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Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Our responsibility to Iraqi refugees

I've been hearing a bit about Iraqi refugees lately, and when I was in Amman, Jordan last year, they were impossible to ignore. And even if they're less visible in Syria, it seems that there are also many Iraqis who have taken refuge in Damascus as well. The numbers are alarming: 1.8 million internally displaced Iraqis and 2 million who have sought refuge abroad.

So what has the US's response been? To take in fewer than 500 Iraqis and to set up a program that allows Afghans and Iraqis who have worked with the American military to immigrate to the US. The maximum limit of people accepted into this program each year: 50 people.

There has not been enough media coverage of this problem, which is why I am glad to see that the Times has an op-ed today about our responsibility to Iraqi refugees:

To calculate the price that Iraqis have paid for the American misadventure in their country, you have to deal in big, round, horrifying numbers. Civilians killed last year: 34,000. Driven from their homes within Iraq: 1.8 million. Fled to other countries: an additional 2 million, and growing. The number of Iraqis who have found refuge in the United States is easier to pin down. This country has admitted a grand total of 466 Iraqi refugees since 2003.

However President Bush tries to manage the endgame of his dismal war, America has an obligation to the Iraqis whose lives it has upended. It owes a particular debt to those who have faced incredible dangers working with American forces as interpreters, guides and contractors. These allies -- and their families -- have become a haunted and hunted group, branded as traitors and targeted for kidnapping and assassination by insurgents and militias.

By any measure, the Bush administration is failing them. The current price tag for the war is $8 billion a month, yet the State Department plans to spend only $20 million in the coming fiscal year to help shelter Iraqi refugees overseas and to resettle them here. A special visa program to resettle Iraqi and Afghan military translators has been capped at 50 people a year and has a six-year waiting list.

NPR has had some good coverage of the refugee issue, as well as on congressional hearings on ameliorating the situation and the individual faces of the crisis, as seen in the story of an Iraqi translator forced to flee after working with the Americans. NPR also has a segment on the differences between the policies toward Vietnamese and Iraqi refugees.

According to an interview with Ropert Green, UN High Commission for Refugees representative in Jordan (most UN Iraq offices are in Amman since Iraq is too dangerous), based on an agreement with the Government of Jordan, they are "restricted in how we can actually apply that refugee title" to Iraqis. The Jordanian agreement requires UNHCR to find a third country of resettlement willing to host each Iraqi who has been labeled a refugee, which is why only 600 out of the over 700,000 refugees in Iraq have been officially designated as refugees.

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Troop surge in Afghanistan

The Onion has the scoop on the surge deployment of the 325th Marine Expeditionary Brigade in Kandahar province:

In an effort to display his administration's willingness to fight on all fronts in the War on Terror, President Bush said at a press conference Monday that American ground forces in Afghanistan will be aided by the immediate deployment of Marine Pfc. Tim Ekenberg of Camp Lejeune, NC.

...The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, 2nd Lt. Jon Pinard, said that Ekenberg will be a valuable addition to his existing military assets.

"Our Marines are the best-equipped and best-trained in the world, and I have it on good authority that Tim is an especially well-trained Marine," Pinard said. "We have requested that he receive full logistical support while deployed in this theater. We've been told that his body armor will be arriving within six months of his reporting for duty, budget permitting."

Friday, January 26, 2007

Escalation with Iran

According to Reuters, Bush has authorized the killing or capturing of Iranians in Iraq. This goes for intelligence agents or members of the Revolutionary Guard, but not, apparently, for diplomats or civilians.

First of all, this seems like an obvious escalation in the conflict between Iran and the US, and I think if something comes of it, then Washington will see that Tehran can be very, very nasty: look for the capture of American contractors or soldiers as a reaction. Furthermore, the problem with the distinction between civilians/diplomats and intelligence/revolutionary guards is that it is standard practice for countries to give intelligence officers diplomatic or civilian cover. For example, many CIA operations are run from American embassies abroad.

Mark my words: The first Iranian that gets killed in Iraq will mean bad news for everyone. I can't help but wonder if this is not just a tactic by the Bush administration to goad Tehran into doing something that will give the US an "excuse" to bomb Iranian nuclear plants.

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Obama and his madrasa

The Moon and Murdoch media outlets have been in a frenzy about claims that Barack Obama went to a "madrasa" when he was a child in Indonesia. CNN investigated the claim and showed it to be another case of attempted character assassination. The latter says that Obama did not got to a madrasa, which is both true and false.

You see, in Arabic, the word madrasa (مدرسة) comes from the three-letter root "d-r-s" (درس) which means to study. In Arabic, most words are derived from adding prefixes, infixes and suffixes to an original three-letter root verb. For example, when you add the prefix "ma," to a root verb, you get the place where that verb is done. In the case of "d-r-s," this gets you the place where one studies, or madrasa.

In Arabic, any school from elementary to high school is called a madrasa. Indonesia is a predominantly Muslim country, which means that it has a lot of Arabic loan words. Madrasa is one of them.

The confusion arises because of the media's use of the word madrasa to describe a madrasat al-ulum, which is a religious seminary, the likes of which we've heard about so much in coverage of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

So did Obama go to a madrasa? If by that you mean elementary or high school, then yes, of course he did. If by that you mean a deobandi or wahhabi religious seminary, then no. And of course, the latter charge is patently absurd, seeing as how he was six when he lived in Indonesia.

This stems from the media's ignorance of all things Arab or Muslim. So we get people throwing around words like shaheed, madrasa and jihad in order to give their writing a veneer of credibility, when in most cases, these words are used incorrectly. Likewise, I often laugh when I see American writers, "haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones," throw in French phrases to make themselves seem more intellectual or better read.

All this makes me think of George Orwell's little essay, Politics and the English Language. I think more people ought to follow his simple advice on this subject: "Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent."

UPDATE: According to Chad in comments, in Indonesia, only a religious school, like a Catholic school in the US, is called a madrasa in Indonesia. He says that some are normal public-funded schools, like the public school Obama went to, whereas others are private. I'll double check this with an Indonesian colleague, in any case.

Temperature rises in Lebanon

The opposition led by Hezbollah and General Aoun held a general strike yesterday that included blocking the road to the airport and degenerated into street clashes between pro-government and opposition supporters. What this means is that Sunni and Shia groups have been clashing, as well as Christian supporters of Geagea (pro-government) and Aoun (opposition):

Violent clashes erupted across the country, with two areas witnessing the return of old "fault lines" from the 1975-1990 Lebanese Civil War.

The Shiite supporters of Hizbullah and Amal clashed with the Future Movement's Sunni supporters in the predominantly Sunni area of Corniche al-Mazraa. Stone-throwing and fistfights injured dozens of people and wreaked damage on cars and private property.

At the same time, supporters of Christian opposition leader Michel Aoun clashed with followers of Lebanese Forces chief Samir Geagea in several predominantly Christian areas, in fights recalling the leaders' bitter rivalry in the late 1980s.

Lebanese officials were quoted as warning that the Aoun-Geagea struggle may turn into "a war of elimination."

This is obviously bad news for Lebanon, and I'm surprised that it's taking so long to come up with a compromise package deal that would get the government up and running again as national unity government. Of course there are a lot of things to be settled, including the presidency, expanding the cabinet, the Hariri tribunal and the Paris III economic deal, but I don't think that these are unbridgeable gaps.

Hezbollah has said that yesterday was a taste of what it's capable of, and I don't think anyone doubts their resolve or power.

Washington opposition to peace between Israel and Syria?

The Times has an op-ed today by Michael Oren, the Israeli author of a new book on American involvement in the Middle East, about the possibility of an peace between Israel and Syria.

I mentioned these secret talks earlier and maintain that the smartest move the US could make would be to broker a settlement between Syria and Israel (but not at the expense of Lebanon). Oren seems to think, however, that the US is against these talks and that a peace between Syria and Israel would be opposed by Washington:

The last thing Washington wants is a Syrian-Israeli treaty that would transform Mr. Assad from pariah to peacemaker and lend him greater latitude in promoting terrorism and quashing Lebanon’s freedom. Some Israeli officials, by contrast, see substantive benefits in ending their nation's 60-year conflict with Syria. An accord would invariably provide for the cessation of Syrian aid to Hamas and Hezbollah, which endanger Israel’s northern and southern sectors.

More crucial still, by detaching Syria from Iran's orbit, Israel will be able to address the Iranian nuclear threat -- perhaps by military means -- without fear of retribution from Syrian ground forces and missiles. Forfeiting the Golan Heights, for these Israelis, seems to be a sufferable price to pay to avoid conventional and ballistic attacks across most of Israel’s borders.

The potentially disparate positions of Israel and the United States on the question of peace with Syria could trigger a significant crisis between the two countries — the first of Mr. Bush's expressly pro-Israel presidency. And yet, facing opposition from a peace-minded Democratic Congress and from members of his own party who have advocated a more robust American role in Middle East mediation, Mr. Bush would have difficulty in withholding approval from a comprehensive Syrian-Israeli agreement.

I tend to believe that the Assad regime wants first and foremost to stay in power and regain the Golan Heights. Yes, Damascus has been bruised by being thrown out of Lebanon, but it's entirely possible that Assad wanted to leave and is fighting an internal battle with the remnants of his father's security regime. The problem is that the decision-making process is so opaque in Damascus that it's very difficult to see who's making which calls.

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

More on Iran and the bomb

The London Review of Books has another article by Norman Dombey, Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics at Sussex University, on Iran and the bomb. He looks at historical precedents, especially when Israel bombed the Iraqi Osirak reactor in 1981 while looking a little into the nuts and bolts of Iran's nuclear programs:

The Arak reactor is certainly more suitable for producing plutonium than Osirak would have been: it can run on natural uranium fuel (0.7 per cent U-235, 99.3 per cent U-238), so the irradiated fuel rods would be good sources of plutonium. Israel and India obtained plutonium for their weapons programmes from this type of reactor. Arak is not due to be finished until 2009 at the earliest and it will need to run for at least one year before its fuel rods can be withdrawn and plutonium extracted. Nevertheless, when constructed, the reactor is expected to be inspected regularly by the IAEA, specifically in order to detect any diversion of nuclear material for potential weapon use.

So, until or unless Iran withdraws from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the facilities at Natanz and Arak are safeguarded by the IAEA. Cameras are installed at Natanz (they function continuously), and there are monthly inspections. Similar arrangements will be made for Arak. Any enriched uranium or plutonium made will be under IAEA seal and will not be available for casting into the core of a weapon. There is no pressing nuclear threat from Iran at the moment; nor does there appear to be a tipping point in sight, beyond which it would be impossible to prevent the country from acquiring weapons.

Sources close to the US and Israeli governments nevertheless insist that Iran represents a significant threat, which needs to be dealt with without delay. They assert that Iran has a clandestine programme in addition to its declared programme, as Iraq had. Israeli intelligence claims that Iran is close to having an implosion capability, which it will need to make compact weapons. Yet according to Seymour Hersh, writing in the New Yorker in November, the CIA recently completed an assessment of the evidence for the existence of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons programme. The report, which was based on satellite and other data, concluded that there was no evidence of a secret programme. Nor can it be assumed that Iran could make weapons small enough to fit into missiles without testing: the dud North Korean test shows that even with testing success cannot be taken for granted.

A diplomatic solution is available, but the US and its EU allies do not want to consider it. It is the same deal I have mentioned in these pages before, whereby Iran would be allowed limited enrichment rights (say, up to 5 per cent enrichment), together with security guarantees and technical help. Richard Haass, who was director of policy planning at the State Department until 2003, believes that 'Iran should be offered an array of economic, political and security incentives', including 'a highly limited uranium-enrichment pilot programme so long as it accepts highly intrusive inspections'.

Hrant Dink's last column

The tragic assassination of Hrant Dink seems to be leading to somesmall but symbolic conciliation between Armenia and Turkey.

Meanwhile, the BBC has an excerpt of Dink's last column about his trial for "insulting Turkishness," published the day he was shot dead in the streets of Istanbul:

The memory of my computer is filled with angry, threatening lines sent by citizens from this sector...

How real are these threats? To be honest, it is impossible for me to know for sure.

What is truly threatening and unbearable for me is the psychological torture I place myself in. The question that really gets to me, is: 'What are these people thinking about me?'

Unfortunately I am now better-known than before and I feel people looking at me, thinking: 'Oh, look, isn't he that Armenian guy?'

I am just like a pigeon, equally obsessed by what goes-on on my left and right, front and back. My head is just as mobile and fast.

... Do you ministers know the price of making someone as scared as a pigeon?

What my family and I have been through has not been easy. I have considered leaving this country at times...

But leaving a 'boiling hell' to run to a 'heaven' is not for me. I wanted to turn this hell into heaven.

We stayed in Turkey because that was what we wanted - and out of respect for the thousands of people here who supported me in my fight for democracy...

I am now applying to the European Court of Human Rights. I don't know how long the case will take, but what I do know is that I will continue living here in Turkey until the case is finalised.

And if the court rules in my favour I will be very happy and will never have to leave my country.

2007 will probably be an even harder year for me. The court cases will continue, new ones will be initiated and God knows what kind of additional injustices I will have to face.

I may see myself as frightened as a pigeon, but I know that in this country people do not touch pigeons.

Pigeons can live in cities, even in crowds. A little scared perhaps, but free.

Saturday, January 20, 2007

A nuclear Middle East

Ha'aretz has an interview with King Abdullah of Jordan. In it, he confirms that Jordan is thinking about starting a nuclear program:

"[T]he rules have changed on the nuclear subject throughout the whole region. Where I think Jordan was saying, 'we'd like to have a nuclear-free zone in the area,' after this summer, everybody's going for nuclear programs.

"The Egyptians are looking for a nuclear program. The GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] are looking at one, and we are actually looking at nuclear power for peaceful and energy purposes. We've been discussing it with the West.

"I personally believe that any country that has a nuclear program should conform to international regulations and should have international regulatory bodies that check to make sure that any nuclear program moves in the right direction."

In other words, you're saying that you expect Israel to join the NPT [non-proliferation treaty].

"What's expected from us should be a standard across the board. We want to make sure this is used for energy. What we don't want is an arms race to come out of this. As we become part of an international body and its international regulations are accepted by all of us, then we become a united front."

This sort of a nuclear proliferation in the Middle East was obvious but not inevitable. (I've brought it up before here and here.) As I've mentioned before, the Middle East should be a nuclear free zone, but since Pakistan, India and Israel all have nuclear weapons (and Iran is most likely doing it's best join the club), it seems inevitable that the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and now Jordan will follow suit.

Such an explosive region is already problematic, but I find the prospect of all the players being armed with nuclear weapons more than a little disconcerting.

Friday, January 19, 2007

Current reading

I finished reading Vali Nasr's The Shia Revival the other day. It was a pretty good introduction on Shia and Sunni relations in the region, and while most of the Lebanese, Iranian and Iraqi parts were review for me, the sections on Bahrain and Pakistan made for new and interesting reading. Nasr does a good job of explaining the specifics of situations in various countries and then using them to draw a bigger picture of the direction that Shia politics are heading in the Middle East.

Otherwise, I've just stared reading Rashid Khalidi's Resurrecting Empire. I'm only about 40 pages in, but the quotes that open chapter two were particularly interesting:

Oh ye Egyptians, they may say to you that I have not made an expedition hither for any other object than that of abolishing your religion ... but tell the slanderers that I have not come to you except for the purpose of restoring your rights from the hands of the oppressors.
--Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexandria, July 2, 1798

Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators....It is the hope and desire of the British people and the nations in alliance with them that the Arab race may rise once more to greatness and renown among the peoples of the earth.
--General F.S. Maude, Commander of British Forces, Baghdad, March 19, 1917

Unlike many armies in the world, you came not to conquer, not to occupy, but to liberate, and the Iraqi people know this.
--Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense, Baghdad, April 29, 2003

The Arab blogosphere

The Colombia Journalism Review has an piece on Arab bloggers, The New Arab Conversation. It talks about the explosion of new blogs in the Arab world. It focuses, of course, on blogs in English, but it's hard to fault them that, since I imagine none of them speak Arabic.

Last summer was, in fact, a watershed moment for the Middle Eastern blogosphere. The conflict between Israel and Hezbollah not only brought attention to the many different Arab conversations that had taken place on homemade Web sites in the past two or three years, but also launched thousands more of them. And they were more than just a handful of aberrant voices. They reflected a new culture of openness, dialogue, and questioning. And unlike the neoconservative notion that these ideals can be dropped on a foreign population like so many bomblets, the push for change here is coming from within. Whether it is a Jordanian student discussing the taboo subject of the monarchy’s viability or a Saudi woman writing about her sexual experiences or an Egyptian commenting with sadness at an Israeli blogger’s description of a suicide bombing, each of these unprecedented acts is one small move toward opening up these societies.

Another aspect of this "new conversation" is that it includes dialogue between Arabs and Israelis. This, of course, has sparked realizations on both sides of the divide that their enemies are people too.

From Egypt:
The blogger known as Egyptian Sandmonkey, the twenty-five-year-old son of a prominent member of Egypt's ruling National Democratic Party, is on the phone from Cairo and laughing. "I didn’t know there was such a thing as a poor Jew," he says. "What? Poor Jews? How did that happen? I thought that at your bar mitzvah you got full membership and the manual for how to rule the world. And then they give you your shares in the media. I keep telling my friends, if the Jews really control the media, they are some of the most self-hating Jews I've ever met in my life."

Developing a complex picture of Jews, and of Israelis (the distinction between the two is not often made in the Arab world), is no easy task in Egypt. Even for someone like Sandmonkey, who comes from what he calls an "upper middle-class family," and was educated largely outside his birth country, the distorted perceptions run deep. "The Egyptians know nothing about the Israelis," he says. "We don't know anything about Israeli society. We don't know anything about their culture. And part of that has been our government trying to keep us away from the information. An Israeli can come into Egypt very easily. For an Egyptian to go to Israel, it's really, really hard to do. You have to go through a large bureaucratic process. And the point is to keep us in the dark. Don't humanize the people. It's easier to vilify the Jews in Israel."

And from the Israeli side:

Lirun Rabinowitz, who has been living in Israel for a year and a half ... shares his blog with a Lebanese woman and was recently invited to be a co-author on the United Arab Emirates community blog and, even more surprisingly, on an annual Ramadan blog, in which various bloggers write about how the Muslim holiday is celebrated in their countries. Recently, on the UAE blog, he was accused in the comments section of being needlessly provocative for putting the words "Tel Aviv" after his name at the end of his posts. To his surprise, a number of Arab readers rushed to his defense in the comments section.

Rabinowitz says that perusing the Arab blogosphere has deepened his understanding of what is happening inside Arab society. "When I go to them, I see what are they worrying about, what are they wondering, how they are feeling, what level of analysis they are putting on things, how keen they are to see my side, and when they are only prepared to see their own. Is there room for bridging? And I learn a lot about what their knee-jerk reaction looks like, what their analysis looks like, what their fears look like." And to him, that added layer of knowledge is a rebuke to the other forces in Israeli society that he feels are trying to define the "enemy" for him. "You want to tell me that these people are stupid? Well, they're not," says Rabinowitz. "You want to tell me that these people want to live in a dictatorship? Well, they don't. You want to tell me that they can't be Muslim and tolerant and friendly at the same time? Well, it's wrong. You want to tell me that they hate me just because they're Muslim and I'm Jewish? Well that's wrong, too. And they prove that to me every day. And I get this amazing opportunity to dispel every demonic myth and every stupid stereotype that I could have ever thought of, and that's amazingly liberating."

Of course, as the article admits, those who are blogging in the Arab world, and especially those doing so in English or French, are the elite and make up a very small percentage of the "Arab Street." But the fact remains that they are making a difference, and just because they're the elite, doesn't mean that they aren't also the vanguard of a larger movement towards homegrown democratic reform in the Arab world.

Thursday, January 18, 2007

Arming the Iraqi government

Via Kevin, the Post reports that what Al-Maliki really wants is heavier arms for government forces.

A few months ago, I was talking with an Iraqi friend of mine in the government about American pressure on Al Maliki to rein in Sadr's Mahdi Army. We were discussing how it might be political suicide for him to do so, since he depended on Sadr for some of his political support and how it would probably be physical suicide, since government troops don't have the firepower to take on the militias. My friend kept stressing to me that "the Americans won't give us the weapons to get rid of these guys!"

Of course, concerns about American weapons ending up in the wrong hands are warranted, particularly since so much of the Ministry of the Interior has been infiltrated by the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigrade. But if the Iraqi government is ever going to be able to beat the militias politically, the state will have to have a monopoly on military force. And for this to be possible, it'll need additional firepower.

Bush's speech

The Times published a point-by-point analysis of Bush's speech. It's definitely worth a read, since not many people seem to have analyzed the actual speech, mostly because they knew the overall lines of what Bush was going to announce weeks in advance.

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Secret unofficial peace deal between Syria and Israel

I've been saying for a while that one of the best things America could do in the Middle East is broker a deal between Syria and Israel by negotiating a settlement for the Golan Heights. This would cut off the ground link between Iran and Hezbollah, help secure the Iraq-Syria border, and perhaps put some pressure on the military branch of Hamas to fall more in line with the political branch (although I'm not sure where Meshaal would go if Syria expelled him).

Ha'aretz reported yesterday that there has been a secret session of private diplomacy between Syria and Israel. The plan is an exercise in creative thinking that would allow Syria the pride of getting the Golan Heights back but stop them from controlling the area's water sources or using the Heights militarily. The idea would be to create a natural park under Syrian sovereignty to which Israelis had access without a visa or Syrian approval.

The main points of the understandings are as follows:

An agreement of principles will be signed between the two countries, and following the fulfillment of all commitments, a peace agreement will be signed.

As part of the agreement on principles, Israel will withdraw from the Golan Heights to the lines of 4 June, 1967. The timetable for the withdrawal remained open: Syria demanded the pullout be carried out over a five-year period, while Israel asked for the withdrawal to be spread out over 15 years.

At the buffer zone, along Lake Kinneret, a park will be set up for joint use by Israelis and Syrians. The park will cover a significant portion of the Golan Heights. Israelis will be free to access the park and their presence will not be dependent on Syrian approval.

Israel will retain control over the use of the waters of the Jordan River and Lake Kinneret.

The border area will be demilitarized along a 1:4 ratio (in terms of territory) in Israel's favor.

According to the terms, Syria will also agree to end its support for Hezbollah and Hamas and will distance itself from Iran.

This is a good start, and I'm glad to see that there is some progress being made; however, I'm a little skeptical that Assad would accept such a deal, even if the Syrians were pressing to turn the private talks into official secret talks between Israeli and Syrian government members. An Iraqi diplomat friend of mine once told me that Bashar's father Hafez explained why he couldn't accept taking the Golan Heights and letting the Israeli's keep the water rights: Sadat had been killed for less.

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Little mosque on the prairie

The CBC has had a great idea with their new television sitcom Little Mosque on the Prairie. It's about a small Muslim community in, of all place, Saskatchewan that's trying to start a mosque in a local church's parish hall.

I haven't watched it yet, but from what I've read, this is exactly the sort of show that should be played in the States, where Muslim actors generally only get to portray terrorists and bad guys.

It looks like it's on bittorrent and can be downloaded here.


UPDATE: I've just watched the show, and it's pretty cute. It's really similar to other sitcoms on television, except that there are Muslims, Muslims who are normal people. And to my mind, that is what makes this show so important.

A Franco-British merger?

In one of the most surprising things I've read in a while, the Guardian reported that PM Guy Mollet went to London in 1956 to discuss joining the United Kingdom with PM Anthony Eden, exploring the possibility of the Queen becoming the titular head of state in France. According to the Guardian,

When Mr Mollet's request for a union failed, he quickly responded with another plan - that France be allowed to join the British commonwealth - which was said to have been met more warmly by Sir Anthony.

A document dated September 28 1956 records a conversation between the prime minister and his cabinet secretary, Sir Norman Brook, saying:

"The PM told him [Brook] on the telephone that he thought, in the light of his talks with the French:

  • That we should give immediate consideration to France joining the Commonwealth
  • That Monsieur Mollet had not thought there need be difficulty over France accepting the headship of her Majesty
  • That the French would welcome a common citizenship arrangement on the Irish basis."

  • Even if such unions are discussed to this day, between Sudan and Egypt and between Somalia and Ethiopia, for example, it seems unthinkable for this to happen as late as the 1950s between two major players like the UK and France. This news is kind of revelation must be a little embarrassing for France, and it just seems really, really odd considering French aversion to the idea of monarchy, not to mention Gallic pride.

    A British friend of mine in Paris sent this article to his French girlfriend, who responded this way:

    The UK was a "staunch French ally during the two world wars"? As far as I know the UK didn't want to back de Gaulle and sided with the US. And they sank all the French military boats stationed in the Channel so that the Germans wouldn't capture them and invade England - and they didn't even bother to warn the French about their upcoming air-raid on French boats so hundreds of Frenchmen died under British fire.

    Nope, really, not much of a staunch ally as far as this side of the sea is concerned...

    [Mollet] would have been hanged if he'd even mentioned this in France.

    Writing history in Lebanon

    About a week ago, the Times had an interesting article about Lebanon's truncated history:

    History classes across the globe serve two purposes — they educate the young and they shape national identity. They also often sidestep controversy to avoid offense.

    It is the same here as elsewhere, but the controversy being avoided is the vicious, 15-year civil war that started in 1975 in which Lebanon kidnapped, killed and bombed itself nearly into oblivion.

    The bizarre results are evident in any schoolbook here -- history seems simply to come to a halt in the early 1970s, Lebanon's heyday. With sectarian tensions once again boiling here, some educators fear that the failure to forge a common version of the events is dooming the young to repeat the past, with most of them learning contemporary history from their families, on the streets or from political leaders who may have their own agendas.

    "America used the school to create a melting pot; we used it to reinforce sectarian identity at the expense of the national identity," said Nemer Frayha, the former director of the Education Center for Research and Development, a research organization that develops Lebanon’s curriculum. "From the start, I am forming the student as a sectarian person, not as a citizen. And what's worse is that the people who are encouraging this are the intellectuals themselves."

    There is a serious lack of knowledge about the civil war in Lebanon. I've seen firsthand that many of the youth were abroad, because their families fled the war, and others that stayed have only the fragmented and fearful memories of a child who did not understand what was happening. So to the extent that the youth learn about the war at all, it's usually through sectarian lenses, a distrust or hatred of other Lebanese groups.

    And even ancient history can be very touchy in Lebanon. As the article mentions, Muslims tend to focus more on the Arab history of the country whereas Christians tend to relate more with the Phoenician period, so much so that many Christians I know don't consider themselves Arab. (Interestingly enough, the roots of secular pan-Arabism in Lebanon and Syria are mostly Christian in general and Greek Orthodox in particular.)

