when the Reagan administration tried to impose an Israeli-designed treaty on Lebanon against Syria’s will?

I was there, I remember quite well: Hezbollah, no doubt backed by Syria or Iran, debuted its skills for the world by blowing up the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and the U.S. Marine and French peacekeeping battalions. This is not a knitting circle here.

Can we get the Syrians on board? Can we split Damascus from Tehran? My conversations here suggest it would be very hard, but worth a shot. It is the most important strategic play we could make, because Syria is the bridge between Iran and Hezbollah. But it would take a high-level, rational dialogue. Dr. Rice says we can deal with Syria through normal diplomatic channels. Really?

We’ve withdrawn our ambassador from Damascus, and the U.S. diplomats left here are allowed to meet only the Foreign Ministry’s director of protocol, whose main job is to ask how you like your Turkish coffee. Syria’s ambassador in Washington is similarly isolated.

Is this Syrian regime brutal and ruthless? You bet it is. If the Bush team wants to go to war with Syria, I get that. But the U.S. boycott of Syria is not intimidating Damascus. (Its economy is still growing, thanks to high oil prices.) So we’re left with the worst of all worlds — a hostile Syria that is not afraid of us.

We need to get real on Lebanon. Hezbollah made a reckless mistake in provoking Israel. Shame on Hezbollah for bringing this disaster upon Lebanon by embedding its “heroic” forces amid civilians. I understand Israel’s vital need to degrade Hezbollah’s rocket network. But Hezbollah’s militia, which represents 40 percent of Lebanon, the Shiites, can’t be wiped out at a price that Israel, or America’s Arab allies, can sustain — if at all.

You can’t go into an office in the Arab world today without finding an Arab TV station featuring the daily carnage in Lebanon. It’s now the Muzak of the Arab world, and it is toxic for us and our Arab friends.

Despite Hezbollah’s bravado, Israel has hurt it and its supporters badly, in a way they will never forget. Point made. It is now time to wind down this war and pull together a deal — a cease-fire, a prisoner exchange, a resumption of the peace effort and an international force to help the Lebanese Army secure the border with Israel — before things spin out of control. Whoever goes for a knockout blow will knock themselves out instead.

Will Syria play? Syrians will tell you that their alliance with Tehran is “a marriage of convenience.” Syria is a largely secular country, with a Sunni majority. Its leadership is not comfortable with Iranian Shiite ayatollahs. The Iranians know that, which is why “they keep sending high officials here every few weeks to check on the relationship,” a diplomat said.

So uncomfortable are many Syrian Sunnis with the Iran relationship that President Bashar al-Assad has had to allow a surge of Sunni religiosity; last April, a bigger public display was made of Muhammad’s birthday than the Syrian Baath Party’s anniversary, which had never happened before.

Syrian officials stress that they formed their alliance with Iran because they felt they had no other option. One top Syrian official said the door with the U.S. was “not closed from Damascus. [But] when you have only one friend, you stay with him all the time. When you have 10 friends, you stay with each one of them.”

What do the Syrians want? They say: respect for their security interests in Lebanon and a resumption of negotiations over the Golan. Syria is also providing support for the Sunni Baathists in Iraq. Much as the Bush team wants to, it can’t fight everyone at once and get where it needs to go. There will not be a peace force in south Lebanon unless it’s backed by Syria. No one will send troops.

I repeat: I don’t know if Syria can be brought around, and we certainly can’t do it at Lebanon’s expense. But you have to try, with real sticks and real carrots. Syria is not going to calm things in Lebanon, or Iraq, just so the Bush team can then focus on regime change in Damascus. As one diplomat here put it to me, “Turkeys don’t vote for Thanksgiving.”

July 25, 2006
Editorial
No More Foot-Dragging
NEW YORK TIMES

Nearly two weeks into the bloody conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice finally made it to the region. We’d like to believe that means Washington is now urgently committed to finding a way to halt the fighting.

Ms. Rice’s surprise first stop in Beirut was intended to show support for Lebanon’s embattled democracy. Her pledge of humanitarian assistance is welcome, but it is far too little and extremely late.

What the people of Lebanon and Israel urgently need is a cease-fire followed by the swift deployment of a well-armed force with a mandate to aggressively keep the peace. That must be accompanied by an international guarantee that Hezbollah will be forced to halt its attacks on Israel permanently and disband its militia so Lebanon can regain control of its borders and its sovereignty.

The White House has resisted calls for a cease-fire, arguing that a return to the situation that existed before the latest fighting would not bring lasting peace. While that is true, we fear that what the administration has been doing is buying Israel more time to pound Hezbollah and Lebanon. Since July 12, hundreds of Lebanese civilians have been killed and nearly a score of Israelis. For all that dying, there is little sign that Hezbollah — which fired 100 missiles into Israel on Sunday — has been so deeply wounded that it can’t rebuild quickly. Ms. Rice needs to make clear to Israel that more civilian deaths in Lebanon won’t make Israelis safer.

What is needed now is the sort of aggressive diplomacy and international coalition building that the Bush administration typically disdains. And it needs to come together in days, not weeks.

The United States and its allies must start aggressively soliciting contributors for a peacekeeping force. Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain first raised the idea to Mr. Bush more than a week ago, and was brushed off. Such a force will need to be well armed and be given a robust mandate so that Hezbollah will have little choice but to retreat. The United States has already made clear it won’t be sending its own troops, and rallying others for such a dangerous mission will not be easy.

After her sessions in Israel, Ms. Rice goes on to Rome, where she will meet with Arab and European officials. She needs to use these discussions to win support for a United Nations resolution authorizing such a force and strengthening its call — so far unheeded — for Hezbollah to disarm.

Ms. Rice has no plans, apparently, for a surprise visit to Damascus. At a minimum she must urge European and Arab allies to make that trip. They must deliver a united message that isolation and scorn is the price Syria and Iran will pay for continuing to abet Hezbollah, and that Israel will not be restrained until Hezbollah is restrained.

