Credit Default Swaps – Through The Looking Glass

by Satyajit Das

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13157

Good and Bad Nuclear Weapons. Berlin's Part in Shaping Nuclear Reality (PDF)
Michael Rühle, Körber Policy Paper
Editor's Note: How to maintain confidence in extended deterrence is one of the important, complicated challenges that arises from President Obama's call for movement toward a nuclear-weapon free world. Germany's views on the subject will weigh heavily. This report by Michael Rühle, Deputy Director of Policy Planning in the Private Office of the Secretary General of NATO, presents a cogent, provocative argument for Germany to come out clearly in favor of NATO remaining a nuclear alliance.

http://www.koerber-stiftung.de/fileadmin/u..._Paper_No_3.pdf

Israeli bombing of Iran's nuclear facilities later this year

http://www.upi.com/Emerging_Threats/2009/0...12831239721292/

Commentary: Gulf war jitters

By ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE, UPI Editor at Large

Published: April 14, 2009

WASHINGTON, April 14 (UPI) -- Gulf Cooperation Council members -- Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Oman -- are getting ready for what many now assume will be retaliation from Iran following Israeli bombing of Iran's nuclear facilities later this year.

Up and down the Persian Gulf , Patriot missile batteries have been quietly deployed around key oil installations. The Patriot system is designed to detect, target and then hit incoming missiles that may be no more than 10 to 20 feet long and flying at three to five times the speed of sound. Iran has hundreds of missiles and rockets.

There is also a steady traffic in and out of Washington of high-ranking GCC military and defense officials, including army, air force and navy chiefs. Gulf rulers are fearful Israel 's new government, headed by the tough, uncompromising Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, will walk away from any possibility of a Palestinian solution. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said as much when he made clear "we are no longer bound by the previous government's undertakings for the negotiation of a Palestinian state." The Annapolis accord of 2007 for a two-state solution? Didn't happen on our watch, said Israel 's new governing team. Lieberman even wants to strip any rights from Arab Israelis who are disloyal to the Jewish state.

Undeterred, George Mitchell, the new super negotiator for a Middle East settlement, went back to the region for the third time since Barack Obama became president of the United States . He sees a glimmer of hope for a peace deal with Syria that would detach the ruling dictatorship from its close ties with Iran . But a Netanyahu government in Israel is not about to give up control of the Golan Heights it has occupied since the 1967 Six Day War.

While Iran may unclench its fist in words, as President Obama unclenched America 's, no one in Israel , and very few in other countries, believe Iran 's theocrats will relinquish the nuclear ambitions they have been working on secretly for the past quarter of a century. Netanyahu echoed near-unanimous Israeli feelings when he said an Iranian bomb, coupled with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejads threats of destruction against the Jewish state, is an "existential crisis" that Israel cannot and will not ignore.

Israel's moderate President Shimon Peres added a stern warning. If forthcoming talks with Iran don't yield results, he admonished, "we'll strike." But, he added, this cannot be done without the United States . Israel 's military intelligence chief, Amos Yadlin, told the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that the emergence of a nuclear arsenal in Iran is now "mainly dependent on a political decision."

The assumption among most GCC rulers is that Israel will launch bombers against some of Iran 's 27 nuclear sites as soon as it becomes clear the mullahs won't agree to surrender their nuclear option at upcoming six-power talks. The United States and Iran will be at the same negotiating table -- along with China , Russia , Britain , France and Germany -- for the first time since the Iranian Revolution ousted the shah 30 years ago.

Iran's next presidential elections are scheduled for June 14, when Ahmadinejad may lose the presidency to a candidate judged by Western powers to be comparatively moderate. But the latest word from Iran watchers is that the supreme religious leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, favors the re-election of his extremist protege. This would be another green light for the Netanyahu coalition government to order an attack.

Interestingly enough, not all the ruling Sunni families in the gulf are against an Israeli attempt to disrupt Iran 's nuclear plans. Most feel threatened by nukes in the hands of a Shiite clerical regime that dreams of dominating the gulf, as the shah once did when Britain in 1968 gave up all its commitments east of Suez . In 1971, the shah seized three strategic islands near the Strait of Hormuz -- Abu Musa and Lesser and Greater Tunb -- that Britain had entrusted to the ruler of Abu Dhabi . The mullahs refused to return them -- and then militarized them with naval guns.

There is plenty of tinder up and down the gulf for a major conflagration throughout the region should Israel strike Iran . The mullahs with their revolutionary guards and far-flung intelligence services possess formidable asymmetrical retaliatory capabilities. They also have at their subversive disposal Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza coupled with a growing influence in the West Bank .

Morocco recently severed diplomatic relations with Iran after its agents were caught proselytizing against Sunni Islam and King Mohammed VI. Dubai , one of the seven emirates in the United Arab Emirates , has 400,000 Iranian residents -- including scores of undercover agents. Saudi Arabia's eastern province, where most its oil fields are located, as well as the world's largest offshore oil terminal at Ras Tanura and the kingdom's oil nerve center at Abqaiq, also has a large Shiite minority. And in the kingdom of Bahrain , headquarters for the U.S. 5th Fleet, a majority of the population is Shiite and subject to frequent agitation against the ruling Sunni family.

Qatar, which now enjoys the world's highest standard of living with a per capita income of $78,000, straddles the gulf fence with both ears to the ground, a somewhat ungainly posture but one that's deemed far more secure. The firebrand satellite television station al-Jazeera was created by Qatar 's ruling al-Thani family and is headquartered in Doha , the capital. But the United States was also authorized to build a base in Qatar with one of the world's longest military runways. Qatar is forward headquarters for the Tampa-based Central Command headed by Gen. David Petraeus. For the past 15 years the charismatic Sheika Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned, the Qatari emir's wife, spearheaded an educational drive that brought several leading U.S. universities to establish branches in Qatar .

If attacked, Iran could also jeopardize an orderly U.S. military exit from neighboring Iraq in 2010. The two countries fought a war from 1980-1988 that killed about 1 million soldiers from both countries. Iran is influential in the western region of Afghanistan .

Oman, which faces Iran across the Strait of Hormuz, has always made good relations with Iran a top priority. But the prudent Omanis also have the gulf's best internal security system.

AlterNet

Will Israel Attack? Mixed Messages from Washington Could Lead to Catastrophe in Iran

By Roane Carey, Tomdispatch.com
Printed on April 13, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/136295/

JERUSALEM -- Israel has been steadily ratcheting up pressure on the United States concerning the grave threat allegedly posed by Iran, which seems poised to master the nuclear fuel cycle, and thus the capacity to produce nuclear weapons. The new Israeli prime minister, Likud Party hawk Benjamin Netanyahu, has warned President Barack Obama that if Washington does not quickly find a way to shut down Iran's nuclear program, Israel will.

Some analysts argue that this is manufactured hysteria, not so much a reflection of genuine Israeli fears as a purposeful diversion from other looming difficulties. The Netanyahu government is filled with hardliners adamantly opposed to withdrawal from, or even a temporary freeze on, settlements in the occupied territories, not to mention to any acceptance of Palestinian statehood. On his first day as foreign minister, extremist demagogue Avigdor Lieberman, with characteristic bluster, announced that Israel was no longer bound by the 2007 Annapolis agreements brokered by Washington, which called for accelerated negotiations toward a two-state settlement.

Such talk threatens to lead the Israelis directly into a clash with the Obama administration. In what can only be taken as a rebuttal of the Netanyahu government's recent pronouncements, in his speech to the Turkish Parliament Obama pointedly reasserted Washington's commitment to a two-state settlement and to the Annapolis understandings. So what better way for Netanyahu to avoid an ugly clash with a popular American president than to conveniently shift the discussion to an existential threat from Iran -- especially if he can successfully present it as a threat not just to Israel but to the West in general?

All of this adds up to a plausible argument against undue alarm over the latest Israeli warnings about an attack on Iran, but it's flawed on several grounds. There is a broad, generally accepted paranoia in Israel about Iran, a belief that its leaders must be stopped before they proceed much further in their uranium enrichment program. (This view is not shared on the Israeli left, but it's now a ghost of its former self.)

In an interview for TomDispatch, Ephraim Kam, deputy director of the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv and a specialist on the Iran issue, commented, "Of course there are different opinions, but there is a general consensus, among both security experts and political leaders, from Labor to the right wing. This is not a controversial issue: if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, it will pose a deep threat. It will be the first time in our history that another country can deal a major blow to Israel."

Kam hastens to add that, in his own view, the scenario Netanyahu proposes -- that Iran is led by irrational fanatics who would nuke Israel at the first chance, even knowing that an Israeli nuclear counterstrike would be swift and catastrophic -- is false. "Iran is a pragmatic, logical player," Kam says. He remains convinced that "even a radical fundamentalist regime" wouldn't attack Israel, but he adds, "This is just my assessment, and assessments can go wrong. I wrote a study on wrong assessments, so I know something about this." In other words, if Kam's claims about the Israeli consensus are correct, the country's leadership takes it for granted that Iran is indeed hell-bent on producing a nuclear weapon and is not inclined to take a chance that a nuclear Iran will play by the MAD (as in mutually assured destruction) rules hammered out by the two Cold War superpowers decades ago and never use it.

This attitude reflects a longstanding Israeli strategic principle: that no neighboring state or combination of states can ever be allowed to achieve anything faintly approaching military parity, because if they do, they will try to destroy the Jewish state. By this logic, Israel's only option is to establish and then maintain absolute military superiority over its neighbors; they will, so this view goes, accept Israel's presence only if they know they're sure to be defeated, or at least vastly outmatched.

This is the famous "iron wall," conceived by early Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky more than 80 years ago, well before the founding of Israel itself. (Jabotinsky founded the Revisionist movement, which in opposition to the Labor mainstream refused to accept any territorial compromise regarding Zionist aims, such as partition. Although he and his followers were for years shut out of the political leadership, their views regarding Israel's neighbors became deeply lodged in the public psyche.) If Iran were to acquire the capacity to build even one nuke -- Israel itself is estimated to have 150-200 of them -- that iron wall would be considered seriously breached, and the country might no longer be able to dictate terms to its neighbors. Given Iran's support for Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, Israel would then have to recalibrate its strategy both on its northern front and vis-à-vis the Palestinians.

Recent developments in Israel could certainly give the impression of a nation preparing for war: the Home Front command, one of four regional divisions of the Israeli army, has just announced the largest defense exercise in the country's history. It will last an entire week and is intended to prepare the civilian population for missile strikes from both conventional warheads and unconventional ones (whether chemical, biological or nuclear). Meanwhile, the country is accelerating its testing of missile defense systems, having just announced the successful launch of the Arrow II interceptor.

Can Israel Go It Alone?

Would Israel really attack Iran without at least tacit approval from Washington? Could Israel do so without such approval? At the very least, Israel would need approval simply to get permission to fly over Iraq, whose airspace is controlled by the U.S. military, not the Iraqi government in Baghdad. As columnist Aluf Benn put it in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, "Defense experts say that without a green light from Washington, Netanyahu and Barak will not be able to send in the air force." Kam adds, "In my judgment, it is somewhere between difficult to impossible for Israel to do it alone, for both technical and political reasons."

Most analysts here believe that a solo Israeli attack would, at best, set back Iran's nuclear program by several years -- not that this would necessarily be a deterrent to Netanyahu & Co. It's widely believed that, in their view, even a temporary delay in Iran's nuclear capability would be an improvement on the current course. It's worth recalling that Israel sought an explicit go-ahead from the Bush administration for an attack last year, which President Bush -- presumably fearing massive conventional retaliation from Iran in both Iraq and Afghanistan -- sensibly refused, a rare moment in his tenure when he did not accede to Israeli wishes.

It's also clear that President Obama seeks to resolve the standoff with Iran through diplomatic means. He's abandoned the confrontational rhetoric of his predecessor and continues to extend peace feelers to the Islamic Republic. Tehran's response has been mixed, but at least a new mood of negotiation is in the air.

Israeli strategists, however, see this new mood as threatening, not hopeful. Any U.S. rapprochement with Iran -- especially if carried out on terms that acknowledge Iran's status as a regional power -- could, they fear, undermine Israel's "special relationship" with Washington. As Iran analyst Trita Parsi put it in a recent piece in the Huffington Post, Iran would then "gain strategic significance in the Middle East at the expense of Israel."

It's within the realm of possibility, for example, that Washington could work out a grand bargain with Tehran terminating its policy of regime change and ending sanctions in return for Tehran's vow never to weaponize its nuclear program. Intrusive international inspections would presumably guarantee such a bargain, but Tehran's national pride would remain intact, as it would be allowed to retain the right to enrich uranium and develop a peaceful nuclear infrastructure.

There has even been some recent slippage in Washington's language when it comes to demands placed on Iran -- with an insistence on an end to all nuclear enrichment evidently being replaced by an insistence on no weapons development. To Israel, this would be a completely unsatisfactory compromise, as its leaders fear that Iran might at some point abandon such an agreement and in fairly short order weaponize.

Given Obama's new approach, it might seem that Israel is stymied for now. After all, it's hard to imagine Obama giving the go-ahead for an attack. Just this week, Vice President Joe Biden told CNN that he thought such an Israeli attack "would be ill-advised."

Other factors, however, play in the hardliners' favor: the Obama administration's new special envoy for Iran, Dennis Ross, is himself a hardliner. Last year, Ross was part of an ultra-hawkish task force that predicted the failure of any negotiations and all but called for war with Iran. Ross is a man who not only knows how to play the bureaucratic game in Washington, but has powerful backers in the administration, and his views will have plenty of support from pro-Israel hawks in Congress.

The attitude of another key sector in decision-making, the high command of the U.S. military, may also be evolving. Washington's dilemma in Iraq is not nearly as dire as it was two years ago. The nightmare envisioned by the American generals running the Iraq campaign in recent years -- that, in response to an attack on its nuclear facilities, Iran could send tens of thousands of well-trained commandos across the border and inflict grave damage on U.S. forces -- has faded somewhat. The Iraqi government's military has much better control of the country today, with insurgent violence at far lower levels. The Shiite Mahdi Army and Iran-connected "special groups" seem to be mostly quiescent.

Of course, the situation in Iraq is still unstable, and any attack on Iran could easily throw the country back into ungovernable chaos. Still, given the role we know American commanders played in nixing such an attack in the Bush years, the question remains: Has resistance to such an attack lessened in the military? It's unclear, but an issue worth monitoring, because American commanders were the most consistent, persuasive voices for moderation during the Bush administration.

It should go without saying that an Israeli attack on Iran would have disastrous consequences. No matter what Washington might claim, or how vociferously officials there denounce it, such an attack would be widely understood throughout the Muslim world as a joint U.S.-Israeli operation.

It would, as a start, serve as a powerful recruiting tool for extremist Islamist groups. In addition, an outraged Iran might indeed send commandos into Iraq, aid armed Iraqi groups determined to attack U.S. and government forces, shoot missiles into the Saudi or Kuwaiti oilfields, and attempt to block the Straits of Hormuz though which a significant percentage of global oil passes. Washington would certainly have to write off desperately needed cooperation in the war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Any attack would only strengthen the reign of the mullahs in Iran and reinforce the country's determination to acquire a nuclear deterrent force that would prevent future attacks. And keep in mind, Iran's nuclear program has overwhelming public support, even from those opposed to the current regime.

Given the Netanyahu government's visible determination to attack, an ambiguous signal from Washington, something far less than a green light, could be misread in Tel Aviv. Anything short of a categorical, even vociferous U.S. refusal to countenance an Israeli attack might have horrific consequences. So here's a message to Obama from an observer in Israel: Don't flash the yellow light -- not even once.

Roane Carey, on leave as managing editor of the Nation magazine, is on a journalism fellowship at the Chaim Herzog Center for Middle East Studies and Diplomacy at Ben-Gurion University in Beer-Sheva, Israel.