    According to Milhem Chaoul, a professor of sociology at the University of Lebanon, "Typically the victor writes the history. The problem with the civil war was that nobody won, and you still can't write its history because we are still not at peace."

    Wednesday, January 10, 2007

    So much for diplomacy


    The US has changed its policy of working through Somali warlords (previously) and the Ethiopian military (recently) by bombing a Somali fishing village near the border with Kenya where Somali Islamists were allegedly hiding, possibly with some local Al-Qaeda operatives.

    American officials said terrorists from Al Qaeda had been the target of the strike, which they said had killed about a dozen people. But the officials acknowledged that the identities of the victims were still unknown.

    Several residents of the area, in the southern part of the country, said dozens of civilians had been killed, and news of the attack immediately set off new waves of anti-American anger in Mogadishu, Somalia’s battle-scarred capital, where the United States has a complicated legacy.

    As was to be expected, this seems to have gone over like a lead balloon in Somalia, particularly as there have been reports that many civilian farmers and their livestock were killed in the bombing.

    Monday, January 08, 2007

    On Iraq and the Hippocratic oath

    James Traub's post over at TPM Cafe's America Abroad reflects some of the misgivings and ambivalence that I've felt about a full American withdrawal from Iraq.

    At least seven months ago the atrocities in Haditha helped me decide that the US was doing more harm than good in Iraq. I read about how Americans had become just one more militia in Iraq, killing Iraqis.

    The choice was a hard one. And I still had my doubts, despite the convincing prose of Luttwak's decision (two years ago) that we should leave:

    American forces continue to suffer casualties in combat against factions that should be confronting one another instead. Perhaps what the new Iraqi state needs in order to achieve stability is precisely a certain amount of civil war. Preventing it may impede a natural and perhaps very desirable political evolution. Americans would not today be happier if European Great Powers, horrified by the carnage of our own Civil War, had enforced an armistice between North and South that might endure still between two feeble states.

    Because even if Iraq needed to get a civil war out of its system, or dissolve itself in the process, who's to say that it would ever end? The war between the North and South of Sudan lasted for decades; sectarian bloodshed in Lebanon, where I live part of the year, was curbed only with Syria's heavy-handed and often violent intervention. Or we could look at Somalia.

    At the end of the day though, thinking that we could "fix Iraq" is what got America into this mess in the first place. Taking a long hard look at how things currently stand in Iraq and how little we know about the country, it would be hard to convince me that we can do, above all, anything but harm there.

    This also brings up the question of who should decide whether we stay or go. Should it be the American people? Should it be the American government? What about the Iraqis? Should it be the government or the people in that country?

    I'm inclined to believe that it ought to be the Iraqis who get to decide. They've had so little say in their lives for the last several decades, it's about time they got to make a decision about something. To my mind, a national referendum is in order. Let Iraqis stain their fingers purple and show us the door. This would permit the US to leave with a little more decorum (or less shame, you could say) while allowing the Iraqis the dignity of having a say in their country's fate, however terrible it may turn out to be.

    New Mexico governor meets with Sudanese president

    In an unexpected (by me) trip, New Mexico governor, Bill Richards, went to Khartoum to try to get Khartoum to allow UN peacekeepers in Darfur. He met separately with President Omar al-Bashir, former rebel leader Minni Minnowi and foreign minister Lam Akol:

    Richardson told an Associated Press reporter traveling with him that he and al-Bashir discussed the U.N. peacekeeping force, a cease-fire, protection for humanitarian groups working in the region, increasing sexual violence against refugees and a potential conference with rebel leaders.

    ...He discussed the [Abuja accord] later with Minni Minnawi, the leader of the rebel Sudan Liberation Movement that signed the agreement and subsequently became a presidential assistant. Minnawi expressed disappointment that the government has not yet disarmed the militias and told Richardson if the al-Bashir's government does not honor its commitments, there will be regime change.

    ...In Khartoum, Richardson also met with Sudanese foreign minister Lam Akol, bringing along humanitarian workers that included one representative of the Save Darfur Coalition. The coalition organized the trip and has been instrumental in bringing attention to the crisis and criticism on al-Bashir's government.

    According to the AP, this trip was meant to draw attention to Richardson's "extensive foreign policy background, including his tenure as U.S. envoy to the United Nations" in preparation for his "likely White House bid."

    Given how apathetic Americans are about the genocide in Darfur, I can't imagine that this sort of a trip could do much besides show voters that he's got enough clout to meet with a head of state (although it's a lot less controversial than a similar trip to Iraq, Iran or North Korea). In any case, if it's an attempt to garner future votes, it's certainly made me sympathetic to his platform.

    Let's hope he has some success in Sudan.

    A Middle East Summit


    Here's a great piece of Op-Art to be published in the San Francisco Chronicle. It was done by a"Kossack" over at the Daily Kos:

    "Kill me in Iraq."

    This segment on Al Jazeera (translated and edited by MEMRI), is more than a little disconcerting. The segment pits Sadeq al-Musawi, a Shia journalist, against Mishan al-Jabouri, the Sunni owner of the Iraqi satellite network, Al Zawraa. I'm not really exaggerating when I use the word "pit," because it's almost as though two cocks had been set in a hole to kill each other.

    Jabouri tells Musawi that he "should choose your words carefully, or else I will do things to you that you will not imagine, you Persian liar ... you are an Iranian shoe!"

    Musawi responds with, "Your father killed Kurds!"

    Finally, Jabouri advises Musawi against speaking ill of Saddam Hussein, to which Musawi tells him not to advise anything, but rather, "kill me in Iraq, send your militia to kill me."

    I've been reading Vali Nasr's The Shia Revival, and he writes a lot about how the Sunni regard the Shia as not being proper Arabs, because Shiism has had much influence from Iran and since some Shia in Lebanon and Iraq are the descendants of Persians who migrated centuries ago. Jabouri literally calls Musawi and Iranian (he says both Ajami and Irani), and brings some paperwork (which he proceeds to throw at his interlocutor) out to support his claims. And in the end, who knows whether Musawi is Iranian or not. Maybe he is, or maybe his family fled Iraq and he was born in Iran to Iraqi parents.

    But that's not really important. The important point is the internecine venom. Jabouri tells the Jazeera moderator, "The people who executed Saddam Hussein are the same people who killed Umar, the same people who killed Abu Bakr." Are these Iraqi militants? western viewers might ask. No, Umar and Abu Bakr are the first and second Caliphs, those who succeeded Mohammad in the 7th century. Umar ibn al-Khattab was poisoned by a Persian slave, and Abu Bakr either died of a cold or from being poisoned a year earlier, depending on your source. (The partisans of Ali, the Shi'at 'Ali, believed that Ali should have been Caliph instead of Abu Bakr and Umar.)

    I find it disconcerting that the Iraqi political discourse still hinges on the desert politics of Medina and Mecca nearly 1400 years ago. And seeing the historical complexities of the situation in Iraq, I find it even more disconcerting that most of the people who are paid to understand these historico-religious contexts don't even know the difference between the Sunni and the Shia.

    DiggIt and Del.icio.us and Reddit links...

    I've added links next to the comment section for DiggIt and Del.icio.us and Reddit in case anyone wants to add any of my posts to either of those sites...

    Just another Iraqi tribe?


    I was reading a back and forth in the London Review debating the source of anti-Semitic remarks that had been attributed (falsely it seems) to Hassan Nasrallah, all of which came in response to Charles Glass's recent piece about Hezbollah learning from its mistakes. This led me to go check out some of his previous writings, since he seems to be an interesting character who studied at the American University in Beirut and was kidnapped by Hezbollah in the 1987.

    While reading his piece in The Nation, From Beirut to Damascus, I came across this: "Kamal Salibi, Lebanon's historian laureate at the American University of Beirut, used to tell me the Palestinians had made the mistake of becoming another Lebanese tribe."

    And this started me to thinking, has the US become just another Iraqi tribe?

    Using Diplomacy in Somalia


    There's a very good op-ed piece on Somalia in today's Times, A fleeting victory in Somalia. Jonathan Stevenson, at the United States Naval War College, argues, rightly in my opinion, that a robust round of diplomacy is needed to work out Somalia's problems, namely, a power-sharing plan with the Islamic Courts and the transitional government, an engagement of clan leaders and an agreement on the place of Islamic law in Somalia. He adds that the US should join efforts by the EU and Kenya to help broker an agreement, similar to the one that finally ended the war between Southern Sudan and Khartoum:

    The temptation in Washington will be to keep its distance and rely on Ethiopia, the European Union and Kenya for as long as possible. This attitude is myopic. Neither the American public nor the world believe that the Bush administration?s predominantly military approach to counterterrorism is working. Relying primarily on Ethiopian troops to tamp down Somali Islamism would represent a continuation of that flawed model, and of the corresponding risk of fueling the jihad.

    The United States' full participation in a diplomatic process in the Horn of Africa, on the other hand, would constitute a relatively low-cost way of signaling a new American approach to Islam and a re-engagement in sub-Saharan Africa, which has largely been left out of Washington's post-9/11 calculus. A result could be a small political victory in the Muslim world that would deprive Osama bin Laden and his followers of a new grievance rather than supplying them with one.

    He points out that any prolonged presence of Ethiopian troops could be very dangerous. Many Somalis are afraid of Ethiopian designs on the country and disconcerted by the recent comments of the transitional Interior Minister Hussein Mohammad Aideed (whose father was made famous by the "Black Hawk Down" incident) that Somalia and Ethiopia "should unite, just like the Europeans. One money. One passport. One security."

    The problem, then, lies in a tendency to rely on military force instead of negotiation. I tend to believe that it was a bad idea for the Ethiopians to invade; a better idea would have been negotiations in Yemen or Kenya to agree on a power-sharing deal, because even if the thought of another Islamic regime bothers me, the Courts did manage to bring some sort of stability and decrease the violence in the areas they controlled. Now, there is a risk that continued Ethiopian presence will rub Somalis the wrong way and that the spotty order of the Islamists will revert back to the reign of warlords and inter-clan violence.

    A local radio journalist summed up the problems of an Ethiopian presence in the country, as reported by the Times:

    With Somalia's longtime fears that Ethiopia might swallow it, the sooner [the Ethiopians' withdrawal] happens, the better. On Saturday, Nasteh Dahir Farah, a reporter for a Kismayo radio station, visited the town's airport with three foreign journalists. The foreigners were allowed in. Mr. Farah was not. He was shooed away by Ethiopian soldiers at the gate and told never to come back.

    "This is my country, not theirs," he said. "If I didn't have a job," Mr. Farah muttered, straightening himself up and smoothing the shirt where he had been poked in the chest, "I'd join the resistance."

    A little humiliation, it seems, goes a long, long way.

    And indeed it does, as we have seen throughout the Muslim world, but especially in Iraq.

    So while it seems imperative for negotiations to begin in good faith between the transitional government, the clan leaders and the Islamic Courts, I've got a sneaking suspicion that the transitional government has let their Ethiopian-backed success go to their head. And remarks by the transitional defense minister do little to reassure me:

    The big man in Kismayo is Barre Aadan Shire, the transitional government's defense minister and a former warlord, whose strong jaw, natty goatee and bald head lend him an uncanny resemblance to Lenin. He says many people in Kismayo have asked him to reach out to the Islamists, but he does not want to. The last of the Islamist fighters have retreated to the Kenya border, about 150 miles away.

    "If we were going to compromise," Mr. Shire said, "why go to war?"

    Saturday, January 06, 2007

    Disney hate radio and advertising


    Via Juan Cole, Daily Kos has the story of a blogger who contacted a talk radio station's advertisers to tell them that their products were being associated with and read by the same voices that call for torturing people and murdering Muslims. He sent advertisers polite informative letters and was subsequently slapped with a cease and desist letter by Disney's lawyers because he was providing audio recordings of the broadcasts to allow advertisers to hear the comments for themselves. It seems that this hit a nerve with Disney, particularly as Visa seems to have pulled their ads from the shows in question.

    Here's a copy of the letter he sent AT&T:


    To: Wendy Clark, VP-advertising, AT&T

    Dear Ms. Clark:

    Thanks to radio hosts from KSFO your brand is being associated with torturing and killing people. Would your marketing people be happy to hear your commercial ran after Lee Rogers said this about a black man in Lincoln, Nebraska?

    "Now you start with the Sear's Diehard the battery cables connected to his testi*les and you entertain him with that for awhile and then you blow his bleeping head off. " (Audio link)

    You should know the person calling for the execution and torture of the black man in that clip READS THE AT&T commercials on the air. Right now on KSFO Lee Rogers is THE VOICE of AT&T to the SF Bay area. (Audio Link)

    Sadly, calling for the death and torture of individuals and groups of people is a regular occurrence on KSFO 560 AM, owned by ABC Radio Disney.

    Another example: immediately after the 6 am ABC Radio news on October 27th:

    Lee Rogers: I say they catch the person, tie 'em to a post and burn 'em. Set 'em on fire.

    Officer Vic: Yeah.

    Lee Rogers: Let 'em know what it feels like.

    Melanie Morgan: Hog tie 'em first. That would be good.

    Next, Lee Rogers talks about a protester at a Cindy Sheehan event:

    "Whoever did that should have been stomped to death right there. Just stomp their bleeping guts out." (Audio link).

    Within three minutes they called for someone to be burned alive and a protester to be stomped to death. If you dismissed the first clip as a "joke", note that in this clip they were clearly not joking:

    Melanie Morgan famously called for Bill Keller of the New York Times (and nine editors from other papers) to be hanged.  (Audio link)

    On Nov. 14th  Melanie Morgan said this about Nancy Pelosi:

    "We've got a bulls-eye painted on her big laughing eyes." (Audio link)

    Also note that Morgan reads the Cingular Wireless commercials on KSFO.

    Of course political speech is protected, but I believe the FBI and the FCC frown on targeting elected officials for death or inciting violence toward leaders of any political party.

    Because of how ads are purchased, your ad placement agency probably didn't know that Tom Brenner (the "comic relief" called Officer Vic) regularly mocks advertiser's products.  Listen as he:


  • calls Chevrolet's product "shi**y" (audio link)
  • suggests an anti-virus product is part of a protection racket (audio link)
  • pretends a cold pill is really a suppository (audio link)

    The odds are your product will be mocked. If they don't respect a big client like Chevrolet, will they respect your brand?

    And it's not simply calls for killing specific people or mocking products, the radio hosts at KSFO proudly talk about their anti-Muslim views. Based on my research, your business has rules about discrimination against people of other religions, so what message are you sending when your employees or customers hear your advertisements right after Brian Sussman demands of a caller:

    "Say Allah is a Wh*re!" (audio link)

    Or when Lee Rogers says,

    "Indonesia is really just another enemy Muslim nation. ... You keep screwing around with stuff like this we are going to kill a bunch of you. Millions of you. "   (audio link)

    Maybe you haven't heard any complaints. Would KSFO management let you know about complaints?  Doubtful. Morgan's husband, Jack Swanson, is KSFO's operations manager. The president of KSFO, Mickey Luckoff, started the station format and has a history of defending hosts like Michael Savage until he was forced to fire him.

    I understand you can't listen to all the shows you advertise on - no one can. You rely on the accurate representation of the sales reps and the show description. But you don't need to take my word, listen to the programs. You probably won't have to listen long to hear something that offends or disgusts you.  If you wish to hear the complete context on any clip or the audio during a date your ad ran contact me I have an educational archive of audio clips, I've listed a few below.

    I want to emphasize that if you withdrawal your ads you aren't limiting their free speech, just removing your paid support of it. Some other company without the values you describe on the AT&T website can support them. You can choose to advertise elsewhere. This is really about YOU. Do YOU want to be associated with these comments? Do you want your company and brand to be associated with these comments?

    I urge you to discontinue advertising on KSFO during the shows hosted by Melanie Morgan, Lee Rogers, Tom Brenner and Brian Sussman.

    If you want to contact KSFO here is a link to their website. If you wish to express your displeasure to their parent company contact Zenia Mucha, Senior Vice President, Corporate Communications, The Walt Disney Company PHONE: (818) 560-5300 CA, (212) 456-7255 NY or email Heather Rim, Vice President, Communications, ABC, Inc.  heather.rim@abc.com.

    Sincerely,

    P.S.  I would appreciate hearing your final determination in this matter.

  • Read the Daily Kos write up for the full story.

    Friday, January 05, 2007

    Ordinary Iraqis and extraordinary rendition


    The New York Review has articles about torture and extraordinary rendition (subscription only) and ordinary Iraqis. The latter reviews Anthony Shadid's book Night Draws Near, which was recommended to me by an Iraqi diplomat friend of mine. I recently met Shadid in Beirut, and he's an extremely nice guy, and judging from his recent coverage of Lebanon, I can understand why his book would be really good. (Unfortunately, I haven't picked it up yet.)

    The piece on extraordinary rendition helpfully brings together the stories of some of the more publicized victims of the Bush Administration's policy as well as some of the reporting done by CIA plane watchers who helped uncover the story of the "black sites" in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Under review are the Canadian Government's report on the rendition to Syria and subsequent torture of Canadian citizen Maher Arar and Steven Grey's Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program:

    Edward Walker Jr., a career diplomat, was the US ambassador in Egypt between 1994 and 1997 when some of the first renditions took place. According to Walker, there were only a few occasions when the procedure was used, and they concerned men who were wanted by the Egyptians for terrorist acts allegedly committed there. Walker thought it was a good policy. "They were bad guys, and they were set on causing harm. And you know it's not a perfect world," he told Grey. But he was under no illusions about how they would be treated. "I cannot believe that anybody that was involved in this," he said, "didn't in his heart of hearts, if he was halfway intelligent, think that they were getting abusive interrogation techniques that were tantamount to torture."

    Grey asked Walker: "When Condoleezza Rice and the President now stand in front of people and say we don't send people to countries where they torture, are they telling the truth?"

    Walker replied: "No, they're not telling the truth."

    A former CIA officer was more colorful. "Coming out and saying 'we don't do torture' is as bad as President Clinton saying, 'I didn't have sex with that woman.'" he told Grey. "It's a bare-faced lie. Of course we do torture. Imagine putting President Bush's head under water and telling him to raise his hand when he thinks he's being tortured. Give him the water-board treatment, and he'd be raising his hand straightaway."

    Wednesday, January 03, 2007

    Media coverage of Iraq


    Al Jazeera has an interesting article about the Western media coverage of Iraq, and Iraq's sectarian makeup in particular.

    Among the complaints about Western coverage is the claim by Tariq al-Hashimi, Iraq's Sunni Arab vice-president, that the media overestimates the number of Shia in the country:

    Western media often refer to Iraq as being "overwhelmingly Shia", or use other phrases to imply a large Shia majority. This, [al-Hashimi] says, is wrong -- and it has resulted in over-representation of Shia parties in the Iraqi government at the expense of Sunni Arabs.

    Al-Hashimi said: "The false allegations promoted by Western media have resulted in an [inappropriate] political process, and everyone is paying the price for its wrong foundations."

    Where the figures came from to back up assertions of a large Shia majority are unclear: no Iraqi census in modern history has ever included sect.

    Sources such as Encyclopaedia Britannica put the Shia population in Iraq at 52 per cent of the total in 2001. However, figures circulated by the US military, which invaded Iraq in 2003, put the figure at 60 per cent.

    The CIA's World Factbook puts the Shia at 60 to 65 percent of the Iraqi population.

    Other complaints include the characterization of the insurgency as essentially Sunni and the assertion that the Baath party was a Sunni-run apparatus that persecuted the Shia. According to the current Baath spokesperson,

    "Actually, sect was never an issue in Iraq. I am a Shia and I have been a senior Baath official ... No Baath party official -- no Iraqi official -- ever asked me about my sect.

    "When the US army occupied Iraq they issued a list of 55 wanted top Iraqi officials, starting with President Saddam Hussein; half of those senior officials were Shia.

    "The Committee of Debaathification issued a list of 100,000 senior Iraqi Baathists who would not be allowed to enjoy governmental posts, 66,000 of them were Shia - so how is the Baath party a Sunni party?

    ...Abu Muhammad voiced resentment at the the term "Sunni insurgency", saying that Iraqis from different backgrounds are fighting the foreign presence in Iraq.

    "This term plays down Iraqi nationalism," he said. "I repeat, I am a Shia and I am resisting the US forces in Iraq, and we know for sure that resistance fighters from all background are fighting. Why do the Western agencies insist that only Sunni are fighting? Big question mark, I think."


    On the other hand, there are those who disagree:

    However, Karim Bader, an independent Iraqi politician, said that Western media had done a decent job on reporting what had occurred under Saddam's rule.

    He said one had to look only at the senior army commanders and intelligence officers in Saddam's day, all of whom he said were Sunni. Or to look at the sizes of houses in Shia suburbs - small and overcrowded - or in Sunni areas, where houses were far larger but with fewer occupants.

    Bader said: "I think there was sectarianism under Saddam and the Western media reflected that, but the question is, should we hold the Sunni sect responsible for that? I think Iraqis must be careful in answering this question."

    Updates


    A lot has happened while I was away. I woke up the other morning to hear that Saddam Hussein had been executed; and on the same day while on my way back to Spain, I heard that the airport had been bombed by ETA, the militant Basque separatist group; then I saw that Bangkok had been rocked by bomb blasts on new year's eve. Besides that, Addis Ababa sent troops to Somalia to rout the Islamic Courts.

    First things first: I'm generally against the death penalty, but I might be convinced to accept it for those guilty of genocide or other crimes against humanity. However, if Iraq was trying to show the world that it has a modern functioning government, this execution was a poor showing for al-Malaki's goverment: it was decidedly neither solemn nor professional and was carried out on the first day of Eid.

    As for the ETA bombing, I saw the results first hand, because I left Madrid from the terminal that was bombed the next day. The bomb did some pretty serious damage and has probably left two people dead. It looks like this is going to cripple if not kill the peace talks between ETA and the Spanish Government. They haven't seemed to explain why they broke a cease-fire. Although I hadn't been following the talks closely at all, I remember that there was an Irish priest that had been called in to mediate, and I had the impression that progress was being made.

    In Thailand, my first fear was that it was Muslims from the south, but it seems that the bombings are being blamed on supporters of ousted PM Shinawatra.

    In Somalia, I've been afraid of an Ethiopian campaign for a while, since such explicit attacks might lead to an Eritrean invasion on behalf of its Islamist allies, rekindling the war between those two countries and making Somalia a battleground for a regional war. However, the Eritreans seem to have stayed out of it, and the Islamic Courts were routed surprisingly fast. However, as soon as the Courts moved out of Mogadishu, looting was rampant and order was on short supply in Somalia's capital. Furthermore, I wouldn't be surprised to see a guerrilla resurgence of Islamist forces in Somalia, which brings me to the point that a negotiated settlement that brought the Islamic Courts into the government would be the best solution. The last thing Somalia needs is for Eritrea and Ethiopia to have a little war on Somali territory. In some good news, Kenya has called for a ceasefire and a brokered peace in Somalia, which may or may not be fueled by their fear of more Somali refugees.

    Wednesday, January 31, 2007

    Our responsibility to Iraqi refugees

    I've been hearing a bit about Iraqi refugees lately, and when I was in Amman, Jordan last year, they were impossible to ignore. And even if they're less visible in Syria, it seems that there are also many Iraqis who have taken refuge in Damascus as well. The numbers are alarming: 1.8 million internally displaced Iraqis and 2 million who have sought refuge abroad.

    So what has the US's response been? To take in fewer than 500 Iraqis and to set up a program that allows Afghans and Iraqis who have worked with the American military to immigrate to the US. The maximum limit of people accepted into this program each year: 50 people.

    There has not been enough media coverage of this problem, which is why I am glad to see that the Times has an op-ed today about our responsibility to Iraqi refugees:

    To calculate the price that Iraqis have paid for the American misadventure in their country, you have to deal in big, round, horrifying numbers. Civilians killed last year: 34,000. Driven from their homes within Iraq: 1.8 million. Fled to other countries: an additional 2 million, and growing. The number of Iraqis who have found refuge in the United States is easier to pin down. This country has admitted a grand total of 466 Iraqi refugees since 2003.

    However President Bush tries to manage the endgame of his dismal war, America has an obligation to the Iraqis whose lives it has upended. It owes a particular debt to those who have faced incredible dangers working with American forces as interpreters, guides and contractors. These allies -- and their families -- have become a haunted and hunted group, branded as traitors and targeted for kidnapping and assassination by insurgents and militias.

    By any measure, the Bush administration is failing them. The current price tag for the war is $8 billion a month, yet the State Department plans to spend only $20 million in the coming fiscal year to help shelter Iraqi refugees overseas and to resettle them here. A special visa program to resettle Iraqi and Afghan military translators has been capped at 50 people a year and has a six-year waiting list.

    NPR has had some good coverage of the refugee issue, as well as on congressional hearings on ameliorating the situation and the individual faces of the crisis, as seen in the story of an Iraqi translator forced to flee after working with the Americans. NPR also has a segment on the differences between the policies toward Vietnamese and Iraqi refugees.

    According to an interview with Ropert Green, UN High Commission for Refugees representative in Jordan (most UN Iraq offices are in Amman since Iraq is too dangerous), based on an agreement with the Government of Jordan, they are "restricted in how we can actually apply that refugee title" to Iraqis. The Jordanian agreement requires UNHCR to find a third country of resettlement willing to host each Iraqi who has been labeled a refugee, which is why only 600 out of the over 700,000 refugees in Iraq have been officially designated as refugees.

    Tuesday, January 30, 2007

    Troop surge in Afghanistan

    The Onion has the scoop on the surge deployment of the 325th Marine Expeditionary Brigade in Kandahar province:

    In an effort to display his administration's willingness to fight on all fronts in the War on Terror, President Bush said at a press conference Monday that American ground forces in Afghanistan will be aided by the immediate deployment of Marine Pfc. Tim Ekenberg of Camp Lejeune, NC.

    ...The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, 2nd Lt. Jon Pinard, said that Ekenberg will be a valuable addition to his existing military assets.

    "Our Marines are the best-equipped and best-trained in the world, and I have it on good authority that Tim is an especially well-trained Marine," Pinard said. "We have requested that he receive full logistical support while deployed in this theater. We've been told that his body armor will be arriving within six months of his reporting for duty, budget permitting."

    Friday, January 26, 2007

    Escalation with Iran

    According to Reuters, Bush has authorized the killing or capturing of Iranians in Iraq. This goes for intelligence agents or members of the Revolutionary Guard, but not, apparently, for diplomats or civilians.

    First of all, this seems like an obvious escalation in the conflict between Iran and the US, and I think if something comes of it, then Washington will see that Tehran can be very, very nasty: look for the capture of American contractors or soldiers as a reaction. Furthermore, the problem with the distinction between civilians/diplomats and intelligence/revolutionary guards is that it is standard practice for countries to give intelligence officers diplomatic or civilian cover. For example, many CIA operations are run from American embassies abroad.