As eager as Arab leaders are to see Israel halt its attacks and Hezbollah contained, that tough talk will be difficult for rulers who always prefer to sit on the sidelines, and now have to answer to their increasingly angry populations. That is why Ms. Rice should be willing to make compromises of her own and travel to Damascus. All this needs to happen quickly. There has been too much foot-dragging and too much dying already.

EXCELLENT POINTS TAZ!

I would quibble just on three points.

1) I would quibble as to the exact location of the Shrub's head right now.

2) The risks are that Hezbollah will never forget. We could see a spiral of terrorist reprisals extending into the 22nd century. The next weeks will tell how extensively IDF operations have degraded Hezbollah military assets, but they are likley to regroup within months and years. Keeping rockets out of Lebanon is no easier than keeping marijuana from crossing the Mexican border.

3) Turkey doesn't vote for having Kurdish nationalists on their border either.

Dear Colleagues:

This is a post I have done that includes a link to the transcript of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s remarks at a small, but important, dinner gathering Thursday evening. The attendees were top tier journalists and policy intellectuals – and I list some of them in the post near the end.

But read Brzezinski. His presentation and responses to questions (which I hope to have a transcript for before long) were riveting. His comments have already been appearing in some of the leading press around the country.

I hope you find this of interest.
--
Steven Clemons
Publisher, www.TheWashingtonNote.com
202-986-0342 phone 202-986-3696 fax
steve@thewashingtonnote.com Email

http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/001559.php
The Washington Note
July 25, 2006
Brzezinski: Israel's Actions in Lebanon Essentially Amount to "the Killing of Hostages"

On Thursday, 20 July (last week), former National Security Advisor and one of America's top strategic thinkers, Zbigniew Brzezinksi, spoke at a public policy dinner salon that my colleagues and I at the New Amerca Foundation organized.

Brzezinski's presentation and responses to questions were riveting. He framed the stakes of what was evolving in the Middle East as well as the basic motivations of all the players in ways that many policy intellectuals and senior foreign policy writers had not considered.

I am posting Zbigniew Brzezinski's comments here. The Q&A was not fully on the record, so I will be working to digest the best material from the Q&A to protect the identities of those posing questions or making comments -- and will post that material at a later time. But I wanted to get Zbigniew Brzezinski's opening remarks on line now.

Some of the notable points made by Brzezinski were:


1. America's "policy in the Middle East is the basic test of America's capacity to exercise global leadership." This is similar to "what transpired during the Cold War when the ultimate test of America's capacity to act as a defender of the free world was its ability to conduct a meaningful policy in Europe."

If America does not do well in its Middle East challenge, the U.S. will lose its capacity to lead.

2. Neither the United States nor Israel "has the capacity to impose a unilateral solution" to Israel's problems in the Middle East. "There may be people who deceive themselves of that. We call them neo-cons in this country and there are other equivalents in Israel as well."

3. Israel and its neighbors alone "can never resolve their conflict peacefully, no matter how much they try, now matter how sincere they may be." When one party is sincere, the other's intentions are not synchronous.

4. Brzezinski stated: "I hate to say this but I will say it. I think what the Israelis are doing today for example in Lebanon is in effect, in effect -- maybe not in intent -- the killing of hostages. The killing of hostages."

"Because when you kill 300 people, 400 people, who have nothing to do with the provocations Hezbollah staged, but you do it in effect deliberately by being indifferent to the scale of collateral damage, you're killing hostages in the hope of intimidating those that you want to intimidate. And more likely than not you will not intimidate them. You'll simply outrage them and make them into permanent enemies with the number of such enemies increasing."

5. "The solution can only come if there is a serious international involvement that supports the moderates from both sides, however numerous or non-numerous they are, but also creates the situation in which it becomes of greater interest to both parties to accommodate than to resist because both of the incentives and the capacity of the external intervention to impose costs. That means a deliberate peace effort led by the United States, which then doubtless would be supported by the international community, which defines openly in a semi-binding fashion how the United States and the international community envisages the outlines of the accommodation."

6. It's becoming increasingly difficult to separate the Israeli-Palestinian, problem, the Iraq problem and Iran from each other.

7. "The Iraq problem, look what Prime Minister al-Maliki said today -- it's an indication of things to come. The notion that we're going to get a pliant, democratic, stable, pro-American, Israel-loving Iraq is a myth which is rapidly eroding and which is now being contradicted by political realities."

8. "And that leads me then to the proposition beforehand, namely that we have now, we're not only committed to what I said earlier, regarding the Israeli-Palestinian process, but more deliberately by terminating our involvement in Iraq. And I have put forth a four-point program which [I am sure] I have discussed in one of the rare occasions within the last year administration has talked to me, some top level people in the administration. They listened to this:

That we start talking to the Iraqis of the day of our disengagement., We say to them we want to set it jointly, but in the process, indicate to them that we will not leave precipitously. I asked Khalilzad what would be his definition of precipitous and he said four months and I said I agree. Are you saying to the Iraqis, we intend to disengage by some period? We need to."

9. "As far as Iran is concerned--and with this I'll end--thanks to Iraq, I think we have made an offer to the Iranians that is reasonable. I do not know that Iranians have the smarts to respond favorably or at least not negatively. I sort of lean to the idea that they'll probably respond not negatively but not positively and try to stall out the process. But that is not so bad provided they do not reject it.

Because while the Iranian nuclear problem is serious, and while the Iranians are marginally involved in Lebanon and to a greater extent in Syria, the fact of the matter is that the challenge they pose to us, while serious, is not imminent. And because it isn't imminent, it gives us time to deal with it. And sometimes in international politics, the better part of wisdom is to defer dangers rather than try to eliminate them altogether instantly, because the later produces intense counter-reactions that are destructive. We have time to deal with Iran, provided the process is launched, dealing with the nuclear energy problem, which can then be extended to involve also security talks about the region.

In the final analysis, Iran is a serious country, it's not Iraq. It's going to be there. It's going to be a player. And in the longer historical term, it has all of the preconditions for a constructive internal evolution if you measure it by rates of literacy, access to higher education, the role of women in society, a sense of tradition and status which is real.