© 2009 Tomdispatch.com All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/136295/

bitterlemons-international.org
Middle East Roundtable

Edition 14 Volume 7 - April 16, 2009

Obama's initial regional deployment: Turkey

• Converging regional policies - Bulent Aras
Under Obama, Turkey will serve as a short-cut for American policy coordination in the region.

• Fixing anti-Americanism in Turkey - Soner Cagaptay
Lately, the United States has done the right things to win Turkish hearts and minds.

• Restoration of US-Turkey relations? - Fadi Hakura
Obama seems to prefer a Turkish foreign policy of the quiet and constructive type.

• Aims beyond Turkey - Mustafa Kibaroglu
No other country than Turkey could better suit the expectations of the Obama administration in appealing to the Islamic world.

Converging regional policies
Bulent Aras

During a visit to the United States that preceded President Barack Obama's visit to Turkey, Ahmet Davutoglu, chief advisor to Turkey's prime minister, stated that "Our approach and principles are almost the same, very similar to the US on issues such as the Middle East, Caucasus, Balkans and energy security. Therefore, we hope that there is a golden era ahead in cooperation." That sentiment was based on converging developments in the Turkish and American approach to foreign policy issues, particularly the Middle East. Obama's subsequent visit to Turkey signaled that this new golden era had indeed begun.

It can be inferred from Hillary Clinton's remarks during her delegation's stay in Turkey that the US regards Turkey as an effective negotiator in the region. Turkey's relationship with Iran, Syria and Hamas is critical to the foreign-policy-through-diplomacy approach of the Obama administration: Turkey can act as a conduit through which America communicates with these countries and actors. Despite outspoken criticism in Washington of Turkey's open dialogue with America's enemies, the Obama camp regards Turkey's relationship with Iran, Syria and Hamas as positive.

Several issues marked the agenda during the Obama visit to Turkey. He addressed the Muslim world, arguing that the gap between the West and the world of Islam is not insurmountable. He extended an olive branch to the Muslim world with a strong declaration that "the United States is not, and never will be, at war with Islam." Obama's speech in the Turkish Parliament continued with words of friendship and the promise of seeking "broader engagement based on mutual interest and mutual respect". His speech was broadcast live on al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya, the two most important Arabic satellite TV channels.

He placed his support for Turkey's inclusion in the European Union in the same context. In Prague, just before his visit to Turkey, he argued that Turkey's membership would make the EU a truly multi-cultural entity and help to bridge the gap between Islam and the West. He added in Turkey that the EU would be stronger with its inclusion. In addition, he sent a strong message of rapprochement to Iran from Turkey, implicitly honoring Ankara's offer to mediate between Tehran and Washington.

He proposed a "model partnership" between Turkey and the US. He wants Turkey to continue to contribute to Syrian-Israeli peace talks. Obama also satisfied Turkish concerns over his involvement in the Armenian genocide issue, noting that if Turkey and Armenia "can move forward and deal with a difficult and tragic history, then I think the entire world should encourage that."

Under the Obama administration, America's foreign policy vision converges with Turkey's on democracy, human rights, peace and international legitimacy. This convergence is more about values than considerations of realpolitik. The Obama administration needs regional allies to implement its foreign policy through multilateral diplomacy. The way forward for the US toward positive bilateral relations with Turkey and a more effective engagement with the Muslim world is to firmly establish its foreign policy priorities in alignment with Turkey's. A review of the Obama delegation's agenda for his visit to Turkey reveals that the president did indeed present proposals for addressing such Turkish foreign policy problems as normalization of Turkish-Armenian relations, associating this requirement with Turkey's leading role as a peacemaker in the region.

Obama called for further reform and democratization in Turkey, with strong reference to improvement of minority rights. He made it clear that there will be consistent support for Turkey's government as long as it moves in the direction he outlined. This should contribute to democratization in Turkey. Ankara's civilian elite is currently expending a great deal of energy to eliminate the Cold War-style illegal apparatus popularly known as Ergenekon that was deeply rooted within the state. US support for democratization and EU membership will anchor Turkey on this path.

The positive atmosphere of rapprochement that emerged with the Obama presidency will soon overturn the bitter legacy of the Bush era. One can easily foresee a rapid improvement of America's standing in Turkey and the Middle East. Obama with his new image will narrow the gap between East and West and establish sustainable friendships in the region. Considering the new foreign policy orientation of the US, under Obama Turkey will serve as a short-cut for American policy coordination in the region.

Obama pledged during his election campaign to enter into cooperation with Turkey; his visit proves that he will keep his word. Obama underlined Turkey's democratic, western, secular and Muslim charters and classified Turkey as an influential western country with multiple identities in the Middle East and its environs. The current Turkish administration promotes a domestic and foreign policy orientation that accommodates cooperation, as demonstrated by Turkey's recent peace-brokering in the region. It is only a matter of time before we witness the effects that a positive Turkish-American relationship has on the Middle East and the rest of the Muslim world.- Published 16/4/2009 © bitterlemons-international.org

Prof. Bulent Aras chairs the Department of International Relations at Isik University, Istanbul.

Fixing anti-Americanism in Turkey
Soner Cagaptay

President Barack Obama's visit to Turkey could not have gone better in terms of winning Turkish hearts and minds. Obama did all the right things, visiting Ataturk's mausoleum, the Blue Mosque and the Turkish parliament, capturing the complexity of a country that is Turkish by birth, Muslim in culture and western in its political identity.

Yet Washington still faces a challenge among the Turks: after a debilitating downturn in recent years, America's favorability rating is at rock bottom. Obama should be concerned about this phenomenon that, if ignored, will eat into the foundations of the new US-Turkish relationship he wants to promote on key issues, including Iraq, Iran and Pakistan. As serious as the problem is, though, Turkish anti-Americanism can be fixed.

Obama cannot and should not ignore anti-Americanism in Turkey, because as a democracy, Turkish politics are ultimately accountable to public opinion. Washington can sustain cooperation with all sorts of authoritarian Muslim states, such as Egypt, despite pervasive anti-Americanism in those countries, because these authoritarian regimes do not care for public opinion. In Turkey, though, these sentiments will sooner or later erode, reshape and then cripple governmental cooperation with the United States. Anti-Americanism in Turkey presents a larger, more immediate challenge to Obama than it does in other Muslim majority societies.

Obamania will help face this challenge. According to a recent poll by Infacto, whereas only 9 percent of Turks thought favorably of the US president four years ago, today 39 percent have a positive view of Obama. However, this jolt has not lifted America's standing in Turkey to match political ambitions for long-term and grand cooperation with Ankara as laid out by Obama's speech to the Turkish parliament on April 6. The Infacto poll also shows that 44 percent of the Turks view the United States as the biggest threat to Turkey.

Lately, the United States has done the right things to win Turkish hearts and minds. First, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, during her March visit to Turkey, and then President Obama gave the Turks a needed bear hug, emphasizing that the United States likes the Turks, respects their faith and supports their western vocation. Washington is assisting Turkey in its struggle against Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) terror attacks, a key security concern for many Turks. Obama has even shied away from his campaign promise to support the "Armenian Genocide" bill in the US Congress, which many Turks find extremely offensive.

At this stage, there is little more Washington can do to charm the Turks. As I learned during a recent sabbatical in Turkey, the Turks form their views of the world based upon what they hear from their leadership. Turkey is a rare fence-sitting country between East and West, in which pro-American and western statements have the same weight in shaping public views as do views that oppose the United States and the West.

Since the Justice and Development Party (AKP) assumed power in 2002, the Turks have not heard anything positive about the West from their leadership. In fact, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has often lambasted the West, suggesting, for instance, that "the West uses terrorism to sell Turkey weapons" or that "Turkey has borrowed only immoral stuff from the West." Anti-Americanism has become pervasive in Turkey as not just the AKP but even secular and nationalist leaders now vehemently voice such views.

The United States cannot stop entrenched anti-Americanism altogether; only the Turkish leadership can do that. Hence, the first step toward combating anti-Americanism would be zero anti-American and anti-western rhetoric from opinion makers in Turkey, government and opposition alike. By avoiding anti-American rhetoric, the Turkish leadership could demonstrate that it is ready to receive Obama's extended olive branch.

The next step is targeting existing anti-Americanism, which can be alleviated precisely because the Turks are a fence-sitting people. What the Turks hear about the United States and the West shapes their views. In battling anti-Americanism, the Turkish leadership needs to highlight for the Turks the common interests of Turkey and the US, such as a stable Iraq; shared institutions, such as NATO; and shared values, such as democracy. Ankara should also give Washington major credit for intelligence assistance to Turkey in its attempt to stop terror attacks launched by the PKK. Many Turks are not only unaware of this fact, but also think that the United States supports the PKK, as many news reports and government allegations insinuate. The situation on the PKK shows best how Turkish views of the United States can be distorted.

President Obama should not despair when faced with evidence of anti-Americanism in Turkey. This is indeed an immediate and big problem, but it can be fixed, for there is a Turkish solution to anti-Americanism in Turkey.- Published 16/4/2009 © bitterlemons-international.org

Soner Cagaptay is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the author of "Islam, Secularism and Nationalism in Modern Turkey: Who Is a Turk?"

Restoration of US-Turkey relations?
Fadi Hakura

President Barack Hussein Obama swooped into Turkey on April 6 for two days of fence-mending bilateral relations with erstwhile, if sometimes prickly, ally Turkey while disseminating a message of friendship to the wider Muslim world. Obama cut a dashing figure, mesmerizing the normally skeptical Turkish public with self-deprecating references to his inspirational life story of struggle and achievement.

This trip can be characterized as a success in terms of public diplomacy. Opinion polls indicate that Turks have a growing favorable attitude toward Obama. Turkey's media was also mostly upbeat, bringing into sharp focus the contrast between the positive vibes toward Obama and the negative perceptions of former President George W Bush. Meanwhile, President Obama heaped praise on Turkey's European perspective, democratic and secular traditions, and regional aspirations in the Middle East. He deftly maneuvered around the hot Armenian issue without conceding on his points of principle.

Obama also awed audiences beyond Turkey. After all, the visit was not just about Turkey but additionally about the Muslim world. His speech to the Turkish parliament--in which the sound bite that the US is not at "war with Islam" was interpreted as a radical break with Bush's "war on terror" rhetoric--attracted the close attention of the Arab media.

Now that the party is over, a more sober assessment of the ultimate impact of the Turkey jamboree is needed. For starters, it is fair to say that US-Turkey relations witnessed a rapid turnaround before Obama, during the tail end of previous administration, after President George W. Bush agreed to actively cooperate with the Turkish military against Kurdistan Workers' Party combatants infiltrating Turkey from northern Iraq.

But Obama's charm offensive has generated heightened expectations of a substantive shift in US foreign policy, specifically targeting the Middle East. Turkey welcomes Obama's current desire to open dialogue with Iran and Syria, as well as the ongoing plan to withdraw US combat troops from Iraq by mid-2010 and all troops by the end of 2011. But, as always, the real litmus test will be the US stance on the dispute between Israel and its neighbors, particularly the Palestinians, Syria and Lebanon. How the US handles the new government in Israel and the glaring divide between Palestinian groups will be closely watched by Turkey and the Muslim world.

Naturally, heightened expectations are not just a one-way street. Obama expects Turkey to deliver on its promises to improve ties with Armenia by re-opening the border that has been closed since 1993 and establishing diplomatic relations. Whether Turkey can re-open the border in the absence of a resolution to the Azerbaijani-Armenian dispute over the enclave of Nagorno Karabakh is open to debate. Yet, there is a serious risk of disappointment in Washington if promises fall short or flat.

Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan's increasingly abrasive style of diplomacy, displayed in full during his adamant opposition to Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen's candidacy to take the helm at NATO, could eventually irk US policymakers. Obama seems to prefer a Turkish foreign policy of the quiet and constructive type rather than one based on emotional gestures and religious undertones. So the ground exists for some disappointment here as well.

Despite the pitfalls, there is no doubt that US-Turkey relations are, at least for now, on a firmer, realistic footing. Gone are the poisonous atmospherics, in come greater mutual cooperation and respect. However, the present mood cannot be taken for granted. That the stability of instability in the Middle East and Caucasus could provoke events that scuttle relations with Turkey is possible, perhaps resulting from the Israel-Arab bifurcation, Iran's nuclear endeavors, Iraq, Afghanistan or Armenia, to name just a few examples. Public diplomacy was the easy part. Delivery is a far harder prospect.- Published 16/4/2009 © bitterlemons-international.org

Fadi Hakura is the Turkey analyst at Chatham House in London.

Aims beyond Turkey
Mustafa Kibaroglu

Why did President Barack Hussein Obama visit Turkey so soon? Considering that Turkey and the United States have a long history of strategic relations both at the bilateral level and in the context of the North Atlantic alliance, the opening question may seem redundant. However, it is not. What is unusual in Obama's state visit to Turkey is its timing.

US presidents traditionally pay their first visits to their northern neighbor Canada, and Obama did not make an exception to this rule. Then, on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Washington Treaty that established NATO, Obama stopped in Europe. In the aftermath of this important summit meeting, Obama chose Turkey for his first state visit to a foreign country.

Despite the degree of deterioration in Turkish-American relations during the better part of the two Bush administrations and the need for a quick recovery, Obama would still not have visited Turkey on day 76 of his term in the White House had there not been urgency to fulfill another important mission.

The accomplishments of US presidents in their first 100 days in office are carefully scrutinized by the world's media. Needless to say, putting in place a series of comprehensive measures to effectively deal with the economic as well as financial crisis in the United States, which has had far-reaching consequences worldwide, was assigned the highest priority by the Obama administration.

A second and equally important priority of the new administration in its first 100 days, however, was to appeal to the Islamic world with a view to repairing the severely damaged relations since 9/11. Political observers were quick to place bets on which country Obama would choose as the podium to appeal to the hearts and minds of more than a billion Muslims around the world.

Countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan were all touted in this context, while Turkey was rarely mentioned. A few on the list, such as Egypt and Indonesia, were seen as the most likely candidates for such a mission by virtue of the strategic relationship between the United States and the former, and the close personal connection of President Obama with the latter.

Turkey was not seen as a likely candidate mainly because of strong opposition from secular circles in Turkish society, including the powerful military, who are very keen on the secular character of the republican regime founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923, and not so keen on being perceived as a role-model for the Islamic world. These circles had reason to be suspicious of possible hidden intentions behind such a role for Turkey, given the fact that the United States was not successful in mitigating their fears with several reckless statements to this effect from the higher ranks of the Bush administration.

Thus Obama's address on April 6 to the Turkish Grand National Assembly was delicately balanced with respect to the role that the new US administration had in mind for Turkey. His speech incorporated carefully placed references to "Turkey's strong and secular democracy" being Ataturk's "greatest legacy", as well as statements about America's "partnership with the Muslim world" being "critical in rolling back a fringe ideology that people of all faiths reject". Obama on the one hand emphasized that "the United States [was] not at war with Islam and [would] never be," and, on the other hand, underlined the fact that he was "one of [the Americans]" who had "Muslims in their family".

In hindsight, no other country than Turkey could better suit the expectations of the Obama administration in appealing to the Islamic world. There are two reasons for this. The first is Obama's strong emphasis on the co-habitation of the virtues of secularism and democracy with the Islamic faith in the Republic of Turkey, which are clearly acknowledged and appreciated by the western world.

Second is the rising profile of Turkey in the public domain of Islamic nations across the globe, especially since the critical involvement of Turkey in efforts to stop the Israeli Gaza offensive, and also due to the growing popularity of Turkish Premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan following his strong reaction to Israeli President Shimon Peres at the Davos summit in January.

Decades-old strategic relations between the United States and Turkey aside, the early-bird visit of Obama to Turkey owes much to the secular, democratic character of Muslim Turkey and also aims at fulfilling an urgent mission, long overdue: to capture the broken hearts and the confused minds of Muslim populations around the world, including those of secular Turks.- Published 16/4/2009 © bitterlemons-international.org

Dr. Mustafa Kibaroglu teaches courses on arms control and disarmament in the Department of International Relations at Bilkent University in Ankara.