    Mark my words: The first Iranian that gets killed in Iraq will mean bad news for everyone. I can't help but wonder if this is not just a tactic by the Bush administration to goad Tehran into doing something that will give the US an "excuse" to bomb Iranian nuclear plants.

    Wednesday, January 24, 2007

    Obama and his madrasa

    The Moon and Murdoch media outlets have been in a frenzy about claims that Barack Obama went to a "madrasa" when he was a child in Indonesia. CNN investigated the claim and showed it to be another case of attempted character assassination. The latter says that Obama did not got to a madrasa, which is both true and false.

    You see, in Arabic, the word madrasa (مدرسة) comes from the three-letter root "d-r-s" (درس) which means to study. In Arabic, most words are derived from adding prefixes, infixes and suffixes to an original three-letter root verb. For example, when you add the prefix "ma," to a root verb, you get the place where that verb is done. In the case of "d-r-s," this gets you the place where one studies, or madrasa.

    In Arabic, any school from elementary to high school is called a madrasa. Indonesia is a predominantly Muslim country, which means that it has a lot of Arabic loan words. Madrasa is one of them.

    The confusion arises because of the media's use of the word madrasa to describe a madrasat al-ulum, which is a religious seminary, the likes of which we've heard about so much in coverage of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

    So did Obama go to a madrasa? If by that you mean elementary or high school, then yes, of course he did. If by that you mean a deobandi or wahhabi religious seminary, then no. And of course, the latter charge is patently absurd, seeing as how he was six when he lived in Indonesia.

    This stems from the media's ignorance of all things Arab or Muslim. So we get people throwing around words like shaheed, madrasa and jihad in order to give their writing a veneer of credibility, when in most cases, these words are used incorrectly. Likewise, I often laugh when I see American writers, "haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones," throw in French phrases to make themselves seem more intellectual or better read.

    All this makes me think of George Orwell's little essay, Politics and the English Language. I think more people ought to follow his simple advice on this subject: "Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent."

    UPDATE: According to Chad in comments, in Indonesia, only a religious school, like a Catholic school in the US, is called a madrasa in Indonesia. He says that some are normal public-funded schools, like the public school Obama went to, whereas others are private. I'll double check this with an Indonesian colleague, in any case.

    Temperature rises in Lebanon

    The opposition led by Hezbollah and General Aoun held a general strike yesterday that included blocking the road to the airport and degenerated into street clashes between pro-government and opposition supporters. What this means is that Sunni and Shia groups have been clashing, as well as Christian supporters of Geagea (pro-government) and Aoun (opposition):

    Violent clashes erupted across the country, with two areas witnessing the return of old "fault lines" from the 1975-1990 Lebanese Civil War.

    The Shiite supporters of Hizbullah and Amal clashed with the Future Movement's Sunni supporters in the predominantly Sunni area of Corniche al-Mazraa. Stone-throwing and fistfights injured dozens of people and wreaked damage on cars and private property.

    At the same time, supporters of Christian opposition leader Michel Aoun clashed with followers of Lebanese Forces chief Samir Geagea in several predominantly Christian areas, in fights recalling the leaders' bitter rivalry in the late 1980s.

    Lebanese officials were quoted as warning that the Aoun-Geagea struggle may turn into "a war of elimination."

    This is obviously bad news for Lebanon, and I'm surprised that it's taking so long to come up with a compromise package deal that would get the government up and running again as national unity government. Of course there are a lot of things to be settled, including the presidency, expanding the cabinet, the Hariri tribunal and the Paris III economic deal, but I don't think that these are unbridgeable gaps.

    Hezbollah has said that yesterday was a taste of what it's capable of, and I don't think anyone doubts their resolve or power.

    Washington opposition to peace between Israel and Syria?

    The Times has an op-ed today by Michael Oren, the Israeli author of a new book on American involvement in the Middle East, about the possibility of an peace between Israel and Syria.

    I mentioned these secret talks earlier and maintain that the smartest move the US could make would be to broker a settlement between Syria and Israel (but not at the expense of Lebanon). Oren seems to think, however, that the US is against these talks and that a peace between Syria and Israel would be opposed by Washington:

    The last thing Washington wants is a Syrian-Israeli treaty that would transform Mr. Assad from pariah to peacemaker and lend him greater latitude in promoting terrorism and quashing Lebanon’s freedom. Some Israeli officials, by contrast, see substantive benefits in ending their nation's 60-year conflict with Syria. An accord would invariably provide for the cessation of Syrian aid to Hamas and Hezbollah, which endanger Israel’s northern and southern sectors.

    More crucial still, by detaching Syria from Iran's orbit, Israel will be able to address the Iranian nuclear threat -- perhaps by military means -- without fear of retribution from Syrian ground forces and missiles. Forfeiting the Golan Heights, for these Israelis, seems to be a sufferable price to pay to avoid conventional and ballistic attacks across most of Israel’s borders.

    The potentially disparate positions of Israel and the United States on the question of peace with Syria could trigger a significant crisis between the two countries — the first of Mr. Bush's expressly pro-Israel presidency. And yet, facing opposition from a peace-minded Democratic Congress and from members of his own party who have advocated a more robust American role in Middle East mediation, Mr. Bush would have difficulty in withholding approval from a comprehensive Syrian-Israeli agreement.

    I tend to believe that the Assad regime wants first and foremost to stay in power and regain the Golan Heights. Yes, Damascus has been bruised by being thrown out of Lebanon, but it's entirely possible that Assad wanted to leave and is fighting an internal battle with the remnants of his father's security regime. The problem is that the decision-making process is so opaque in Damascus that it's very difficult to see who's making which calls.

    Tuesday, January 23, 2007

    More on Iran and the bomb

    The London Review of Books has another article by Norman Dombey, Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics at Sussex University, on Iran and the bomb. He looks at historical precedents, especially when Israel bombed the Iraqi Osirak reactor in 1981 while looking a little into the nuts and bolts of Iran's nuclear programs:

    The Arak reactor is certainly more suitable for producing plutonium than Osirak would have been: it can run on natural uranium fuel (0.7 per cent U-235, 99.3 per cent U-238), so the irradiated fuel rods would be good sources of plutonium. Israel and India obtained plutonium for their weapons programmes from this type of reactor. Arak is not due to be finished until 2009 at the earliest and it will need to run for at least one year before its fuel rods can be withdrawn and plutonium extracted. Nevertheless, when constructed, the reactor is expected to be inspected regularly by the IAEA, specifically in order to detect any diversion of nuclear material for potential weapon use.

    So, until or unless Iran withdraws from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the facilities at Natanz and Arak are safeguarded by the IAEA. Cameras are installed at Natanz (they function continuously), and there are monthly inspections. Similar arrangements will be made for Arak. Any enriched uranium or plutonium made will be under IAEA seal and will not be available for casting into the core of a weapon. There is no pressing nuclear threat from Iran at the moment; nor does there appear to be a tipping point in sight, beyond which it would be impossible to prevent the country from acquiring weapons.

    Sources close to the US and Israeli governments nevertheless insist that Iran represents a significant threat, which needs to be dealt with without delay. They assert that Iran has a clandestine programme in addition to its declared programme, as Iraq had. Israeli intelligence claims that Iran is close to having an implosion capability, which it will need to make compact weapons. Yet according to Seymour Hersh, writing in the New Yorker in November, the CIA recently completed an assessment of the evidence for the existence of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons programme. The report, which was based on satellite and other data, concluded that there was no evidence of a secret programme. Nor can it be assumed that Iran could make weapons small enough to fit into missiles without testing: the dud North Korean test shows that even with testing success cannot be taken for granted.

    A diplomatic solution is available, but the US and its EU allies do not want to consider it. It is the same deal I have mentioned in these pages before, whereby Iran would be allowed limited enrichment rights (say, up to 5 per cent enrichment), together with security guarantees and technical help. Richard Haass, who was director of policy planning at the State Department until 2003, believes that 'Iran should be offered an array of economic, political and security incentives', including 'a highly limited uranium-enrichment pilot programme so long as it accepts highly intrusive inspections'.

    Hrant Dink's last column

    The tragic assassination of Hrant Dink seems to be leading to somesmall but symbolic conciliation between Armenia and Turkey.

    Meanwhile, the BBC has an excerpt of Dink's last column about his trial for "insulting Turkishness," published the day he was shot dead in the streets of Istanbul:

    The memory of my computer is filled with angry, threatening lines sent by citizens from this sector...

    How real are these threats? To be honest, it is impossible for me to know for sure.

    What is truly threatening and unbearable for me is the psychological torture I place myself in. The question that really gets to me, is: 'What are these people thinking about me?'

    Unfortunately I am now better-known than before and I feel people looking at me, thinking: 'Oh, look, isn't he that Armenian guy?'

    I am just like a pigeon, equally obsessed by what goes-on on my left and right, front and back. My head is just as mobile and fast.

    ... Do you ministers know the price of making someone as scared as a pigeon?

    What my family and I have been through has not been easy. I have considered leaving this country at times...

    But leaving a 'boiling hell' to run to a 'heaven' is not for me. I wanted to turn this hell into heaven.

    We stayed in Turkey because that was what we wanted - and out of respect for the thousands of people here who supported me in my fight for democracy...

    I am now applying to the European Court of Human Rights. I don't know how long the case will take, but what I do know is that I will continue living here in Turkey until the case is finalised.

    And if the court rules in my favour I will be very happy and will never have to leave my country.

    2007 will probably be an even harder year for me. The court cases will continue, new ones will be initiated and God knows what kind of additional injustices I will have to face.

    I may see myself as frightened as a pigeon, but I know that in this country people do not touch pigeons.

    Pigeons can live in cities, even in crowds. A little scared perhaps, but free.

    Saturday, January 20, 2007

    A nuclear Middle East

    Ha'aretz has an interview with King Abdullah of Jordan. In it, he confirms that Jordan is thinking about starting a nuclear program:

    "[T]he rules have changed on the nuclear subject throughout the whole region. Where I think Jordan was saying, 'we'd like to have a nuclear-free zone in the area,' after this summer, everybody's going for nuclear programs.

    "The Egyptians are looking for a nuclear program. The GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] are looking at one, and we are actually looking at nuclear power for peaceful and energy purposes. We've been discussing it with the West.

    "I personally believe that any country that has a nuclear program should conform to international regulations and should have international regulatory bodies that check to make sure that any nuclear program moves in the right direction."

    In other words, you're saying that you expect Israel to join the NPT [non-proliferation treaty].

    "What's expected from us should be a standard across the board. We want to make sure this is used for energy. What we don't want is an arms race to come out of this. As we become part of an international body and its international regulations are accepted by all of us, then we become a united front."

    This sort of a nuclear proliferation in the Middle East was obvious but not inevitable. (I've brought it up before here and here.) As I've mentioned before, the Middle East should be a nuclear free zone, but since Pakistan, India and Israel all have nuclear weapons (and Iran is most likely doing it's best join the club), it seems inevitable that the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and now Jordan will follow suit.

    Such an explosive region is already problematic, but I find the prospect of all the players being armed with nuclear weapons more than a little disconcerting.

    Friday, January 19, 2007

    Current reading

    I finished reading Vali Nasr's The Shia Revival the other day. It was a pretty good introduction on Shia and Sunni relations in the region, and while most of the Lebanese, Iranian and Iraqi parts were review for me, the sections on Bahrain and Pakistan made for new and interesting reading. Nasr does a good job of explaining the specifics of situations in various countries and then using them to draw a bigger picture of the direction that Shia politics are heading in the Middle East.

    Otherwise, I've just stared reading Rashid Khalidi's Resurrecting Empire. I'm only about 40 pages in, but the quotes that open chapter two were particularly interesting:

    Oh ye Egyptians, they may say to you that I have not made an expedition hither for any other object than that of abolishing your religion ... but tell the slanderers that I have not come to you except for the purpose of restoring your rights from the hands of the oppressors.
    --Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexandria, July 2, 1798

    Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators....It is the hope and desire of the British people and the nations in alliance with them that the Arab race may rise once more to greatness and renown among the peoples of the earth.
    --General F.S. Maude, Commander of British Forces, Baghdad, March 19, 1917

    Unlike many armies in the world, you came not to conquer, not to occupy, but to liberate, and the Iraqi people know this.
    --Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense, Baghdad, April 29, 2003

    The Arab blogosphere

    The Colombia Journalism Review has an piece on Arab bloggers, The New Arab Conversation. It talks about the explosion of new blogs in the Arab world. It focuses, of course, on blogs in English, but it's hard to fault them that, since I imagine none of them speak Arabic.

    Last summer was, in fact, a watershed moment for the Middle Eastern blogosphere. The conflict between Israel and Hezbollah not only brought attention to the many different Arab conversations that had taken place on homemade Web sites in the past two or three years, but also launched thousands more of them. And they were more than just a handful of aberrant voices. They reflected a new culture of openness, dialogue, and questioning. And unlike the neoconservative notion that these ideals can be dropped on a foreign population like so many bomblets, the push for change here is coming from within. Whether it is a Jordanian student discussing the taboo subject of the monarchy’s viability or a Saudi woman writing about her sexual experiences or an Egyptian commenting with sadness at an Israeli blogger’s description of a suicide bombing, each of these unprecedented acts is one small move toward opening up these societies.

    Another aspect of this "new conversation" is that it includes dialogue between Arabs and Israelis. This, of course, has sparked realizations on both sides of the divide that their enemies are people too.

    From Egypt:
    The blogger known as Egyptian Sandmonkey, the twenty-five-year-old son of a prominent member of Egypt's ruling National Democratic Party, is on the phone from Cairo and laughing. "I didn’t know there was such a thing as a poor Jew," he says. "What? Poor Jews? How did that happen? I thought that at your bar mitzvah you got full membership and the manual for how to rule the world. And then they give you your shares in the media. I keep telling my friends, if the Jews really control the media, they are some of the most self-hating Jews I've ever met in my life."

    Developing a complex picture of Jews, and of Israelis (the distinction between the two is not often made in the Arab world), is no easy task in Egypt. Even for someone like Sandmonkey, who comes from what he calls an "upper middle-class family," and was educated largely outside his birth country, the distorted perceptions run deep. "The Egyptians know nothing about the Israelis," he says. "We don't know anything about Israeli society. We don't know anything about their culture. And part of that has been our government trying to keep us away from the information. An Israeli can come into Egypt very easily. For an Egyptian to go to Israel, it's really, really hard to do. You have to go through a large bureaucratic process. And the point is to keep us in the dark. Don't humanize the people. It's easier to vilify the Jews in Israel."

    And from the Israeli side:

    Lirun Rabinowitz, who has been living in Israel for a year and a half ... shares his blog with a Lebanese woman and was recently invited to be a co-author on the United Arab Emirates community blog and, even more surprisingly, on an annual Ramadan blog, in which various bloggers write about how the Muslim holiday is celebrated in their countries. Recently, on the UAE blog, he was accused in the comments section of being needlessly provocative for putting the words "Tel Aviv" after his name at the end of his posts. To his surprise, a number of Arab readers rushed to his defense in the comments section.

    Rabinowitz says that perusing the Arab blogosphere has deepened his understanding of what is happening inside Arab society. "When I go to them, I see what are they worrying about, what are they wondering, how they are feeling, what level of analysis they are putting on things, how keen they are to see my side, and when they are only prepared to see their own. Is there room for bridging? And I learn a lot about what their knee-jerk reaction looks like, what their analysis looks like, what their fears look like." And to him, that added layer of knowledge is a rebuke to the other forces in Israeli society that he feels are trying to define the "enemy" for him. "You want to tell me that these people are stupid? Well, they're not," says Rabinowitz. "You want to tell me that these people want to live in a dictatorship? Well, they don't. You want to tell me that they can't be Muslim and tolerant and friendly at the same time? Well, it's wrong. You want to tell me that they hate me just because they're Muslim and I'm Jewish? Well that's wrong, too. And they prove that to me every day. And I get this amazing opportunity to dispel every demonic myth and every stupid stereotype that I could have ever thought of, and that's amazingly liberating."

    Of course, as the article admits, those who are blogging in the Arab world, and especially those doing so in English or French, are the elite and make up a very small percentage of the "Arab Street." But the fact remains that they are making a difference, and just because they're the elite, doesn't mean that they aren't also the vanguard of a larger movement towards homegrown democratic reform in the Arab world.

    Thursday, January 18, 2007

    Arming the Iraqi government

    Via Kevin, the Post reports that what Al-Maliki really wants is heavier arms for government forces.

    A few months ago, I was talking with an Iraqi friend of mine in the government about American pressure on Al Maliki to rein in Sadr's Mahdi Army. We were discussing how it might be political suicide for him to do so, since he depended on Sadr for some of his political support and how it would probably be physical suicide, since government troops don't have the firepower to take on the militias. My friend kept stressing to me that "the Americans won't give us the weapons to get rid of these guys!"

    Of course, concerns about American weapons ending up in the wrong hands are warranted, particularly since so much of the Ministry of the Interior has been infiltrated by the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigrade. But if the Iraqi government is ever going to be able to beat the militias politically, the state will have to have a monopoly on military force. And for this to be possible, it'll need additional firepower.

    Bush's speech

    The Times published a point-by-point analysis of Bush's speech. It's definitely worth a read, since not many people seem to have analyzed the actual speech, mostly because they knew the overall lines of what Bush was going to announce weeks in advance.

    Wednesday, January 17, 2007

    Secret unofficial peace deal between Syria and Israel

    I've been saying for a while that one of the best things America could do in the Middle East is broker a deal between Syria and Israel by negotiating a settlement for the Golan Heights. This would cut off the ground link between Iran and Hezbollah, help secure the Iraq-Syria border, and perhaps put some pressure on the military branch of Hamas to fall more in line with the political branch (although I'm not sure where Meshaal would go if Syria expelled him).

    Ha'aretz reported yesterday that there has been a secret session of private diplomacy between Syria and Israel. The plan is an exercise in creative thinking that would allow Syria the pride of getting the Golan Heights back but stop them from controlling the area's water sources or using the Heights militarily. The idea would be to create a natural park under Syrian sovereignty to which Israelis had access without a visa or Syrian approval.

    The main points of the understandings are as follows:

    An agreement of principles will be signed between the two countries, and following the fulfillment of all commitments, a peace agreement will be signed.

    As part of the agreement on principles, Israel will withdraw from the Golan Heights to the lines of 4 June, 1967. The timetable for the withdrawal remained open: Syria demanded the pullout be carried out over a five-year period, while Israel asked for the withdrawal to be spread out over 15 years.

    At the buffer zone, along Lake Kinneret, a park will be set up for joint use by Israelis and Syrians. The park will cover a significant portion of the Golan Heights. Israelis will be free to access the park and their presence will not be dependent on Syrian approval.

    Israel will retain control over the use of the waters of the Jordan River and Lake Kinneret.

    The border area will be demilitarized along a 1:4 ratio (in terms of territory) in Israel's favor.

    According to the terms, Syria will also agree to end its support for Hezbollah and Hamas and will distance itself from Iran.

    This is a good start, and I'm glad to see that there is some progress being made; however, I'm a little skeptical that Assad would accept such a deal, even if the Syrians were pressing to turn the private talks into official secret talks between Israeli and Syrian government members. An Iraqi diplomat friend of mine once told me that Bashar's father Hafez explained why he couldn't accept taking the Golan Heights and letting the Israeli's keep the water rights: Sadat had been killed for less.

    Tuesday, January 16, 2007

    Little mosque on the prairie

    The CBC has had a great idea with their new television sitcom Little Mosque on the Prairie. It's about a small Muslim community in, of all place, Saskatchewan that's trying to start a mosque in a local church's parish hall.

    I haven't watched it yet, but from what I've read, this is exactly the sort of show that should be played in the States, where Muslim actors generally only get to portray terrorists and bad guys.

    It looks like it's on bittorrent and can be downloaded here.


    UPDATE: I've just watched the show, and it's pretty cute. It's really similar to other sitcoms on television, except that there are Muslims, Muslims who are normal people. And to my mind, that is what makes this show so important.

    A Franco-British merger?

    In one of the most surprising things I've read in a while, the Guardian reported that PM Guy Mollet went to London in 1956 to discuss joining the United Kingdom with PM Anthony Eden, exploring the possibility of the Queen becoming the titular head of state in France. According to the Guardian,

    When Mr Mollet's request for a union failed, he quickly responded with another plan - that France be allowed to join the British commonwealth - which was said to have been met more warmly by Sir Anthony.

    A document dated September 28 1956 records a conversation between the prime minister and his cabinet secretary, Sir Norman Brook, saying:

    "The PM told him [Brook] on the telephone that he thought, in the light of his talks with the French:

  • That we should give immediate consideration to France joining the Commonwealth
  • That Monsieur Mollet had not thought there need be difficulty over France accepting the headship of her Majesty
  • That the French would welcome a common citizenship arrangement on the Irish basis."

  • Even if such unions are discussed to this day, between Sudan and Egypt and between Somalia and Ethiopia, for example, it seems unthinkable for this to happen as late as the 1950s between two major players like the UK and France. This news is kind of revelation must be a little embarrassing for France, and it just seems really, really odd considering French aversion to the idea of monarchy, not to mention Gallic pride.

    A British friend of mine in Paris sent this article to his French girlfriend, who responded this way:

    The UK was a "staunch French ally during the two world wars"? As far as I know the UK didn't want to back de Gaulle and sided with the US. And they sank all the French military boats stationed in the Channel so that the Germans wouldn't capture them and invade England - and they didn't even bother to warn the French about their upcoming air-raid on French boats so hundreds of Frenchmen died under British fire.

    Nope, really, not much of a staunch ally as far as this side of the sea is concerned...

    [Mollet] would have been hanged if he'd even mentioned this in France.

    Writing history in Lebanon

    About a week ago, the Times had an interesting article about Lebanon's truncated history:

    History classes across the globe serve two purposes — they educate the young and they shape national identity. They also often sidestep controversy to avoid offense.

    It is the same here as elsewhere, but the controversy being avoided is the vicious, 15-year civil war that started in 1975 in which Lebanon kidnapped, killed and bombed itself nearly into oblivion.

    The bizarre results are evident in any schoolbook here -- history seems simply to come to a halt in the early 1970s, Lebanon's heyday. With sectarian tensions once again boiling here, some educators fear that the failure to forge a common version of the events is dooming the young to repeat the past, with most of them learning contemporary history from their families, on the streets or from political leaders who may have their own agendas.

    "America used the school to create a melting pot; we used it to reinforce sectarian identity at the expense of the national identity," said Nemer Frayha, the former director of the Education Center for Research and Development, a research organization that develops Lebanon’s curriculum. "From the start, I am forming the student as a sectarian person, not as a citizen. And what's worse is that the people who are encouraging this are the intellectuals themselves."

    There is a serious lack of knowledge about the civil war in Lebanon. I've seen firsthand that many of the youth were abroad, because their families fled the war, and others that stayed have only the fragmented and fearful memories of a child who did not understand what was happening. So to the extent that the youth learn about the war at all, it's usually through sectarian lenses, a distrust or hatred of other Lebanese groups.

    And even ancient history can be very touchy in Lebanon. As the article mentions, Muslims tend to focus more on the Arab history of the country whereas Christians tend to relate more with the Phoenician period, so much so that many Christians I know don't consider themselves Arab. (Interestingly enough, the roots of secular pan-Arabism in Lebanon and Syria are mostly Christian in general and Greek Orthodox in particular.)

    According to Milhem Chaoul, a professor of sociology at the University of Lebanon, "Typically the victor writes the history. The problem with the civil war was that nobody won, and you still can't write its history because we are still not at peace."

    Wednesday, January 10, 2007

    So much for diplomacy


    The US has changed its policy of working through Somali warlords (previously) and the Ethiopian military (recently) by bombing a Somali fishing village near the border with Kenya where Somali Islamists were allegedly hiding, possibly with some local Al-Qaeda operatives.

    American officials said terrorists from Al Qaeda had been the target of the strike, which they said had killed about a dozen people. But the officials acknowledged that the identities of the victims were still unknown.

    Several residents of the area, in the southern part of the country, said dozens of civilians had been killed, and news of the attack immediately set off new waves of anti-American anger in Mogadishu, Somalia’s battle-scarred capital, where the United States has a complicated legacy.

    As was to be expected, this seems to have gone over like a lead balloon in Somalia, particularly as there have been reports that many civilian farmers and their livestock were killed in the bombing.

    Monday, January 08, 2007

    On Iraq and the Hippocratic oath

    James Traub's post over at TPM Cafe's America Abroad reflects some of the misgivings and ambivalence that I've felt about a full American withdrawal from Iraq.

    At least seven months ago the atrocities in Haditha helped me decide that the US was doing more harm than good in Iraq. I read about how Americans had become just one more militia in Iraq, killing Iraqis.

    The choice was a hard one. And I still had my doubts, despite the convincing prose of Luttwak's decision (two years ago) that we should leave:

    American forces continue to suffer casualties in combat against factions that should be confronting one another instead. Perhaps what the new Iraqi state needs in order to achieve stability is precisely a certain amount of civil war. Preventing it may impede a natural and perhaps very desirable political evolution. Americans would not today be happier if European Great Powers, horrified by the carnage of our own Civil War, had enforced an armistice between North and South that might endure still between two feeble states.

    Because even if Iraq needed to get a civil war out of its system, or dissolve itself in the process, who's to say that it would ever end? The war between the North and South of Sudan lasted for decades; sectarian bloodshed in Lebanon, where I live part of the year, was curbed only with Syria's heavy-handed and often violent intervention. Or we could look at Somalia.

    At the end of the day though, thinking that we could "fix Iraq" is what got America into this mess in the first place. Taking a long hard look at how things currently stand in Iraq and how little we know about the country, it would be hard to convince me that we can do, above all, anything but harm there.

    This also brings up the question of who should decide whether we stay or go. Should it be the American people? Should it be the American government? What about the Iraqis? Should it be the government or the people in that country?

    I'm inclined to believe that it ought to be the Iraqis who get to decide. They've had so little say in their lives for the last several decades, it's about time they got to make a decision about something. To my mind, a national referendum is in order. Let Iraqis stain their fingers purple and show us the door. This would permit the US to leave with a little more decorum (or less shame, you could say) while allowing the Iraqis the dignity of having a say in their country's fate, however terrible it may turn out to be.

    New Mexico governor meets with Sudanese president

    In an unexpected (by me) trip, New Mexico governor, Bill Richards, went to Khartoum to try to get Khartoum to allow UN peacekeepers in Darfur. He met separately with President Omar al-Bashir, former rebel leader Minni Minnowi and foreign minister Lam Akol:

    Richardson told an Associated Press reporter traveling with him that he and al-Bashir discussed the U.N. peacekeeping force, a cease-fire, protection for humanitarian groups working in the region, increasing sexual violence against refugees and a potential conference with rebel leaders.