I'm convinced that the mullahs are part of the past in Iran, not its future. But that process can change in Iran, not in a confrontation but through engagement. I think if we pursue these policies, we can perhaps avert the dangers that we face but if we do not, I fear that the region will explode, and for that matter, Israel will be in the long run in great jeopardy."


Again, the transcript of Zbigniew Brzezinski's opening comments is available by clicking here.

There was an amazing small group assembled to participate in this discussion.

Those who attended the dinner included (not complete list):

ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI, his wife the artist EMILIE BRZEZINSKI Hauser Foundation President and International Peace Academy Chair RITA HAUSER, Financial Times Diplomatic Correspondent GUY DINMORE, American Prospect Editor in Chief MICHAEL TOMASKY, Middle East blogger and University of Michigan professor JUAN COLE;

AP Diplomatic Corresponent ANNE GEARAN, Correspondent for The Nation ARI BERMAN, New America Foundation Whitehouse Senior Fellow MICHAEL LIND, Inter-Press News Service correspondent JIM LOBE, New York Times Diplomatic Correspondent HELENE COOPER, Juniper Financial CEO RICHARD VAGUE, Open Society Institute Founder and Chairman GEORGE SOROS, New America Foundation Geopolitics of Energy Initiative Director FLYNT LEVERETT;

McGuire Woods attorney MARK BRZEZINSKI, journalist and NYU Center on Law & Security Senior Fellow SIDNEY BLUMENTHAL, Los Angeles Times Diplomatic Correspondent PAUL RICHTER, Washington Post columnist DAVID IGNATIUS, Georgetown professor and Council on Foreign Relations Fellow CHARLES KUPCHAN, CNN Washington, DC Bureau Chief DAVID BOHRMAN, former Hill & Knowlton Chairman FRANK MANKIEWICZ, "The Week" Washington Editor MARGARET CARLSON;

Dallas Morning News DC Bureau Chief CARL LEUBSDORF, Slate Chief Political Correspondent JOHN DICKERSON, Trammell & Co. CEO JEFFREY TRAMMELL, Washington Post intelligence correspondent DANA PRIEST, New Yorker correspondent JANE MAYER, Department of State analyst HILLARY MANN, Johns Hopkins University/SAIS professor FRANCIS FUKUYAMA;

New America Foundation/Century Foundation Fellow DANIEL LEVY, Washington College professor ANDREW OROS, Wall Street Journal political correspondent NEIL KING JR., Time Magazine diplomatic correspondent ELAINE SHANNON, New York Times investigative correspondent and "State of War" author JAMES RISEN, Financial Times Correspondent HOLLY YEAGER, EDS Executive BILL SWEENEY, and others.

-- Steven Clemons publishes www.TheWashingtonNote.com

Many thanks Snuff...

Istoodforu:

I agree.

Our foreign policy seems to be guided by the goal of what else can we do to inflame tensions in the Middle East to further alienate Americans from Arabs...

And then there is al Qaeda...

July 26, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
The Enemy of My Enemy Is Still My Enemy
By BERNARD HAYKEL
NEW YORK TIMES

WITH Israel at war with Hezbollah, where, you might wonder, is Al Qaeda? From all appearances on the Web sites frequented by its sympathizers, which I frequently monitor, Al Qaeda is sitting, unhappily and uneasily, on the sidelines, watching a movement antithetical to its philosophy steal its thunder. That might sound like good news. But it is more likely an ominous sign.

Al Qaeda’s Sunni ideology regards Shiites as heretics and profoundly distrusts Shiite groups like Hezbollah. It was Al Qaeda that is reported to have given Sunni extremists in Iraq the green light to attack Shiite civilians and holy sites. A Qaeda recruiter I met in Yemen described the Shiites as “dogs and a thorn in the throat of Islam from the beginning of time.”

But now Hezbollah has taken the lead on the most incendiary issue for jihadis of all stripes: the fight against Israel.

Many Sunnis are therefore rallying to Hezbollah’s side, including the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan. The Saudi cleric Salman al-Awda has defied his government’s anti-Hezbollah position, writing on his Web site that “this is not the time to express our differences with the Shiites because we are all confronted by our greater enemy, the criminal Jews and Zionists.”

For Al Qaeda, it is a time of panic. The group’s Web sites are abuzz with messages and questions about how to respond to Hezbollah’s success. One sympathizer asks whether, even knowing that the Shiites are traitors and the accomplices of the infidel Americans in Iraq, it is permissible to say a prayer for Hezbollah. He is told to curse Hezbollah along with Islam’s other enemies.

Several of Al Qaeda’s ideologues have issued official statements explaining Hezbollah’s actions and telling followers how to respond to them. The gist of their argument is that the Shiites are conspiring to destroy Islam and to resuscitate Persian imperial rule over the Middle East and ultimately the world. The ideologues label this effort the “Sassanian-Safavid conspiracy,” in reference to the Sassanians, a pre-Islamic Iranian dynasty, and to the Safavids, a Shiite dynasty that ruled Iran and parts of Iraq from 1501 till 1736.

They go on to argue that thanks to the United States (the leader of the Zionist-Crusader conspiracy), Iraq has been handed over to the Shiites, who are now wantonly massacring the country’s Sunnis. Syria is already led by a Shiite heretic, President Bashar al-Assad, whose policies harm the country’s Sunni majority.

Hezbollah, according to these analyses, seeks to dupe ordinary Muslims into believing that the Shiites are defending Islam’s holiest cause, Palestine, in order to cover for the wholesale Shiite alliance with the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Ultimately, this theory goes, the Shiites will fail in their efforts because the Israelis and Americans will destroy them once their role in the broader Zionist-Crusader conspiracy is accomplished. And then God will assure the success of the Sunni Muslims and the defeat of the Zionists and Crusaders.

In the meantime, no Muslim should be fooled by Hezbollah, whose members have never fought the infidel on any of the real battlefronts, like Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya or Kashmir. The proper attitude for Muslims to adopt is to dissociate themselves completely from the Shiites.