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Bitterlemons-international.org is an internet forum for an array of world perspectives on the Middle East and its specific concerns. It aspires to engender greater understanding about the Middle East region and open a new common space for world thinkers and political leaders to present their viewpoints and initiatives on the region. Editors Ghassan Khatib and Yossi Alpher can be reached at ghassan@bitterlemons-international.org and yossi@bitterlemons-international.org, respectively.

LOS ANGELES TIMES

4/16/09

Gates warns against Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear facilities

The Defense secretary tells a group of Marine students that such a strike would only delay the nuclear program while strengthening the Iranians' resolve.

Paul Richter

Reporting from Washington — Amid increasing suggestions that Israel might attack Iran's nuclear facilities, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates warned this week that such a strike would have dangerous consequences, and asserted that Tehran's acquisition of a bomb can be prevented only if "Iranians themselves decide it's too costly."

Using his strongest language on the subject to date, Gates told a group of Marine Corps students that a strike would probably delay Tehran's nuclear program from one to three years. A strike, however, would unify Iran, "cement their determination to have a nuclear program, and also build into the whole country an undying hatred of whoever hits them," he said.

Israeli officials fear that the Islamic Republic may gain the know-how to build a bomb as early as this year. Several of them have warned that Israel could strike first to eliminate what it considers an existential threat.

Iran responded this week to the Israeli declarations, asking the United Nations to intervene to stop the threats.

Mohammad Khazaee, Iran's ambassador to the United Nations, sent a letter Tuesday to the president of the U.N. Security Council denouncing "unlawful and insolent" threats of an attack. He said the threats violated international law and the U.N. Charter, and urged the organization to respond.

Israeli officials would probably seek the cooperation and approval of their American allies before carrying out any such strike, experts say.

One reason is that Israelis may want U.S. clearance to fly over Iraq, and possibly help with aircraft refueling or other aspects of the operation. In addition, a strike could set off retaliatory Iranian attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, straining relations between the two allies.

Though the Obama administration has not ruled out the use of military force, several officials have indicated strong opposition to using it. Last week, Vice President Joe Biden said Israel's new conservative prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, would be "ill advised" to launch a strike.

Shimon Peres, Israel's president, said in an interview with Israel's Kol Hai Radio on Sunday that Israel would attack if Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad didn't drop his plans for the nuclear program.

"We'll strike him," Peres said in the interview.

Netanyahu has also hinted at the possibility of an Israeli attack, describing the Iranian program as an "existential threat."

Obama administration officials are exploring whether they can convince Tehran through negotiations to give up its nuclear ambitions. Officials have said they are ready to try to intensify economic and political sanctions on Iran if diplomacy doesn't work.

Gates told students at Marine Corps University in Quantico, Va., that while President Obama "needs the full range of options," in his view "we need to look at every way we can to increase the cost of that program to them, whether it's through economic sanctions or other things."

The Defense secretary said other nations need to put more emphasis on arguments that a bomb would diminish rather than improve Iran's security, "particularly if it launches an arms race in the Middle East."

Gates' comments were delivered on Monday and first reported by the Army Times newspaper. A Defense official confirmed their accuracy.

The comments by Gates and Biden suggest that in their private conversations, U.S. officials are discouraging such a course, even though officials say they would never deny Israel's right to act in self-defense.

Hypocrisy, Favoritism and Fear-Mongering: Why the U.S. Position on Nukes is Totally Bankrupt
by Allison Kilkenny, AlterNet
http://www.alternet.org/audits/135872/hypo...tally_bankrupt/

Israel Is Bluffing: Constant War Threats Against Iran Are Empty, But Still Dangerous
by Trita Parsi, Huffington Post
Israel does not have the military capability to successfully eliminate Iran's nuclear program. But its threats are strangling diplomatic alternatives.

http://www.alternet.org/audits/136296/isra...till_dangerous/

Cash-rich China courts the Caspian

China on Thursday agreed to loan Kazakhstan US$10 billion in return for the right to take a big stake in the Central Asian country's energy sector. This follows similar initiatives with Russian energy giants and the financing of a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan via Uzbekistan to China. The global financial crisis has provided cash-rich Beijing with opportunity, and it is grasping it with gusto. - M K Bhadrakumar (Apr 17,'09)

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/KD18Ag01.html

Behind the Scenes, U.S. Tempts Iran with Global Nuclear Fuel Bank Deal
M.K. Bhadrakumar, Asia Times
ForeignPolicy: Obama plans to ease the tensions on Iran's nuclear prog
ram by offering access to a global nuclear fuel bank and Tehran has been receptive.

http://www.alternet.org/audits/136297/behi...fuel_bank_deal/

Obama's Nuclear Challenge
by Jonathan Schell
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090504/schell?rel=hp_picks

Boycott blow for UN racism forum
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8006852.stm

A major UN conference on racism looks to be in disarray as more countries confirmed they will not take part.

Australia and the Netherlands joined the US, Israel, Italy and Canada in boycotting the talks. The UK is sending a delegation, but no senior official.

The move is over concerns about anti-Israel and anti-Western bias. Iran's president, who has denied the Holocaust, is to address the meeting.

The talks are meant to review progress in fighting racism since a 2001 forum.

That conference, in Durban, ended in acrimony when Arab countries tried to define Zionism as racism.

India Wary on Obama
- Stanley Weiss, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/18/opinion/...&ref=global

Why Middle East sheikhs are running amok.
- Neil MacFarquhar, Foreign Policy
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4868

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4258

Think Again: Israel
Six decades after its founding, the Jewish state is neither as vulnerable as its supporters claim nor as callous and calculating as its critics imagine. But if it is to continue defying all expectations, Israel must first confront its own mythology.

Barack Obama: Crime Boss

by Stephen Lendman / April 18th, 2009 (8)

Since taking office, Obama, wittingly or otherwise, has headed the largest criminal enterprise in history — the mass looting of national wealth to enrich his Wall Street benefactors. He assembled a rogue economic team of Clinton/Robert Rubin retreads — to fix the current crisis they engineered.

In a March 13 article, (author and former Republican strategist) Kevin Phillips called them “recycled senior (Clinton administration) Democrats (responsible for the) tech mania, deregulation binge and (1997-2000) stock market bubble and crash. (Obama) extend(ed) the (disastrous) mismanagement and pro-Wall Street bias of the 2008 Bush regime bailout.”

He called Geithner and Bernanke “hapless,” the …
(Full article …)http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/04/barack-obama-crime-boss/

The Jerusalem Post Internet Edition

NU's Katz reminds Emanuel he's Jewish
Apr. 19, 2009
Matthew Wagner , THE JERUSALEM POST

National Union chairman Ya'acov "Ketzele" Katz sent a letter to White House chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel last week admonishing him not to forget his Jewish and Israeli origins.

Katz's missive came in response to a reported verbal exchange between Emanuel and an unidentified American Jewish leader.

Katz claims that in a private meeting with the unnamed leader, Emanuel said, "In the next four years, there will be a peace agreement with the Palestinians on the basis of two states for two peoples, and it does not matter to us who is the prime minister."

In the letter, a Hebrew version of which was provided to The Jerusalem Post by Katz's parliamentary aide, Katz wrote: "For many Israelis, this report is a cause for worry because it reveals a condescending attitude toward our prime minister and Israeli public opinion. This is an attitude that Israel does not expect from a real friend such as the US, and all the more so from an Israeli Jew who has succeeded in being appointed White House chief-of-staff."

Katz went on to compare Emanuel to the biblical Esther, who ended up at using her influence with Persian King Ahashverosh to intervene on behalf of the Jews of the Persian Empire.

"For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father's family will perish. And who knows but that you have come to royal position for such a time as this?" Katz wrote, quoting from the Book of Esther (4:14).

Katz was hinting that Emanuel should use his influence to protect Israeli interests, which, he believes, are best served by preventing the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Emanuel was born in Chicago in 1959. His father, Benjamin M. Emanuel, a Jerusalem-born pediatrician, was a member of the IZL (Irgun).

Rahm Emanuel and his brothers attended summer camp in Israel. Emanuel and his wife, Amy Rule, are members of Anshe Sholom B'nai Israel, a modern Orthodox congregation in Chicago. They have a son and two daughters; the older two attend the same Conservative day school Emanuel himself attended as a child.

During the Clinton administration he directed the details of the 1993 Rose Garden signing ceremony for the Oslo Accords, down to the choreography of the handshake between prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasser Arafat.

In November, Emanuel said US President Barack Obama did not need his influence to "orientate his policy toward Israel."

Meanwhile, the National Union said it was never officially notified by the Likud that it would not be entering the new government coalition.

"Basically, we are still waiting for a telephone call," Harel Cohen, secretary of the NU's rabbinic council, said on Sunday.

"Up until the swearing in of the new government, we were still receiving signals from the Likud that we were wanted in the coalition," Cohen said.

He also said that in principle, there was nothing in the Netanyahu government's platform that would prevent the NU from joining the coalition.

"Obviously, if the present government adopts a 'two-states for two peoples' solution, that would be problematic. But so far that has not happened."

The NU's rabbinic council, which gives final approval for all of the party's political decisions, released a letter of support for Katz.

The council, whose members include Hebron-Kiryat Arba Rabbi Dov Lior, Beit El Rabbi Zalman Melamed and Rabbi Ya'acov Yosef, son of Shas spiritual mentor Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, responded to claims that Katz had made "outrageous demands" that kept the NU out of the coalition.

Rather, according to the rabbis, it was a sudden, inexplicable change of mood in the Likud.

Emanuel Says Obama Insists On Implementing Two State Solution, No Ifs, Ands, or Buts

M.J. Rosenberg
Israel Policy Forum
April 16, 2009

Yedioth Achronoth, the largest circulation daily in Israel, reports today that President Obama intends to see the two-state solution signed, sealed and delivered during his first term.
Rahm Emanuel told an (unnamed) Jewish leader; "In the next four years there is going to be a permanent status arrangement between Israel and the Palestinians on the basis of two states for two peoples, and it doesn't matter to us at all who is prime minister."
He also said that the United States will exert pressure to see that deal is put into place. "Any treatment of the Iranian nuclear problem will be contingent upon progress in the negotiations and an Israeli withdrawal from West Bank territory," the paper reports Emanuel as saying. In other words, US sympathy for Israel's position vis a vis Iran depends on Israel's willingness to live up to its commitment to get out of the West Bank and permit the establishment of a Palestinian state there, in Gaza, and East Jerusalem.
Yedioth also reports that Obama is conveying his displeasure with the new Israeli government in several ways. "US administration officials informed Netanyahu that President Obama will not be able to meet with him in early May, while the AIPAC conference is held in Washington. The meeting between the new Israeli premier and the president of the United States is perceived in Israel as a sign that the formation process of the new government has been completed and as a salutation by Israel's close friend. Netanyahu had hoped to capitalize on the opportunity and to meet with Obama during the annual AIPAC conference, but the Americans informed the Israelis that Obama was not going to be 'in town.' That being the case, the inclination among Netanyahu's aides is to cancel his trip to attend the AIPAC conference and to try to secure a date for a meeting with Obama later in May.
"Sources in Washington also said that the Obama administration would not continue the tradition that developed during the Bush administration of hosting Israeli premiers many times during the year, sometimes with just a phone call's advance notice."
So far neither the White House or the Israeli government has commented on the report which, it should be noted, comes from Shimon Shiffer, one of Israel's most highly respected journalists.

Washington Watch

Sour Grapes Poisoning the Well
By Dr. James Zogby
Posted on Monday April 20, 2009

In the weeks leading up to the Supreme Court decision ending the 2000 election, my brother, John Zogby, polled Democrats and Republicans, asking each whether or not they would respect the outcome of the contest and view as “legitimate” the presidency of either George W. Bush or Al Gore. Two-thirds of Democrats said that, despite their misgivings about the process, they would still respect the outcome and see Bush as the “legitimate” president. Less than one-third of Republicans said that they would respect Gore as “legitimate.”

Based on this finding, John expressed concern, at the time, that should Gore be declared the winner, Republicans would mount a rather strident opposition, doing their best to obstruct his presidency.

In any case, the Supreme Court ruled in Bush’s favor and Gore, ever the statesman, conceded, urging his supporters to unify the country. And so, despite hard feelings about the way the GOP had hounded Bill Clinton, almost derailing his presidency with endless investigations and an impeachment, and the ugliness and heat of the post-election drama, Democrats accepted the Bush presidency. While not supporting his entire agenda, some Democrats even gave Bush the votes he needed to pass controversial legislation on taxes, education, prescription drug reform, and then the Patriot Act and the war on Iraq.

After ten years as the dominant force in Congress, Republicans lost control of both houses in the 2006 election. And then, in 2008, their eight-year hold on the White House came to an end. Barack Obama’s victory, unlike the contests of 2000 and 2004, was neither close nor controversial. It was decisive. Nevertheless, it appears from their behavior, Republicans simply refuse to accept the fact that they have lost the White House and Congress. Their rhetoric is harsh and unyielding. In Congress, they have largely voted as a bloc against the new President’s agenda. More troubling, still, has been the degree to which extremist “non-elected” conservative commentators on television, radio and the internet, have irresponsibly attacked President Obama, raising concerns that they may be inciting dangerous fringe elements of the far right.

All of this was in evidence during the past week, first, with the publishing of the results of a Pew poll showing a deep partisan divide in support for the President. The poll found a gap of 61 points between Republican and Democratic approval ratings of President Obama’s job performance.

And then, on April 15th – the deadline for Americans to file their tax returns – there was a day of national anti-tax demonstrations. While these anti-tax rallies were not as massive as their organizers had hoped, the vitriol of the demonstrators made clear that this was far more than a tax protest. Many of the signs and slogans used by the demonstrators personally targeted the President. Some depicted Obama as a Marxist, a Nazi, a Muslim, or a “foreigner.” Others were just simply racist.

Also last week, a Department of Homeland Security report, “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment,” came to light. One disturbing finding of the DHS assessment was that “rightwing extremists have capitalized on the election of the first African American president, and are focusing their efforts to recruit new members, mobilize existing supporters, and broaden their scope and appeal through propaganda, but they have not yet turned to attack planning.”

The claim by conservatives that they are innocent of incitement, does not hold up. Listening to the near-hysterical attacks on Obama, and the government in general, launched by the likes of radio’s Rush Limbaugh or Fox TV’s Glenn Beck, can be frightening.

And the argument that this polarization is the president’s fault, since it is he who is dividing the electorate, also has no foundation in fact. He is the president. He won the election, and is pursuing his agenda. This is what some conservatives can’t accept. And so, loosely translated, when they say Obama is a polarizing figure, what they appear to mean is “we are angry that he won, and even angrier that he’s acting like the president.”

This is the treatment that Gore would have received had he been declared the winner in 2001. It is poisoning the well of American politics, and as the DHS report warns, it may pose dangers in the future.


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McCLATCHY WASHINGTON BUREAU 4/17/09

U.S. experts: Pakistan on course to become Islamist state

Jonathan S. Landay

WASHINGTON — A growing number of U.S. intelligence, defense and diplomatic officials have concluded that there's little hope of preventing nuclear-armed Pakistan from disintegrating into fiefdoms controlled by Islamist warlords and terrorists, posing a greater threat to the U.S. than Afghanistan's terrorist haven did before 9/11.

"It's a disaster in the making on the scale of the Iranian revolution," said a U.S. intelligence official with long experience in Pakistan who requested anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly.

Pakistan's fragmentation into warlord-run fiefdoms that host al Qaida and other terrorist groups would have grave implications for the security of its nuclear arsenal; for the U.S.-led effort to pacify Afghanistan; and for the security of India, the nearby oil-rich Persian Gulf and Central Asia, the U.S. and its allies.