    ...He discussed the [Abuja accord] later with Minni Minnawi, the leader of the rebel Sudan Liberation Movement that signed the agreement and subsequently became a presidential assistant. Minnawi expressed disappointment that the government has not yet disarmed the militias and told Richardson if the al-Bashir's government does not honor its commitments, there will be regime change.

    ...In Khartoum, Richardson also met with Sudanese foreign minister Lam Akol, bringing along humanitarian workers that included one representative of the Save Darfur Coalition. The coalition organized the trip and has been instrumental in bringing attention to the crisis and criticism on al-Bashir's government.

    According to the AP, this trip was meant to draw attention to Richardson's "extensive foreign policy background, including his tenure as U.S. envoy to the United Nations" in preparation for his "likely White House bid."

    Given how apathetic Americans are about the genocide in Darfur, I can't imagine that this sort of a trip could do much besides show voters that he's got enough clout to meet with a head of state (although it's a lot less controversial than a similar trip to Iraq, Iran or North Korea). In any case, if it's an attempt to garner future votes, it's certainly made me sympathetic to his platform.

    Let's hope he has some success in Sudan.

    A Middle East Summit


    Here's a great piece of Op-Art to be published in the San Francisco Chronicle. It was done by a"Kossack" over at the Daily Kos:

    "Kill me in Iraq."

    This segment on Al Jazeera (translated and edited by MEMRI), is more than a little disconcerting. The segment pits Sadeq al-Musawi, a Shia journalist, against Mishan al-Jabouri, the Sunni owner of the Iraqi satellite network, Al Zawraa. I'm not really exaggerating when I use the word "pit," because it's almost as though two cocks had been set in a hole to kill each other.

    Jabouri tells Musawi that he "should choose your words carefully, or else I will do things to you that you will not imagine, you Persian liar ... you are an Iranian shoe!"

    Musawi responds with, "Your father killed Kurds!"

    Finally, Jabouri advises Musawi against speaking ill of Saddam Hussein, to which Musawi tells him not to advise anything, but rather, "kill me in Iraq, send your militia to kill me."

    I've been reading Vali Nasr's The Shia Revival, and he writes a lot about how the Sunni regard the Shia as not being proper Arabs, because Shiism has had much influence from Iran and since some Shia in Lebanon and Iraq are the descendants of Persians who migrated centuries ago. Jabouri literally calls Musawi and Iranian (he says both Ajami and Irani), and brings some paperwork (which he proceeds to throw at his interlocutor) out to support his claims. And in the end, who knows whether Musawi is Iranian or not. Maybe he is, or maybe his family fled Iraq and he was born in Iran to Iraqi parents.

    But that's not really important. The important point is the internecine venom. Jabouri tells the Jazeera moderator, "The people who executed Saddam Hussein are the same people who killed Umar, the same people who killed Abu Bakr." Are these Iraqi militants? western viewers might ask. No, Umar and Abu Bakr are the first and second Caliphs, those who succeeded Mohammad in the 7th century. Umar ibn al-Khattab was poisoned by a Persian slave, and Abu Bakr either died of a cold or from being poisoned a year earlier, depending on your source. (The partisans of Ali, the Shi'at 'Ali, believed that Ali should have been Caliph instead of Abu Bakr and Umar.)

    I find it disconcerting that the Iraqi political discourse still hinges on the desert politics of Medina and Mecca nearly 1400 years ago. And seeing the historical complexities of the situation in Iraq, I find it even more disconcerting that most of the people who are paid to understand these historico-religious contexts don't even know the difference between the Sunni and the Shia.

    DiggIt and Del.icio.us and Reddit links...

    I've added links next to the comment section for DiggIt and Del.icio.us and Reddit in case anyone wants to add any of my posts to either of those sites...

    Just another Iraqi tribe?


    I was reading a back and forth in the London Review debating the source of anti-Semitic remarks that had been attributed (falsely it seems) to Hassan Nasrallah, all of which came in response to Charles Glass's recent piece about Hezbollah learning from its mistakes. This led me to go check out some of his previous writings, since he seems to be an interesting character who studied at the American University in Beirut and was kidnapped by Hezbollah in the 1987.

    While reading his piece in The Nation, From Beirut to Damascus, I came across this: "Kamal Salibi, Lebanon's historian laureate at the American University of Beirut, used to tell me the Palestinians had made the mistake of becoming another Lebanese tribe."

    And this started me to thinking, has the US become just another Iraqi tribe?

    Using Diplomacy in Somalia


    There's a very good op-ed piece on Somalia in today's Times, A fleeting victory in Somalia. Jonathan Stevenson, at the United States Naval War College, argues, rightly in my opinion, that a robust round of diplomacy is needed to work out Somalia's problems, namely, a power-sharing plan with the Islamic Courts and the transitional government, an engagement of clan leaders and an agreement on the place of Islamic law in Somalia. He adds that the US should join efforts by the EU and Kenya to help broker an agreement, similar to the one that finally ended the war between Southern Sudan and Khartoum:

    The temptation in Washington will be to keep its distance and rely on Ethiopia, the European Union and Kenya for as long as possible. This attitude is myopic. Neither the American public nor the world believe that the Bush administration?s predominantly military approach to counterterrorism is working. Relying primarily on Ethiopian troops to tamp down Somali Islamism would represent a continuation of that flawed model, and of the corresponding risk of fueling the jihad.

    The United States' full participation in a diplomatic process in the Horn of Africa, on the other hand, would constitute a relatively low-cost way of signaling a new American approach to Islam and a re-engagement in sub-Saharan Africa, which has largely been left out of Washington's post-9/11 calculus. A result could be a small political victory in the Muslim world that would deprive Osama bin Laden and his followers of a new grievance rather than supplying them with one.

    He points out that any prolonged presence of Ethiopian troops could be very dangerous. Many Somalis are afraid of Ethiopian designs on the country and disconcerted by the recent comments of the transitional Interior Minister Hussein Mohammad Aideed (whose father was made famous by the "Black Hawk Down" incident) that Somalia and Ethiopia "should unite, just like the Europeans. One money. One passport. One security."

    The problem, then, lies in a tendency to rely on military force instead of negotiation. I tend to believe that it was a bad idea for the Ethiopians to invade; a better idea would have been negotiations in Yemen or Kenya to agree on a power-sharing deal, because even if the thought of another Islamic regime bothers me, the Courts did manage to bring some sort of stability and decrease the violence in the areas they controlled. Now, there is a risk that continued Ethiopian presence will rub Somalis the wrong way and that the spotty order of the Islamists will revert back to the reign of warlords and inter-clan violence.

    A local radio journalist summed up the problems of an Ethiopian presence in the country, as reported by the Times:

    With Somalia's longtime fears that Ethiopia might swallow it, the sooner [the Ethiopians' withdrawal] happens, the better. On Saturday, Nasteh Dahir Farah, a reporter for a Kismayo radio station, visited the town's airport with three foreign journalists. The foreigners were allowed in. Mr. Farah was not. He was shooed away by Ethiopian soldiers at the gate and told never to come back.

    "This is my country, not theirs," he said. "If I didn't have a job," Mr. Farah muttered, straightening himself up and smoothing the shirt where he had been poked in the chest, "I'd join the resistance."

    A little humiliation, it seems, goes a long, long way.

    And indeed it does, as we have seen throughout the Muslim world, but especially in Iraq.

    So while it seems imperative for negotiations to begin in good faith between the transitional government, the clan leaders and the Islamic Courts, I've got a sneaking suspicion that the transitional government has let their Ethiopian-backed success go to their head. And remarks by the transitional defense minister do little to reassure me:

    The big man in Kismayo is Barre Aadan Shire, the transitional government's defense minister and a former warlord, whose strong jaw, natty goatee and bald head lend him an uncanny resemblance to Lenin. He says many people in Kismayo have asked him to reach out to the Islamists, but he does not want to. The last of the Islamist fighters have retreated to the Kenya border, about 150 miles away.

    "If we were going to compromise," Mr. Shire said, "why go to war?"

    Saturday, January 06, 2007

    Disney hate radio and advertising


    Via Juan Cole, Daily Kos has the story of a blogger who contacted a talk radio station's advertisers to tell them that their products were being associated with and read by the same voices that call for torturing people and murdering Muslims. He sent advertisers polite informative letters and was subsequently slapped with a cease and desist letter by Disney's lawyers because he was providing audio recordings of the broadcasts to allow advertisers to hear the comments for themselves. It seems that this hit a nerve with Disney, particularly as Visa seems to have pulled their ads from the shows in question.

    Here's a copy of the letter he sent AT&T:


    To: Wendy Clark, VP-advertising, AT&T

    Dear Ms. Clark:

    Thanks to radio hosts from KSFO your brand is being associated with torturing and killing people. Would your marketing people be happy to hear your commercial ran after Lee Rogers said this about a black man in Lincoln, Nebraska?

    "Now you start with the Sear's Diehard the battery cables connected to his testi*les and you entertain him with that for awhile and then you blow his bleeping head off. " (Audio link)

    You should know the person calling for the execution and torture of the black man in that clip READS THE AT&T commercials on the air. Right now on KSFO Lee Rogers is THE VOICE of AT&T to the SF Bay area. (Audio Link)

    Sadly, calling for the death and torture of individuals and groups of people is a regular occurrence on KSFO 560 AM, owned by ABC Radio Disney.

    Another example: immediately after the 6 am ABC Radio news on October 27th:

    Lee Rogers: I say they catch the person, tie 'em to a post and burn 'em. Set 'em on fire.

    Officer Vic: Yeah.

    Lee Rogers: Let 'em know what it feels like.

    Melanie Morgan: Hog tie 'em first. That would be good.

    Next, Lee Rogers talks about a protester at a Cindy Sheehan event:

    "Whoever did that should have been stomped to death right there. Just stomp their bleeping guts out." (Audio link).

    Within three minutes they called for someone to be burned alive and a protester to be stomped to death. If you dismissed the first clip as a "joke", note that in this clip they were clearly not joking:

    Melanie Morgan famously called for Bill Keller of the New York Times (and nine editors from other papers) to be hanged.  (Audio link)

    On Nov. 14th  Melanie Morgan said this about Nancy Pelosi:

    "We've got a bulls-eye painted on her big laughing eyes." (Audio link)

    Also note that Morgan reads the Cingular Wireless commercials on KSFO.

    Of course political speech is protected, but I believe the FBI and the FCC frown on targeting elected officials for death or inciting violence toward leaders of any political party.

    Because of how ads are purchased, your ad placement agency probably didn't know that Tom Brenner (the "comic relief" called Officer Vic) regularly mocks advertiser's products.  Listen as he:


  • calls Chevrolet's product "shi**y" (audio link)
  • suggests an anti-virus product is part of a protection racket (audio link)
  • pretends a cold pill is really a suppository (audio link)

    The odds are your product will be mocked. If they don't respect a big client like Chevrolet, will they respect your brand?

    And it's not simply calls for killing specific people or mocking products, the radio hosts at KSFO proudly talk about their anti-Muslim views. Based on my research, your business has rules about discrimination against people of other religions, so what message are you sending when your employees or customers hear your advertisements right after Brian Sussman demands of a caller:

    "Say Allah is a Wh*re!" (audio link)

    Or when Lee Rogers says,

    "Indonesia is really just another enemy Muslim nation. ... You keep screwing around with stuff like this we are going to kill a bunch of you. Millions of you. "   (audio link)

    Maybe you haven't heard any complaints. Would KSFO management let you know about complaints?  Doubtful. Morgan's husband, Jack Swanson, is KSFO's operations manager. The president of KSFO, Mickey Luckoff, started the station format and has a history of defending hosts like Michael Savage until he was forced to fire him.

    I understand you can't listen to all the shows you advertise on - no one can. You rely on the accurate representation of the sales reps and the show description. But you don't need to take my word, listen to the programs. You probably won't have to listen long to hear something that offends or disgusts you.  If you wish to hear the complete context on any clip or the audio during a date your ad ran contact me I have an educational archive of audio clips, I've listed a few below.

    I want to emphasize that if you withdrawal your ads you aren't limiting their free speech, just removing your paid support of it. Some other company without the values you describe on the AT&T website can support them. You can choose to advertise elsewhere. This is really about YOU. Do YOU want to be associated with these comments? Do you want your company and brand to be associated with these comments?

    I urge you to discontinue advertising on KSFO during the shows hosted by Melanie Morgan, Lee Rogers, Tom Brenner and Brian Sussman.

    If you want to contact KSFO here is a link to their website. If you wish to express your displeasure to their parent company contact Zenia Mucha, Senior Vice President, Corporate Communications, The Walt Disney Company PHONE: (818) 560-5300 CA, (212) 456-7255 NY or email Heather Rim, Vice President, Communications, ABC, Inc.  heather.rim@abc.com.

    Sincerely,

    P.S.  I would appreciate hearing your final determination in this matter.

  • Read the Daily Kos write up for the full story.

    Friday, January 05, 2007

    Ordinary Iraqis and extraordinary rendition


    The New York Review has articles about torture and extraordinary rendition (subscription only) and ordinary Iraqis. The latter reviews Anthony Shadid's book Night Draws Near, which was recommended to me by an Iraqi diplomat friend of mine. I recently met Shadid in Beirut, and he's an extremely nice guy, and judging from his recent coverage of Lebanon, I can understand why his book would be really good. (Unfortunately, I haven't picked it up yet.)

    The piece on extraordinary rendition helpfully brings together the stories of some of the more publicized victims of the Bush Administration's policy as well as some of the reporting done by CIA plane watchers who helped uncover the story of the "black sites" in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Under review are the Canadian Government's report on the rendition to Syria and subsequent torture of Canadian citizen Maher Arar and Steven Grey's Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program:

    Edward Walker Jr., a career diplomat, was the US ambassador in Egypt between 1994 and 1997 when some of the first renditions took place. According to Walker, there were only a few occasions when the procedure was used, and they concerned men who were wanted by the Egyptians for terrorist acts allegedly committed there. Walker thought it was a good policy. "They were bad guys, and they were set on causing harm. And you know it's not a perfect world," he told Grey. But he was under no illusions about how they would be treated. "I cannot believe that anybody that was involved in this," he said, "didn't in his heart of hearts, if he was halfway intelligent, think that they were getting abusive interrogation techniques that were tantamount to torture."

    Grey asked Walker: "When Condoleezza Rice and the President now stand in front of people and say we don't send people to countries where they torture, are they telling the truth?"

    Walker replied: "No, they're not telling the truth."

    A former CIA officer was more colorful. "Coming out and saying 'we don't do torture' is as bad as President Clinton saying, 'I didn't have sex with that woman.'" he told Grey. "It's a bare-faced lie. Of course we do torture. Imagine putting President Bush's head under water and telling him to raise his hand when he thinks he's being tortured. Give him the water-board treatment, and he'd be raising his hand straightaway."

    Wednesday, January 03, 2007

    Media coverage of Iraq


    Al Jazeera has an interesting article about the Western media coverage of Iraq, and Iraq's sectarian makeup in particular.

    Among the complaints about Western coverage is the claim by Tariq al-Hashimi, Iraq's Sunni Arab vice-president, that the media overestimates the number of Shia in the country:

    Western media often refer to Iraq as being "overwhelmingly Shia", or use other phrases to imply a large Shia majority. This, [al-Hashimi] says, is wrong -- and it has resulted in over-representation of Shia parties in the Iraqi government at the expense of Sunni Arabs.

    Al-Hashimi said: "The false allegations promoted by Western media have resulted in an [inappropriate] political process, and everyone is paying the price for its wrong foundations."

    Where the figures came from to back up assertions of a large Shia majority are unclear: no Iraqi census in modern history has ever included sect.

    Sources such as Encyclopaedia Britannica put the Shia population in Iraq at 52 per cent of the total in 2001. However, figures circulated by the US military, which invaded Iraq in 2003, put the figure at 60 per cent.

    The CIA's World Factbook puts the Shia at 60 to 65 percent of the Iraqi population.

    Other complaints include the characterization of the insurgency as essentially Sunni and the assertion that the Baath party was a Sunni-run apparatus that persecuted the Shia. According to the current Baath spokesperson,

    "Actually, sect was never an issue in Iraq. I am a Shia and I have been a senior Baath official ... No Baath party official -- no Iraqi official -- ever asked me about my sect.

    "When the US army occupied Iraq they issued a list of 55 wanted top Iraqi officials, starting with President Saddam Hussein; half of those senior officials were Shia.

    "The Committee of Debaathification issued a list of 100,000 senior Iraqi Baathists who would not be allowed to enjoy governmental posts, 66,000 of them were Shia - so how is the Baath party a Sunni party?

    ...Abu Muhammad voiced resentment at the the term "Sunni insurgency", saying that Iraqis from different backgrounds are fighting the foreign presence in Iraq.

    "This term plays down Iraqi nationalism," he said. "I repeat, I am a Shia and I am resisting the US forces in Iraq, and we know for sure that resistance fighters from all background are fighting. Why do the Western agencies insist that only Sunni are fighting? Big question mark, I think."


    On the other hand, there are those who disagree:

    However, Karim Bader, an independent Iraqi politician, said that Western media had done a decent job on reporting what had occurred under Saddam's rule.

    He said one had to look only at the senior army commanders and intelligence officers in Saddam's day, all of whom he said were Sunni. Or to look at the sizes of houses in Shia suburbs - small and overcrowded - or in Sunni areas, where houses were far larger but with fewer occupants.

    Bader said: "I think there was sectarianism under Saddam and the Western media reflected that, but the question is, should we hold the Sunni sect responsible for that? I think Iraqis must be careful in answering this question."

    Updates


    A lot has happened while I was away. I woke up the other morning to hear that Saddam Hussein had been executed; and on the same day while on my way back to Spain, I heard that the airport had been bombed by ETA, the militant Basque separatist group; then I saw that Bangkok had been rocked by bomb blasts on new year's eve. Besides that, Addis Ababa sent troops to Somalia to rout the Islamic Courts.

    First things first: I'm generally against the death penalty, but I might be convinced to accept it for those guilty of genocide or other crimes against humanity. However, if Iraq was trying to show the world that it has a modern functioning government, this execution was a poor showing for al-Malaki's goverment: it was decidedly neither solemn nor professional and was carried out on the first day of Eid.

    As for the ETA bombing, I saw the results first hand, because I left Madrid from the terminal that was bombed the next day. The bomb did some pretty serious damage and has probably left two people dead. It looks like this is going to cripple if not kill the peace talks between ETA and the Spanish Government. They haven't seemed to explain why they broke a cease-fire. Although I hadn't been following the talks closely at all, I remember that there was an Irish priest that had been called in to mediate, and I had the impression that progress was being made.

    In Thailand, my first fear was that it was Muslims from the south, but it seems that the bombings are being blamed on supporters of ousted PM Shinawatra.

    In Somalia, I've been afraid of an Ethiopian campaign for a while, since such explicit attacks might lead to an Eritrean invasion on behalf of its Islamist allies, rekindling the war between those two countries and making Somalia a battleground for a regional war. However, the Eritreans seem to have stayed out of it, and the Islamic Courts were routed surprisingly fast. However, as soon as the Courts moved out of Mogadishu, looting was rampant and order was on short supply in Somalia's capital. Furthermore, I wouldn't be surprised to see a guerrilla resurgence of Islamist forces in Somalia, which brings me to the point that a negotiated settlement that brought the Islamic Courts into the government would be the best solution. The last thing Somalia needs is for Eritrea and Ethiopia to have a little war on Somali territory. In some good news, Kenya has called for a ceasefire and a brokered peace in Somalia, which may or may not be fueled by their fear of more Somali refugees.

    Wednesday, January 31, 2007

    Our responsibility to Iraqi refugees

    I've been hearing a bit about Iraqi refugees lately, and when I was in Amman, Jordan last year, they were impossible to ignore. And even if they're less visible in Syria, it seems that there are also many Iraqis who have taken refuge in Damascus as well. The numbers are alarming: 1.8 million internally displaced Iraqis and 2 million who have sought refuge abroad.

    So what has the US's response been? To take in fewer than 500 Iraqis and to set up a program that allows Afghans and Iraqis who have worked with the American military to immigrate to the US. The maximum limit of people accepted into this program each year: 50 people.

    There has not been enough media coverage of this problem, which is why I am glad to see that the Times has an op-ed today about our responsibility to Iraqi refugees:

    To calculate the price that Iraqis have paid for the American misadventure in their country, you have to deal in big, round, horrifying numbers. Civilians killed last year: 34,000. Driven from their homes within Iraq: 1.8 million. Fled to other countries: an additional 2 million, and growing. The number of Iraqis who have found refuge in the United States is easier to pin down. This country has admitted a grand total of 466 Iraqi refugees since 2003.

    However President Bush tries to manage the endgame of his dismal war, America has an obligation to the Iraqis whose lives it has upended. It owes a particular debt to those who have faced incredible dangers working with American forces as interpreters, guides and contractors. These allies -- and their families -- have become a haunted and hunted group, branded as traitors and targeted for kidnapping and assassination by insurgents and militias.

    By any measure, the Bush administration is failing them. The current price tag for the war is $8 billion a month, yet the State Department plans to spend only $20 million in the coming fiscal year to help shelter Iraqi refugees overseas and to resettle them here. A special visa program to resettle Iraqi and Afghan military translators has been capped at 50 people a year and has a six-year waiting list.

    NPR has had some good coverage of the refugee issue, as well as on congressional hearings on ameliorating the situation and the individual faces of the crisis, as seen in the story of an Iraqi translator forced to flee after working with the Americans. NPR also has a segment on the differences between the policies toward Vietnamese and Iraqi refugees.

    According to an interview with Ropert Green, UN High Commission for Refugees representative in Jordan (most UN Iraq offices are in Amman since Iraq is too dangerous), based on an agreement with the Government of Jordan, they are "restricted in how we can actually apply that refugee title" to Iraqis. The Jordanian agreement requires UNHCR to find a third country of resettlement willing to host each Iraqi who has been labeled a refugee, which is why only 600 out of the over 700,000 refugees in Iraq have been officially designated as refugees.

    Tuesday, January 30, 2007

    Troop surge in Afghanistan

    The Onion has the scoop on the surge deployment of the 325th Marine Expeditionary Brigade in Kandahar province:

    In an effort to display his administration's willingness to fight on all fronts in the War on Terror, President Bush said at a press conference Monday that American ground forces in Afghanistan will be aided by the immediate deployment of Marine Pfc. Tim Ekenberg of Camp Lejeune, NC.

    ...The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, 2nd Lt. Jon Pinard, said that Ekenberg will be a valuable addition to his existing military assets.

    "Our Marines are the best-equipped and best-trained in the world, and I have it on good authority that Tim is an especially well-trained Marine," Pinard said. "We have requested that he receive full logistical support while deployed in this theater. We've been told that his body armor will be arriving within six months of his reporting for duty, budget permitting."

    Friday, January 26, 2007

    Escalation with Iran

    According to Reuters, Bush has authorized the killing or capturing of Iranians in Iraq. This goes for intelligence agents or members of the Revolutionary Guard, but not, apparently, for diplomats or civilians.

    First of all, this seems like an obvious escalation in the conflict between Iran and the US, and I think if something comes of it, then Washington will see that Tehran can be very, very nasty: look for the capture of American contractors or soldiers as a reaction. Furthermore, the problem with the distinction between civilians/diplomats and intelligence/revolutionary guards is that it is standard practice for countries to give intelligence officers diplomatic or civilian cover. For example, many CIA operations are run from American embassies abroad.

    Mark my words: The first Iranian that gets killed in Iraq will mean bad news for everyone. I can't help but wonder if this is not just a tactic by the Bush administration to goad Tehran into doing something that will give the US an "excuse" to bomb Iranian nuclear plants.

    Wednesday, January 24, 2007

    Obama and his madrasa

    The Moon and Murdoch media outlets have been in a frenzy about claims that Barack Obama went to a "madrasa" when he was a child in Indonesia. CNN investigated the claim and showed it to be another case of attempted character assassination. The latter says that Obama did not got to a madrasa, which is both true and false.

    You see, in Arabic, the word madrasa (مدرسة) comes from the three-letter root "d-r-s" (درس) which means to study. In Arabic, most words are derived from adding prefixes, infixes and suffixes to an original three-letter root verb. For example, when you add the prefix "ma," to a root verb, you get the place where that verb is done. In the case of "d-r-s," this gets you the place where one studies, or madrasa.

    In Arabic, any school from elementary to high school is called a madrasa. Indonesia is a predominantly Muslim country, which means that it has a lot of Arabic loan words. Madrasa is one of them.

    The confusion arises because of the media's use of the word madrasa to describe a madrasat al-ulum, which is a religious seminary, the likes of which we've heard about so much in coverage of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

    So did Obama go to a madrasa? If by that you mean elementary or high school, then yes, of course he did. If by that you mean a deobandi or wahhabi religious seminary, then no. And of course, the latter charge is patently absurd, seeing as how he was six when he lived in Indonesia.

    This stems from the media's ignorance of all things Arab or Muslim. So we get people throwing around words like shaheed, madrasa and jihad in order to give their writing a veneer of credibility, when in most cases, these words are used incorrectly. Likewise, I often laugh when I see American writers, "haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones," throw in French phrases to make themselves seem more intellectual or better read.

    All this makes me think of George Orwell's little essay, Politics and the English Language. I think more people ought to follow his simple advice on this subject: "Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent."

    UPDATE: According to Chad in comments, in Indonesia, only a religious school, like a Catholic school in the US, is called a madrasa in Indonesia. He says that some are normal public-funded schools, like the public school Obama went to, whereas others are private. I'll double check this with an Indonesian colleague, in any case.

    Temperature rises in Lebanon

    The opposition led by Hezbollah and General Aoun held a general strike yesterday that included blocking the road to the airport and degenerated into street clashes between pro-government and opposition supporters. What this means is that Sunni and Shia groups have been clashing, as well as Christian supporters of Geagea (pro-government) and Aoun (opposition):

    Violent clashes erupted across the country, with two areas witnessing the return of old "fault lines" from the 1975-1990 Lebanese Civil War.

    The Shiite supporters of Hizbullah and Amal clashed with the Future Movement's Sunni supporters in the predominantly Sunni area of Corniche al-Mazraa. Stone-throwing and fistfights injured dozens of people and wreaked damage on cars and private property.

    At the same time, supporters of Christian opposition leader Michel Aoun clashed with followers of Lebanese Forces chief Samir Geagea in several predominantly Christian areas, in fights recalling the leaders' bitter rivalry in the late 1980s.

    Lebanese officials were quoted as warning that the Aoun-Geagea struggle may turn into "a war of elimination."