This analysis — conspiratorial, bizarre and uncompelling, except to the most diehard radicals — signals an important defeat for Al Qaeda’s public relations campaign. The truth is that Al Qaeda has met a formidable challenge in Hezbollah and its charismatic leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, who have made canny choices that appeal to Al Qaeda’s Sunni followers. Al Qaeda’s improbable conspiracy theory does little to counter these advantages.

First, although Sheik Nasrallah wears the black turban and carries the title of “sayyid,” both of which identify him as a Shiite descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, he preaches a nonsectarian ideology and does not highlight his group’s Shiite identity. Hezbollah has even established an effective alliance with Hamas, a Sunni and Muslim Brotherhood organization.

Second, Hezbollah’s statements focus on the politics of resistance to occupation and invoke shared Islamic principles about the right to self-defense. Sheik Nasrallah is extremely careful to hew closely to the dictates of Islamic law in his military attacks. These include such principles as advance notice, discrimination in selecting targets and proportionality.

Finally, only Hezbollah has effectively defeated Israel (in Lebanon in 2000) and is now taking it on again, hitting Haifa and other places with large numbers of rockets — a feat that no Arab or Muslim power has accomplished since Israel’s founding in 1948.

These are already serious selling points. And Hezbollah will score a major propaganda victory in the Muslim world if it simply remains standing in Lebanon after the present bout of warfare is over and maintains the relationships it is forging with Hamas and other Sunni Islamist organizations.

What will such a victory mean? Perhaps Hezbollah’s ascendancy among Sunnis will make it possible for Shiites and Sunnis to stop the bloodletting in Iraq — and to focus instead on their “real” enemies, namely the United States and Israel. Rumblings against Israeli actions in Lebanon from both Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq already suggest such an outcome.

That may be good news for Iraqis, but it marks a dangerous turn for the West. And there are darker implications still. Al Qaeda, after all, is unlikely to take a loss of status lying down. Indeed, the rise of Hezbollah makes it all the more likely that Al Qaeda will soon seek to reassert itself through increased attacks on Shiites in Iraq and on Westerners all over the world — whatever it needs to do in order to regain the title of true defender of Islam.

Bernard Haykel, an associate professor of Islamic Studies at New York University, is the author of “Revival and Reform in Islam.”

This is ominous. IMHO Al Qaeda's main motivation for the 9/11 attacks was to recruit fighters from all over the world.

Sorry Snuff --- had to post it all. You are right --- it was too important to leave out.

The New America Foundation American Strategy Program

http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/...h%207-20web.htm

AMERICAN STRATEGY AND THE MIDDLE EAST

July 20, 2006

Restaurant Nora, Washington, D.C.



The Honorable Zbigniew Brzezinski

National Security Advisor to President Carter and

Trustee and Counselor, Center for Strategic and International Studies



presider

Steven Clemons*

Sr. Fellow & Dir., American Strategy Program, New America Foundation and

publisher, www.TheWashingtonNote.com





[Text in brackets unclear or inaudible]



Let me be serious now because this is a serious time which calls for serious reflection. I have to talk for about 15 or so minutes. I will be brief. Let me start by sharing with you what I consider to be 3 axiomatic propositions.



The first is that today, for the United States, its policy in the Middle East is the basic test of America’s capacity to exercise global leadership. It’s become that. I see it as in many respects similar to what transpired during the Cold War when the ultimate test of America’s capacity to act as a defender of the free world was its ability to conduct a meaningful policy in Europe for Europe then was the central front and we know the outcome.

Today the Middle East is the fundamental test of American ability to lead, and at stake is precisely that. If we do not do well, we will lose our capacity to lead, and that concerns me greatly.

The second axiomatic proposition that I want to share with you is that the experience of recent times--and much of the experience connected also with the existence of the state of Israel--teaches us that neither Israel nor the United States in the final analysis have the capacity to impose a unilateral solution. There may be people who deceive themselves of that. We call them neo-cons in this country and there are other equivalents in Israel as well. They may think that either the United States or Israel can impose a solution

The United States has already learned--or at least it is in the process of learning in Iraq-- that it does not have the capacity to impose unilateral solutions to the problems it faces, by force, acting on its own, and neither does Israel.

And my third proposition is that by now it should be very evident to all concerned that the parties that are fighting now in the Middle East, particularly the Israelis and the Palestinians can never resolve their conflict peacefully, no matter how much they try, no matter how sincere they may be. And when they are sincere, unfortunately it is in-synchronous to the sincerity of the other side, and more often than not, one or the other is not sincere. Quite often, neither is sincere. As a result, there has been no peace in the Middle East.

Let me speak a little bit to each of these propositions. The use of force and unilateral solution. There has been a great deal of talk recently about Israel seeking a unilateral solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. …

How can one envisage it? One can envisage an imposition of a condition but one should not confuse it with a legitimate, acceptable peace settlement. A settlement based on the expansion, to some significant degree, of the state of Israel beyond ‘67 lines without territorial compensation or accommodation is going to be a settlement that leaves the West Bank essentially in a condition closely approximating that of a Bantustan which had been planned in the days of apartheid in South Africa.

A solution which is unilateral which involves the incorporation of all of Jerusalem in the state of Israel is going to leave the roof of the Golden Dome on top of the Temple on the Mount visible to most Palestinians in a physical sense. Those of you who know the region know you can see it from afar, and that will be a symbol of the illegitimacy and unacceptability of that imposed settlement. And the failure to generate a political equilibrium will lead to further rounds of violence.

So I do not see Israel being able to change the mindset of the peoples involved and particularly not by use of force. Use of force can achieve certain short-term objectives, perhaps even today in Lebanon provides Israel some modest success in interdicting some Hezbollah military capability. But use of force breeds its own antithesis: the mobilization of deeper resistance, the radicalization of those around you, and a growing sense of outrage and determination to survive.