"Pakistan has 173 million people and 100 nuclear weapons, an army which is bigger than the American army, and the headquarters of al Qaida sitting in two-thirds of the country which the government does not control," said David Kilcullen, a retired Australian army officer, a former State Department adviser and a counterinsurgency consultant to the Obama administration.

"Pakistan isn't Afghanistan, a backward, isolated, landlocked place that outsiders get interested in about once a century," agreed the U.S. intelligence official. "It's a developed state . . . (with) a major Indian Ocean port and ties to the outside world, especially the (Persian) Gulf, that Afghanistan and the Taliban never had."

"The implications of this are disastrous for the U.S.," he added. "The supply lines (from Karachi to U.S. bases) in Kandahar and Kabul from the south and east will be cut, or at least they'll be less secure, and probably sooner rather than later, and that will jeopardize the mission in Afghanistan, especially now that it's getting bigger."

The experts McClatchy interviewed said their views aren't a worst case scenario but a realistic expectation based on the militants' gains and the failure of Pakistan's civilian and military leadership to respond.

"The place is beyond redemption," said a Pentagon adviser who asked not to be further identified so he could speak freely. "I don't see any plausible scenario under which the present government or its most likely successor will mobilize the economic, political and security resources to push back this rising tide of violence.

"I think Pakistan is moving toward a situation where the extremists control virtually all of the countryside and the government controls only the urban centers," he continued. "If you look out 10 years, I think the government will be overrun by Islamic militants."

That pessimistic view of Pakistan's future has been bolstered by Islamabad's surrender this week for the first time of areas outside the frontier tribal region to Pakistan's Taliban movement and by a growing militant infiltration of Karachi, the nation's financial center, and the industrial and political heartland province of Punjab, in part to evade U.S. drone strikes in the tribal belt.

Civilian deaths in the drone attacks, the eight-year-old U.S. intervention in Afghanistan and U.S. support for Pakistan's former military dictatorship also have sown widespread ambivalence about the threat the insurgency poses and revulsion at fighting fellow Muslims.

"The government has to ratchet up the urgency and ratchet up the commitment of resources. This is a serious moment for Pakistan," said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman, on April 14 in Islamabad. "The federal government has got to . . . define this problem as Pakistan's."

Many Pakistanis, however, dismiss such warnings as inflated. They think that the militants are open to dialogue and political accommodation to end the unrest, which many trace to the former military regime's cooperation with the U.S. after 9/11.

Ahsan Iqbal, a top aide to opposition leader and former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, said the insurgency can be quelled if the government rebuilds the judicial system, improves law enforcement, compensates guerrillas driven to fight by relatives' deaths in security force operations and implements democratic reforms.

"It will require time," Iqbal told McClatchy reporters and editors this week. "We need a very strong resolve and internal unity."

Many U.S. officials, though, regard the civilian government of Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari as unpopular, dysfunctional and mired in infighting. It's been unable to agree on an effective counterinsurgency strategy or to address the ills that are feeding the unrest. These include ethnic and sectarian hatreds, ineffective police, broken courts, widespread corruption, endemic poverty and a deepening financial crisis, they said.

Pakistan's army, meanwhile, is hobbled by a lack of direction from the country's civilian leaders, disparaged for its repeated coups and shaken by repeated defeats by the militants. It remains fixated on India to ensure high budgets and cohesion among troops of divergent ethnic and sectarian allegiances, U.S. officials and experts said.

Many officers and politicians also oppose fighting the Islamist groups that Pakistan nurtured to fight proxy wars in Afghanistan and Kashmir, and because they think the U.S. is secretly conspiring with India to destabilize their country.

Alarm rose in Washington this week after the parliament and Zardari agreed to impose Islamic law in the Swat district, where extremists have repelled several army offensives; closed girls' schools; and beheaded, hanged and lashed opponents and alleged criminals.

The government's capitulation handed the militants their first refuge outside the remote tribal area bordering Afghanistan, and less than 100 miles north of Islamabad. Taliban fighters also advanced virtually unopposed from Swat into the Buner district, 60 miles north of Islamabad.

Buner is close to a key hydroelectric dam and to the highways that link Pakistan to China, and Islamabad to Peshawar, the capital of the North West Frontier Province, much of which is already under Taliban sway.

Many U.S. officials and other experts expect the militants to continue advancing.

The Taliban "have now become a self-sustaining force," author Ahmed Rashid, an expert on the insurgency, told a conference in Washington on Wednesday. "They have an agenda for Pakistan, and that agenda is no less than to topple the government of Pakistan and 'Talibanizing' the entire country."

Iqbal, the adviser to Sharif, disagreed. While militants will overrun small pockets, most Pakistanis embrace democracy and will resist living under the Taliban's harsh interpretation of Islam, he said.

"The psychology, the temperament, the mood of the Pakistani nation does not subscribe to these extremist views," Iqbal said.

The U.S. intelligence official, however, said that Pakistan's elite, dominated since the country's independence in 1947 by politicians, bureaucrats and military officers from Punjab, have failed to recognize the seriousness of the situation.

"The Punjabi elite has already lost control of Pakistan, but neither they nor the Obama administration realize that," the official said. "Pakistan will be an Islamist state — or maybe a collection of four Islamic states, probably within a few years. There's no civilian leadership in Islamabad that can stop this, and so far, there hasn't been any that's been willing to try."

Several U.S. officials said that the Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy that President Barack Obama unveiled last month is being called into question by the accelerating rate at which the insurgency in Pakistan is expanding.

The plan hinges on the Pakistani army's willingness to put aside its obsession with Hindu-dominated India and focus on fighting the Islamist insurgency. It also presupposes, despite doubts held by some U.S. officials, that sympathetic Pakistani military and intelligence officers will sever their links with militant groups.


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Norman Birnbaum's lyrical sketch of our country's changing times appeared in the April 18 2009 edition of El País (Madrid).


Nobody Knows The Epochs I Have Seen


Norman Birnbaum

“Nobody knows the troubles I have seen” is one of those Afro-American hymns which made immortal the courage of the oppressed. Now the entire nation faces troubles the like of which most of the present generation have not seen. Indeed, much of our political argument has become historical. How shall we deal with the economic crisis, with its obvious negation of the views of the American model so triumphantly advanced so recently? What place will the US occupy in a world changing far faster than our capacity to master or even understand it? The problem of a national historical path is especially troubling, since there is no agreement on much of the past in both high and popular culture. A revival of interest in The New Deal has become a bitter debate on the relationship of market and state, and judgments on Franklin Roosevelt’s policies are almost as divided now as I recall them from the 1930s.

American majorities are prepared to accept a large role for state intervention in the economy to achieve substantial minima of equality in education, health care, old age provision and life chances generally.The Democrats face a Republican Party repeating the economic incantations it has uttered since 1920. The Republicans are equally retrograde in matters cultural, obsessively patriarchal and sexually repressive, indifferent or hostile to science, and complacent about the environment.

In foreign and military policy, American unilateralists have accused Obama of paying too much attention to the opinions and interests of other nations. . Substantial numbers of Democratic leaders share these views, which fuse national self-righteousness with over- estimation of American power: witness our unending catastrophes.

Still, the President is largely supported by the public, which viewed his trip abroad as a success and now expects decisive economic action from him. Resistance to his policies is due to the systematic manipulation of anxiety and interest by powerful and wealthy groups who have much to loose. The Democrats have had to reverse course---to become New Dealers again after (a vocal minority excepted) under Bill Clinton having become a party of the market. The era of educated and militant mass memberships in European Socialist and Social Democratic parties is over. We never quite had that and the American advocates of change are divided into single issue groups with no common project.

Something essential is missing in this familiar progressive account of the situation. Max Weber, in his furious argument with Marx, declared that interests alone do not determine ideologies: world views set the switches on the tracks of history. One source of American exceptionalism is our continuous conflict of ideas of historical time. The white South lived for one hundred years as if the Civil War had just ended. The overlapping waves of immigrant groups joined ethnocentric readings of their fates to very different experiences in the new nation. The descendants of the New England Puritans and southern planters have tired of increasingly unsuccessful efforts to maintain their proprietary claims on our society. They have become self-consciously antiquarian. The Spaniards who originally settled the southwest profit almost as little from their longevity as the Indians do from having been here first.

Meanwhile, modernists and traditionalists battle in the churches. The boundaries between religious and secular America are in constant movement. Fluctuations in the number of those terming themselves believers are less important when beliefs are so unfixed. To all of these differences, the cultural constraints of class and generation similar to those in Europe are added.

Obama is criticised for being in perpetual ideological motion, for moving from problem to problem with no larger plan. Our extremely intelligent President knows what he is doing. He considers his election due to the supersession of a politics in which shallow ideologies and rigidified interests did not reflect the new contours of national existence. He is struggling to define a new and more inclusive sense of the substance of American history. However economical he has been with references to his own mixed origins, his journey through the world and the society is as important to his sense of mission as his reliance on the technocrats who staff his government. Indeed some (Hillary Clinton possibly) are drawn again to the newer frontiers they explored when young. Along with the veterans of a routinized politics, quite a few graduates of once marginal social movements are now slowly filling the middle ranks of government.

They bring with them a conviction of historical possibility like that of the younger Obama. They do not think of it as just one idea of our history to set against the others, but as a recognition of a new epoch. Obama’s own approach relies on allusion, gesture, and symbol---as if he were consulting not electoral strategists but cultural historians. “Nobody knows the epochs I’ve seen,” however, is as good a theme for a refoundation of our history as any, and better than most.


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Uri Avnery

A Little Red Light

18/04/09

PERHAPS Avigdor Lieberman is only a passing episode in the annals of the State of Israel. Perhaps the fire he is trying to ignite will flicker briefly and go out by itself. Or perhaps the police investigations into the grave corruption affair of which he is suspected will lead to his removal from the public sphere.

But the opposite is also possible. Last week he promised his acolytes that the next elections would bring him to power.

Perhaps Lieberman will prove to be an “Israbluff”’ (a term he himself likes to use), and be revealed, behind the frightful façade, as nothing more than a run of the mill impostor.

Perhaps this Lieberman will indeed disappear, to be replaced by another, even worse Lieberman.

Either way, we should candidly confront the phenomenon he represents. If one believes that his utterances sound fascist, one has to ask oneself: is there a possibility that a fascist regime might come to power in Israel?

THE INITITIAL gut-feeling is a resounding NO. In Israel? In the Jewish State? After the Holocaust which Nazi fascism brought upon us? Can one even imagine that Israelis would become something like the Nazis?

When Yeshayahu Leibowitz coined, many years ago, the term “Judeo-Nazis”, the entire country blew up. Even many of his admirers thought that this time the turbulent professor had gone too far.

But Lieberman’s slogans do justify him in retrospect.

Some would dismiss Lieberman’s achievement in the recent elections. After all, his “Israel is Our Home” party is not the first one to appear from nowhere and win an impressive 15 seats. Exactly the same number that was won by the Dash party of General Yigael Yadin in 1977 and the Shinui party of Tommy Lapid in 2003 – and both disappeared soon after without leaving a trace.

But Lieberman’s voters are not like those of Yadin and Lapid, who were ordinary citizens fed up with some particular aspects of Israeli life. Many of his voters are immigrants from the former Soviet Union, who look upon their “Ivett”, an immigrant from the ex-Soviet land of Moldova, as a representative of their “sector”. Although many of them brought with them from their former homeland a right-wing, anti-democratic and even racist world view, they do not pose by themselves a danger to Israeli democracy.

But the additional power that turned Lieberman’s party into the third-largest faction in the new Knesset came from another sort of voter: Israeli-born youngsters, many of whom had recently taken part in the Gaza War. They voted for him because they believed that he would kick the Arab citizens out of Israel, and the Palestinians out of the entire historical country.

These are not marginal people, fanatical or underprivileged, but normal youngsters who finished high-school and served in the army, who dance in the discotheques and intend to found families. If such people are voting en masse for a declared racist with a pungent fascist odor, the phenomenon cannot be ignored.

FIFTY YEARS ago I wrote a book called ”The Swastika”, in which I described how the Nazis took over Germany. I was helped by my childhood memories. I was 9 years old when the Nazis came to power. I witnessed the agonies of German democracy and the first steps of the new regime before my parents, in their infinite wisdom, decided to escape and settle in Palestine.

I wrote the book on the eve of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, after realizing that the young generation in Israel knew a lot about the Holocaust but next to nothing about the people who brought it about. What occupied me more than anything else was the question: how could such a monstrous party succeed in coming to power democratically in one of the most civilized countries in the world?

The last chapter of my book was called “It Can Happen Here”. That was a paraphrase of the title of a book by the American writer Sinclair Lewis, “It Can’t Happen Here”, in which he described precisely how it could happen in the United States.

I argued in the book that Nazism was not a specifically German disease, that in certain circumstances any country in the world could be infected by this virus – including our own state. In order to avoid this danger, one had to understand the underlying causes for the development of the disease.

To the assertion that I am “obsessed” by this matter, that I see this danger lurking in every corner, I answer: not true. For years I have avoided dealing with this subject. But it is true that I carry in my head a little red light that comes on when I sense the danger.

This light is now blinking.

WHAT CAUSED the Nazi disease to break out in the past? Why did it break out at a certain time and not at another? Why in Germany and not in another country suffering from similar problems?

The answer is that fascism is a special phenomenon, unlike any other. It is not an “extreme Right”, an extension of “nationalist” or “conservative” attitudes. Fascism is the opposite of conservatism in many ways, even though it may appear in a conservative disguise. Also, it is not a radicalization of ordinary, normal nationalism, which exists in every nation.

Fascism is a unique phenomenon and has unique traits: the notion of being a “superior nation”, the denial of the humanity of other nations and national minorities, a cult of the leader, a cult of violence, disdain for democracy, an adoration of war, contempt for accepted morality. All these attributes together create the phenomenon, which has no agreed scientific definition.

How did this happen?

Hundreds of books have been written about it, dozens of theories have been put forward, and none of them is satisfying. In all humility I propose a theory of my own, without claiming more validity than any of the others.

According to my perception, a fascist revolution breaks out when a very special personality meets with a very special national situation.

ON THE personality of Adolf Hitler, too, innumerable books have been written. Every phase in his life has been examined under the microscope, each of his actions has been debated relentlessly. There are no secrets about Hitler, yet Hitler has remained an enigma.

One of his most obvious traits was his pathological anti-Semitism, which went far beyond any logic. It remained with him to the very last hour of his life, when he dictated his testament and committed suicide. At the most desperate moments of his war, when his soldiers at the front were crying out for reinforcements and supplies, precious trains were diverted to transport Jews to the death camps. When the Wehrmacht was suffering from a grievous lack of practically everything, Jewish workers were taken from essential factories to be sent to their death.

Many explanations for this pathological anti-Semitism have been suggested, and all of them have been debunked. Did Hitler want to take revenge on a Jew who was suspected of being his real grandfather? Did he hate the Jewish doctor who treated his beloved mother before she died? Was it a punishment for the Jewish director of the Art school who failed to recognize his genius? Did he hate the poor Jews he came across when he was homeless in Vienna? All of this has been examined and found lacking. The enigma remains.

The same is true for his other personal views and attributes. How did he attain the power to hypnotize the masses? What did he have that made so many people, from all walks of life, identify with him? Whence sprang his unbridled lust for power?

We don’t know. There is no full and satisfying explanation. We only know that from among the millions of Germans and Austrians who were living at that time, and the thousands who grew up in similar circumstances, there was (as far as we know) only one Hitler, a unique person. To borrow a term from biology: he was a one-time mutation.

But the unique Hitler would not have become a historic personality if he had not met with Germany in unique circumstances.

GERMANY AT the end of the Weimar republic has also been the subject of many books. What made the German people adopt Nazism? Historical causes, rooted in the terrible catastrophe of the Thirty-year War or even earlier events? The sense of humiliation after the defeat in World War I? The anger at the victors, who ground Germany into the dust and imposed huge indemnities? The terrible inflation of 1923, which wiped out the savings of entire classes? The Great Depression of 1929, which threw millions of decent and diligent Germans into the street?