    This is obviously bad news for Lebanon, and I'm surprised that it's taking so long to come up with a compromise package deal that would get the government up and running again as national unity government. Of course there are a lot of things to be settled, including the presidency, expanding the cabinet, the Hariri tribunal and the Paris III economic deal, but I don't think that these are unbridgeable gaps.

    Hezbollah has said that yesterday was a taste of what it's capable of, and I don't think anyone doubts their resolve or power.

    Washington opposition to peace between Israel and Syria?

    The Times has an op-ed today by Michael Oren, the Israeli author of a new book on American involvement in the Middle East, about the possibility of an peace between Israel and Syria.

    I mentioned these secret talks earlier and maintain that the smartest move the US could make would be to broker a settlement between Syria and Israel (but not at the expense of Lebanon). Oren seems to think, however, that the US is against these talks and that a peace between Syria and Israel would be opposed by Washington:

    The last thing Washington wants is a Syrian-Israeli treaty that would transform Mr. Assad from pariah to peacemaker and lend him greater latitude in promoting terrorism and quashing Lebanon’s freedom. Some Israeli officials, by contrast, see substantive benefits in ending their nation's 60-year conflict with Syria. An accord would invariably provide for the cessation of Syrian aid to Hamas and Hezbollah, which endanger Israel’s northern and southern sectors.

    More crucial still, by detaching Syria from Iran's orbit, Israel will be able to address the Iranian nuclear threat -- perhaps by military means -- without fear of retribution from Syrian ground forces and missiles. Forfeiting the Golan Heights, for these Israelis, seems to be a sufferable price to pay to avoid conventional and ballistic attacks across most of Israel’s borders.

    The potentially disparate positions of Israel and the United States on the question of peace with Syria could trigger a significant crisis between the two countries — the first of Mr. Bush's expressly pro-Israel presidency. And yet, facing opposition from a peace-minded Democratic Congress and from members of his own party who have advocated a more robust American role in Middle East mediation, Mr. Bush would have difficulty in withholding approval from a comprehensive Syrian-Israeli agreement.

    I tend to believe that the Assad regime wants first and foremost to stay in power and regain the Golan Heights. Yes, Damascus has been bruised by being thrown out of Lebanon, but it's entirely possible that Assad wanted to leave and is fighting an internal battle with the remnants of his father's security regime. The problem is that the decision-making process is so opaque in Damascus that it's very difficult to see who's making which calls.

    Tuesday, January 23, 2007

    More on Iran and the bomb

    The London Review of Books has another article by Norman Dombey, Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics at Sussex University, on Iran and the bomb. He looks at historical precedents, especially when Israel bombed the Iraqi Osirak reactor in 1981 while looking a little into the nuts and bolts of Iran's nuclear programs:

    The Arak reactor is certainly more suitable for producing plutonium than Osirak would have been: it can run on natural uranium fuel (0.7 per cent U-235, 99.3 per cent U-238), so the irradiated fuel rods would be good sources of plutonium. Israel and India obtained plutonium for their weapons programmes from this type of reactor. Arak is not due to be finished until 2009 at the earliest and it will need to run for at least one year before its fuel rods can be withdrawn and plutonium extracted. Nevertheless, when constructed, the reactor is expected to be inspected regularly by the IAEA, specifically in order to detect any diversion of nuclear material for potential weapon use.

    So, until or unless Iran withdraws from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the facilities at Natanz and Arak are safeguarded by the IAEA. Cameras are installed at Natanz (they function continuously), and there are monthly inspections. Similar arrangements will be made for Arak. Any enriched uranium or plutonium made will be under IAEA seal and will not be available for casting into the core of a weapon. There is no pressing nuclear threat from Iran at the moment; nor does there appear to be a tipping point in sight, beyond which it would be impossible to prevent the country from acquiring weapons.

    Sources close to the US and Israeli governments nevertheless insist that Iran represents a significant threat, which needs to be dealt with without delay. They assert that Iran has a clandestine programme in addition to its declared programme, as Iraq had. Israeli intelligence claims that Iran is close to having an implosion capability, which it will need to make compact weapons. Yet according to Seymour Hersh, writing in the New Yorker in November, the CIA recently completed an assessment of the evidence for the existence of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons programme. The report, which was based on satellite and other data, concluded that there was no evidence of a secret programme. Nor can it be assumed that Iran could make weapons small enough to fit into missiles without testing: the dud North Korean test shows that even with testing success cannot be taken for granted.

    A diplomatic solution is available, but the US and its EU allies do not want to consider it. It is the same deal I have mentioned in these pages before, whereby Iran would be allowed limited enrichment rights (say, up to 5 per cent enrichment), together with security guarantees and technical help. Richard Haass, who was director of policy planning at the State Department until 2003, believes that 'Iran should be offered an array of economic, political and security incentives', including 'a highly limited uranium-enrichment pilot programme so long as it accepts highly intrusive inspections'.

    Hrant Dink's last column

    The tragic assassination of Hrant Dink seems to be leading to somesmall but symbolic conciliation between Armenia and Turkey.

    Meanwhile, the BBC has an excerpt of Dink's last column about his trial for "insulting Turkishness," published the day he was shot dead in the streets of Istanbul:

    The memory of my computer is filled with angry, threatening lines sent by citizens from this sector...

    How real are these threats? To be honest, it is impossible for me to know for sure.

    What is truly threatening and unbearable for me is the psychological torture I place myself in. The question that really gets to me, is: 'What are these people thinking about me?'

    Unfortunately I am now better-known than before and I feel people looking at me, thinking: 'Oh, look, isn't he that Armenian guy?'

    I am just like a pigeon, equally obsessed by what goes-on on my left and right, front and back. My head is just as mobile and fast.

    ... Do you ministers know the price of making someone as scared as a pigeon?

    What my family and I have been through has not been easy. I have considered leaving this country at times...

    But leaving a 'boiling hell' to run to a 'heaven' is not for me. I wanted to turn this hell into heaven.

    We stayed in Turkey because that was what we wanted - and out of respect for the thousands of people here who supported me in my fight for democracy...

    I am now applying to the European Court of Human Rights. I don't know how long the case will take, but what I do know is that I will continue living here in Turkey until the case is finalised.

    And if the court rules in my favour I will be very happy and will never have to leave my country.

    2007 will probably be an even harder year for me. The court cases will continue, new ones will be initiated and God knows what kind of additional injustices I will have to face.

    I may see myself as frightened as a pigeon, but I know that in this country people do not touch pigeons.

    Pigeons can live in cities, even in crowds. A little scared perhaps, but free.

    Saturday, January 20, 2007

    A nuclear Middle East

    Ha'aretz has an interview with King Abdullah of Jordan. In it, he confirms that Jordan is thinking about starting a nuclear program:

    "[T]he rules have changed on the nuclear subject throughout the whole region. Where I think Jordan was saying, 'we'd like to have a nuclear-free zone in the area,' after this summer, everybody's going for nuclear programs.

    "The Egyptians are looking for a nuclear program. The GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] are looking at one, and we are actually looking at nuclear power for peaceful and energy purposes. We've been discussing it with the West.

    "I personally believe that any country that has a nuclear program should conform to international regulations and should have international regulatory bodies that check to make sure that any nuclear program moves in the right direction."

    In other words, you're saying that you expect Israel to join the NPT [non-proliferation treaty].

    "What's expected from us should be a standard across the board. We want to make sure this is used for energy. What we don't want is an arms race to come out of this. As we become part of an international body and its international regulations are accepted by all of us, then we become a united front."

    This sort of a nuclear proliferation in the Middle East was obvious but not inevitable. (I've brought it up before here and here.) As I've mentioned before, the Middle East should be a nuclear free zone, but since Pakistan, India and Israel all have nuclear weapons (and Iran is most likely doing it's best join the club), it seems inevitable that the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and now Jordan will follow suit.

    Such an explosive region is already problematic, but I find the prospect of all the players being armed with nuclear weapons more than a little disconcerting.

    Friday, January 19, 2007

    Current reading

    I finished reading Vali Nasr's The Shia Revival the other day. It was a pretty good introduction on Shia and Sunni relations in the region, and while most of the Lebanese, Iranian and Iraqi parts were review for me, the sections on Bahrain and Pakistan made for new and interesting reading. Nasr does a good job of explaining the specifics of situations in various countries and then using them to draw a bigger picture of the direction that Shia politics are heading in the Middle East.

    Otherwise, I've just stared reading Rashid Khalidi's Resurrecting Empire. I'm only about 40 pages in, but the quotes that open chapter two were particularly interesting:

    Oh ye Egyptians, they may say to you that I have not made an expedition hither for any other object than that of abolishing your religion ... but tell the slanderers that I have not come to you except for the purpose of restoring your rights from the hands of the oppressors.
    --Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexandria, July 2, 1798

    Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators....It is the hope and desire of the British people and the nations in alliance with them that the Arab race may rise once more to greatness and renown among the peoples of the earth.
    --General F.S. Maude, Commander of British Forces, Baghdad, March 19, 1917

    Unlike many armies in the world, you came not to conquer, not to occupy, but to liberate, and the Iraqi people know this.
    --Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense, Baghdad, April 29, 2003

    The Arab blogosphere

    The Colombia Journalism Review has an piece on Arab bloggers, The New Arab Conversation. It talks about the explosion of new blogs in the Arab world. It focuses, of course, on blogs in English, but it's hard to fault them that, since I imagine none of them speak Arabic.

    Last summer was, in fact, a watershed moment for the Middle Eastern blogosphere. The conflict between Israel and Hezbollah not only brought attention to the many different Arab conversations that had taken place on homemade Web sites in the past two or three years, but also launched thousands more of them. And they were more than just a handful of aberrant voices. They reflected a new culture of openness, dialogue, and questioning. And unlike the neoconservative notion that these ideals can be dropped on a foreign population like so many bomblets, the push for change here is coming from within. Whether it is a Jordanian student discussing the taboo subject of the monarchy’s viability or a Saudi woman writing about her sexual experiences or an Egyptian commenting with sadness at an Israeli blogger’s description of a suicide bombing, each of these unprecedented acts is one small move toward opening up these societies.

    Another aspect of this "new conversation" is that it includes dialogue between Arabs and Israelis. This, of course, has sparked realizations on both sides of the divide that their enemies are people too.

    From Egypt:
    The blogger known as Egyptian Sandmonkey, the twenty-five-year-old son of a prominent member of Egypt's ruling National Democratic Party, is on the phone from Cairo and laughing. "I didn’t know there was such a thing as a poor Jew," he says. "What? Poor Jews? How did that happen? I thought that at your bar mitzvah you got full membership and the manual for how to rule the world. And then they give you your shares in the media. I keep telling my friends, if the Jews really control the media, they are some of the most self-hating Jews I've ever met in my life."

    Developing a complex picture of Jews, and of Israelis (the distinction between the two is not often made in the Arab world), is no easy task in Egypt. Even for someone like Sandmonkey, who comes from what he calls an "upper middle-class family," and was educated largely outside his birth country, the distorted perceptions run deep. "The Egyptians know nothing about the Israelis," he says. "We don't know anything about Israeli society. We don't know anything about their culture. And part of that has been our government trying to keep us away from the information. An Israeli can come into Egypt very easily. For an Egyptian to go to Israel, it's really, really hard to do. You have to go through a large bureaucratic process. And the point is to keep us in the dark. Don't humanize the people. It's easier to vilify the Jews in Israel."

    And from the Israeli side:

    Lirun Rabinowitz, who has been living in Israel for a year and a half ... shares his blog with a Lebanese woman and was recently invited to be a co-author on the United Arab Emirates community blog and, even more surprisingly, on an annual Ramadan blog, in which various bloggers write about how the Muslim holiday is celebrated in their countries. Recently, on the UAE blog, he was accused in the comments section of being needlessly provocative for putting the words "Tel Aviv" after his name at the end of his posts. To his surprise, a number of Arab readers rushed to his defense in the comments section.

    Rabinowitz says that perusing the Arab blogosphere has deepened his understanding of what is happening inside Arab society. "When I go to them, I see what are they worrying about, what are they wondering, how they are feeling, what level of analysis they are putting on things, how keen they are to see my side, and when they are only prepared to see their own. Is there room for bridging? And I learn a lot about what their knee-jerk reaction looks like, what their analysis looks like, what their fears look like." And to him, that added layer of knowledge is a rebuke to the other forces in Israeli society that he feels are trying to define the "enemy" for him. "You want to tell me that these people are stupid? Well, they're not," says Rabinowitz. "You want to tell me that these people want to live in a dictatorship? Well, they don't. You want to tell me that they can't be Muslim and tolerant and friendly at the same time? Well, it's wrong. You want to tell me that they hate me just because they're Muslim and I'm Jewish? Well that's wrong, too. And they prove that to me every day. And I get this amazing opportunity to dispel every demonic myth and every stupid stereotype that I could have ever thought of, and that's amazingly liberating."

    Of course, as the article admits, those who are blogging in the Arab world, and especially those doing so in English or French, are the elite and make up a very small percentage of the "Arab Street." But the fact remains that they are making a difference, and just because they're the elite, doesn't mean that they aren't also the vanguard of a larger movement towards homegrown democratic reform in the Arab world.

    Thursday, January 18, 2007

    Arming the Iraqi government

    Via Kevin, the Post reports that what Al-Maliki really wants is heavier arms for government forces.

    A few months ago, I was talking with an Iraqi friend of mine in the government about American pressure on Al Maliki to rein in Sadr's Mahdi Army. We were discussing how it might be political suicide for him to do so, since he depended on Sadr for some of his political support and how it would probably be physical suicide, since government troops don't have the firepower to take on the militias. My friend kept stressing to me that "the Americans won't give us the weapons to get rid of these guys!"

    Of course, concerns about American weapons ending up in the wrong hands are warranted, particularly since so much of the Ministry of the Interior has been infiltrated by the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigrade. But if the Iraqi government is ever going to be able to beat the militias politically, the state will have to have a monopoly on military force. And for this to be possible, it'll need additional firepower.

    Bush's speech

    The Times published a point-by-point analysis of Bush's speech. It's definitely worth a read, since not many people seem to have analyzed the actual speech, mostly because they knew the overall lines of what Bush was going to announce weeks in advance.

    Wednesday, January 17, 2007

    Secret unofficial peace deal between Syria and Israel

    I've been saying for a while that one of the best things America could do in the Middle East is broker a deal between Syria and Israel by negotiating a settlement for the Golan Heights. This would cut off the ground link between Iran and Hezbollah, help secure the Iraq-Syria border, and perhaps put some pressure on the military branch of Hamas to fall more in line with the political branch (although I'm not sure where Meshaal would go if Syria expelled him).

    Ha'aretz reported yesterday that there has been a secret session of private diplomacy between Syria and Israel. The plan is an exercise in creative thinking that would allow Syria the pride of getting the Golan Heights back but stop them from controlling the area's water sources or using the Heights militarily. The idea would be to create a natural park under Syrian sovereignty to which Israelis had access without a visa or Syrian approval.

    The main points of the understandings are as follows:

    An agreement of principles will be signed between the two countries, and following the fulfillment of all commitments, a peace agreement will be signed.

    As part of the agreement on principles, Israel will withdraw from the Golan Heights to the lines of 4 June, 1967. The timetable for the withdrawal remained open: Syria demanded the pullout be carried out over a five-year period, while Israel asked for the withdrawal to be spread out over 15 years.

    At the buffer zone, along Lake Kinneret, a park will be set up for joint use by Israelis and Syrians. The park will cover a significant portion of the Golan Heights. Israelis will be free to access the park and their presence will not be dependent on Syrian approval.

    Israel will retain control over the use of the waters of the Jordan River and Lake Kinneret.

    The border area will be demilitarized along a 1:4 ratio (in terms of territory) in Israel's favor.

    According to the terms, Syria will also agree to end its support for Hezbollah and Hamas and will distance itself from Iran.

    This is a good start, and I'm glad to see that there is some progress being made; however, I'm a little skeptical that Assad would accept such a deal, even if the Syrians were pressing to turn the private talks into official secret talks between Israeli and Syrian government members. An Iraqi diplomat friend of mine once told me that Bashar's father Hafez explained why he couldn't accept taking the Golan Heights and letting the Israeli's keep the water rights: Sadat had been killed for less.

    Tuesday, January 16, 2007

    Little mosque on the prairie

    The CBC has had a great idea with their new television sitcom Little Mosque on the Prairie. It's about a small Muslim community in, of all place, Saskatchewan that's trying to start a mosque in a local church's parish hall.

    I haven't watched it yet, but from what I've read, this is exactly the sort of show that should be played in the States, where Muslim actors generally only get to portray terrorists and bad guys.

    It looks like it's on bittorrent and can be downloaded here.


    UPDATE: I've just watched the show, and it's pretty cute. It's really similar to other sitcoms on television, except that there are Muslims, Muslims who are normal people. And to my mind, that is what makes this show so important.

    A Franco-British merger?

    In one of the most surprising things I've read in a while, the Guardian reported that PM Guy Mollet went to London in 1956 to discuss joining the United Kingdom with PM Anthony Eden, exploring the possibility of the Queen becoming the titular head of state in France. According to the Guardian,

    When Mr Mollet's request for a union failed, he quickly responded with another plan - that France be allowed to join the British commonwealth - which was said to have been met more warmly by Sir Anthony.

    A document dated September 28 1956 records a conversation between the prime minister and his cabinet secretary, Sir Norman Brook, saying:

    "The PM told him [Brook] on the telephone that he thought, in the light of his talks with the French:

  • That we should give immediate consideration to France joining the Commonwealth
  • That Monsieur Mollet had not thought there need be difficulty over France accepting the headship of her Majesty
  • That the French would welcome a common citizenship arrangement on the Irish basis."

  • Even if such unions are discussed to this day, between Sudan and Egypt and between Somalia and Ethiopia, for example, it seems unthinkable for this to happen as late as the 1950s between two major players like the UK and France. This news is kind of revelation must be a little embarrassing for France, and it just seems really, really odd considering French aversion to the idea of monarchy, not to mention Gallic pride.

    A British friend of mine in Paris sent this article to his French girlfriend, who responded this way:

    The UK was a "staunch French ally during the two world wars"? As far as I know the UK didn't want to back de Gaulle and sided with the US. And they sank all the French military boats stationed in the Channel so that the Germans wouldn't capture them and invade England - and they didn't even bother to warn the French about their upcoming air-raid on French boats so hundreds of Frenchmen died under British fire.

    Nope, really, not much of a staunch ally as far as this side of the sea is concerned...

    [Mollet] would have been hanged if he'd even mentioned this in France.

    Writing history in Lebanon

    About a week ago, the Times had an interesting article about Lebanon's truncated history:

    History classes across the globe serve two purposes — they educate the young and they shape national identity. They also often sidestep controversy to avoid offense.

    It is the same here as elsewhere, but the controversy being avoided is the vicious, 15-year civil war that started in 1975 in which Lebanon kidnapped, killed and bombed itself nearly into oblivion.

    The bizarre results are evident in any schoolbook here -- history seems simply to come to a halt in the early 1970s, Lebanon's heyday. With sectarian tensions once again boiling here, some educators fear that the failure to forge a common version of the events is dooming the young to repeat the past, with most of them learning contemporary history from their families, on the streets or from political leaders who may have their own agendas.

    "America used the school to create a melting pot; we used it to reinforce sectarian identity at the expense of the national identity," said Nemer Frayha, the former director of the Education Center for Research and Development, a research organization that develops Lebanon’s curriculum. "From the start, I am forming the student as a sectarian person, not as a citizen. And what's worse is that the people who are encouraging this are the intellectuals themselves."

    There is a serious lack of knowledge about the civil war in Lebanon. I've seen firsthand that many of the youth were abroad, because their families fled the war, and others that stayed have only the fragmented and fearful memories of a child who did not understand what was happening. So to the extent that the youth learn about the war at all, it's usually through sectarian lenses, a distrust or hatred of other Lebanese groups.

    And even ancient history can be very touchy in Lebanon. As the article mentions, Muslims tend to focus more on the Arab history of the country whereas Christians tend to relate more with the Phoenician period, so much so that many Christians I know don't consider themselves Arab. (Interestingly enough, the roots of secular pan-Arabism in Lebanon and Syria are mostly Christian in general and Greek Orthodox in particular.)

    According to Milhem Chaoul, a professor of sociology at the University of Lebanon, "Typically the victor writes the history. The problem with the civil war was that nobody won, and you still can't write its history because we are still not at peace."

    Wednesday, January 10, 2007

    So much for diplomacy


    The US has changed its policy of working through Somali warlords (previously) and the Ethiopian military (recently) by bombing a Somali fishing village near the border with Kenya where Somali Islamists were allegedly hiding, possibly with some local Al-Qaeda operatives.

    American officials said terrorists from Al Qaeda had been the target of the strike, which they said had killed about a dozen people. But the officials acknowledged that the identities of the victims were still unknown.

    Several residents of the area, in the southern part of the country, said dozens of civilians had been killed, and news of the attack immediately set off new waves of anti-American anger in Mogadishu, Somalia’s battle-scarred capital, where the United States has a complicated legacy.

    As was to be expected, this seems to have gone over like a lead balloon in Somalia, particularly as there have been reports that many civilian farmers and their livestock were killed in the bombing.

    Monday, January 08, 2007

    On Iraq and the Hippocratic oath

    James Traub's post over at TPM Cafe's America Abroad reflects some of the misgivings and ambivalence that I've felt about a full American withdrawal from Iraq.

    At least seven months ago the atrocities in Haditha helped me decide that the US was doing more harm than good in Iraq. I read about how Americans had become just one more militia in Iraq, killing Iraqis.

    The choice was a hard one. And I still had my doubts, despite the convincing prose of Luttwak's decision (two years ago) that we should leave:

    American forces continue to suffer casualties in combat against factions that should be confronting one another instead. Perhaps what the new Iraqi state needs in order to achieve stability is precisely a certain amount of civil war. Preventing it may impede a natural and perhaps very desirable political evolution. Americans would not today be happier if European Great Powers, horrified by the carnage of our own Civil War, had enforced an armistice between North and South that might endure still between two feeble states.

    Because even if Iraq needed to get a civil war out of its system, or dissolve itself in the process, who's to say that it would ever end? The war between the North and South of Sudan lasted for decades; sectarian bloodshed in Lebanon, where I live part of the year, was curbed only with Syria's heavy-handed and often violent intervention. Or we could look at Somalia.

    At the end of the day though, thinking that we could "fix Iraq" is what got America into this mess in the first place. Taking a long hard look at how things currently stand in Iraq and how little we know about the country, it would be hard to convince me that we can do, above all, anything but harm there.

    This also brings up the question of who should decide whether we stay or go. Should it be the American people? Should it be the American government? What about the Iraqis? Should it be the government or the people in that country?

    I'm inclined to believe that it ought to be the Iraqis who get to decide. They've had so little say in their lives for the last several decades, it's about time they got to make a decision about something. To my mind, a national referendum is in order. Let Iraqis stain their fingers purple and show us the door. This would permit the US to leave with a little more decorum (or less shame, you could say) while allowing the Iraqis the dignity of having a say in their country's fate, however terrible it may turn out to be.

    New Mexico governor meets with Sudanese president

    In an unexpected (by me) trip, New Mexico governor, Bill Richards, went to Khartoum to try to get Khartoum to allow UN peacekeepers in Darfur. He met separately with President Omar al-Bashir, former rebel leader Minni Minnowi and foreign minister Lam Akol:

    Richardson told an Associated Press reporter traveling with him that he and al-Bashir discussed the U.N. peacekeeping force, a cease-fire, protection for humanitarian groups working in the region, increasing sexual violence against refugees and a potential conference with rebel leaders.

    ...He discussed the [Abuja accord] later with Minni Minnawi, the leader of the rebel Sudan Liberation Movement that signed the agreement and subsequently became a presidential assistant. Minnawi expressed disappointment that the government has not yet disarmed the militias and told Richardson if the al-Bashir's government does not honor its commitments, there will be regime change.

    ...In Khartoum, Richardson also met with Sudanese foreign minister Lam Akol, bringing along humanitarian workers that included one representative of the Save Darfur Coalition. The coalition organized the trip and has been instrumental in bringing attention to the crisis and criticism on al-Bashir's government.

    According to the AP, this trip was meant to draw attention to Richardson's "extensive foreign policy background, including his tenure as U.S. envoy to the United Nations" in preparation for his "likely White House bid."

    Given how apathetic Americans are about the genocide in Darfur, I can't imagine that this sort of a trip could do much besides show voters that he's got enough clout to meet with a head of state (although it's a lot less controversial than a similar trip to Iraq, Iran or North Korea). In any case, if it's an attempt to garner future votes, it's certainly made me sympathetic to his platform.

    Let's hope he has some success in Sudan.

    A Middle East Summit


    Here's a great piece of Op-Art to be published in the San Francisco Chronicle. It was done by a"Kossack" over at the Daily Kos:

    "Kill me in Iraq."

    This segment on Al Jazeera (translated and edited by MEMRI), is more than a little disconcerting. The segment pits Sadeq al-Musawi, a Shia journalist, against Mishan al-Jabouri, the Sunni owner of the Iraqi satellite network, Al Zawraa. I'm not really exaggerating when I use the word "pit," because it's almost as though two cocks had been set in a hole to kill each other.

    Jabouri tells Musawi that he "should choose your words carefully, or else I will do things to you that you will not imagine, you Persian liar ... you are an Iranian shoe!"

    Musawi responds with, "Your father killed Kurds!"

    Finally, Jabouri advises Musawi against speaking ill of Saddam Hussein, to which Musawi tells him not to advise anything, but rather, "kill me in Iraq, send your militia to kill me."

    I've been reading Vali Nasr's The Shia Revival, and he writes a lot about how the Sunni regard the Shia as not being proper Arabs, because Shiism has had much influence from Iran and since some Shia in Lebanon and Iraq are the descendants of Persians who migrated centuries ago. Jabouri literally calls Musawi and Iranian (he says both Ajami and Irani), and brings some paperwork (which he proceeds to throw at his interlocutor) out to support his claims. And in the end, who knows whether Musawi is Iranian or not. Maybe he is, or maybe his family fled Iraq and he was born in Iran to Iraqi parents.

    But that's not really important. The important point is the internecine venom. Jabouri tells the Jazeera moderator, "The people who executed Saddam Hussein are the same people who killed Umar, the same people who killed Abu Bakr." Are these Iraqi militants? western viewers might ask. No, Umar and Abu Bakr are the first and second Caliphs, those who succeeded Mohammad in the 7th century. Umar ibn al-Khattab was poisoned by a Persian slave, and Abu Bakr either died of a cold or from being poisoned a year earlier, depending on your source. (The partisans of Ali, the Shi'at 'Ali, believed that Ali should have been Caliph instead of Abu Bakr and Umar.)