I hate to say this but I will say it. I think what the Israelis are doing today for example in Lebanon is in effect, in effect--maybe not in intent--the killing of hostages. The killing of hostages. Because when you kill 300 people, 400 people, who have nothing to do with the provocations Hezbollah staged, but you do it in effect deliberately by being indifferent to the scale of collateral damage, you’re killing hostages in the hope of intimidating those that you want to intimidate. And more likely than not you will not intimidate them. You’ll simply outrage them and make them into permanent enemies with the number of such enemies increasing.

I have been involved with this problem for thirty years or so, and my sense is that the difficulty in resolving it is increasing rather than decreasing and that the hostility is hardening. The number of moderates is diminishing, and the prospects for protracted violence is growing, so that is not a solution.

The solution can only come if there is a serious international involvement that supports the moderates from both sides, however numerous or non-numerous they are, but also creates the situation in which it becomes of greater interest to both parties to accommodate than to resist because both of the incentives and the capacity of the external intervention to impose costs. That means a deliberate peace effort led by the United States, which then doubtless would be supported by the international community, which defines openly in a semi-binding fashion how the United States and the international community envisages the outlines of the accommodation. In short, the kind of adoption of the Geneva Accords or the Taba formulations or some of the formulations by Clinton at Camp David, and that should be the position of the international community spelled out in black and white and accompanied by very explicit indication that rejection by the Palestinian side will gravely affect our degree of support and acceptance for the Palestinian regime and exactly the same vis-a-vis Israel.

We’re not prepared to do that, then we might as well kiss the prospects for peace goodbye. Right now every indication is that we’re not prepared to do that. Worse than that, we have abandoned our traditional position from being a mediator and have adopted a policy of almost complete partiality and that contributes to the intensity of the conflict.

Now that brings me to my third and last point because I know Steve doesn’t want me to talk long, which is America’s role in the Middle East as a whole and that goes beyond this issue regarding which I’ve already indicated what I think America ought to be doing, but by now the problems of the Middle East, some of them endemic and generic to the region but some of them of our making involve at least two other issues: Iraq and potentially Iran. And it’s becoming increasingly difficult to separate the three: the Israeli-Palestinian, the Iraq problem, Iran.

The Iraq problem, look what Prime Minister al-Maliki said today--it’s an indication of things to come. The notion that we’re going to get a pliant, democratic, stable, pro-American, Israel-loving Iraq is a myth which is rapidly eroding and which is now being contradicted by political realities.

And the problem of Iran is clearly related because of Iran’s connection to Syria... [inaudible]…destabilize the region, while at the same time there are people in this city and in Jerusalem who would like to make certain that there is no compromise accommodation between the United States and Iran but, on the contrary, that the United States undertakes military action against them. It is mostly an extreme, lunatic fringe.

We have read I’m sure the editorial by [Bill] Kristol in The Weekly Standard, but there are people in the U.S. government who lean that way, who think that way, who agitate that way. And my grave concern is that within the U.S. government today, the structure of authority is such that it is quite conceivable for a key player in that system, especially endowed with a sense of a divine mission as to reach a decision [inaudible]. It is not concluded that such a person is even susceptible to such arguments because of that sense of mission.

What of course imposes the limit are certain objective circumstances. And it is a difficult thing to say, but in fact our failure in Iraq is saving us from duplicating that misadventure vis-à-vis Iran and that is probably the most important impediment to such a repetition.

And that leads me then to the proposition beforehand, namely that we have now, we’re not only committed to what I said earlier, regarding the Israeli-Palestinian process, but more deliberately by terminating our involvement in Iraq. And I have put forth a four-point program which [I am sure] I have discussed in one of the rare occasions within the last year administration has talked to me, some top level people in the administration. They listened to this:

1.That we start talking to the Iraqis of the day of our disengagement., We say to them we want to set it jointly, but in the process, indicate to them that we will not leave precipitously. I asked Khalilzad what would be his definition of precipitous and he said four months and I said I agree. Are you saying to the Iraqis, we intend to disengage by some period? We need to.

2.And then we will see what Iraqi leaders say to us and which leaders say what. I’m convinced those who categorically say to us we don’t want you to leave are the ones who will leave with us when we leave. And ones who will be more prepared to entertain the proposition of us leaving are the ones who have some basis of confidence that they have political and military roots in the country and that they, together, the Shiites and the Kurds they will make arrangements with the Sunnis, handle it on their own.

Once we reach an agreement with the Iraqis, I would secondly announce it as a joint decision. Not as an American decision but as a joint American-Iraqi decision. Because that would give greater credibility to such an Iraqi government.

Thirdly, I would then have the Al-Maliki government convene a conference of all of their adjoining Muslim states, perhaps some of the distant ones, such as Pakistan, Morocco, Algeria on the subject of their potential to help stabilize Iraq after we’re gone. Because once we’re leaving, most of them will be willing to help and stabilize them. Because for different reasons, entirely different reasons, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia would have their own specific stakes in stabilizing Iraq which may not be identical stakes but complementary stakes, and thus it would be quite worthwhile initiating this process.

And then fourth, the United States will announce a donors’ conference to help rehabilitate Iraq’s economy and particularly its energy-producing capacity. I believe that would help the extract us in a fashion which would not be calamitous. It would not be quite defined or what has been defined as “victory”: a secular, democratic, stable Iraq [but] probably an Iraq [engaged] for some time in civil strife. But I believe an indigenous government is much more likely to be effective in repressing domestic insurgency than the occupation army that neither understands the culture of the country nor the language, And because of psychological pressures conducting a counterinsurgency in civilian areas, is itself becoming increasingly affected by the contagion of demoralization that has, in previous history, badly damaged even the most professional of forces.

As far as Iran is concerned--and with this [where] I’ll end--thanks to Iraq, I think we have made an offer to the Iranians that is reasonable. I do not know that Iranians have the smarts to respond favorably or at least not negatively. I sort of lean to the idea that they’ll probably respond not negatively but not positively and try to stall out the process. But that is not so bad provided they do not reject it. Because while the Iranian nuclear problem is serious, and while the Iranians are marginally involved in Lebanon and to a greater extent in Syria, the fact of the matter is that the challenge they pose to us, while serious, is not imminent. And because it isn’t imminent, it gives us time to deal with it. And sometimes in international politics, the better part of wisdom is to defer dangers rather than try to eliminate them altogether instantly, because the later produces intense counter-reactions that are destructive. We have time to deal with Iran, provided the process is launched, dealing with the nuclear energy problem, which can then be extended to involve also security talks about the region.