This question, too, has found no satisfying answer. Other people have also been humiliated. Other people have lost wars. The Great Depression hit dozens of countries. In the US and the UK, too, millions were laid off. Why did fascism not seize power in those countries (except in Italy, of course)?

In my opinion, the fatal spark was ignited at a fateful moment when a people ready for fascism met the man with the attributes of a fascist leader.

What would have happened if Adolf Hitler had been killed in a road accident in the autumn of 1932? Perhaps another Nazi leader would have come to power – but the Holocaust would not have happened, and neither, probably, World War II. His likely replacements – Gregor Strasser, who was No. 2, or Hermann Goering, the flying ace with a morphine addiction – were indeed Nazis, but neither of them was a second Hitler. They lacked his demonic personality.

And what would have happened if Germany had not fallen into the depth of despair? The Western powers could have sensed the danger in time and helped in the reconstruction of the German economy and the reduction of unemployment. They could have abrogated the infamous Versailles Treaty, imposed by the victors after World War I, and allowed Germans to regain their self-respect. The German republic could have been saved, the moral leaders, of which Germany had aplenty, could have regained their leadership role.

What would have happened then? Adolf Hitler, whom the widely adored President of the Reich, a Field Marshall, had contemptuously called “the Bohemian lance-corporal”, would have remained a little demagogue on the lunatic fringe. The 20th century would have looked quite different. Tens of millions of casualties of war and six million Jews would have remained alive, without ever knowing what could have happened.

But Hitler did not die early and the German people were not saved from their fate. At the crucial moment they met, and a spark was struck, lighting the fuse that led to the historic explosion.

SUCH A fateful meeting is not, of course, limited to fascism. It has occurred in history in other circumstances and to other persons.

Winston Churchill, for example. His statues dot the British landscape, and he is considered one of the greatest British leaders of all times.

Yet until the late 1930s, Churchill was a political failure. Few admired him, and even fewer liked him. Many of his colleagues detested him with all their hearts. He was considered an egomaniac, an arrogant demagogue, an erratic drunk. But in a moment of existential danger, Britons found in him their mouthpiece and the leader who took their destiny in his hands. It seemed as if during all the first 65 years of his life, Churchill had been preparing for this one moment, and as if Britain had been waiting for precisely this one man.

Would history have looked different if Churchill had died the previous year of coronary thrombosis, lung cancer or cirrhosis of the liver, and Neville Chamberlain had remained in power? We now know that he and his colleagues, including the influential foreign minister, Lord Halifax, seriously considered accepting Hitler’s 1940 peace offer, based on the partition of the world between the German and the British empires.

Or Lenin. If the imperial German general staff had not provided the famous sealed train to take him from Zurich to Sweden, from where he proceeded St. Petersburg, would the Bolshevik revolution, which changed the face of the 20th century, have taken place at all? True, Trotsky was in town before him, and so was Stalin. But neither of the two was a Lenin, and without Lenin it would quite possibly not have happened, and certainly not the way it did.

Perhaps one could add to this list Barack Obama. A very special person, of unique origin and character, who had a fateful meeting with the American people at an important moment of their destiny, when they were suffering from two crises at once – the economic and the political one – which cast their shadow on the entire world.

BACK TO US. Is the State of Israel approaching an existential crisis – moral, political, economic – that could leave it an endangered nation? Can Lieberman, or someone who could take his place, turn out to be a demonic personality like Hitler, or at least Mussolini?

In our present situation there are some dangerous indications. The last war showed a further decline in our moral standards. The hatred towards Israel’s Arab minority is on the rise, and so is the hatred towards the occupied Palestinian people who are suffering a slow strangulation. In some circles, the cult of brute force is gaining strength. The democratic regime is in a never-ending crisis. The economic situation may descend into chaos, so that the masses will long for a “strongman”. And the belief that we are a “chosen people” is already deeply rooted.

These indications may not necessarily lead to disaster. Absolutely not. History is full of nations in crisis that recovered and returned to normalcy. Besides the real Hitler, who rose to historic heights, there were probably hundreds of other Hitlers, no less crazy and no less talented, who ended their life as bank tellers or frustrated writers, because they did not meet a historic opportunity.

I have a strong faith in the resilience of Israeli society and Israeli democracy. I believe that we have hidden strengths that will come to the fore in an hour of need.

Nothing “must” happen. But anything “can” happen. And the little red light won’t stop blinking.

The Quiet Coup

The Way Out

Looking just at the financial crisis (and leaving aside some problems of the larger economy), we face at least two major, interrelated problems. The first is a desperately ill banking sector that threatens to choke off any incipient recovery that the fiscal stimulus might generate. The second is a political balance of power that gives the financial sector a veto over public policy, even as that sector loses popular support.

Go to link for the rest of the article: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200905/imf-advice/4

Simon Johnson, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, was the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund during 2007 and 2008. He blogs about the financial crisis at baselinescenario.com, along with James Kwak, who also contributed to this essay.

Strong stuff from Bill Pfaff.

American Fascism

William Pfaff



Paris, April 21, 2009 – In 1935, Sinclair Lewis, author of “Babbit” and the first American writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize, published a novel entitled “It Can’t Happen Here.”

It was written to influence the 1936 presidential election. The enormously popular ex-governor of Louisiana, Senator Huey Long, “the Kingfish,” who campaigned to “Share the Wealth” with the people, was widely thought a threat to the reelection to a second term of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The Lewis novel foresaw someone like Huey Long winning the presidency and installing an American counterpart to the fascist dictatorships already in power in Italy and Germany. Lewis was much influenced by his second wife, Dorothy Thompson, who was one of the most important syndicated political columnists of the 1930s, greatly concerned about the possibility of populist dictatorship crossing the Atlantic.

Long was not a fascist, although he could have become a dictator. His support was from the poor. Rightist and white-supremicist forces actually formed an armed militia to oppose him, but he was killed by an assassin, presumably with a family grievance against him, in 1935.

The man who actually opposed Roosevelt in 1936 was the Republican Alf Landon of Kansas, a moderate politician, who was defeated by Roosevelt in the greatest presidential landslide in American history. F.D.R. in 1936 carried all but eight electoral votes. Sinclair Lewis’s fears had been misplaced; “it” didn’t happen here.

In 2004, Philip Roth wrote another novel, this one about the supposed arrival of an anti-semitic and fascist president in the United States. This would have been in 1940, in the supposed person of the aviator, American anti-war nationalist and isolationist, Charles A. Lindbergh. Roosevelt’s actual opponent in 1940 was the businessman Wendell Wilkie, whom he comfortably defeated with 54.7% of the popular vote.

Lindbergh never retracted his opposition to U.S. entry into the European war, and following Pearl Harbor Roosevelt refused ex-Colonel Lindbergh’s effort to rejoin the military. Lindbergh therefore found experimental and consultant work in the aviation industry, helped develop the Vought Corsair, the only American fighter in the Pacific war superior to the Japanese Zero, and despite remaining a civilian, flew 36 combat missions in the Pacific. Once again, “It” had not happened in the United States.

When “It” did happen was in 2001-2008, in the Bush administration.

There was a takeover of the government by a self-willed executive power, unprecedented in American history. The president and vice president acted on a novel and legally unsupported claim to unlimited “wartime” presidential and executive-branch power. The justification was an illegal, undeclared war.

International law and American treaty obligations were defied, as were established American law on the conduct of war and the treatment of prisoners, constitutional protections, and the surveillance of citizens.
All of this occurred without meeting serious, or at least successful, Congressional or judicial challenge, with little or no objection from the national press, and all but unanimous support from the national audiovisual media. One needn’t go through all that again.

There were unsuccessful efforts by individuals inside and outside the government to overturn this state of affairs, but in two congressional elections, and in the presidential election of 2004, the electorate endorsed all that had been done. “It,” which Sinclair Lewis and Philip Roth had both warned against, proved in fact to be very popular. At least this was so until 2008, when the practical and political consequences of this abandonment of law and history finally alienated the electorate.

That is all familiar. What concerns me in this article is something else. It is the fact that the mass of agents and officials of the government, and the vast majority of the population, passively accepted what was done, and even today disputes whether anyone should be held accountable.

President Obama’s unwillingness to see his first term dominated by the crimes of the Bush administration is comprehensible.

Yet there is a limit. The latest case of the human moral vacuum created and encouraged during the Bush years is so outrageous, perverse, sadistic and nihilistic that it demands attention, for all that it tells us about the rest that has happened. I speak of the ordered, authorized, and conscientiously supervised water-boarding of two prisoners 266 times.

The men who authorized, ordered, and performed such acts should be hanged. It is as simple as that.

It then would be possible to face the future with a response to Can It Happen Here.

© Copyright 2009 by Tribune Media Services International. All Rights Reserved.



http://www.williampfaff.com/article.php?storyid=393

Torture, War and the Imperial Project
The Fatal Thread

By CHRIS FLOYD

With the release of the U.S. Senate's report on the Bush Administration torture program, it is now incontrovertibly clear – and officially established by the highest, most respectable Establishment institutions – that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and a host of other top officials deliberately, willingly, and with malice aforethought, established a system of interrogation using brutal techniques that they knew were against the law. Hence the need for the torture memos that attempted to give retroactive legal cover for atrocities that were already taking place at the orders of the White House and the Pentagon. They were also told repeatedly that these tortures were ineffective at producing useful intelligence.

What's more, it is now undeniable that they began this program long before they had captured even one "high-profile al Qaeda detainee," and that they were using these heinous techniques not in a desperate bid to save the nation from further attacks – which has long been their preening, self-serving claim – but instead to produce spurious data about the non-existent link between Iraq and al Qaeda. In other words, George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld ordered their minions to beat and torment captives in order to get them to say something a – anything – that could then be used to "justify" a war of aggression that these grand statesmen had been planning long before the September 11 attacks.

You cannot disentangle the torture program from the war of aggression in Iraq – nor from the illegal wiretapping program, the corrupt war profiteering, and all the other degradations of liberty and law that have been so accelerated in the past eight years. They are all of a piece, part and parcel of a plan to expand and entrench America's "unipolar domination" of world affairs with a thoroughly militarized state led by an unaccountable, authoritarian "Unitary Executive."

This is one reason why Barack Obama is so obviously reluctant to tug on the torture thread too hard. If you tear it out, with full-scale prosecutions and top officials locked up behind bars, the whole rotten skein would fall apart. Once you start genuinely subjecting government officials – including security apparatchiks and military brass – to the full extent of the law, there would be no end to the unraveling: senators, contractors, representatives, bureaucrats, generals, lobbyists, judges, corporate chiefs – the whole edifice of Establishment power would be shaken to the core as its leading lights went down, one after the other.

Thus the mere act of applying the ordinary, bourgeois laws of the land as they stand right now would constitute a world-shaking revolution, an overthrow of the existing order every bit as radical as any ideologue's dream of mass uprising. It would be, in effect, a re-founding of the Republic – and the end of the empire, which cannot survive without continual war, lawless rule and endless corruption.

And that's why we will not see Barack Obama follow such a course. He might, in the end, have to pull much harder on the torture thread than he wants to; as we noted yesterday, a few upper-level middlemen might have to be offered up as scapegoats to quell the PR tempest. But he has already demonstrated, over and over, that he has no intention or desire to unravel the skein of imperial power. Indeed, he is trying to strengthen that skein and bind it more tightly, as we have seen in his various court cases seeking to uphold or even expand authoritarian powers claimed by Bush, in his escalation of the Afghan war, in his continual expansion of attacks in Pakistan, in his servile coddling and protection of the CIA, and in his celebration of the "success" and "extraordinary achievement" of the war crime in Iraq.

Ironically, the torture issue that he is so desperately trying to shake off his hands is in fact the one opportunity for the historical greatness that Obama – and his ardent fans – obviously yearn for. It holds forth the best chance – the last chance? – for dismantling the imperial machine of brutality and corruption, and starting anew. But he would not be where he is today if he were the kind of man to see – and seize – such an opportunity.

He will let it go – and all hope for change, for renewal, for a re-founded Republic, will go with it.

Chris Floyd is an American writer and a frequent contributor to CounterPunch. His blog, Empire Burlesque, can be found at www.chris-floyd.com
http://www.counterpunch.org/floyd04222009.html

Ray McGovern
Obama Plays Hamlet on Torture

We Are Still A Long Way Away From The Bottom - Nouriel Roubini, Forbes

http://www.forbes.com/2009/04/22/depressio...el-roubini.html

The global economy is in the middle of a synchronized contraction that will push global growth into negative territory in 2009 for the first time in decades. This will be the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and the worst global economic downturn in decades. Global trade volumes face their sharpest contractions of the postwar era--trade is expected to contract 12% in 2009 due to the severe and prolonged slump in global demand, excess capacity across supply chains and the continued crunch in trade finance.

Gulf Research Center Analysis


Iran’s 2003 Memo: A Starting Point for Negotiations?

23 April, 2009

Nicole Stracke
Researcher
Security and Terrorism Department

"Iran is like a train without brakes and without reverse gear." This is what the Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stated this week highlighting Iran’s determination to go ahead with the state's plans without considering the costs. In a previous speech on Army Day, the Iranian leader had declared that Iran is “one of the strongest” nations in the region and a “great part of the world.”

Such statements from the Iranian leadership are not promising considering the expected negotiations on the Iranian nuclear program with the US. It is statements like these that make it so difficult for a country to deal with Iran and accept it as a trustworthy, reliable partner in negotiations.

Behind the typical emotional statements lies well-calculated national interest, as the leadership may be seeking to whip up internal public support or gain greater leverage before sitting down at the negotiation table. Many observers do argue that, apart from the emotional slogans, Iranian policy can be rational when the country’s leadership understands the rules of the game. This was evident in 2003 when, just after the successful US invasion of Iraq and the removal of the Ba'ath regime, the Iranian leadership, fearing possible American action to undermine the regime in Tehran, decided to approach the US with a comprehensive offer to settle their differences.

The offer included a proposal to deal with all outstanding key issues which undermine relations between the two states. Among other things, Iran showed its readiness to ensure transparency in its nuclear program, support the disarmament of Hizbollah, and accept the two-state solution in the Arab-Israeli conflict, effectively recognizing the existence of Israel. In return, Iran expected the US to recognize its legitimate security interests in the region, lift the unilateral US sanctions –among them the ILSA Sanctions Act of 1996 – ensure guaranteed access to civilian nuclear technology, and withdraw the classification of Iran as a member of "the axis of evil."

It is not likely that in 2009 the Iranian offer, which was made six years ago, will be still on the table. The regional and international situation has changed fundamentally in favor of Iran. Over the past six years, the strategic environment has altered. The US has lost influence, power and credibility. Militarily, the US has failed to secure a real victory either in Iraq or in Afghanistan. Politically, the US has lost its credibility as a major power, and confidence and trust in the US has diminished among regional allies. Today, they anxiously watch the moves of the new American President Barack Obama, and wait, with deep concern, to see his actions in follow up to his promises.


At the same time, Iran has enhanced its strategic position and power. During the past six years, Iran has emerged as a key player in major issues and conflicts directly affecting US strategic interest. It has also emerged as a major player in Iraqi affairs having direct links to political and religious groups, and armed militias, which has placed Tehran in a unique position to influence future developments in Iraq. Iran has also emerged as a key player in Afghanistan. In other parts of the region, Iranian influence over the major non-state actors like Hizbollah and Hamas has increased. In short, Iran has secured an important position in all areas related to US security interests. Its help has become indispensable to the US.


Iranian strength derives and benefits from US weakness. The balance of power has changed in favor of Iran in every aspect and major developments have made the Iranian memorandum of 2003 outdated. From the Iranian standpoint, this memorandum can no longer serve as a starting point for negotiations. On the other hand, the ceiling for future Iranian demands for settlement could be much higher than before, corresponding with the new status of Iran. What will be offered to Mr. Obama in 2009 is going to be different from what was offered to Mr. Bush in 2003.