    I find it disconcerting that the Iraqi political discourse still hinges on the desert politics of Medina and Mecca nearly 1400 years ago. And seeing the historical complexities of the situation in Iraq, I find it even more disconcerting that most of the people who are paid to understand these historico-religious contexts don't even know the difference between the Sunni and the Shia.

    DiggIt and Del.icio.us and Reddit links...

    I've added links next to the comment section for DiggIt and Del.icio.us and Reddit in case anyone wants to add any of my posts to either of those sites...

    Just another Iraqi tribe?


    I was reading a back and forth in the London Review debating the source of anti-Semitic remarks that had been attributed (falsely it seems) to Hassan Nasrallah, all of which came in response to Charles Glass's recent piece about Hezbollah learning from its mistakes. This led me to go check out some of his previous writings, since he seems to be an interesting character who studied at the American University in Beirut and was kidnapped by Hezbollah in the 1987.

    While reading his piece in The Nation, From Beirut to Damascus, I came across this: "Kamal Salibi, Lebanon's historian laureate at the American University of Beirut, used to tell me the Palestinians had made the mistake of becoming another Lebanese tribe."

    And this started me to thinking, has the US become just another Iraqi tribe?

    Using Diplomacy in Somalia


    There's a very good op-ed piece on Somalia in today's Times, A fleeting victory in Somalia. Jonathan Stevenson, at the United States Naval War College, argues, rightly in my opinion, that a robust round of diplomacy is needed to work out Somalia's problems, namely, a power-sharing plan with the Islamic Courts and the transitional government, an engagement of clan leaders and an agreement on the place of Islamic law in Somalia. He adds that the US should join efforts by the EU and Kenya to help broker an agreement, similar to the one that finally ended the war between Southern Sudan and Khartoum:

    The temptation in Washington will be to keep its distance and rely on Ethiopia, the European Union and Kenya for as long as possible. This attitude is myopic. Neither the American public nor the world believe that the Bush administration?s predominantly military approach to counterterrorism is working. Relying primarily on Ethiopian troops to tamp down Somali Islamism would represent a continuation of that flawed model, and of the corresponding risk of fueling the jihad.

    The United States' full participation in a diplomatic process in the Horn of Africa, on the other hand, would constitute a relatively low-cost way of signaling a new American approach to Islam and a re-engagement in sub-Saharan Africa, which has largely been left out of Washington's post-9/11 calculus. A result could be a small political victory in the Muslim world that would deprive Osama bin Laden and his followers of a new grievance rather than supplying them with one.

    He points out that any prolonged presence of Ethiopian troops could be very dangerous. Many Somalis are afraid of Ethiopian designs on the country and disconcerted by the recent comments of the transitional Interior Minister Hussein Mohammad Aideed (whose father was made famous by the "Black Hawk Down" incident) that Somalia and Ethiopia "should unite, just like the Europeans. One money. One passport. One security."

    The problem, then, lies in a tendency to rely on military force instead of negotiation. I tend to believe that it was a bad idea for the Ethiopians to invade; a better idea would have been negotiations in Yemen or Kenya to agree on a power-sharing deal, because even if the thought of another Islamic regime bothers me, the Courts did manage to bring some sort of stability and decrease the violence in the areas they controlled. Now, there is a risk that continued Ethiopian presence will rub Somalis the wrong way and that the spotty order of the Islamists will revert back to the reign of warlords and inter-clan violence.

    A local radio journalist summed up the problems of an Ethiopian presence in the country, as reported by the Times:

    With Somalia's longtime fears that Ethiopia might swallow it, the sooner [the Ethiopians' withdrawal] happens, the better. On Saturday, Nasteh Dahir Farah, a reporter for a Kismayo radio station, visited the town's airport with three foreign journalists. The foreigners were allowed in. Mr. Farah was not. He was shooed away by Ethiopian soldiers at the gate and told never to come back.

    "This is my country, not theirs," he said. "If I didn't have a job," Mr. Farah muttered, straightening himself up and smoothing the shirt where he had been poked in the chest, "I'd join the resistance."

    A little humiliation, it seems, goes a long, long way.

    And indeed it does, as we have seen throughout the Muslim world, but especially in Iraq.

    So while it seems imperative for negotiations to begin in good faith between the transitional government, the clan leaders and the Islamic Courts, I've got a sneaking suspicion that the transitional government has let their Ethiopian-backed success go to their head. And remarks by the transitional defense minister do little to reassure me:

    The big man in Kismayo is Barre Aadan Shire, the transitional government's defense minister and a former warlord, whose strong jaw, natty goatee and bald head lend him an uncanny resemblance to Lenin. He says many people in Kismayo have asked him to reach out to the Islamists, but he does not want to. The last of the Islamist fighters have retreated to the Kenya border, about 150 miles away.

    "If we were going to compromise," Mr. Shire said, "why go to war?"

    Saturday, January 06, 2007

    Disney hate radio and advertising


    Via Juan Cole, Daily Kos has the story of a blogger who contacted a talk radio station's advertisers to tell them that their products were being associated with and read by the same voices that call for torturing people and murdering Muslims. He sent advertisers polite informative letters and was subsequently slapped with a cease and desist letter by Disney's lawyers because he was providing audio recordings of the broadcasts to allow advertisers to hear the comments for themselves. It seems that this hit a nerve with Disney, particularly as Visa seems to have pulled their ads from the shows in question.

    Here's a copy of the letter he sent AT&T:


    To: Wendy Clark, VP-advertising, AT&T

    Dear Ms. Clark:

    Thanks to radio hosts from KSFO your brand is being associated with torturing and killing people. Would your marketing people be happy to hear your commercial ran after Lee Rogers said this about a black man in Lincoln, Nebraska?

    "Now you start with the Sear's Diehard the battery cables connected to his testi*les and you entertain him with that for awhile and then you blow his bleeping head off. " (Audio link)

    You should know the person calling for the execution and torture of the black man in that clip READS THE AT&T commercials on the air. Right now on KSFO Lee Rogers is THE VOICE of AT&T to the SF Bay area. (Audio Link)

    Sadly, calling for the death and torture of individuals and groups of people is a regular occurrence on KSFO 560 AM, owned by ABC Radio Disney.

    Another example: immediately after the 6 am ABC Radio news on October 27th:

    Lee Rogers: I say they catch the person, tie 'em to a post and burn 'em. Set 'em on fire.

    Officer Vic: Yeah.

    Lee Rogers: Let 'em know what it feels like.

    Melanie Morgan: Hog tie 'em first. That would be good.

    Next, Lee Rogers talks about a protester at a Cindy Sheehan event:

    "Whoever did that should have been stomped to death right there. Just stomp their bleeping guts out." (Audio link).

    Within three minutes they called for someone to be burned alive and a protester to be stomped to death. If you dismissed the first clip as a "joke", note that in this clip they were clearly not joking:

    Melanie Morgan famously called for Bill Keller of the New York Times (and nine editors from other papers) to be hanged.  (Audio link)

    On Nov. 14th  Melanie Morgan said this about Nancy Pelosi:

    "We've got a bulls-eye painted on her big laughing eyes." (Audio link)

    Also note that Morgan reads the Cingular Wireless commercials on KSFO.

    Of course political speech is protected, but I believe the FBI and the FCC frown on targeting elected officials for death or inciting violence toward leaders of any political party.

    Because of how ads are purchased, your ad placement agency probably didn't know that Tom Brenner (the "comic relief" called Officer Vic) regularly mocks advertiser's products.  Listen as he:


  • calls Chevrolet's product "shi**y" (audio link)
  • suggests an anti-virus product is part of a protection racket (audio link)
  • pretends a cold pill is really a suppository (audio link)

    The odds are your product will be mocked. If they don't respect a big client like Chevrolet, will they respect your brand?

    And it's not simply calls for killing specific people or mocking products, the radio hosts at KSFO proudly talk about their anti-Muslim views. Based on my research, your business has rules about discrimination against people of other religions, so what message are you sending when your employees or customers hear your advertisements right after Brian Sussman demands of a caller:

    "Say Allah is a Wh*re!" (audio link)

    Or when Lee Rogers says,

    "Indonesia is really just another enemy Muslim nation. ... You keep screwing around with stuff like this we are going to kill a bunch of you. Millions of you. "   (audio link)

    Maybe you haven't heard any complaints. Would KSFO management let you know about complaints?  Doubtful. Morgan's husband, Jack Swanson, is KSFO's operations manager. The president of KSFO, Mickey Luckoff, started the station format and has a history of defending hosts like Michael Savage until he was forced to fire him.

    I understand you can't listen to all the shows you advertise on - no one can. You rely on the accurate representation of the sales reps and the show description. But you don't need to take my word, listen to the programs. You probably won't have to listen long to hear something that offends or disgusts you.  If you wish to hear the complete context on any clip or the audio during a date your ad ran contact me I have an educational archive of audio clips, I've listed a few below.

    I want to emphasize that if you withdrawal your ads you aren't limiting their free speech, just removing your paid support of it. Some other company without the values you describe on the AT&T website can support them. You can choose to advertise elsewhere. This is really about YOU. Do YOU want to be associated with these comments? Do you want your company and brand to be associated with these comments?

    I urge you to discontinue advertising on KSFO during the shows hosted by Melanie Morgan, Lee Rogers, Tom Brenner and Brian Sussman.

    If you want to contact KSFO here is a link to their website. If you wish to express your displeasure to their parent company contact Zenia Mucha, Senior Vice President, Corporate Communications, The Walt Disney Company PHONE: (818) 560-5300 CA, (212) 456-7255 NY or email Heather Rim, Vice President, Communications, ABC, Inc.  heather.rim@abc.com.

    Sincerely,

    P.S.  I would appreciate hearing your final determination in this matter.

  • Read the Daily Kos write up for the full story.

    Friday, January 05, 2007

    Ordinary Iraqis and extraordinary rendition


    The New York Review has articles about torture and extraordinary rendition (subscription only) and ordinary Iraqis. The latter reviews Anthony Shadid's book Night Draws Near, which was recommended to me by an Iraqi diplomat friend of mine. I recently met Shadid in Beirut, and he's an extremely nice guy, and judging from his recent coverage of Lebanon, I can understand why his book would be really good. (Unfortunately, I haven't picked it up yet.)

    The piece on extraordinary rendition helpfully brings together the stories of some of the more publicized victims of the Bush Administration's policy as well as some of the reporting done by CIA plane watchers who helped uncover the story of the "black sites" in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Under review are the Canadian Government's report on the rendition to Syria and subsequent torture of Canadian citizen Maher Arar and Steven Grey's Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program:

    Edward Walker Jr., a career diplomat, was the US ambassador in Egypt between 1994 and 1997 when some of the first renditions took place. According to Walker, there were only a few occasions when the procedure was used, and they concerned men who were wanted by the Egyptians for terrorist acts allegedly committed there. Walker thought it was a good policy. "They were bad guys, and they were set on causing harm. And you know it's not a perfect world," he told Grey. But he was under no illusions about how they would be treated. "I cannot believe that anybody that was involved in this," he said, "didn't in his heart of hearts, if he was halfway intelligent, think that they were getting abusive interrogation techniques that were tantamount to torture."

    Grey asked Walker: "When Condoleezza Rice and the President now stand in front of people and say we don't send people to countries where they torture, are they telling the truth?"

    Walker replied: "No, they're not telling the truth."

    A former CIA officer was more colorful. "Coming out and saying 'we don't do torture' is as bad as President Clinton saying, 'I didn't have sex with that woman.'" he told Grey. "It's a bare-faced lie. Of course we do torture. Imagine putting President Bush's head under water and telling him to raise his hand when he thinks he's being tortured. Give him the water-board treatment, and he'd be raising his hand straightaway."

    Wednesday, January 03, 2007

    Media coverage of Iraq


    Al Jazeera has an interesting article about the Western media coverage of Iraq, and Iraq's sectarian makeup in particular.

    Among the complaints about Western coverage is the claim by Tariq al-Hashimi, Iraq's Sunni Arab vice-president, that the media overestimates the number of Shia in the country:

    Western media often refer to Iraq as being "overwhelmingly Shia", or use other phrases to imply a large Shia majority. This, [al-Hashimi] says, is wrong -- and it has resulted in over-representation of Shia parties in the Iraqi government at the expense of Sunni Arabs.

    Al-Hashimi said: "The false allegations promoted by Western media have resulted in an [inappropriate] political process, and everyone is paying the price for its wrong foundations."

    Where the figures came from to back up assertions of a large Shia majority are unclear: no Iraqi census in modern history has ever included sect.

    Sources such as Encyclopaedia Britannica put the Shia population in Iraq at 52 per cent of the total in 2001. However, figures circulated by the US military, which invaded Iraq in 2003, put the figure at 60 per cent.

    The CIA's World Factbook puts the Shia at 60 to 65 percent of the Iraqi population.

    Other complaints include the characterization of the insurgency as essentially Sunni and the assertion that the Baath party was a Sunni-run apparatus that persecuted the Shia. According to the current Baath spokesperson,

    "Actually, sect was never an issue in Iraq. I am a Shia and I have been a senior Baath official ... No Baath party official -- no Iraqi official -- ever asked me about my sect.

    "When the US army occupied Iraq they issued a list of 55 wanted top Iraqi officials, starting with President Saddam Hussein; half of those senior officials were Shia.

    "The Committee of Debaathification issued a list of 100,000 senior Iraqi Baathists who would not be allowed to enjoy governmental posts, 66,000 of them were Shia - so how is the Baath party a Sunni party?

    ...Abu Muhammad voiced resentment at the the term "Sunni insurgency", saying that Iraqis from different backgrounds are fighting the foreign presence in Iraq.

    "This term plays down Iraqi nationalism," he said. "I repeat, I am a Shia and I am resisting the US forces in Iraq, and we know for sure that resistance fighters from all background are fighting. Why do the Western agencies insist that only Sunni are fighting? Big question mark, I think."


    On the other hand, there are those who disagree:

    However, Karim Bader, an independent Iraqi politician, said that Western media had done a decent job on reporting what had occurred under Saddam's rule.

    He said one had to look only at the senior army commanders and intelligence officers in Saddam's day, all of whom he said were Sunni. Or to look at the sizes of houses in Shia suburbs - small and overcrowded - or in Sunni areas, where houses were far larger but with fewer occupants.

    Bader said: "I think there was sectarianism under Saddam and the Western media reflected that, but the question is, should we hold the Sunni sect responsible for that? I think Iraqis must be careful in answering this question."

    Updates


    A lot has happened while I was away. I woke up the other morning to hear that Saddam Hussein had been executed; and on the same day while on my way back to Spain, I heard that the airport had been bombed by ETA, the militant Basque separatist group; then I saw that Bangkok had been rocked by bomb blasts on new year's eve. Besides that, Addis Ababa sent troops to Somalia to rout the Islamic Courts.

    First things first: I'm generally against the death penalty, but I might be convinced to accept it for those guilty of genocide or other crimes against humanity. However, if Iraq was trying to show the world that it has a modern functioning government, this execution was a poor showing for al-Malaki's goverment: it was decidedly neither solemn nor professional and was carried out on the first day of Eid.

    As for the ETA bombing, I saw the results first hand, because I left Madrid from the terminal that was bombed the next day. The bomb did some pretty serious damage and has probably left two people dead. It looks like this is going to cripple if not kill the peace talks between ETA and the Spanish Government. They haven't seemed to explain why they broke a cease-fire. Although I hadn't been following the talks closely at all, I remember that there was an Irish priest that had been called in to mediate, and I had the impression that progress was being made.

    In Thailand, my first fear was that it was Muslims from the south, but it seems that the bombings are being blamed on supporters of ousted PM Shinawatra.

    In Somalia, I've been afraid of an Ethiopian campaign for a while, since such explicit attacks might lead to an Eritrean invasion on behalf of its Islamist allies, rekindling the war between those two countries and making Somalia a battleground for a regional war. However, the Eritreans seem to have stayed out of it, and the Islamic Courts were routed surprisingly fast. However, as soon as the Courts moved out of Mogadishu, looting was rampant and order was on short supply in Somalia's capital. Furthermore, I wouldn't be surprised to see a guerrilla resurgence of Islamist forces in Somalia, which brings me to the point that a negotiated settlement that brought the Islamic Courts into the government would be the best solution. The last thing Somalia needs is for Eritrea and Ethiopia to have a little war on Somali territory. In some good news, Kenya has called for a ceasefire and a brokered peace in Somalia, which may or may not be fueled by their fear of more Somali refugees.

    Wednesday, January 31, 2007

    Our responsibility to Iraqi refugees

    I've been hearing a bit about Iraqi refugees lately, and when I was in Amman, Jordan last year, they were impossible to ignore. And even if they're less visible in Syria, it seems that there are also many Iraqis who have taken refuge in Damascus as well. The numbers are alarming: 1.8 million internally displaced Iraqis and 2 million who have sought refuge abroad.

    So what has the US's response been? To take in fewer than 500 Iraqis and to set up a program that allows Afghans and Iraqis who have worked with the American military to immigrate to the US. The maximum limit of people accepted into this program each year: 50 people.

    There has not been enough media coverage of this problem, which is why I am glad to see that the Times has an op-ed today about our responsibility to Iraqi refugees:

    To calculate the price that Iraqis have paid for the American misadventure in their country, you have to deal in big, round, horrifying numbers. Civilians killed last year: 34,000. Driven from their homes within Iraq: 1.8 million. Fled to other countries: an additional 2 million, and growing. The number of Iraqis who have found refuge in the United States is easier to pin down. This country has admitted a grand total of 466 Iraqi refugees since 2003.

    However President Bush tries to manage the endgame of his dismal war, America has an obligation to the Iraqis whose lives it has upended. It owes a particular debt to those who have faced incredible dangers working with American forces as interpreters, guides and contractors. These allies -- and their families -- have become a haunted and hunted group, branded as traitors and targeted for kidnapping and assassination by insurgents and militias.

    By any measure, the Bush administration is failing them. The current price tag for the war is $8 billion a month, yet the State Department plans to spend only $20 million in the coming fiscal year to help shelter Iraqi refugees overseas and to resettle them here. A special visa program to resettle Iraqi and Afghan military translators has been capped at 50 people a year and has a six-year waiting list.

    NPR has had some good coverage of the refugee issue, as well as on congressional hearings on ameliorating the situation and the individual faces of the crisis, as seen in the story of an Iraqi translator forced to flee after working with the Americans. NPR also has a segment on the differences between the policies toward Vietnamese and Iraqi refugees.

    According to an interview with Ropert Green, UN High Commission for Refugees representative in Jordan (most UN Iraq offices are in Amman since Iraq is too dangerous), based on an agreement with the Government of Jordan, they are "restricted in how we can actually apply that refugee title" to Iraqis. The Jordanian agreement requires UNHCR to find a third country of resettlement willing to host each Iraqi who has been labeled a refugee, which is why only 600 out of the over 700,000 refugees in Iraq have been officially designated as refugees.

    Tuesday, January 30, 2007

    Troop surge in Afghanistan

    The Onion has the scoop on the surge deployment of the 325th Marine Expeditionary Brigade in Kandahar province:

    In an effort to display his administration's willingness to fight on all fronts in the War on Terror, President Bush said at a press conference Monday that American ground forces in Afghanistan will be aided by the immediate deployment of Marine Pfc. Tim Ekenberg of Camp Lejeune, NC.

    ...The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, 2nd Lt. Jon Pinard, said that Ekenberg will be a valuable addition to his existing military assets.

    "Our Marines are the best-equipped and best-trained in the world, and I have it on good authority that Tim is an especially well-trained Marine," Pinard said. "We have requested that he receive full logistical support while deployed in this theater. We've been told that his body armor will be arriving within six months of his reporting for duty, budget permitting."

    Friday, January 26, 2007

    Escalation with Iran

    According to Reuters, Bush has authorized the killing or capturing of Iranians in Iraq. This goes for intelligence agents or members of the Revolutionary Guard, but not, apparently, for diplomats or civilians.

    First of all, this seems like an obvious escalation in the conflict between Iran and the US, and I think if something comes of it, then Washington will see that Tehran can be very, very nasty: look for the capture of American contractors or soldiers as a reaction. Furthermore, the problem with the distinction between civilians/diplomats and intelligence/revolutionary guards is that it is standard practice for countries to give intelligence officers diplomatic or civilian cover. For example, many CIA operations are run from American embassies abroad.

    Mark my words: The first Iranian that gets killed in Iraq will mean bad news for everyone. I can't help but wonder if this is not just a tactic by the Bush administration to goad Tehran into doing something that will give the US an "excuse" to bomb Iranian nuclear plants.

    Wednesday, January 24, 2007

    Obama and his madrasa

    The Moon and Murdoch media outlets have been in a frenzy about claims that Barack Obama went to a "madrasa" when he was a child in Indonesia. CNN investigated the claim and showed it to be another case of attempted character assassination. The latter says that Obama did not got to a madrasa, which is both true and false.

    You see, in Arabic, the word madrasa (مدرسة) comes from the three-letter root "d-r-s" (درس) which means to study. In Arabic, most words are derived from adding prefixes, infixes and suffixes to an original three-letter root verb. For example, when you add the prefix "ma," to a root verb, you get the place where that verb is done. In the case of "d-r-s," this gets you the place where one studies, or madrasa.

    In Arabic, any school from elementary to high school is called a madrasa. Indonesia is a predominantly Muslim country, which means that it has a lot of Arabic loan words. Madrasa is one of them.

    The confusion arises because of the media's use of the word madrasa to describe a madrasat al-ulum, which is a religious seminary, the likes of which we've heard about so much in coverage of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

    So did Obama go to a madrasa? If by that you mean elementary or high school, then yes, of course he did. If by that you mean a deobandi or wahhabi religious seminary, then no. And of course, the latter charge is patently absurd, seeing as how he was six when he lived in Indonesia.

    This stems from the media's ignorance of all things Arab or Muslim. So we get people throwing around words like shaheed, madrasa and jihad in order to give their writing a veneer of credibility, when in most cases, these words are used incorrectly. Likewise, I often laugh when I see American writers, "haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones," throw in French phrases to make themselves seem more intellectual or better read.

    All this makes me think of George Orwell's little essay, Politics and the English Language. I think more people ought to follow his simple advice on this subject: "Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent."

    UPDATE: According to Chad in comments, in Indonesia, only a religious school, like a Catholic school in the US, is called a madrasa in Indonesia. He says that some are normal public-funded schools, like the public school Obama went to, whereas others are private. I'll double check this with an Indonesian colleague, in any case.

    Temperature rises in Lebanon

    The opposition led by Hezbollah and General Aoun held a general strike yesterday that included blocking the road to the airport and degenerated into street clashes between pro-government and opposition supporters. What this means is that Sunni and Shia groups have been clashing, as well as Christian supporters of Geagea (pro-government) and Aoun (opposition):

    Violent clashes erupted across the country, with two areas witnessing the return of old "fault lines" from the 1975-1990 Lebanese Civil War.

    The Shiite supporters of Hizbullah and Amal clashed with the Future Movement's Sunni supporters in the predominantly Sunni area of Corniche al-Mazraa. Stone-throwing and fistfights injured dozens of people and wreaked damage on cars and private property.

    At the same time, supporters of Christian opposition leader Michel Aoun clashed with followers of Lebanese Forces chief Samir Geagea in several predominantly Christian areas, in fights recalling the leaders' bitter rivalry in the late 1980s.

    Lebanese officials were quoted as warning that the Aoun-Geagea struggle may turn into "a war of elimination."

    This is obviously bad news for Lebanon, and I'm surprised that it's taking so long to come up with a compromise package deal that would get the government up and running again as national unity government. Of course there are a lot of things to be settled, including the presidency, expanding the cabinet, the Hariri tribunal and the Paris III economic deal, but I don't think that these are unbridgeable gaps.

    Hezbollah has said that yesterday was a taste of what it's capable of, and I don't think anyone doubts their resolve or power.

    Washington opposition to peace between Israel and Syria?

    The Times has an op-ed today by Michael Oren, the Israeli author of a new book on American involvement in the Middle East, about the possibility of an peace between Israel and Syria.

    I mentioned these secret talks earlier and maintain that the smartest move the US could make would be to broker a settlement between Syria and Israel (but not at the expense of Lebanon). Oren seems to think, however, that the US is against these talks and that a peace between Syria and Israel would be opposed by Washington:

    The last thing Washington wants is a Syrian-Israeli treaty that would transform Mr. Assad from pariah to peacemaker and lend him greater latitude in promoting terrorism and quashing Lebanon’s freedom. Some Israeli officials, by contrast, see substantive benefits in ending their nation's 60-year conflict with Syria. An accord would invariably provide for the cessation of Syrian aid to Hamas and Hezbollah, which endanger Israel’s northern and southern sectors.

    More crucial still, by detaching Syria from Iran's orbit, Israel will be able to address the Iranian nuclear threat -- perhaps by military means -- without fear of retribution from Syrian ground forces and missiles. Forfeiting the Golan Heights, for these Israelis, seems to be a sufferable price to pay to avoid conventional and ballistic attacks across most of Israel’s borders.

    The potentially disparate positions of Israel and the United States on the question of peace with Syria could trigger a significant crisis between the two countries — the first of Mr. Bush's expressly pro-Israel presidency. And yet, facing opposition from a peace-minded Democratic Congress and from members of his own party who have advocated a more robust American role in Middle East mediation, Mr. Bush would have difficulty in withholding approval from a comprehensive Syrian-Israeli agreement.

    I tend to believe that the Assad regime wants first and foremost to stay in power and regain the Golan Heights. Yes, Damascus has been bruised by being thrown out of Lebanon, but it's entirely possible that Assad wanted to leave and is fighting an internal battle with the remnants of his father's security regime. The problem is that the decision-making process is so opaque in Damascus that it's very difficult to see who's making which calls.

    Tuesday, January 23, 2007

    More on Iran and the bomb

    The London Review of Books has another article by Norman Dombey, Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics at Sussex University, on Iran and the bomb. He looks at historical precedents, especially when Israel bombed the Iraqi Osirak reactor in 1981 while looking a little into the nuts and bolts of Iran's nuclear programs:

    The Arak reactor is certainly more suitable for producing plutonium than Osirak would have been: it can run on natural uranium fuel (0.7 per cent U-235, 99.3 per cent U-238), so the irradiated fuel rods would be good sources of plutonium. Israel and India obtained plutonium for their weapons programmes from this type of reactor. Arak is not due to be finished until 2009 at the earliest and it will need to run for at least one year before its fuel rods can be withdrawn and plutonium extracted. Nevertheless, when constructed, the reactor is expected to be inspected regularly by the IAEA, specifically in order to detect any diversion of nuclear material for potential weapon use.