In the final analysis, Iran is a serious country, it’s not Iraq. It’s going to be there. It’s going to be a player. And in the longer historical term, it has all of the preconditions for a constructive internal evolution if you measure it by rates of literacy, access to higher education, the role of women in society, a sense of tradition and status which is real.

I’m convinced that the mullahs are part of the past in Iran, not its future. But that process can change in Iran, not in a confrontation but through engagement. I think if we pursue these policies, we can perhaps avert the dangers that we face but if we do not, I fear that the region will explode, and for that matter, Israel will be in the long run in great jeopardy.

When we accept today’s realities, American pre-eminence in Middle East affairs is in danger and without correction, our primacy may last for a short duration.

Could U.S. Troops End Up in Lebanon?

Posted on Wednesday, July 26, 2006. By Ken Silverstein.


There's much discussion of putting a multinational, NATO-led force in southern Lebanon as part of a ceasefire agreement in the Israel–Lebanon conflict, but Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, according to a story in the Washington Post, has said that she does “not think that it is anticipated that U.S. ground forces . . . are expected for that force.” However, a well-connected former CIA officer has told me that the Bush Administration is in fact considering exactly such a deployment.

The officer, who had broad experience in the Middle East while at the CIA, noted that NATO and European countries, including England, have made clear that they are either unwilling or extremely reluctant to participate in an international force. Given other nations' lack of commitment, any “robust” force—between 10,000 and 30,000 troops, according to estimates being discussed in the media—would by definition require major U.S. participation. According to the former official, Israel and the United States are currently discussing a large American role in exactly such a “multinational” deployment, and some top administration officials, along with senior civilians at the Pentagon, are receptive to the idea.

The uniformed military, however, is ardently opposed to sending American soldiers to the region, according to my source. “They are saying 'What the "expletive deleted"?'” he told me. “Most of our combat-ready divisions are in Iraq or Afghanistan, or on their way, or coming back. The generals don't like it because we're already way overstretched.”

Sending American soldiers is at this point simply an option and by is no means a certainty, but if the administration decides to move forward, my source said, “It would be viewed in the Arab world as the United States picking up a combat role on behalf of Israel.” And as Mahan Abedin, Director of Research at the Centre for the Study Of Terrorism in London, noted in an email he sent me yesterday, any deployment of peacekeepers to southern Lebanon “would require the acquiescence of Hezbollah. There are no indications [that] this will be forthcoming, not least because such a force could potentially lay the groundwork for Hezbollah's disarmament.”

The former CIA officer said that the Bush Administration seems not to understand Hezbollah's deep roots and broad support among Lebanon's Shiites, the country's largest single ethnic bloc. “A U.S. force is going to end up making, not keeping, peace with Hezbollah. Once you start fighting in a place like that you’re basically at war with the Shiite population. That means that our soldiers are going to be getting shot at by Hezbollah. This would be a sheer disaster for us.”

The scenario of an American deployment appears to come straight out of the neoconservative playbook: send U.S. forces into the Middle East, regardless of what our own military leaders suggest, in order to “stabilize” the region. The chances of success, as we have seen in Iraq, are remote. So what should be done? My source said the situation is so volatile at the moment that the only smart policy is to get an immediate ceasefire and worry about the terms of a lasting truce afterwards.


http://harpers.org/sb-source-bush-admin-le...1153936109.html

MIDDLE EAST POLICY COUNCIL

“MIDDLE EASTERN VIEWS OF THE US:
WHAT DO THE TRENDS INDICATE?”

SPEAKERS:
SHIBLEY TELHAMI,
SADAT CHAIR, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND;
SENIOR FELLOW, BROOKINGS INSTITUTION
BRIAN KATULIS,
DIRECTOR OF DEMOCRACY AND PUBLIC DIPLOMACY,
CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS
JON ALTERMAN
DIRECTOR AND SENIOR FELLOW,
MIDDLE EAST PROGRAM, CSIS
MILTON VIORST
AUTHOR, “STORM FROM THE EAST”
MODERATOR/DISCUSSANT:
CHAS. W. FREEMAN, JR.
PRESIDENT, MIDDLE EAST POLICY COUNCIL

10:00 AM – 12:30 PM
THURSDAY, JULY 20, 2006

Transcript by:
Federal News Service
Washington, D.C.

CHAS W. FREEMAN, JR.: We are going to get started even though we are missing a key panelist. He is probably caught in the security procedures at the gate. I hope everybody feels very secure.

For those of you who don’t work in this building or in anywhere connected to it underground, I commend you on your fortitude on coming through this horrible hot weather. You obviously have to be interested in the topic. And we welcome you.

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Chas Freeman, and it’s my honor and sometimes pleasure to be president of the Middle East Policy Council, a small, struggling organization that has been around for about 30 years attempting to educate the uneducable about realities in the Middle East.

We do three things. We come up here to the heart of darkness and we light a candle to illuminate some politically incorrect or awkward or overly neglected topic, and then we make the transcript of the discussion. That becomes the first item in our quarterly, which is the most commonly cited in the field, and which is full of interesting analyses, opinions, and recommendations. We have one member of the editorial board here, Shibley Telhami. Shibley, we are very glad to have you here.

And finally, throughout the country, we have conducted a program of training high school teachers in how to teach about the Arab civilization and Islam, and we have trained about 18,000, reach about 1.4 million kids a year, with a fact or two, which is at least one fact more than they would otherwise encounter in the course of their public school education, and therefore quite worthwhile.

We have this morning the perfect topic for the sort of discussion that we like to do. It is a topic which is discussed in our media with all of the intellectual consistency and substance of the flatulence of cows.