Yet, the 2003 memorandum is important as it is shows the issues that Iran considers negotiable and those which it does not. It demonstrates Iran’s rational decision-making that is based on the state's national interests rather than on principles. The memorandum underlined that Iranian policies are negotiable on a tactical level, given the right incentives. Iran might be persuaded to halt the support for Hizbollah or accept the Arab Peace Plan and the two-state solution if, in return, it is recognized as a "regional power,” allowed to go on with its nuclear program and have friendly relations with the US. Surely, Iran will avoid giving any substantial concessions on strategic issues or anything that would undermine its position as a regional power. This includes the development of the nuclear program which is an essential part of Iranian regional ambition. In fact, the stronger geopolitical position of Iran in 2009 will make it difficult, if not impossible, for the US to persuade Tehran to give up the nuclear program.

US hands are tied. In fact, the US may have to consider the possibility that Iran might be willing to negotiate most outstanding issues between the two states except one: the nuclear program. It may have to risk starting negotiations with Iran on some of the issues before, or even without, getting any meaningful concession on the nuclear program. Eventually, Mr. Obama will be forced to consider his priorities and options. Would the US settle for a bargain with Iran whereby Tehran would recognize Israel, stop its support to militant groups such Hizbollah, offer help in Iraq and Afghanistan, but keep its nuclear program? Or would Mr. Obama still keep military action against Iran as a serious option on the table? This will be a difficult decision to make for the new US administration. For some of the hardliners in Iran, however, it will not matter; abandoning nuclear enrichment is not an option. They believe that losing the nuclear program through an Israeli or US military strike would be less painful than losing it through political or economic pressure from the US, EU, or the UN.

Published on Thursday, April 23, 2009 by The Independent/UK
Walking Out on Ahmadinejad was Just Plain Childish
What are we trying to say? That any mention of Israel is now barred?

by Adrian Hamilton

Isn't it time western diplomats just grew up and stopped these infantile games over President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? All that this play-acting over boycotting of conferences because of his presence and walking out because of his words achieves is to flatter his ego, boost his poll ratings at home and play into the hands of an Israel that is desperate to prove Iran the gravest threat to its existence.

True, Iran's President is not the world's most endearing character. Some of the things he says are certainly contentious. But he is far from the most offensive leader on the block at the moment. With Silvio Berlusconi sounding off about women and sex, and Nicolas Sarkozy sounding off about everything from the quality of his fellow leaders to the unsuitability of Muslims to join the civilised nations, and a Polish president, Lech Kaczynski, giving his views on gays, Europe could claim its fair share of premiers who should not be allowed out in public.

Read Ahmadinejad's address at the UN conference on racism in Geneva this week and there is little to surprise and a certain amount to be agreed with. His accusations against the imperial powers for what they did with colonial rule and the business of slavery is pretty much part of the school curriculum now. His anger at the way the economic crisis originated in the West but has hit worst the innocent of the developing world would find a ready echo (and did) among most of the delegates.

It was not for this, however, that the countries of Europe and North America gathered up their skirts and walked out of Ahmadinejad's peroration. The UK's ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Peter Gooderham, rather gave the game away when he said afterwards: "As soon as President Ahmadinejad started talking about Israel, that was the cue for us to walk out. We agreed in advance that if there was any such rhetoric there would be no tolerance for it." The Iranian leader, he went on to say, was guilty of anti-Semitisim.

Just how you can accuse a man of anti-Semitisim when you haven't stayed to hear him talk is one of those questions which the Foreign Office no doubt trains its diplomats to explain. But what basically was our representative trying to say here? That any mention of the word Israel is barred from international discussions? That the mere mention of it is enough to have the Western governments combine to still it? In fact, Ahmadinejad's speech was not anti-Semitic, not in the strict sense of the word. Nowhere in his speech did he mention his oft-quoted suggestion that Israel be expunged from the map of the world. At no point did he mention the word "Jews", only "Zionists", and then specifically in an Israeli context. Nor did he repeat his infamous Holocaust denials, although he did reportedly refer to it slightingly as "ambiguous" in its evidence.

Instead, he launched the time-honoured Middle Eastern accusation that Israel was an alien country imposed on the local population by the West, out of its own guilt for the genocide; that it was supported by a Zionist take-over of Western politics and that it pursued racist policies towards the Palestinians. Now you may find these calls offensive or far-fetched (if there is a Zionist world conspiracy, it is making a singularly bad job of it) but it is pretty much the standard view in the Muslim world. Western support of Israel is seen as a conspiracy, and it is not just prejudice. There are now books by Western academics arguing that the pro-Israeli lobby wields an influence in the US out of all proportion to its numbers. If the Western walkout in Geneva did nothing else, it rather proved the point.

Nor is it far-fetched to charge Israel with being a racist state. As the only country in the world that defines itself and its immigrants on racial grounds, it could be regarded as fair comment. And if you doubt that this founding principle leads Israel into racist attitudes to non-Israelis, then you only have to read the comments of its new Foreign Secretary, Avigdor Lieberman, to disabuse you.

Of course, Ahamadinejad was playing to his home audience. He is a politician facing re-election at a time when his domestic economic record makes him vulnerable. Most of the educated class are fed up with his cavorting on the world stage while his country goes from wrack to ruin. And, of course, international conferences of this sort, intended to spread sweetness and light, are not the most appropriate forums for such tirades.

But on these issues he does speak for the majority not just in Iran but in the region. Deny that view a hearing and you will only increase the resentment and the sense of a Western world set up against them. Which is precisely what our oh-so-sanctimonious representatives achieved this week.
© 2009 The Independent
a.hamilton@independent.co.uk [1]

How Bush's Torture Helped al-Qaeda
Though George W. Bush's defenders say his torture policies worked, al-Qaeda captives told fake stories about Iraq and bought time for al-Qaeda to regroup in nuclear-armed Pakistan, reports Robert Parry. April 23, 2009

Captured al-Qaeda operatives, facing the threat or reality of torture, appear to have fed the Bush administration's obsession about Iraq, buying Osama bin Laden and other terrorist leaders time to rebuild their organization inside nuclear-armed Pakistan

Even now, as al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies expand their power ever closer to Pakistan's capital of Islamabad, ex-Bush administration officials continue to insist they protected U.S. security by repeatedly waterboarding the likes of 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and terrifying others, such as Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, with "extraordinary renditions" to foreign countries known to torture.


However, the emerging evidence, including recently released Justice Department memos, suggests that the "high-value detainees" may have helped divert U.S. focus away from their al-Qaeda colleagues by providing tantalizing misinformation about Saddam Hussein's Iraq and dropping tidbits about Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who operated inside Iraq.

The May 30, 2005, memo by Steven Bradbury, then acting head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, also appears to have exaggerated the value of intelligence extracted from detainee Abu Zubaydah through harsh interrogations – references that Bush administration defenders have cited as justification for abusive tactics, including the near-drowning of waterboarding.

The May 30 memo states: "Interrogations of Zubaydah – again, once enhanced techniques were employed – furnished detailed information regarding al Qaeda's 'organizational structure, key operatives, and modus operandi' and identified KSM [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] as the mastermind of the September 11 attacks. …

"You [CIA officials] have informed us that Zubaydah also 'provided significant information on two operatives, [including] Jose Padilla [,] who planned to build and detonate a 'dirty bomb' in Washington DC area."

However, that last claim conflicts with known evidence about Zubaydah's interrogations and with the time elements of Padilla's arrest. Zubaydah was captured on March 28, 2002, after a gunfight that left him wounded. Padilla, an American citizen who converted to Islam, was arrested on May 8, 2002.

Yet, Bush administration lawyers did not give clearance for the "enhanced interrogation techniques" until late July, verbally, and on Aug. 1, 2002, in writing.

In addition, Zubaydah's information about Padilla and KSM was provided to FBI interrogators who had employed rapport-building techniques with Zubaydah, not the harsh tactics that CIA interrogators insisted upon later, according to published accounts.

For rest of the article go to:
http://www.consortiumnews.com/Print/2009/042209.html

Bush Team Ignored Waterboard Cases

By Jason Leopold
April 23, 2009

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/042309b.html

What They Craved
Torture Used to Try to Link Saddam with 9/11

By MARJORIE COHN
When I testified last year before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties about Bush interrogation policies, Congressman Trent Franks (R-Ariz) stated that former CIA Director Michael Hayden had confirmed that the Bush administration only waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zabaydah, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashirit for one minute each. I told Franks that I didn’t believe that. Sure enough, one of the newly released torture memos reveals that Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times and Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times. One of Stephen Bradbury’s 2005 memos asserted that “enhanced techniques” on Zubaydah yielded the identification of Mohammed and an alleged radioactive bomb plot by Jose Padilla. But FBI supervisory special agent Ali Soufan, who interrogated Zubaydah from March to June 2002, wrote in the New York Times that Zubaydah produced that information under traditional interrogation methods, before the harsh techniques were ever used.

Why, then, the relentless waterboarding of these two men? It turns out that high Bush officials put heavy pressure on Pentagon interrogators to get Mohammed and Zubaydah to reveal a link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 hijackers, in order to justify Bush’s illegal and unnecessary invasion of Iraq in 2003. That link was never established.

President Obama released the four memos in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the ACLU. They describe unimaginably brutal techniques and provide “legal” justification for clearly illegal acts of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. In the face of monumental pressure from the CIA to keep them secret, Obama demonstrated great courage in deciding to make the grotesque memos public. At the same time, however, in an attempt to pacify the intelligence establishment, Obama said, “it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution.”

In startlingly clinical and dispassionate terms, the authors of the newly-released torture memos describe and then rationalize why the devastating techniques the CIA sought to employ on human beings do not violate the Torture Statute (18 U.S.C. sec. 2340).

The memos justify 10 techniques, including banging heads into walls 30 times in a row, prolonged nudity, repeated slapping, dietary manipulation, and dousing with cold water as low as 41 degrees. They allow shackling in a standing position for 180 hours, sleep deprivation for 11 days, confinement of people in small dark boxes with insects for hours, and waterboarding to create the perception they are drowning. Moreover, the memos permit many of these techniques to be used in combination for a 30-day period. They find that none of these techniques constitute torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

Waterboarding, admittedly the most serious of the methods, is designed, according to Jay Bybee, to induce the perception of “suffocation and incipient panic, i.e. the perception of drowning.” But although Bybee finds that “the use of the waterboard constitutes a threat of imminent death,” he accepts the CIA’s claim that it does “not anticipate that any prolonged mental harm would result from the use of the waterboard.” One of Bradbury’s memos requires that a physician be on duty during waterboarding to perform a tracheotomy in case the victim doesn’t recover after being returned to an upright position.

As psychologist Jeffrey Kaye points out, the CIA and the Justice Department “ignored a wealth of other published information” that indicates dissociative symptoms, changes greater than those in patients undergoing heart surgery, and drops in testosterone to castration levels after acute stress associated with techniques that the memos sanction.

The Torture Statute punishes conduct, or conspiracy to engage in conduct, specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering. “Severe mental pain or suffering” means the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from either the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering, or from the threat of imminent death.

Bybee asserts that “if a defendant acts with the good faith belief that his actions will not cause such suffering, he has not acted with specific intent.” He makes the novel claim that the presence of personnel with medical training who can stop the interrogation if medically necessary “indicates that it is not your intent to cause severe physical pain.”

Now a federal judge with lifetime appointment, Bybee concludes that waterboarding does not constitute torture under the Torture Statute. However, he writes, “we cannot predict with confidence whether a court would agree with this conclusion.”

Bybee’s memo explains why the 10 techniques could be used on Abu Zubaydah, who was considered to be a top Al Qaeda operative. “Zubaydah does not have any pre-existing mental conditions or problems that would make him likely to suffer prolonged mental harm from [the CIA’s] proposed interrogation methods,” the CIA told Bybee. But Zubaydah was a low-ranking Al Qaeda operative, according to leading FBI counter-terrorism expert Dan Coleman, who advised a top FBI official, “This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality.” This was reported by Ron Suskind in his book, The One Percent Doctrine.

The CIA’s request to confine Zubaydah in a cramped box with an insect was granted by Bybee, who told the CIA it could place a harmless insect in the box and tell Zubaydah that it will sting him but it won’t kill him. Even though the CIA knew that Zubaydah had an irrational fear of insects, Bybee found there would be no threat of severe physical pain or suffering if it followed this procedure.

Obama’s intent to immunize those who violated our laws banning torture and cruel treatment violates the President’s constitutional duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

U.S. law prohibits torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, and requires that those who subject people to such treatment be prosecuted. The Convention against Torture compels us to refer all torture cases for prosecution or extradite the suspect to a country that will undertake a criminal investigation.

Obama has made a political calculation to seek amnesty for the CIA torturers. However, good faith reliance on superior orders was rejected as a defense at Nuremberg and in Lt. Calley’s Vietnam-era trial for the My Lai Massacre. The Torture Convention provides unequivocally, “An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification for torture.”

There is evidence that the CIA was using the illegal techniques as early as April 2002, three to four months before the August memo was written. That would eliminate “good faith” reliance on Justice Department advice as a “defense” to prosecution.

The Senate IntelligenceCommittee revealed that Condoleezza Rice approved waterboarding in July 17, 2002 “subject to a determination of legality by the OLC.” She got it two weeks later from Bybee and John Yoo. Rice, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales and George Tenet reassured the CIA in spring 2003 that the abusive methods were legal.

Obama told AP’s Jennifer Loven in the Oval Office: “With respect to those who formulated those legal decisions, I would say that is going to be more of a decision for the Attorney General within the parameters of various laws, and I don't want to prejudge that.” If Holder continues to carry out Obama’s political agenda by resisting investigations and prosecution, Congress can, and should, authorize the appointment of a special independent prosecutor to do what the law requires.

The President must fulfill his constitutional duty to ensure that the laws are faithfully executed. Obama said that “nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.” He is wrong. There is more to gain from upholding the rule of law. It will make future leaders think twice before they authorize the cruel, illegal treatment of other human beings.

Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and president of the National Lawyers Guild and author of Cowboy Republic. and co-author of the new book, Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent. Her articles are archived at www.marjoriecohn.com.

http://www.counterpunch.org/cohn04242009.html

The Central Asian Water Crisis
The "Upstream" against the "DownStream" Countries
- by Aleksandr Shustov - 2009-04-23

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13322

The Destabilization of Pakistan: Finding Clarity in the Baluchistan Conundrum- by Talha Mujaddidi - 2009-04-24

Horrors! A Handshake! – Editorial, New York Times:

Mr. Obama got elected on a pledge to do things differently. At last week’s hemispheric summit, years of antagonism gave way to eagerness for new relations with Washington. Mr. Obama undercut Mr. Chávez’s bluster with that handshake and his promise of a “new beginning” with Cuba.

Whether it is an unexpected food crisis or a devastating hurricane, the world’s weakest states are the most exposed when crisis strikes. In the fourth annual Failed States Index, FOREIGN POLICY and The Fund for Peace rank the countries where state collapse may be just one disaster away.




When troops opened fire in the streets of Mogadishu in early May, it was a tragically familiar scene in war-torn Somalia. Except on this day, soldiers weren’t fighting Islamist militias or warlords. They were combating a mob of tens of thousands rioting over soaring food prices.

On top of the country’s already colossal challenges, a food crisis seems an especially cruel turn for a place like Somalia. But it is a test that dozens of weak states are being forced to confront this year, with escalating prices threatening to undo years of poverty-alleviation and development efforts. The unrest in Mogadishu echoes food riots that have erupted on nearly every continent in the past year. Tens of thousands of Mexicans protested when the price of corn flour jumped 400 percent in early 2007. Thousands of Russian pensioners took to the streets in November to call for a return to price controls on milk and bread. In Egypt, the army was ordered to bake more loaves at military-run bakeries after riots broke out across the country. Kabul, Port-au-Prince, and Jakarta experienced angry protests over spikes in the price of staples.