    So, until or unless Iran withdraws from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the facilities at Natanz and Arak are safeguarded by the IAEA. Cameras are installed at Natanz (they function continuously), and there are monthly inspections. Similar arrangements will be made for Arak. Any enriched uranium or plutonium made will be under IAEA seal and will not be available for casting into the core of a weapon. There is no pressing nuclear threat from Iran at the moment; nor does there appear to be a tipping point in sight, beyond which it would be impossible to prevent the country from acquiring weapons.

    Sources close to the US and Israeli governments nevertheless insist that Iran represents a significant threat, which needs to be dealt with without delay. They assert that Iran has a clandestine programme in addition to its declared programme, as Iraq had. Israeli intelligence claims that Iran is close to having an implosion capability, which it will need to make compact weapons. Yet according to Seymour Hersh, writing in the New Yorker in November, the CIA recently completed an assessment of the evidence for the existence of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons programme. The report, which was based on satellite and other data, concluded that there was no evidence of a secret programme. Nor can it be assumed that Iran could make weapons small enough to fit into missiles without testing: the dud North Korean test shows that even with testing success cannot be taken for granted.

    A diplomatic solution is available, but the US and its EU allies do not want to consider it. It is the same deal I have mentioned in these pages before, whereby Iran would be allowed limited enrichment rights (say, up to 5 per cent enrichment), together with security guarantees and technical help. Richard Haass, who was director of policy planning at the State Department until 2003, believes that 'Iran should be offered an array of economic, political and security incentives', including 'a highly limited uranium-enrichment pilot programme so long as it accepts highly intrusive inspections'.

    Hrant Dink's last column

    The tragic assassination of Hrant Dink seems to be leading to somesmall but symbolic conciliation between Armenia and Turkey.

    Meanwhile, the BBC has an excerpt of Dink's last column about his trial for "insulting Turkishness," published the day he was shot dead in the streets of Istanbul:

    The memory of my computer is filled with angry, threatening lines sent by citizens from this sector...

    How real are these threats? To be honest, it is impossible for me to know for sure.

    What is truly threatening and unbearable for me is the psychological torture I place myself in. The question that really gets to me, is: 'What are these people thinking about me?'

    Unfortunately I am now better-known than before and I feel people looking at me, thinking: 'Oh, look, isn't he that Armenian guy?'

    I am just like a pigeon, equally obsessed by what goes-on on my left and right, front and back. My head is just as mobile and fast.

    ... Do you ministers know the price of making someone as scared as a pigeon?

    What my family and I have been through has not been easy. I have considered leaving this country at times...

    But leaving a 'boiling hell' to run to a 'heaven' is not for me. I wanted to turn this hell into heaven.

    We stayed in Turkey because that was what we wanted - and out of respect for the thousands of people here who supported me in my fight for democracy...

    I am now applying to the European Court of Human Rights. I don't know how long the case will take, but what I do know is that I will continue living here in Turkey until the case is finalised.

    And if the court rules in my favour I will be very happy and will never have to leave my country.

    2007 will probably be an even harder year for me. The court cases will continue, new ones will be initiated and God knows what kind of additional injustices I will have to face.

    I may see myself as frightened as a pigeon, but I know that in this country people do not touch pigeons.

    Pigeons can live in cities, even in crowds. A little scared perhaps, but free.

    Saturday, January 20, 2007

    A nuclear Middle East

    Ha'aretz has an interview with King Abdullah of Jordan. In it, he confirms that Jordan is thinking about starting a nuclear program:

    "[T]he rules have changed on the nuclear subject throughout the whole region. Where I think Jordan was saying, 'we'd like to have a nuclear-free zone in the area,' after this summer, everybody's going for nuclear programs.

    "The Egyptians are looking for a nuclear program. The GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] are looking at one, and we are actually looking at nuclear power for peaceful and energy purposes. We've been discussing it with the West.

    "I personally believe that any country that has a nuclear program should conform to international regulations and should have international regulatory bodies that check to make sure that any nuclear program moves in the right direction."

    In other words, you're saying that you expect Israel to join the NPT [non-proliferation treaty].

    "What's expected from us should be a standard across the board. We want to make sure this is used for energy. What we don't want is an arms race to come out of this. As we become part of an international body and its international regulations are accepted by all of us, then we become a united front."

    This sort of a nuclear proliferation in the Middle East was obvious but not inevitable. (I've brought it up before here and here.) As I've mentioned before, the Middle East should be a nuclear free zone, but since Pakistan, India and Israel all have nuclear weapons (and Iran is most likely doing it's best join the club), it seems inevitable that the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and now Jordan will follow suit.

    Such an explosive region is already problematic, but I find the prospect of all the players being armed with nuclear weapons more than a little disconcerting.

    Friday, January 19, 2007

    Current reading

    I finished reading Vali Nasr's The Shia Revival the other day. It was a pretty good introduction on Shia and Sunni relations in the region, and while most of the Lebanese, Iranian and Iraqi parts were review for me, the sections on Bahrain and Pakistan made for new and interesting reading. Nasr does a good job of explaining the specifics of situations in various countries and then using them to draw a bigger picture of the direction that Shia politics are heading in the Middle East.

    Otherwise, I've just stared reading Rashid Khalidi's Resurrecting Empire. I'm only about 40 pages in, but the quotes that open chapter two were particularly interesting:

    Oh ye Egyptians, they may say to you that I have not made an expedition hither for any other object than that of abolishing your religion ... but tell the slanderers that I have not come to you except for the purpose of restoring your rights from the hands of the oppressors.
    --Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexandria, July 2, 1798

    Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators....It is the hope and desire of the British people and the nations in alliance with them that the Arab race may rise once more to greatness and renown among the peoples of the earth.
    --General F.S. Maude, Commander of British Forces, Baghdad, March 19, 1917

    Unlike many armies in the world, you came not to conquer, not to occupy, but to liberate, and the Iraqi people know this.
    --Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense, Baghdad, April 29, 2003

    The Arab blogosphere

    The Colombia Journalism Review has an piece on Arab bloggers, The New Arab Conversation. It talks about the explosion of new blogs in the Arab world. It focuses, of course, on blogs in English, but it's hard to fault them that, since I imagine none of them speak Arabic.

    Last summer was, in fact, a watershed moment for the Middle Eastern blogosphere. The conflict between Israel and Hezbollah not only brought attention to the many different Arab conversations that had taken place on homemade Web sites in the past two or three years, but also launched thousands more of them. And they were more than just a handful of aberrant voices. They reflected a new culture of openness, dialogue, and questioning. And unlike the neoconservative notion that these ideals can be dropped on a foreign population like so many bomblets, the push for change here is coming from within. Whether it is a Jordanian student discussing the taboo subject of the monarchy’s viability or a Saudi woman writing about her sexual experiences or an Egyptian commenting with sadness at an Israeli blogger’s description of a suicide bombing, each of these unprecedented acts is one small move toward opening up these societies.

    Another aspect of this "new conversation" is that it includes dialogue between Arabs and Israelis. This, of course, has sparked realizations on both sides of the divide that their enemies are people too.

    From Egypt:
    The blogger known as Egyptian Sandmonkey, the twenty-five-year-old son of a prominent member of Egypt's ruling National Democratic Party, is on the phone from Cairo and laughing. "I didn’t know there was such a thing as a poor Jew," he says. "What? Poor Jews? How did that happen? I thought that at your bar mitzvah you got full membership and the manual for how to rule the world. And then they give you your shares in the media. I keep telling my friends, if the Jews really control the media, they are some of the most self-hating Jews I've ever met in my life."

    Developing a complex picture of Jews, and of Israelis (the distinction between the two is not often made in the Arab world), is no easy task in Egypt. Even for someone like Sandmonkey, who comes from what he calls an "upper middle-class family," and was educated largely outside his birth country, the distorted perceptions run deep. "The Egyptians know nothing about the Israelis," he says. "We don't know anything about Israeli society. We don't know anything about their culture. And part of that has been our government trying to keep us away from the information. An Israeli can come into Egypt very easily. For an Egyptian to go to Israel, it's really, really hard to do. You have to go through a large bureaucratic process. And the point is to keep us in the dark. Don't humanize the people. It's easier to vilify the Jews in Israel."

    And from the Israeli side:

    Lirun Rabinowitz, who has been living in Israel for a year and a half ... shares his blog with a Lebanese woman and was recently invited to be a co-author on the United Arab Emirates community blog and, even more surprisingly, on an annual Ramadan blog, in which various bloggers write about how the Muslim holiday is celebrated in their countries. Recently, on the UAE blog, he was accused in the comments section of being needlessly provocative for putting the words "Tel Aviv" after his name at the end of his posts. To his surprise, a number of Arab readers rushed to his defense in the comments section.

    Rabinowitz says that perusing the Arab blogosphere has deepened his understanding of what is happening inside Arab society. "When I go to them, I see what are they worrying about, what are they wondering, how they are feeling, what level of analysis they are putting on things, how keen they are to see my side, and when they are only prepared to see their own. Is there room for bridging? And I learn a lot about what their knee-jerk reaction looks like, what their analysis looks like, what their fears look like." And to him, that added layer of knowledge is a rebuke to the other forces in Israeli society that he feels are trying to define the "enemy" for him. "You want to tell me that these people are stupid? Well, they're not," says Rabinowitz. "You want to tell me that these people want to live in a dictatorship? Well, they don't. You want to tell me that they can't be Muslim and tolerant and friendly at the same time? Well, it's wrong. You want to tell me that they hate me just because they're Muslim and I'm Jewish? Well that's wrong, too. And they prove that to me every day. And I get this amazing opportunity to dispel every demonic myth and every stupid stereotype that I could have ever thought of, and that's amazingly liberating."

    Of course, as the article admits, those who are blogging in the Arab world, and especially those doing so in English or French, are the elite and make up a very small percentage of the "Arab Street." But the fact remains that they are making a difference, and just because they're the elite, doesn't mean that they aren't also the vanguard of a larger movement towards homegrown democratic reform in the Arab world.

    Thursday, January 18, 2007

    Arming the Iraqi government

    Via Kevin, the Post reports that what Al-Maliki really wants is heavier arms for government forces.

    A few months ago, I was talking with an Iraqi friend of mine in the government about American pressure on Al Maliki to rein in Sadr's Mahdi Army. We were discussing how it might be political suicide for him to do so, since he depended on Sadr for some of his political support and how it would probably be physical suicide, since government troops don't have the firepower to take on the militias. My friend kept stressing to me that "the Americans won't give us the weapons to get rid of these guys!"

    Of course, concerns about American weapons ending up in the wrong hands are warranted, particularly since so much of the Ministry of the Interior has been infiltrated by the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigrade. But if the Iraqi government is ever going to be able to beat the militias politically, the state will have to have a monopoly on military force. And for this to be possible, it'll need additional firepower.

    Bush's speech

    The Times published a point-by-point analysis of Bush's speech. It's definitely worth a read, since not many people seem to have analyzed the actual speech, mostly because they knew the overall lines of what Bush was going to announce weeks in advance.

    Wednesday, January 17, 2007

    Secret unofficial peace deal between Syria and Israel

    I've been saying for a while that one of the best things America could do in the Middle East is broker a deal between Syria and Israel by negotiating a settlement for the Golan Heights. This would cut off the ground link between Iran and Hezbollah, help secure the Iraq-Syria border, and perhaps put some pressure on the military branch of Hamas to fall more in line with the political branch (although I'm not sure where Meshaal would go if Syria expelled him).

    Ha'aretz reported yesterday that there has been a secret session of private diplomacy between Syria and Israel. The plan is an exercise in creative thinking that would allow Syria the pride of getting the Golan Heights back but stop them from controlling the area's water sources or using the Heights militarily. The idea would be to create a natural park under Syrian sovereignty to which Israelis had access without a visa or Syrian approval.

    The main points of the understandings are as follows:

    An agreement of principles will be signed between the two countries, and following the fulfillment of all commitments, a peace agreement will be signed.

    As part of the agreement on principles, Israel will withdraw from the Golan Heights to the lines of 4 June, 1967. The timetable for the withdrawal remained open: Syria demanded the pullout be carried out over a five-year period, while Israel asked for the withdrawal to be spread out over 15 years.

    At the buffer zone, along Lake Kinneret, a park will be set up for joint use by Israelis and Syrians. The park will cover a significant portion of the Golan Heights. Israelis will be free to access the park and their presence will not be dependent on Syrian approval.

    Israel will retain control over the use of the waters of the Jordan River and Lake Kinneret.

    The border area will be demilitarized along a 1:4 ratio (in terms of territory) in Israel's favor.

    According to the terms, Syria will also agree to end its support for Hezbollah and Hamas and will distance itself from Iran.

    This is a good start, and I'm glad to see that there is some progress being made; however, I'm a little skeptical that Assad would accept such a deal, even if the Syrians were pressing to turn the private talks into official secret talks between Israeli and Syrian government members. An Iraqi diplomat friend of mine once told me that Bashar's father Hafez explained why he couldn't accept taking the Golan Heights and letting the Israeli's keep the water rights: Sadat had been killed for less.

    Tuesday, January 16, 2007

    Little mosque on the prairie

    The CBC has had a great idea with their new television sitcom Little Mosque on the Prairie. It's about a small Muslim community in, of all place, Saskatchewan that's trying to start a mosque in a local church's parish hall.

    I haven't watched it yet, but from what I've read, this is exactly the sort of show that should be played in the States, where Muslim actors generally only get to portray terrorists and bad guys.

    It looks like it's on bittorrent and can be downloaded here.


    UPDATE: I've just watched the show, and it's pretty cute. It's really similar to other sitcoms on television, except that there are Muslims, Muslims who are normal people. And to my mind, that is what makes this show so important.

    A Franco-British merger?

    In one of the most surprising things I've read in a while, the Guardian reported that PM Guy Mollet went to London in 1956 to discuss joining the United Kingdom with PM Anthony Eden, exploring the possibility of the Queen becoming the titular head of state in France. According to the Guardian,

    When Mr Mollet's request for a union failed, he quickly responded with another plan - that France be allowed to join the British commonwealth - which was said to have been met more warmly by Sir Anthony.

    A document dated September 28 1956 records a conversation between the prime minister and his cabinet secretary, Sir Norman Brook, saying:

    "The PM told him [Brook] on the telephone that he thought, in the light of his talks with the French:

  • That we should give immediate consideration to France joining the Commonwealth
  • That Monsieur Mollet had not thought there need be difficulty over France accepting the headship of her Majesty
  • That the French would welcome a common citizenship arrangement on the Irish basis."

  • Even if such unions are discussed to this day, between Sudan and Egypt and between Somalia and Ethiopia, for example, it seems unthinkable for this to happen as late as the 1950s between two major players like the UK and France. This news is kind of revelation must be a little embarrassing for France, and it just seems really, really odd considering French aversion to the idea of monarchy, not to mention Gallic pride.

    A British friend of mine in Paris sent this article to his French girlfriend, who responded this way:

    The UK was a "staunch French ally during the two world wars"? As far as I know the UK didn't want to back de Gaulle and sided with the US. And they sank all the French military boats stationed in the Channel so that the Germans wouldn't capture them and invade England - and they didn't even bother to warn the French about their upcoming air-raid on French boats so hundreds of Frenchmen died under British fire.

    Nope, really, not much of a staunch ally as far as this side of the sea is concerned...

    [Mollet] would have been hanged if he'd even mentioned this in France.

    Writing history in Lebanon

    About a week ago, the Times had an interesting article about Lebanon's truncated history:

    History classes across the globe serve two purposes — they educate the young and they shape national identity. They also often sidestep controversy to avoid offense.

    It is the same here as elsewhere, but the controversy being avoided is the vicious, 15-year civil war that started in 1975 in which Lebanon kidnapped, killed and bombed itself nearly into oblivion.

    The bizarre results are evident in any schoolbook here -- history seems simply to come to a halt in the early 1970s, Lebanon's heyday. With sectarian tensions once again boiling here, some educators fear that the failure to forge a common version of the events is dooming the young to repeat the past, with most of them learning contemporary history from their families, on the streets or from political leaders who may have their own agendas.

    "America used the school to create a melting pot; we used it to reinforce sectarian identity at the expense of the national identity," said Nemer Frayha, the former director of the Education Center for Research and Development, a research organization that develops Lebanon’s curriculum. "From the start, I am forming the student as a sectarian person, not as a citizen. And what's worse is that the people who are encouraging this are the intellectuals themselves."

    There is a serious lack of knowledge about the civil war in Lebanon. I've seen firsthand that many of the youth were abroad, because their families fled the war, and others that stayed have only the fragmented and fearful memories of a child who did not understand what was happening. So to the extent that the youth learn about the war at all, it's usually through sectarian lenses, a distrust or hatred of other Lebanese groups.

    And even ancient history can be very touchy in Lebanon. As the article mentions, Muslims tend to focus more on the Arab history of the country whereas Christians tend to relate more with the Phoenician period, so much so that many Christians I know don't consider themselves Arab. (Interestingly enough, the roots of secular pan-Arabism in Lebanon and Syria are mostly Christian in general and Greek Orthodox in particular.)

    According to Milhem Chaoul, a professor of sociology at the University of Lebanon, "Typically the victor writes the history. The problem with the civil war was that nobody won, and you still can't write its history because we are still not at peace."

    Wednesday, January 10, 2007

    So much for diplomacy


    The US has changed its policy of working through Somali warlords (previously) and the Ethiopian military (recently) by bombing a Somali fishing village near the border with Kenya where Somali Islamists were allegedly hiding, possibly with some local Al-Qaeda operatives.

    American officials said terrorists from Al Qaeda had been the target of the strike, which they said had killed about a dozen people. But the officials acknowledged that the identities of the victims were still unknown.

    Several residents of the area, in the southern part of the country, said dozens of civilians had been killed, and news of the attack immediately set off new waves of anti-American anger in Mogadishu, Somalia’s battle-scarred capital, where the United States has a complicated legacy.

    As was to be expected, this seems to have gone over like a lead balloon in Somalia, particularly as there have been reports that many civilian farmers and their livestock were killed in the bombing.

    Monday, January 08, 2007

    On Iraq and the Hippocratic oath

    James Traub's post over at TPM Cafe's America Abroad reflects some of the misgivings and ambivalence that I've felt about a full American withdrawal from Iraq.

    At least seven months ago the atrocities in Haditha helped me decide that the US was doing more harm than good in Iraq. I read about how Americans had become just one more militia in Iraq, killing Iraqis.

    The choice was a hard one. And I still had my doubts, despite the convincing prose of Luttwak's decision (two years ago) that we should leave:

    American forces continue to suffer casualties in combat against factions that should be confronting one another instead. Perhaps what the new Iraqi state needs in order to achieve stability is precisely a certain amount of civil war. Preventing it may impede a natural and perhaps very desirable political evolution. Americans would not today be happier if European Great Powers, horrified by the carnage of our own Civil War, had enforced an armistice between North and South that might endure still between two feeble states.

    Because even if Iraq needed to get a civil war out of its system, or dissolve itself in the process, who's to say that it would ever end? The war between the North and South of Sudan lasted for decades; sectarian bloodshed in Lebanon, where I live part of the year, was curbed only with Syria's heavy-handed and often violent intervention. Or we could look at Somalia.

    At the end of the day though, thinking that we could "fix Iraq" is what got America into this mess in the first place. Taking a long hard look at how things currently stand in Iraq and how little we know about the country, it would be hard to convince me that we can do, above all, anything but harm there.

    This also brings up the question of who should decide whether we stay or go. Should it be the American people? Should it be the American government? What about the Iraqis? Should it be the government or the people in that country?

    I'm inclined to believe that it ought to be the Iraqis who get to decide. They've had so little say in their lives for the last several decades, it's about time they got to make a decision about something. To my mind, a national referendum is in order. Let Iraqis stain their fingers purple and show us the door. This would permit the US to leave with a little more decorum (or less shame, you could say) while allowing the Iraqis the dignity of having a say in their country's fate, however terrible it may turn out to be.

    New Mexico governor meets with Sudanese president

    In an unexpected (by me) trip, New Mexico governor, Bill Richards, went to Khartoum to try to get Khartoum to allow UN peacekeepers in Darfur. He met separately with President Omar al-Bashir, former rebel leader Minni Minnowi and foreign minister Lam Akol:

    Richardson told an Associated Press reporter traveling with him that he and al-Bashir discussed the U.N. peacekeeping force, a cease-fire, protection for humanitarian groups working in the region, increasing sexual violence against refugees and a potential conference with rebel leaders.

    ...He discussed the [Abuja accord] later with Minni Minnawi, the leader of the rebel Sudan Liberation Movement that signed the agreement and subsequently became a presidential assistant. Minnawi expressed disappointment that the government has not yet disarmed the militias and told Richardson if the al-Bashir's government does not honor its commitments, there will be regime change.

    ...In Khartoum, Richardson also met with Sudanese foreign minister Lam Akol, bringing along humanitarian workers that included one representative of the Save Darfur Coalition. The coalition organized the trip and has been instrumental in bringing attention to the crisis and criticism on al-Bashir's government.

    According to the AP, this trip was meant to draw attention to Richardson's "extensive foreign policy background, including his tenure as U.S. envoy to the United Nations" in preparation for his "likely White House bid."

    Given how apathetic Americans are about the genocide in Darfur, I can't imagine that this sort of a trip could do much besides show voters that he's got enough clout to meet with a head of state (although it's a lot less controversial than a similar trip to Iraq, Iran or North Korea). In any case, if it's an attempt to garner future votes, it's certainly made me sympathetic to his platform.

    Let's hope he has some success in Sudan.

    A Middle East Summit


    Here's a great piece of Op-Art to be published in the San Francisco Chronicle. It was done by a"Kossack" over at the Daily Kos:

    "Kill me in Iraq."

    This segment on Al Jazeera (translated and edited by MEMRI), is more than a little disconcerting. The segment pits Sadeq al-Musawi, a Shia journalist, against Mishan al-Jabouri, the Sunni owner of the Iraqi satellite network, Al Zawraa. I'm not really exaggerating when I use the word "pit," because it's almost as though two cocks had been set in a hole to kill each other.

    Jabouri tells Musawi that he "should choose your words carefully, or else I will do things to you that you will not imagine, you Persian liar ... you are an Iranian shoe!"

    Musawi responds with, "Your father killed Kurds!"

    Finally, Jabouri advises Musawi against speaking ill of Saddam Hussein, to which Musawi tells him not to advise anything, but rather, "kill me in Iraq, send your militia to kill me."

    I've been reading Vali Nasr's The Shia Revival, and he writes a lot about how the Sunni regard the Shia as not being proper Arabs, because Shiism has had much influence from Iran and since some Shia in Lebanon and Iraq are the descendants of Persians who migrated centuries ago. Jabouri literally calls Musawi and Iranian (he says both Ajami and Irani), and brings some paperwork (which he proceeds to throw at his interlocutor) out to support his claims. And in the end, who knows whether Musawi is Iranian or not. Maybe he is, or maybe his family fled Iraq and he was born in Iran to Iraqi parents.

    But that's not really important. The important point is the internecine venom. Jabouri tells the Jazeera moderator, "The people who executed Saddam Hussein are the same people who killed Umar, the same people who killed Abu Bakr." Are these Iraqi militants? western viewers might ask. No, Umar and Abu Bakr are the first and second Caliphs, those who succeeded Mohammad in the 7th century. Umar ibn al-Khattab was poisoned by a Persian slave, and Abu Bakr either died of a cold or from being poisoned a year earlier, depending on your source. (The partisans of Ali, the Shi'at 'Ali, believed that Ali should have been Caliph instead of Abu Bakr and Umar.)

    I find it disconcerting that the Iraqi political discourse still hinges on the desert politics of Medina and Mecca nearly 1400 years ago. And seeing the historical complexities of the situation in Iraq, I find it even more disconcerting that most of the people who are paid to understand these historico-religious contexts don't even know the difference between the Sunni and the Shia.

    DiggIt and Del.icio.us and Reddit links...

    I've added links next to the comment section for DiggIt and Del.icio.us and Reddit in case anyone wants to add any of my posts to either of those sites...

    Just another Iraqi tribe?


    I was reading a back and forth in the London Review debating the source of anti-Semitic remarks that had been attributed (falsely it seems) to Hassan Nasrallah, all of which came in response to Charles Glass's recent piece about Hezbollah learning from its mistakes. This led me to go check out some of his previous writings, since he seems to be an interesting character who studied at the American University in Beirut and was kidnapped by Hezbollah in the 1987.

    While reading his piece in The Nation, From Beirut to Damascus, I came across this: "Kamal Salibi, Lebanon's historian laureate at the American University of Beirut, used to tell me the Palestinians had made the mistake of becoming another Lebanese tribe."

    And this started me to thinking, has the US become just another Iraqi tribe?

    Using Diplomacy in Somalia


    There's a very good op-ed piece on Somalia in today's Times, A fleeting victory in Somalia. Jonathan Stevenson, at the United States Naval War College, argues, rightly in my opinion, that a robust round of diplomacy is needed to work out Somalia's problems, namely, a power-sharing plan with the Islamic Courts and the transitional government, an engagement of clan leaders and an agreement on the place of Islamic law in Somalia. He adds that the US should join efforts by the EU and Kenya to help broker an agreement, similar to the one that finally ended the war between Southern Sudan and Khartoum:

    The temptation in Washington will be to keep its distance and rely on Ethiopia, the European Union and Kenya for as long as possible. This attitude is myopic. Neither the American public nor the world believe that the Bush administration?s predominantly military approach to counterterrorism is working. Relying primarily on Ethiopian troops to tamp down Somali Islamism would represent a continuation of that flawed model, and of the corresponding risk of fueling the jihad.

    The United States' full participation in a diplomatic process in the Horn of Africa, on the other hand, would constitute a relatively low-cost way of signaling a new American approach to Islam and a re-engagement in sub-Saharan Africa, which has largely been left out of Washington's post-9/11 calculus. A result could be a small political victory in the Muslim world that would deprive Osama bin Laden and his followers of a new grievance rather than supplying them with one.

    He points out that any prolonged presence of Ethiopian troops could be very dangerous. Many Somalis are afraid of Ethiopian designs on the country and disconcerted by the recent comments of the transitional Interior Minister Hussein Mohammad Aideed (whose father was made famous by the "Black Hawk Down" incident) that Somalia and Ethiopia "should unite, just like the Europeans. One money. One passport. One security."

    The problem, then, lies in a tendency to rely on military force instead of negotiation. I tend to believe that it was a bad idea for the Ethiopians to invade; a better idea would have been negotiations in Yemen or Kenya to agree on a power-sharing deal, because even if the thought of another Islamic regime bothers me, the Courts did manage to bring some sort of stability and decrease the violence in the areas they controlled. Now, there is a risk that continued Ethiopian presence will rub Somalis the wrong way and that the spotty order of the Islamists will revert back to the reign of warlords and inter-clan violence.