It is the subject of famous conventional wisdom. We all knew before 9/11 that we were admired and emulated by foreigners, including foreigners in the Middle East. Yet on 9/11 we learned that we were hated because of our values. Now I think the American people perceive that in fact we are widely disliked, and our government is detested. And there is a question – Jon, welcome. I assume you were caught in the security. We now suspect that Americans are increasingly unwelcome in the region. At any rate, there are many theories and very few facts in this arena, and I suspect that, as is so often the case, the conventional wisdom is more conventional than wise.

So we will today have an opportunity to discuss Middle Eastern views of the United States and what the trends indicate. I hope we will be able to break this down into parts and not stay at a high level of generality. And I’m delighted to say that we have at truly wonderful panel today to go over this topic.

For those on the panel who are new to this process, you get to speak for 10 or 12 minutes. If you exceed that, I throw you off the rostrum physically. I will menace you with little notes and other annoying things as you approach your time limit. There is no amplification today, so you must speak up. If those of you in the back can’t hear, raise your hand or do something else to get my attention.

Now we will proceed. I am not going to recapitulate the biographies of everybody in the panel because they are on the back of the program.

I will just say Shibley Telhami is of course the Anwar Sadat Professor at Maryland, and is at the Brookings Institution, I believe.

Brian Katulis, seated over here, is at the Center for American Progress. He worked in the Middle East, and was on the NSE staff and policy planning council.

Jon Alterman runs a marvelous program on the Middle East at CSIS, the Center for Strategic and International Studies. And he too has been on the policy planning staff at State.

And Milton Viorst is an author, writer, with many, many wonderful books and articles to his credit, including most recently one that I’m greatly enjoying, which is called “Storm From the East: The Struggle Between the Arab World and the Christian West,” which puts the current difficulties in historical perspective very succinctly and evocatively.

So with these few words, and hoping that I have not left anybody out. I will invite the panel to come up and speak briefly. Shibley, you’re on first.

SHIBLEY TELHAMI: Thanks very much. I would like to begin by addressing the question of who cares about Arab public opinion? I mean, there is a – we’re in some ways, we’re looking at attitudes toward the United States and the Arab world. And we have a lot of people in this town who say, so what does it matter? You know, public opinion really doesn’t matter much.

And they have a lot of evidence on their side, frankly. Arab governments have gone against their public opinion in the recent Iraq war and survived. Over 90 percent of Arabs didn’t want the Iraq war, and frankly, many Arab states not only supported it tacitly, but actually cooperated with the United States. We had American military stationed on their soil.

And even now, you look at this crisis in Gaza and Lebanon, and you see where public opinion is. Public opinion in the Arab world, whether it’s Sunni or Shi’a or Christian, is decidedly on the side of Hezbollah. We haven’t had scientific public opinion surveys since the crisis across the Arab world, but there have been a lot of evidence, not only just reporting and anecdotal evidence, but some significant nonscientific polling like the one that Al Jazeera, where 200,000 people participated in it on an online survey, and 91 percent of people who participated said they endorsed Hezbollah.

So what you have in this case is a huge gap between public opinion, and you have governments, particularly Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, and others who have been very bold in a way in going against that tide and taking a position that Hezbollah is at least in part, if not mostly to blame, for the Lebanese crisis. So you have a significant gap that has emerged. And clearly the bet by governments that they can ride the storm of public opinion and prevail, they can make the strategic calculations based on other issues – and so in that sense, why should we even be paying attention to where public opinion is on this issue.

So let me tell you why – just very briefly, why it still matters and why we cannot ignore it before I tell you where it is. First, think about this gap. I mean, you know, all of this discourse about – that follow 9/11 was initially was it’s about the political system in the region. The absence of democracy is correlated with the strength of anti-American terrorism. That was conventional wisdom; that the spread of democracy was a policy that came out of this accepted notion in conventional wisdom.

And you look at this environment in which we operate, where you have what – the policies are widening the gap between governments and publics, and imagine how the Saudis or the Egyptians or the Jordanians tomorrow morning are going to be able to open up the political system when they have a strongly opposed public opinion.

So what you are going to have in the short term – undoubtedly this gap exacerbates and increases repression, because the only way you can control the tide of public opinion is by being more oppressive, even if you have these electoral exercises that you go – and that is why, by the way, when you ask people in the Arab world is the Middle East more democratic or less democratic than it was before the Iraq war, the majority say it’s less democratic, despite the fact that we have had obviously some apparent improvements in the electoral process in a number of countries.

So, first, the casualty of all of this most certainly will be any idea that democracy or more participatory kind of political system will emerge as a consequence of this widening gap that can be addressed in the short term by insecure governments only through increased repression. And that is a casualty. If we understand that and we’re willing to live with the consequence of that, that is one thing.

The second thing is while it is of course true that we can actually pressure governments to accept positions that go against the public opinion, the cost of doing business is much higher. It takes a lot more power to do that. The United States remains the most powerful nation in the world. It is still more powerful than anyone else. Despite all of the weakness that emerged out of the Iraq war, despite all of the expenditures that came out of the Iraq war, the United States is still the most powerful nation on earth.

We have the capacity to prevail on any small issue. It is the cost of doing business that escalates. It makes it very hard to manage, we pay too heavy a price, and that eventually becomes a complicating factor at a minimum more down the road in terms of the exercise of American power.

And third, where you have public opinion that is going very strongly against you, it is very hard for you to fight your enemies in the environment where more people think you are the enemy more than your enemies.

So, for example, if you are trying to get the Pakistani security services and military to be wholeheartedly dedicated to the eradication of al Qaeda in Pakistan, and they deep down in their heart think this is an American war, they don’t like America, and they – even if they don’t endorse al Qaeda, the extent to which you are going to have full cooperation, the extent to which you are going to have public cooperation – the public will tell you where they are hiding – is going to be diminished, significantly diminished. So your ability to succeed, particularly when it comes to this kind of operations, diminish.

And finally, the task that is facing – the challenges that are facing many of the countries, but particularly the United States, are primarily challenges that come from non-state actors much more than from states. As such, the U.S. has really, even with Iran – you know, a complicated factor – Iran is still a deterrable country, and the same thing with Syria.