But if few foretold the hunger and hardship that have followed the uptick in prices, the events of 2007 revealed that unexpected shocks can play a decisive role in the stability of an increasing number of vulnerable states. Primary among last year’s shocks was the implosion of the U.S. subprime market, which burst housing bubbles worldwide, slowed trade, and sent currencies into tailspins. A contested election in Kenya in December swiftly shredded any semblance of ethnic peace in a country that many had considered an African success story. And though Benazir Bhutto feared her own assassination upon returning to Pakistan, her murder reverberated in a country already contending with the challenges of ambitious mullahs, suicide bombers, and an all-powerful military.

These shocks are the sparks of state failure, events that further corrode the integrity of weak states and push those on the edge closer to combustion. As the food crisis has shown, these political and economic setbacks are not unique to the world’s most vulnerable countries. But weak states are weak precisely because they lack the resiliency to cope with unwelcome—and unpleasant—surprises. When a global economic downturn pinches the main export base, an election goes awry, or a natural disaster wipes out villages, the cracks of vulnerability open wider.

Because it is crucial to closely monitor weak states—their progress, their deterioration, and their ability to withstand challenges—the Fund for Peace, an independent research organization, and FOREIGN POLICY present the fourth annual Failed States Index. Using 12 social, economic, political, and military indicators, we ranked 177 states in order of their vulnerability to violent internal conflict and societal deterioration. To do so, we examined more than 30,000 publicly available sources, collected from May to December 2007, to form the basis of the index’s scores. The 60 most vulnerable states are listed in the rankings, and the full results are available at ForeignPolicy.com and fundforpeace.org.

Go to link for rest of the article: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4350


Copyright 2008, The Fund for Peace and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. All rights reserved. FOREIGN POLICY is a registered trademark owned by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

from the April 23, 2009 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0423/p06s13-wome.html
New bombings in Iraq steal thunder from top insurgent's arrest
<h2 class="sub">Al Qaeda in Iraq appears to be exploiting instability in Iraq's government</h2> By Tom A. Peter | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor Amman, Jordan In what Iraqi authorities say could be the biggest blow to Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) since its former leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed in a 2006, a military spokesman announced Thursday that Iraqi security forces had arrested the group's current leader, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi. [Editor's note: The original version did not specify the nationality of the security forces.]

The news was a morale boost in Iraq, which has seen increased violence in recent weeks, including two bombings Thursday that killed dozens.

US military officials, however, said that they did not have information from the field to confirm the capture of the self-proclaimed "emir of the Islamic State of Iraq."

But even if Mr. Baghdadi was captured, Iraq's recent uptick in violence is not likely to abate soon, experts say. The government remains divided and the country's sectarian fault lines are easily exploitable.

"Far from becoming a functioning democracy, far becoming a stable state, far from winning the war in Iraq, Iraq remains a highly precarious state," says Fawaz Gerges, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, N.Y. "The central political conflict has not been resolved ... [and] as long as Iraq remains sectarian-based you're going to have instability and violence."

On Thursday, two separate bomb blasts left at least 60 people dead and more than 110 injured in Baghdad and Muqdadiya, north of the capital city. The attacks resembled past incidents linked to AQI, but it remains unclear who was responsible for them. Earlier this month, AQI launched a coordinated strike detonating seven car bombs in Baghdad that killed at least 37 people.

US officials have emphasized that, despite the renewed violence, US and Iraqi forces are making progress in the fight against remaining insurgent and terrorist elements. On President Obama's recent visit to Iraq, Gen. Raymond Odierno, the top military commander in Iraq, assured him that violence was at 2003 levels, before the insurgency began.

"These attacks [on Thursday] are an attempt to incite violence, but the Iraqi people have shown that they are rejecting this bankrupt philosophy," writes Lt. John Brimley, a spokesman for the Multi-National Force – Iraq, in an e-mail to The Christian Science Monitor.

AQI tries to undermine Awakening

The US had made significant inroads against AQI by building and funding a Sunni paramilitary group known as the Sons of Iraq (also referred to as the Awakening). But members of the group – which at one point included more than 100,000 members – have become disgruntled in recent months over the arrests of key leaders and a delay in payment from the Shiite-led Iraqi government, which has been in charge of their activities since late last year.

"If you continue arresting, harassing, and shunning Awakening types – many of whom were originally derived from the insurgency – you're really playing with fire," says Wayne White, an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington and the former deputy director of the State Department's office of Near East intelligence.

Earlier this week, a senior AQI leader called on Awakening members to return to the terrorist organization. Other reports indicate that, amid growing neglect from the Iraqi government, AQI is having increasing success unravelling the community-policing organization.

Additionally, in the face of increased pressure from both the Awakening members and American and Iraqi forces, AQI, which originally behaved more like a militia than a terrorist group, had to go deep underground. It adopted more of a cellular operating structure that has allowed it to continue operations even if top leaders are killed or captured.

"It is a multisegmented hydra that can survive this kind of thing," Mr. White says. "It can survive being beheaded more."

US again caught between Sunni and Shiite

The Maliki government and Iraqi security forces remain predominantly Shiite organizations, providing fertile recruiting ground for AQI, which has played on sectarian tensions to recruit Sunnis.

If the Awakening movement, a predominantly Sunni group, were to rejoin AQI or create new militias, American forces could find themselves in a difficult position.

"The Sunni Arab population that AQI depends on for support increasingly has the feeling that we [the US] are walking away from them," says Patrick Lang, a Middle East expert and former US Army officer. "There's this feeling that the Maliki government is so Shiite that it intends to not treat the Sunni Arabs very well, and the United States is not showing any inclination to continue to support [the Sunnis]."

Should the US take up arms against former Awakening members, it could create the perception that American forces had sided with the Shiites, some analysts warn. With strained relations between Iraq's three major ethnic groups – the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds – and no apparent road to a unity government, deeper conflict could still be brewing in the restive nation.

The US had the mistaken "belief that everybody would just decide to play nice in the school yard without their interests being served," says Mr. Lang. "We've made these mistake over and over again in Iraq."

Will Afghanistan Be Worse Than Vietnam? 7 Tough Questions to Ask Obama Before He Sinks Us Into a New Quagmire

By William Astore, Tomdispatch.com. Posted April 20, 2009.
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/137390/w...a_new_quagmire/

Poor and Unemployed, Young Afghan Men Turning to Part-Time Work for the Taliban
by Fetrat Zerak, Institute for War and Peace Reporting

It’s Democracy’s Turn: Bankers of the World, Untie!

by Greg Moses / April 24th, 2009 (6)

It wasn’t the housing bubble exactly. It was more the way the bubble was blown.

In the official language of the International Monetary Fund report for April 2009, “the crisis was largely caused by weak risk management in large institutions at the core of the global financial system combined with failures in financial regulation and supervision.”

After “the crisis” was caused, the weak risk managers along with their failed regulators and supervisors came back to loot the national debt.

In essence, the mortgage of the American Worker has been preyed upon to inflate the wealth and power of financiers. …
(Full article …)http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/04/it%E2%80%99s-democracy%E2%80%99s-turn-bankers-of-the-world-untie/

The Mighty Debt Purge of 2009
by Mike Whitney / April 23rd, 2009 (8)

The Fed’s $12.8 trillion of monetary stimulus has triggered a six-week long surge in the stock market. Think of it as Bernanke’s Bear Market Rally, a torrent of capital gushing from every rusty pipe in the financial system. The Fed’s so-called “lending facilities” have gone far beyond their original purpose, which was to backstop a broken system. Now they’re leaking liquidity into the equities markets and sending stocks soaring while the “real” economy sinks to the bottom of the fish tank. That’s how the Fed does business these days: plenty of tasty crepes for the Wall Street kingpins and table …

(Full article …)

Strategic Focus: Empire
http://www.fpif.org/fpifinfo/5976

Is the Obama administration winding down our empire or simply trying to implement a kinder, gentler version?

In Piracy and Empire, John Feffer notes that pirates were present at the creation of the U.S. empire. Have they returned for the empire's finale? http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/6073

Is the United States running out of power at this time of economic crisis? asks Mark Engler in Empire Foreclosed? http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/6049

The new administration needs to move beyond the nation's imperial tradition in this hemisphere, says Manuel Pérez-Rocha in Empire and Latin America in the Obama Era.
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/6007

In the video at left, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecKj5g_8P1c, John Feffer interviews Professor Stephen Zunes about the role of the U.S. in the world under the Obama administration. Will the U.S. empire roll back or continue on?

Empire Roundtable: We asked FPIF's senior analysts to weigh in on the future course of American foreign policy: maintenance of empire or its rejection? http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5997


Strategic Dialogue on R2P: Trevor Keck and Bridget Moix, Steven Fake and Kevin Funk, and Shaun Randol all weigh in on the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, with a corresponding debate on the subject. http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5982
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5985

Media Disinformation: Reframing the War in Afghanistan and Pakistan as a "Class War"- by Michael Skinner - 2009-04-25

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13341

Beyond Pakistan: The First Nuclear Failed State Part One
Washington (UPI) April 24, 2009
Afghanistan is a big problem for the Western world and for the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But if Pakistan fails, the United States and its allies have an even bigger problem. What can the West do to prevent a large, dysfunctional nuclear-armed Muslim nation of 172 million inhabitants from becoming a major incubator of anti-Western hostility? The disintegration or conti ... read more
http://www.spacewar.com/reports/Beyond_Pakistan_The_First_Nuclear_Failed_State_Part_One_999.html

TIME

4/24/09

Does Pakistan's Taliban Surge Raise a Nuclear Threat?

Mark Thompson

When asked last year about the security of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Admiral Mike Mullen didn't hesitate: "I'm very comfortable that the nuclear weapons in Pakistan are secure," he said flatly. Asked the same question earlier this month, his answer had changed. "I'm reasonably comfortable," he said, "that the nuclear weapons are secure."

As America's top military officer, Mullen has traveled regularly to Pakistan — twice in just the past two weeks — for talks with his Pakistani counterpart, General Ashfaq Kayani, and others. And like all those who have risen to four-star rank, Mullen chooses his words with extreme care. Replacing "very comfortable" with "reasonably comfortable" is a decidedly discomforting signal of Washington's concern that no matter how well-guarded the nukes may be today, the chaos now enveloping Pakistan doesn't bode well for their status tomorrow or the day after.

The prospect of turmoil in Pakistan sends shivers up the spines of those U.S. officials charged with keeping tabs on foreign nuclear weapons. Pakistan is thought to possess about 100 — the U.S. isn't sure of the total, and may not know where all of them are. Still, if Pakistan collapses, the U.S. military is primed to enter the country and secure as many of those weapons as it can, according to U.S. officials.

The U.S. has been keeping a watchful eye on Pakistan's nukes since it first detonated a series of devices a decade ago. "Pakistan has taken important steps to safeguard its nuclear weapons, although vulnerabilities still exist," Army General Michael Maples, chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last month. Then, he immediately turned to the threat posed by al-Qaeda, which, along with the Taliban, is sowing unrest in Pakistan. "Al-Qaeda continues efforts to acquire chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear materials," he said, "and would not hesitate to use such weapons if the group develops sufficient capabilities."

The concern in Washington is less that al-Qaeda or the Taliban would manage to actually seize Pakistan's nuclear weapons, but instead that increasingly-radicalized younger Pakistanis are finding their way into military and research circles where they may begin to play a growing role in the nation's nuclear-weapons program. Pakistani officials insist their personnel safeguards are stringent, but a sleeper cell could cause big trouble, U.S. officials say.

Nowhere in the world is the gap between would-be terror-martyrs and the nuclear weapons they crave as small as it is in Pakistan. Nor is their much comfort in the fact that Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal who was recently ordered freed from house arrest by the country's supreme court, was the Johnny Appleseed of nuclear proliferation, dispatching the atomic genie to Iran, Libya and North Korea. But U.S. and Pakistani officials insist it is important to separate Pakistan's poor proliferation record with what is, by all accounts, a modern and multilayered system designed to protect its nuclear weapons from falling into the wrong hands.

For starters, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials, there is no way a complete nuclear weapon can be plucked from Islamabad's stockpile, which is protected by about 10,000 of the Pakistani military's most elite troops. The guts of the nuclear warhead are kept separate from the rest of the device, and a nuclear detonation is impossible without both pieces. Additionally, the delivery vehicle — plane or missile — is also segregated from the warhead components.

Over the past decade, Pakistan has created the National Command Authority and the Strategic Plans Division to manage the nuclear infrastructure from day to day, and the U.S. has given Pakistan an estimated $100 million since 9/11 to bolster the security of its arsenal. While much of that has been spent on bringing Pakistani nuclear personnel to the U.S. for training, it has also been spent on hardware, including various surveillance and security systems.

Then, there's the touchy area of "permissive action links" — the electronic "locks" on nuclear weapons that must be "opened" for a nuclear detonation to take place. Washington doesn't share its own PALs with other countries for fear of losing control of the technology and surrendering key elements about U.S. weapons design (although installing PALs on another country's nukes — with a secret "kill" capability that could remotely render the weapons impotent — has always been a tempting option). "Permissive action links are custom-made devices based on the design and configuration of the weapons," former senior Pakistani nuclear official Naeem Salik told TIME 16 months ago. Until late 2005, he had served as director of arms control and disarmament affairs at Pakistan's National Command Authority, created in 1999 as the command and control center for Pakistan's nuclear weapons. "Unless one is willing to share the technical configuration of the weapon, a permissive action link cannot be developed. We did not share these secrets, so we never asked for the permissive action links — our people have developed our own."

That may all be well and good, Mullen seemed to suggest to NBC during a Wednesday interview in Afghanistan, just before he headed across the border to Islamabad. But, he cautioned, it may not be good enough, given the turmoil racking Pakistan. "My long-term worry," Mullen said, "is that descent — should it continue — gives us the worst possible outcome there."

PROSPECTS FOR PEACE

4/21/09

Potential Traps for George Mitchell

Daniel Levy

President Obama's special peace envoy, former Sen. George Mitchell, is just wrapping up his latest visit to the Middle East. It's his third trip since being appointed and this time in addition to Israel, the West Bank, and Egypt, included Saudi Arabia and North Africa (Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria), with an emphasis on a comprehensive regional peace, building on the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002. (Mitchell has yet to visit Damascus or Beirut, something unlikely to take place until after June's parliamentary elections in Lebanon.)

In meetings with Israeli and Palestinian leaders, Mitchell continued to reiterate U.S. support for a two-state solution, although the emphasis of the visit, perhaps understandably, still seems to be the listening tour aspect, including the first meetings since Israel's new government took office.

Some reports on these latest meetings portray PLO chairman Mahmoud Abbas as carrying a message of hope and peace in the face of a rejectionist Israeli premier. Others depict Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as being seized by the more urgent calling of the Iranian threat, and showing a willingness to make progress on practical issues with the Palestinians, such as the economy, while avoiding a possibly dangerous and premature effort to address the political differences -- especially given the enfeebled nature of the Palestinian counterpart.

Both views are wrong.

The sad truth is that neither leader has a meaningful strategy for creating a new equilibrium for resolving this conflict. Despite all their differences (and there are many), Netanyahu and Abbas are similar in two major respects: Both stand atop deeply dysfunctional political systems that eschew bold decision-making. And both are focused on short-term political survival, an understandable instinct and one certainly not unique to the Levant, but also woefully inadequate given the challenges faced by their respective peoples.

So, due to both circumstance and a generous dose of intentional design, Senator Mitchell's Palestinian and Israeli interlocutors are busy preparing sugar-coated traps and distractions. The Mitchell team should be well prepared to recognize the pitch of a snake- oil salesman when they hear one.