And so the war – as we can see in the insurgency in Iraq, as we can see in the insurgency in Iraq, as we can see in the stability in the relationship with Syria despite the fact that the U.S. and Israel don’t like Syria, and Syria can be a menace, it still can be deterred.

And when it comes to non-state groups, public opinion matters a lot because that is where the groups are going to be connected to the public, that is where they are going to draw their support, that is where they are going to draw their power. And so in that sense, public opinion matters a lot despite the fact that you can have a lot of people who will just be accepting or at least are not going to take on their governments if there is such a gap.

Revolutions are rare in history, and the chance that they will happen in the Arab world because of this gap remains small. They don’t happen very often. Frankly, in modern times, we have only had really the Iranian revolution as a real genuine public revolution that took place. That is always there as a possibility, but the chance of it is small. But all of these other things mean that these trends matter.

What are the trends? So let me very quickly tell you what the trends have been over the past five years. I have been polling five countries – in six countries, in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Lebanon for the past five years, with the Zogby International to look at a variety of attitudes, not only attitudes toward the Untied Stats.

And if you ask me what is new in the past year that is different from – what has changed, I wouldn’t say that it’s the fact that many Arabs don’t like American foreign policy; I think the truth of the matter is many Arabs didn’t like American foreign policy even when the foreign policy was a little bit more balanced from the point of view of the Arab world.

There have been really two things that have happened over the past five years, one that we have began detecting already in 2000, 2001, after the collapse of the – after the collapse of the Camp David negotiations with Israel and the Palestinians, and the is the decline in the trust in the United States. Trust is different from do you like foreign policies? Do you have confidence in the government? And that we have seen is a dramatic decline in the confidence measure particularly from, particularly after the collapse of the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations. Those continued to decline after 9/11. That is one.

The second is that we have seen that, particularly in the last – in the most recent survey, what we have seen is that the United States is now seen as a threat, a primary threat. It’s not just that they don’t like America, but the United States is seen as a primary threat in the Arab world by a majority of the public.

In an open question that I asked, name the two countries that you think are – that are the most threatening to you, the vast majority of people in every country named the United States and Israel as the two countries that are most threatening to them. And Iran, which you would think would be seen as a threat, at least in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – those who identified it as a threat were in the single digit. And that tells you that, again, the Iraq war has become a new prism through which Arabs are looking at the United States and looking at the Middle East.

I know I am told I have only minute. So let me just wrap it up by saying – by giving you two more examples pertaining to this. When you ask people what – in a world where you have a single superpower, which of the following country would you like that superpower be, the United States is at the bottom of that scale, together with Russia. France, by the way, is number one; surprisingly remains number one, mostly because of its position on Iraq, nothing else. But China and Pakistan score pretty well up there right after.

And when you ask people on Iran specifically do you believe that Iranians are developing nuclear weapons, a plurality of Arabs, nearly half believe that Iran is actually developing nuclear weapons. If you ask them, do you think the international community should pressure Iran to stop that, a majority say no. Again, they see that mostly through the prism of the American threat, and therefore they are willing to even bypass this perceived threat. That is separate from the governments, where obviously the governments in the Gulf see Iran as a threat and have a different kind of strategy. We’re talking about public opinion.

But I want to end with one comment that I think we have – a lot of people have misunderstood this rise of frustration toward the U.S. as being an endorsement of al Qaeda’s agenda in the region. And they have used all of these seeming trends, of rise of Islamism in – Muslim Brotherhood Egypt, Hamas in the Palestinian areas, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and so forth, as an example of this rising tide that endorses a pan-Islamic agenda. The evidence is not there.

On the contrary, al Qaeda has not been able to win hearts and minds. Most people have not endorsed its agenda. In fact, what aspect of al Qaeda do you sympathize with most, only 6 percent say they sympathize with their advocacy of a puritanical Islamic state. Only 7 percent, they say – they sympathize with their methods. A plurality say they like the fact that they are standing up to the United States. This is a negative, not a positive.

And if you look at these other Islamic groups, and also the trends, the positions of the public on social issues, you find that they are rejecting the agenda that is advocated by al Qaeda, but they win by default because of the anger toward the United States. Thanks very much.

MR. FREEMAN: Thank you, Shibley. I think you have made a pretty clear case that public opinion does shape the environment in which the United States and other countries must defend their national security or attempt to address the issues in it. And I knew we wouldn’t be able to avoid the topic of the day, and I don’t think we should, although we are talking about something more broad than the effort by Israel, backed by the United States, to try once again to flog the Arabs into docility, an approach that has been tried on many occasions over many years and has never worked. Perhaps this time will prove to be the miraculous exception.

One question I hope we will get to in the course of the discussion is to what extent opinion in the region still makes distinctions between the United States and Israel, because we seem to have become totally identified with the Israelis and their policies. This has practical consequences; I’ll just mention one obvious one.


When we planned a non-combatant evacuation from Lebanon, we couldn’t use the normal methodology, which you have all seen over the years elsewhere. The Marines couldn’t go ashore and secure a perimeter, and safely escort people out because they would very likely have been seen as allies of the Israelis and treated accordingly. Therefore the Lebanese Army secured a beach, and a very small group of lightly armed Marines assisted the passengers, or are assisting passengers onto a landing craft.

This is a reminder that public opinion and the distinctions it makes ultimately do create security environments, even for military operations. And various theories about public opinion are constantly tested. In effect at the moment, the entire Israeli strategy rests on theories of public opinion, and that is that if you terrorize Lebanese sufficiently, their government will go into South Lebanon and do what the Israeli ground forces really can’t do at acceptable costs, namely search and destroy; collect the weapons that Hezbollah has.

So we have this odd strategy. Having failed to do anything to build the capacity of the Lebanese government to enforce its sovereignty, the Israelis, with our blessing, are now destroying Lebanon in order to extend its sovereignty, and we hope the Lebanese who don’t have the capacity to go into th