On the Israel interlocutor side, here are the main traps Mitchell should look out for:

1) The ‘Say the Magic Words' Game. Thus far, Netanyahu is refusing to explicitly endorse the two-state formula. This is being nicely set up to become a rather large red herring, whereby diplomatic attention becomes focused on teasing out a linguistic formula to claim that Israel's premier is indeed a "two-stater." Last Friday's headline in the Israeli daily Ma'ariv even suggests that Netanyahu is planning for a dramatic climb- down gesture during his first visit with U.S. President Barack Obama (now postponed from early May to possibly later in the month), during which he would declare acceptance of the two states position. What a colossal distraction and waste of time.

To paraphrase what always used to be said of former PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat --what matters are his actions, not his words. Saying the magic words is of minor import. Ending the occupation and actually delivering on a two-state solution is what should matter to the Mitchell team. The latest ruse to apparently come out of the Netanyahu-Mitchell meeting was an Israeli demand that the Palestinians first recognize Israel as a Jewish state (something that neither Egypt, nor Jordan, did in their respective peace treaties with Israel) -- a meaningless diversionary tactic.

2) It's not the economy, stupid. Netanyahu advocates focusing first on what he calls "economic peace" -- developing the Palestinian economy as a prerequisite for two states. Indeed, economic improvement would be welcome, and no one should oppose moves such as ending the closures, removing the 600-plus obstacles to freedom of Palestinian movement in the West Bank (that dovetail with the map of settlements and settler road use arrangements), lifting the siege on Gaza, etc. However, by now the secret may be out that developing the Palestinian economy in order to make the Palestinians a peace-loving people, while maintaining the Israeli occupation and the settlements, is precisely what's been tried for the last 15 years -- with dismal results. The Palestinians won't be bought off; this is a political conflict requiring political solutions. Economic improvements are important as a support ballast, not as a central plank.

3) "You go first; no you go first." If Netanyahu is smart (as I consider him to be), then he is likely to spot a tantalizing diversionary opportunity in the Arab Peace Initiative. That plan, initiated by the Saudis and adopted by the Arab League in 2002, and reissued in 2007, calls for recognition, security, and normal relations between all the Arab states and Israel in exchange for a comprehensive agreement between Israel and its immediate neighbors, based on land-for-peace, two-states, and U.N. resolutions. It's a potential game-changer, and the Obama administration (unlike its predecessor, which ignored the initiative) is apparently keen on using the initiative as a framing principle for its peace efforts. Its beauty is in its simplicity and in its comprehensive nature: everything for everything.

The lurking danger would lie be if Netanyahu attempts to break the initiative down into gradual, sequential, bite-size mini-steps that each side would be expected to take. For instance, Israel says the words "two states" or returns to negotiations, or freezes settlements in return for partial normalization from the Arab side. This may sound nice, but beware: In practice, it will prove to be a recipe for an endless, fruitless, and oxygen-sucking debate on the sequencing -- "you go first; no you go first" -- reminiscent of an Alphonse and Gaston routine, minus the exaggerated politeness.

All this even before Netanyahu gets out his bag of Iran party tricks and distractions. So much for the Israeli side. On to the Palestinians, who talk a good game and often sound eminently reasonable, but are equally infatuated with distraction promotion. (Here, it's important to remember that Mitchell's interlocutor is not the "Palestinians"; it is a political leadership with political calculations and a well-developed fear of change.) So what cards might they be expected to play?

1) Cheering on a fight. Judging by reports from Friday's meetings, the focus in Ramallah right now seems to be egging on a fight between Israel and America. Such a spat would undoubtedly create a fleeting, feel-good factor, but then what? While it's nice to sound good on CNNi, to play the blame game, and to appear closer to Washington's talking points, winning the media war is hardly a strategy for national liberation.

If Israel and America are at some point to publicly disagree, then it should be about something meaningful, such as an actual plan for implementing two states, rather than, for instance, over terminology or a dozen out of more than 600 obstacles to Palestinian freedom of movement. Often, the PLO leadership seems interested in spectacle for its own sake rather than real results. Bottom line: the U.S.-Israeli spat is a distraction.

2) Cross-dressing on preconditions. Ever since the first Palestinian national unity government was formed in 2007, bringing together the electorally victorious Hamas, and the ousted Fatah, Israel, America and the Quartet demanded that any Palestinian government meet three preconditions (recognize Israel, accept past agreements, and renounce terrorism). Since the Netanyahu government was sworn in, the PLO leadership has adopted this same mantra: In order for negotiations to continue, the Israeli government must accept two states, abide by previous agreements, and freeze settlements.

Preconditions were a mistake when applied to the Palestinians, and will be equally mistaken if applied to the Israelis. (And in fact, this is much more about domestic Palestinian politics than Israel-Palestinian affairs and it's being used by Fatah in its struggle with Hamas.) Most troubling, this approach could hamper an especially urgent issue: reopening Gaza and allowing a regular flow of goods and materials, including those desperately needed for reconstruction following Israel's Operation Cast Lead.

3) Nostalgia for Bush and Annapolis. Palestinian leaders never had very many good things to say about the Bush administration, so it's ironic that they are advocating a return and adherence to the Roadmap and the Annapolis process. Again, don't be fooled. The latter is little more than a pushback against the Israeli government's apparent rejection of Annapolis as explicitly stated by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. Plus, as with so much of the Bush legacy in the Middle East, Annapolis was a failure and structurally flawed, relying on bilateral negotiations between the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships with no U.S. presence, and making Palestinian performance a prerequisite for ending the occupation.

Just as there have been policy reviews and significant course corrections on Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, the Mitchell team should apply the same principle of a rethink on the Israeli-Arab track. The United States should not be maneuvered back to the flawed Annapolis design, whether in response to a Palestinian bear hug or an Israeli pushback.

Indeed, there seems little value then in recycling that approach. A moment has presented itself where there is a new U.S. administration, a new Israeli government, and a chance to devise a new way of finally achieving -- and not just talking about - two states living side by side in security and dignity. These new circumstances can be seen more as an opportunity than a crisis. The Mitchell team would do well to avoid the distractions and traps on offer, whether from Israelis or Palestinians, and take its time in devising an American plan that delivers on the American interest in resolving the conflict. It's time for the United States to step up.

SWAT Analysis: Keeping an Eye on the Resurgent Taliban

By Animesh Roul


‘Swat Analysis’ is a Daily brief on the resurgent Taliban and their safe sanctuaries in Pakistan. The brief will be posted in regular intervals focusing on the developments in Swat province, NWPF and other Taliban hotspots.

The scenic Swat valley (an administrative district in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) of Pakistan is under complete control of Pakistani Taliban since the Islamabad administration succumbed to the demands of the militants and allowed them to implement Sharia law. The so called peace deal between Taliban and the NWFP government, effective from February 16, gave more power to Taliban elements to run parallel government and to exploit its abundant natural resources to fund their terrorist activities (they call it Jihad). The Taliban group in Swat led by Maulana Fazlullah, and pro Taliban religious extremist outfit Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM) led by Sufi Muhammad have been ruling the region with active support from Taliban umbrella group, Baitullah Mehsud's Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). At present, the Taliban consisting of Pakistanis, Afghans, Chechen and Tajik militants are well trained and equipped with SUVs, Kalashnikov assault rifles and rocket launchers posing greater threat not only to Pakistan’s integrity, but to the South Asian region at large.

President Zardari signed the agreement, the Sharia Nizam-i-Adl Regulation 2009, on April 13, 2009 only to allow tranquility in the area. However, Mullah Fazlullah has said that the Taliban would accept only Islamic writ in the Valley and the whole Malakand division. Taliban forces also want Sharia rule all over Pakistan sooner or later. Terming democracy as unIslamic, TNSM chief Sufi Muhammad said recently that the prevailing political system in the country contravenes Islam and the Quran. He even accused Pakistan’s political elites of appeasing the USA and allies by thrusting the system of 'kafirs' or infidels on the people of the country.

On April 27, Pakistani forces retaliated against the rampaging Taliban in NWPF, following Taliban's Buner pullout couple of days back. Pakistan forces have killed nearly 50 Taliban militants in the latest renewed offensive against Taliban hideouts in Dir and Swat.

After this the TNSM which has been the face and voice of Taliban in Malakand region pulled out of the already fragile February 16 (2009) peace deal. In the face of this dangerous development, Taliban’s only English speaking spokesman Muslim Khan indicated strongly that the militants would not lay down their arms at any cost. The TNSM threatened earlier to quit the peace deal if Darul Qaza and the qazi courts are not established in Malakand division as per the deal. (The deal reportedly encompasses the whole Malakand Division that includes Swat, Dir (both Lower and Upper), Buner, Shangla, Chitral, Malakand areas and Kohistan in NWFP)

The situation remains volatile and unpredictable in Pakistan's NWFP, as a 20 member Ulema delegation reached Swat for talks with Suif Mohammad and members of shura of TNSM.

April 27, 2009 02:12 PM Print

http://www.aaiusa.org/washington-watch/386...aeli-arab-peace
Democrats’ and Republicans’ Divergent Views on Israeli-Arab Peace

By Dr. James Zogby
Posted on Monday April 27, 2009

The American electorate is deeply divided on issues related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with voters who backed Barack Obama and John McCain holding dramatically divergent views on the conflict, what should be done to solve it, and the role the U.S. ought to play.

This is the most startling finding of a Zogby International interactive survey conducted in April, 2009, for the Doha Debates, a BBC-TV program emanating from Doha, Qatar. The survey engaged 4,230 U.S. adults, and has a margin of error of plus or minus 1.5%.

The survey found that substantial majorities (of all groups) believed: that a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is important; that the conflict negatively impacts U.S. interests in the Middle East; that both Israelis and Palestinians are entitled to equal rights; and that there should be a Palestinian state.

Overall, the survey established that, while favorable attitudes toward Israel remain strong, pluralities of Americans believe that President Obama should pursue a policy less supportive of Israel than his predecessor. They believe he ought to “get tough” with Israel on settlements, and “steer a middle course between Israel and the Palestinians.”

These findings, however, mask the deep divide within the electorate.

Attitudes toward U.S.-Israeli Relations

Americans do support Israel, to be sure. But, are the interests of the two countries identical, and does its support for Israel strengthen or weaken the U.S.? Three quarters of voters who supported John McCain believe that the interests of the U.S. and Israel are identical. Nearly as many believe that the U.S. is strengthened by its support of Israel. Obama voters, however, strongly disagree with both propositions, with more than one half disagreeing that the interests of the two countries are the same. Similarly, half of Obama voters believe the U.S. is weakened by its support for Israel, with only one in five seeing the U.S. as strengthened.

When asked which is more important to the U.S.— relations with Israel, the Arabs, or both – only 7% of Obama voters say Israel, 17% say the Arabs, and 68% say both. On the other hand, 46% of McCain voters say that the U.S. relationship with Israel is most important, only 3% emphasize relations with the Arabs, while 48% say both.

It appears from the results of the survey that the recent war in Gaza served to widen the gap between the two groups of voters. Half of Obama supporters said that war made them less supportive of Israel, while two-thirds of McCain voters actually say that the Gaza war made them more supportive of Israel.

What Should the U.S. Do?

Predictably, McCain voters saw Bush as an honest broker (by an 84%-8% margin). Obama voters disagreed by an equally overwhelming margin. But what should President Obama do? When asked, 73% of those who voted for President Obama say he should “steer a middle course,” with only 10% saying he should support Israel and 6% saying support the Palestinians. Wildly different responses come from the McCain voters, 60% of whom say the current President should support Israel! Only 22% of McCain supporters say the President should be balanced in his approach to the conflict

Engage with Hamas? By a 67%-16% margin Obama voters say yes, while 79% of McCain voters say no. And should the U.S. get tough with Israel? 80% of Obama voters say it is time to get tough, with 73% Of McCain voters disagreeing.

Solving Final Status Issues

Even when it comes to solving critical final status issues, the two camps hold positions that are mirror opposites of one another. Do Palestinians have the right of return? Obama voters agree they do by a margin of 61%-13%, while McCain voters disagree, 21%-51%. Should Jerusalem be divided and serve as the capital of two states, or remain under sole Israeli control? Obama voters prefer the “divided” and “two capitals” option with McCain voters overwhelmingly supporting Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel

Similarly, a majority of Obama voters believe Israel should be made to remove its settlements from occupied Palestinian lands, while a majority of McCain voters believe the settlements should stay.

Two Observations

The depth of this partisan divide is instructive on many levels. First and foremost, it establishes that, despite the claim of hard-line supporters of Israel, traditional U.S. policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict does not have bipartisan backing. In fact, as the two parties have evolved over the past thirty years, and as the issue itself has evolved – since Oslo – each of the two parties have moved in different directions.

The dominant role of the religious right, which now comprises up to one-third of the base of the Republican Party, coupled with the degree to which neo-conservativism has come to define the world view of that party, have contributed to a significant reorientation of the GOP. These two strands of thought were brought together by George W. Bush, who also embraced Ariel Sharon, and, post-9/11, characterized the struggles of Israel and the U.S. as identical. As a result, it now appears that the GOP is no longer the party of George Herbert Walker Bush and James Baker, but an entirely new entity.

Meanwhile, the base of the Democratic Party, has come to be defined by progressives (including a significant number of progressive Jews) and minority communities who have grown weary of Bush’s ideological approach to conflict. They have come to reject his policies and recoil from their consequences.

Obama’s victory, therefore, represents not only the election of a new President, but the victory of a new coalition whose component parts support an anti-war, pro-peace and pro-human rights agenda. This coalition, our poll findings demonstrate, can provide the support the new President needs, should he decide on a dramatically different direction for U.S policy toward the Israeli-Arab conflict.

Saudis Now Dis Bush and Put Their Hopes on Obama
A senior Saudi official refers to the "trials and tribulations" of the recent Bush years
By Thomas Omestad
Posted April 27, 2009

In the latter part of the Bush administration, a few signs of deepening Saudi Arabian unhappiness with U.S. policy were breaking out. King Abdullah decided to opt out of an invitation to a formal state dinner at the Bush White House. And the monarch breezily rebuffed Bush's plea to increase oil production to bring relief to American gasoline consumers at a time of high prices.

Just how deeply disappointed the Saudi royal family must have been with George W. Bush, who along with his father once enjoyed personally cordial ties with the royals, became a bit clearer on Monday at a conference in Washington. "Trials and tribulations of the recent past" is how the kingdom's current minister of commerce and industry, Abdullah Alireza, described the Bush years.

He also referred to the last eight years as a "long hibernation." That was an apparent reference to the Saudi (and widespread Arab) view that the Bush administration had taken a long absence from even-handed mediation in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Alireza called for a "new, value-added relationship between our two countries." He urged a relationship that goes beyond traditional ties largely based on oil supplies to matters that involve "intellectual capital and knowledge-sharing" as Saudi Arabia seeks to propel its economy into new sectors. He was speaking at a conference sponsored by the New America Foundation and the Committee for International Trade of the Saudi Chambers of Commerce.

In contrast to his only slightly veiled criticism of Bush policy, Alireza said that President Obama's early moves are being warmly welcomed in Saudi Arabia as "a serious glimmer of hope." Obama has embarked on an effort to reach out to Muslim communities around the world and has promised to re-energize Mideast peace diplomacy.

Saudi annoyance with the Bush administration was driven first and foremost by Bush's decision to invade neighboring Iraq in 2003. The kingdom's diplomats, while no fans of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, feared that U.S. military intervention would trigger violence between Shiites and Sunnis, lead to Shiite control, and open a path for Iranian influence. To varying degrees, all of those things happened.

The Saudis also faulted Bush for maintaining what they regarded as such tight ties to Israel—to the exclusion of Arab views—that Washington was incapable of netting significant progress on the peace process. And the Saudis saw the Bush administration as unwilling to push Israel to curb military attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza that resulted in civilian deaths. A Saudi-authored outline for peace also languished during the period.

The Saudis made clear that they still have their worries. Alireza warned that an attack on Iran would "open up a Wild West in the Middle East." He added, "Saudi Arabia probably would be one of the first casualties after an attack on Iran by certain quarters," presumably a reference to Israel.

Saudi says Pakistan can survive Talibann inf