    A local radio journalist summed up the problems of an Ethiopian presence in the country, as reported by the Times:

    With Somalia's longtime fears that Ethiopia might swallow it, the sooner [the Ethiopians' withdrawal] happens, the better. On Saturday, Nasteh Dahir Farah, a reporter for a Kismayo radio station, visited the town's airport with three foreign journalists. The foreigners were allowed in. Mr. Farah was not. He was shooed away by Ethiopian soldiers at the gate and told never to come back.

    "This is my country, not theirs," he said. "If I didn't have a job," Mr. Farah muttered, straightening himself up and smoothing the shirt where he had been poked in the chest, "I'd join the resistance."

    A little humiliation, it seems, goes a long, long way.

    And indeed it does, as we have seen throughout the Muslim world, but especially in Iraq.

    So while it seems imperative for negotiations to begin in good faith between the transitional government, the clan leaders and the Islamic Courts, I've got a sneaking suspicion that the transitional government has let their Ethiopian-backed success go to their head. And remarks by the transitional defense minister do little to reassure me:

    The big man in Kismayo is Barre Aadan Shire, the transitional government's defense minister and a former warlord, whose strong jaw, natty goatee and bald head lend him an uncanny resemblance to Lenin. He says many people in Kismayo have asked him to reach out to the Islamists, but he does not want to. The last of the Islamist fighters have retreated to the Kenya border, about 150 miles away.

    "If we were going to compromise," Mr. Shire said, "why go to war?"

    Saturday, January 06, 2007

    Disney hate radio and advertising


    Via Juan Cole, Daily Kos has the story of a blogger who contacted a talk radio station's advertisers to tell them that their products were being associated with and read by the same voices that call for torturing people and murdering Muslims. He sent advertisers polite informative letters and was subsequently slapped with a cease and desist letter by Disney's lawyers because he was providing audio recordings of the broadcasts to allow advertisers to hear the comments for themselves. It seems that this hit a nerve with Disney, particularly as Visa seems to have pulled their ads from the shows in question.

    Here's a copy of the letter he sent AT&T:


    To: Wendy Clark, VP-advertising, AT&T

    Dear Ms. Clark:

    Thanks to radio hosts from KSFO your brand is being associated with torturing and killing people. Would your marketing people be happy to hear your commercial ran after Lee Rogers said this about a black man in Lincoln, Nebraska?

    "Now you start with the Sear's Diehard the battery cables connected to his testi*les and you entertain him with that for awhile and then you blow his bleeping head off. " (Audio link)

    You should know the person calling for the execution and torture of the black man in that clip READS THE AT&T commercials on the air. Right now on KSFO Lee Rogers is THE VOICE of AT&T to the SF Bay area. (Audio Link)

    Sadly, calling for the death and torture of individuals and groups of people is a regular occurrence on KSFO 560 AM, owned by ABC Radio Disney.

    Another example: immediately after the 6 am ABC Radio news on October 27th:

    Lee Rogers: I say they catch the person, tie 'em to a post and burn 'em. Set 'em on fire.

    Officer Vic: Yeah.

    Lee Rogers: Let 'em know what it feels like.

    Melanie Morgan: Hog tie 'em first. That would be good.

    Next, Lee Rogers talks about a protester at a Cindy Sheehan event:

    "Whoever did that should have been stomped to death right there. Just stomp their bleeping guts out." (Audio link).

    Within three minutes they called for someone to be burned alive and a protester to be stomped to death. If you dismissed the first clip as a "joke", note that in this clip they were clearly not joking:

    Melanie Morgan famously called for Bill Keller of the New York Times (and nine editors from other papers) to be hanged.  (Audio link)

    On Nov. 14th  Melanie Morgan said this about Nancy Pelosi:

    "We've got a bulls-eye painted on her big laughing eyes." (Audio link)

    Also note that Morgan reads the Cingular Wireless commercials on KSFO.

    Of course political speech is protected, but I believe the FBI and the FCC frown on targeting elected officials for death or inciting violence toward leaders of any political party.

    Because of how ads are purchased, your ad placement agency probably didn't know that Tom Brenner (the "comic relief" called Officer Vic) regularly mocks advertiser's products.  Listen as he:


  • calls Chevrolet's product "shi**y" (audio link)
  • suggests an anti-virus product is part of a protection racket (audio link)
  • pretends a cold pill is really a suppository (audio link)

    The odds are your product will be mocked. If they don't respect a big client like Chevrolet, will they respect your brand?

    And it's not simply calls for killing specific people or mocking products, the radio hosts at KSFO proudly talk about their anti-Muslim views. Based on my research, your business has rules about discrimination against people of other religions, so what message are you sending when your employees or customers hear your advertisements right after Brian Sussman demands of a caller:

    "Say Allah is a Wh*re!" (audio link)

    Or when Lee Rogers says,

    "Indonesia is really just another enemy Muslim nation. ... You keep screwing around with stuff like this we are going to kill a bunch of you. Millions of you. "   (audio link)

    Maybe you haven't heard any complaints. Would KSFO management let you know about complaints?  Doubtful. Morgan's husband, Jack Swanson, is KSFO's operations manager. The president of KSFO, Mickey Luckoff, started the station format and has a history of defending hosts like Michael Savage until he was forced to fire him.

    I understand you can't listen to all the shows you advertise on - no one can. You rely on the accurate representation of the sales reps and the show description. But you don't need to take my word, listen to the programs. You probably won't have to listen long to hear something that offends or disgusts you.  If you wish to hear the complete context on any clip or the audio during a date your ad ran contact me I have an educational archive of audio clips, I've listed a few below.

    I want to emphasize that if you withdrawal your ads you aren't limiting their free speech, just removing your paid support of it. Some other company without the values you describe on the AT&T website can support them. You can choose to advertise elsewhere. This is really about YOU. Do YOU want to be associated with these comments? Do you want your company and brand to be associated with these comments?

    I urge you to discontinue advertising on KSFO during the shows hosted by Melanie Morgan, Lee Rogers, Tom Brenner and Brian Sussman.

    If you want to contact KSFO here is a link to their website. If you wish to express your displeasure to their parent company contact Zenia Mucha, Senior Vice President, Corporate Communications, The Walt Disney Company PHONE: (818) 560-5300 CA, (212) 456-7255 NY or email Heather Rim, Vice President, Communications, ABC, Inc.  heather.rim@abc.com.

    Sincerely,

    P.S.  I would appreciate hearing your final determination in this matter.

  • Read the Daily Kos write up for the full story.

    Friday, January 05, 2007

    Ordinary Iraqis and extraordinary rendition


    The New York Review has articles about torture and extraordinary rendition (subscription only) and ordinary Iraqis. The latter reviews Anthony Shadid's book Night Draws Near, which was recommended to me by an Iraqi diplomat friend of mine. I recently met Shadid in Beirut, and he's an extremely nice guy, and judging from his recent coverage of Lebanon, I can understand why his book would be really good. (Unfortunately, I haven't picked it up yet.)

    The piece on extraordinary rendition helpfully brings together the stories of some of the more publicized victims of the Bush Administration's policy as well as some of the reporting done by CIA plane watchers who helped uncover the story of the "black sites" in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Under review are the Canadian Government's report on the rendition to Syria and subsequent torture of Canadian citizen Maher Arar and Steven Grey's Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program:

    Edward Walker Jr., a career diplomat, was the US ambassador in Egypt between 1994 and 1997 when some of the first renditions took place. According to Walker, there were only a few occasions when the procedure was used, and they concerned men who were wanted by the Egyptians for terrorist acts allegedly committed there. Walker thought it was a good policy. "They were bad guys, and they were set on causing harm. And you know it's not a perfect world," he told Grey. But he was under no illusions about how they would be treated. "I cannot believe that anybody that was involved in this," he said, "didn't in his heart of hearts, if he was halfway intelligent, think that they were getting abusive interrogation techniques that were tantamount to torture."

    Grey asked Walker: "When Condoleezza Rice and the President now stand in front of people and say we don't send people to countries where they torture, are they telling the truth?"

    Walker replied: "No, they're not telling the truth."

    A former CIA officer was more colorful. "Coming out and saying 'we don't do torture' is as bad as President Clinton saying, 'I didn't have sex with that woman.'" he told Grey. "It's a bare-faced lie. Of course we do torture. Imagine putting President Bush's head under water and telling him to raise his hand when he thinks he's being tortured. Give him the water-board treatment, and he'd be raising his hand straightaway."

    Wednesday, January 03, 2007

    Media coverage of Iraq


    Al Jazeera has an interesting article about the Western media coverage of Iraq, and Iraq's sectarian makeup in particular.

    Among the complaints about Western coverage is the claim by Tariq al-Hashimi, Iraq's Sunni Arab vice-president, that the media overestimates the number of Shia in the country:

    Western media often refer to Iraq as being "overwhelmingly Shia", or use other phrases to imply a large Shia majority. This, [al-Hashimi] says, is wrong -- and it has resulted in over-representation of Shia parties in the Iraqi government at the expense of Sunni Arabs.

    Al-Hashimi said: "The false allegations promoted by Western media have resulted in an [inappropriate] political process, and everyone is paying the price for its wrong foundations."

    Where the figures came from to back up assertions of a large Shia majority are unclear: no Iraqi census in modern history has ever included sect.

    Sources such as Encyclopaedia Britannica put the Shia population in Iraq at 52 per cent of the total in 2001. However, figures circulated by the US military, which invaded Iraq in 2003, put the figure at 60 per cent.

    The CIA's World Factbook puts the Shia at 60 to 65 percent of the Iraqi population.

    Other complaints include the characterization of the insurgency as essentially Sunni and the assertion that the Baath party was a Sunni-run apparatus that persecuted the Shia. According to the current Baath spokesperson,

    "Actually, sect was never an issue in Iraq. I am a Shia and I have been a senior Baath official ... No Baath party official -- no Iraqi official -- ever asked me about my sect.

    "When the US army occupied Iraq they issued a list of 55 wanted top Iraqi officials, starting with President Saddam Hussein; half of those senior officials were Shia.

    "The Committee of Debaathification issued a list of 100,000 senior Iraqi Baathists who would not be allowed to enjoy governmental posts, 66,000 of them were Shia - so how is the Baath party a Sunni party?

    ...Abu Muhammad voiced resentment at the the term "Sunni insurgency", saying that Iraqis from different backgrounds are fighting the foreign presence in Iraq.

    "This term plays down Iraqi nationalism," he said. "I repeat, I am a Shia and I am resisting the US forces in Iraq, and we know for sure that resistance fighters from all background are fighting. Why do the Western agencies insist that only Sunni are fighting? Big question mark, I think."


    On the other hand, there are those who disagree:

    However, Karim Bader, an independent Iraqi politician, said that Western media had done a decent job on reporting what had occurred under Saddam's rule.

    He said one had to look only at the senior army commanders and intelligence officers in Saddam's day, all of whom he said were Sunni. Or to look at the sizes of houses in Shia suburbs - small and overcrowded - or in Sunni areas, where houses were far larger but with fewer occupants.

    Bader said: "I think there was sectarianism under Saddam and the Western media reflected that, but the question is, should we hold the Sunni sect responsible for that? I think Iraqis must be careful in answering this question."

    Updates


    A lot has happened while I was away. I woke up the other morning to hear that Saddam Hussein had been executed; and on the same day while on my way back to Spain, I heard that the airport had been bombed by ETA, the militant Basque separatist group; then I saw that Bangkok had been rocked by bomb blasts on new year's eve. Besides that, Addis Ababa sent troops to Somalia to rout the Islamic Courts.

    First things first: I'm generally against the death penalty, but I might be convinced to accept it for those guilty of genocide or other crimes against humanity. However, if Iraq was trying to show the world that it has a modern functioning government, this execution was a poor showing for al-Malaki's goverment: it was decidedly neither solemn nor professional and was carried out on the first day of Eid.

    As for the ETA bombing, I saw the results first hand, because I left Madrid from the terminal that was bombed the next day. The bomb did some pretty serious damage and has probably left two people dead. It looks like this is going to cripple if not kill the peace talks between ETA and the Spanish Government. They haven't seemed to explain why they broke a cease-fire. Although I hadn't been following the talks closely at all, I remember that there was an Irish priest that had been called in to mediate, and I had the impression that progress was being made.

    In Thailand, my first fear was that it was Muslims from the south, but it seems that the bombings are being blamed on supporters of ousted PM Shinawatra.

    In Somalia, I've been afraid of an Ethiopian campaign for a while, since such explicit attacks might lead to an Eritrean invasion on behalf of its Islamist allies, rekindling the war between those two countries and making Somalia a battleground for a regional war. However, the Eritreans seem to have stayed out of it, and the Islamic Courts were routed surprisingly fast. However, as soon as the Courts moved out of Mogadishu, looting was rampant and order was on short supply in Somalia's capital. Furthermore, I wouldn't be surprised to see a guerrilla resurgence of Islamist forces in Somalia, which brings me to the point that a negotiated settlement that brought the Islamic Courts into the government would be the best solution. The last thing Somalia needs is for Eritrea and Ethiopia to have a little war on Somali territory. In some good news, Kenya has called for a ceasefire and a brokered peace in Somalia, which may or may not be fueled by their fear of more Somali refugees.

    Wednesday, January 31, 2007

    Our responsibility to Iraqi refugees

    I've been hearing a bit about Iraqi refugees lately, and when I was in Amman, Jordan last year, they were impossible to ignore. And even if they're less visible in Syria, it seems that there are also many Iraqis who have taken refuge in Damascus as well. The numbers are alarming: 1.8 million internally displaced Iraqis and 2 million who have sought refuge abroad.

    So what has the US's response been? To take in fewer than 500 Iraqis and to set up a program that allows Afghans and Iraqis who have worked with the American military to immigrate to the US. The maximum limit of people accepted into this program each year: 50 people.

    There has not been enough media coverage of this problem, which is why I am glad to see that the Times has an op-ed today about our responsibility to Iraqi refugees:

    To calculate the price that Iraqis have paid for the American misadventure in their country, you have to deal in big, round, horrifying numbers. Civilians killed last year: 34,000. Driven from their homes within Iraq: 1.8 million. Fled to other countries: an additional 2 million, and growing. The number of Iraqis who have found refuge in the United States is easier to pin down. This country has admitted a grand total of 466 Iraqi refugees since 2003.

    However President Bush tries to manage the endgame of his dismal war, America has an obligation to the Iraqis whose lives it has upended. It owes a particular debt to those who have faced incredible dangers working with American forces as interpreters, guides and contractors. These allies -- and their families -- have become a haunted and hunted group, branded as traitors and targeted for kidnapping and assassination by insurgents and militias.

    By any measure, the Bush administration is failing them. The current price tag for the war is $8 billion a month, yet the State Department plans to spend only $20 million in the coming fiscal year to help shelter Iraqi refugees overseas and to resettle them here. A special visa program to resettle Iraqi and Afghan military translators has been capped at 50 people a year and has a six-year waiting list.

    NPR has had some good coverage of the refugee issue, as well as on congressional hearings on ameliorating the situation and the individual faces of the crisis, as seen in the story of an Iraqi translator forced to flee after working with the Americans. NPR also has a segment on the differences between the policies toward Vietnamese and Iraqi refugees.

    According to an interview with Ropert Green, UN High Commission for Refugees representative in Jordan (most UN Iraq offices are in Amman since Iraq is too dangerous), based on an agreement with the Government of Jordan, they are "restricted in how we can actually apply that refugee title" to Iraqis. The Jordanian agreement requires UNHCR to find a third country of resettlement willing to host each Iraqi who has been labeled a refugee, which is why only 600 out of the over 700,000 refugees in Iraq have been officially designated as refugees.

    Tuesday, January 30, 2007

    Troop surge in Afghanistan

    The Onion has the scoop on the surge deployment of the 325th Marine Expeditionary Brigade in Kandahar province:

    In an effort to display his administration's willingness to fight on all fronts in the War on Terror, President Bush said at a press conference Monday that American ground forces in Afghanistan will be aided by the immediate deployment of Marine Pfc. Tim Ekenberg of Camp Lejeune, NC.

    ...The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, 2nd Lt. Jon Pinard, said that Ekenberg will be a valuable addition to his existing military assets.

    "Our Marines are the best-equipped and best-trained in the world, and I have it on good authority that Tim is an especially well-trained Marine," Pinard said. "We have requested that he receive full logistical support while deployed in this theater. We've been told that his body armor will be arriving within six months of his reporting for duty, budget permitting."

    Friday, January 26, 2007

    Escalation with Iran

    According to Reuters, Bush has authorized the killing or capturing of Iranians in Iraq. This goes for intelligence agents or members of the Revolutionary Guard, but not, apparently, for diplomats or civilians.

    First of all, this seems like an obvious escalation in the conflict between Iran and the US, and I think if something comes of it, then Washington will see that Tehran can be very, very nasty: look for the capture of American contractors or soldiers as a reaction. Furthermore, the problem with the distinction between civilians/diplomats and intelligence/revolutionary guards is that it is standard practice for countries to give intelligence officers diplomatic or civilian cover. For example, many CIA operations are run from American embassies abroad.

    Mark my words: The first Iranian that gets killed in Iraq will mean bad news for everyone. I can't help but wonder if this is not just a tactic by the Bush administration to goad Tehran into doing something that will give the US an "excuse" to bomb Iranian nuclear plants.

    Wednesday, January 24, 2007

    Obama and his madrasa

    The Moon and Murdoch media outlets have been in a frenzy about claims that Barack Obama went to a "madrasa" when he was a child in Indonesia. CNN investigated the claim and showed it to be another case of attempted character assassination. The latter says that Obama did not got to a madrasa, which is both true and false.

    You see, in Arabic, the word madrasa (مدرسة) comes from the three-letter root "d-r-s" (درس) which means to study. In Arabic, most words are derived from adding prefixes, infixes and suffixes to an original three-letter root verb. For example, when you add the prefix "ma," to a root verb, you get the place where that verb is done. In the case of "d-r-s," this gets you the place where one studies, or madrasa.

    In Arabic, any school from elementary to high school is called a madrasa. Indonesia is a predominantly Muslim country, which means that it has a lot of Arabic loan words. Madrasa is one of them.

    The confusion arises because of the media's use of the word madrasa to describe a madrasat al-ulum, which is a religious seminary, the likes of which we've heard about so much in coverage of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

    So did Obama go to a madrasa? If by that you mean elementary or high school, then yes, of course he did. If by that you mean a deobandi or wahhabi religious seminary, then no. And of course, the latter charge is patently absurd, seeing as how he was six when he lived in Indonesia.

    This stems from the media's ignorance of all things Arab or Muslim. So we get people throwing around words like shaheed, madrasa and jihad in order to give their writing a veneer of credibility, when in most cases, these words are used incorrectly. Likewise, I often laugh when I see American writers, "haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones," throw in French phrases to make themselves seem more intellectual or better read.

    All this makes me think of George Orwell's little essay, Politics and the English Language. I think more people ought to follow his simple advice on this subject: "Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent."

    UPDATE: According to Chad in comments, in Indonesia, only a religious school, like a Catholic school in the US, is called a madrasa in Indonesia. He says that some are normal public-funded schools, like the public school Obama went to, whereas others are private. I'll double check this with an Indonesian colleague, in any case.

    Temperature rises in Lebanon

    The opposition led by Hezbollah and General Aoun held a general strike yesterday that included blocking the road to the airport and degenerated into street clashes between pro-government and opposition supporters. What this means is that Sunni and Shia groups have been clashing, as well as Christian supporters of Geagea (pro-government) and Aoun (opposition):

    Violent clashes erupted across the country, with two areas witnessing the return of old "fault lines" from the 1975-1990 Lebanese Civil War.

    The Shiite supporters of Hizbullah and Amal clashed with the Future Movement's Sunni supporters in the predominantly Sunni area of Corniche al-Mazraa. Stone-throwing and fistfights injured dozens of people and wreaked damage on cars and private property.

    At the same time, supporters of Christian opposition leader Michel Aoun clashed with followers of Lebanese Forces chief Samir Geagea in several predominantly Christian areas, in fights recalling the leaders' bitter rivalry in the late 1980s.

    Lebanese officials were quoted as warning that the Aoun-Geagea struggle may turn into "a war of elimination."

    This is obviously bad news for Lebanon, and I'm surprised that it's taking so long to come up with a compromise package deal that would get the government up and running again as national unity government. Of course there are a lot of things to be settled, including the presidency, expanding the cabinet, the Hariri tribunal and the Paris III economic deal, but I don't think that these are unbridgeable gaps.

    Hezbollah has said that yesterday was a taste of what it's capable of, and I don't think anyone doubts their resolve or power.

    Washington opposition to peace between Israel and Syria?

    The Times has an op-ed today by Michael Oren, the Israeli author of a new book on American involvement in the Middle East, about the possibility of an peace between Israel and Syria.

    I mentioned these secret talks earlier and maintain that the smartest move the US could make would be to broker a settlement between Syria and Israel (but not at the expense of Lebanon). Oren seems to think, however, that the US is against these talks and that a peace between Syria and Israel would be opposed by Washington:

    The last thing Washington wants is a Syrian-Israeli treaty that would transform Mr. Assad from pariah to peacemaker and lend him greater latitude in promoting terrorism and quashing Lebanon’s freedom. Some Israeli officials, by contrast, see substantive benefits in ending their nation's 60-year conflict with Syria. An accord would invariably provide for the cessation of Syrian aid to Hamas and Hezbollah, which endanger Israel’s northern and southern sectors.

    More crucial still, by detaching Syria from Iran's orbit, Israel will be able to address the Iranian nuclear threat -- perhaps by military means -- without fear of retribution from Syrian ground forces and missiles. Forfeiting the Golan Heights, for these Israelis, seems to be a sufferable price to pay to avoid conventional and ballistic attacks across most of Israel’s borders.

    The potentially disparate positions of Israel and the United States on the question of peace with Syria could trigger a significant crisis between the two countries — the first of Mr. Bush's expressly pro-Israel presidency. And yet, facing opposition from a peace-minded Democratic Congress and from members of his own party who have advocated a more robust American role in Middle East mediation, Mr. Bush would have difficulty in withholding approval from a comprehensive Syrian-Israeli agreement.

    I tend to believe that the Assad regime wants first and foremost to stay in power and regain the Golan Heights. Yes, Damascus has been bruised by being thrown out of Lebanon, but it's entirely possible that Assad wanted to leave and is fighting an internal battle with the remnants of his father's security regime. The problem is that the decision-making process is so opaque in Damascus that it's very difficult to see who's making which calls.

    Tuesday, January 23, 2007

    More on Iran and the bomb

    The London Review of Books has another article by Norman Dombey, Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics at Sussex University, on Iran and the bomb. He looks at historical precedents, especially when Israel bombed the Iraqi Osirak reactor in 1981 while looking a little into the nuts and bolts of Iran's nuclear programs:

    The Arak reactor is certainly more suitable for producing plutonium than Osirak would have been: it can run on natural uranium fuel (0.7 per cent U-235, 99.3 per cent U-238), so the irradiated fuel rods would be good sources of plutonium. Israel and India obtained plutonium for their weapons programmes from this type of reactor. Arak is not due to be finished until 2009 at the earliest and it will need to run for at least one year before its fuel rods can be withdrawn and plutonium extracted. Nevertheless, when constructed, the reactor is expected to be inspected regularly by the IAEA, specifically in order to detect any diversion of nuclear material for potential weapon use.

    So, until or unless Iran withdraws from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the facilities at Natanz and Arak are safeguarded by the IAEA. Cameras are installed at Natanz (they function continuously), and there are monthly inspections. Similar arrangements will be made for Arak. Any enriched uranium or plutonium made will be under IAEA seal and will not be available for casting into the core of a weapon. There is no pressing nuclear threat from Iran at the moment; nor does there appear to be a tipping point in sight, beyond which it would be impossible to prevent the country from acquiring weapons.

    Sources close to the US and Israeli governments nevertheless insist that Iran represents a significant threat, which needs to be dealt with without delay. They assert that Iran has a clandestine programme in addition to its declared programme, as Iraq had. Israeli intelligence claims that Iran is close to having an implosion capability, which it will need to make compact weapons. Yet according to Seymour Hersh, writing in the New Yorker in November, the CIA recently completed an assessment of the evidence for the existence of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons programme. The report, which was based on satellite and other data, concluded that there was no evidence of a secret programme. Nor can it be assumed that Iran could make weapons small enough to fit into missiles without testing: the dud North Korean test shows that even with testing success cannot be taken for granted.

    A diplomatic solution is available, but the US and its EU allies do not want to consider it. It is the same deal I have mentioned in these pages before, whereby Iran would be allowed limited enrichment rights (say, up to 5 per cent enrichment), together with security guarantees and technical help. Richard Haass, who was director of policy planning at the State Department until 2003, believes that 'Iran should be offered an array of economic, political and security incentives', including 'a highly limited uranium-enrichment pilot programme so long as it accepts highly intrusive inspections'.

    Hrant Dink's last column

    The tragic assassination of Hrant Dink seems to be leading to somesmall but symbolic conciliation between Armenia and Turkey.

    Meanwhile, the BBC has an excerpt of Dink's last column about his trial for "insulting Turkishness," published the day he was shot dead in the streets of Istanbul:

    The memory of my computer is filled with angry, threatening lines sent by citizens from this sector...

    How real are these threats? To be honest, it is impossible for me to know for sure.

    What is truly threatening and unbearable for me is the psychological torture I place myself in. The question that really gets to me, is: 'What are these people thinking about me?'

    Unfortunately I am now better-known than before and I feel people looking at me, thinking: 'Oh, look, isn't he that Armenian guy?'

    I am just like a pigeon, equally obsessed by what goes-on on my left and right, front and back. My head is just as mobile and fast.

    ... Do you ministers know the price of making someone as scared as a pigeon?

    What my family and I have been through has not been easy. I have considered leaving this country at times...

    But leaving a 'boiling hell' to run to a 'heaven' is not for me. I wanted to turn this hell into heaven.

    We stayed in Turkey because that was what we wanted - and out of respect for the thousands of people here who supported me in my fight for democracy...

    I am now applying to the European Court of Human Rights. I don't know how long the case will take, but what I do know is that I will continue living here in Turkey until the case is finalised.

    And if the court rules in my favour I will be very happy and will never have to leave my country.

    2007 will probably be an even harder year for me. The court cases will continue, new ones will be initiated and God knows what kind of additional injustices I will have to face.

    I may see myself as frightened as a pigeon, but I know that in this country people do not touch pigeons.

    Pigeons can live in cities, even in crowds. A little scared perhaps, but free.

    Saturday, January 20, 2007

    A nuclear Middle East

    Ha'aretz has an interview with King Abdullah of Jordan. In it, he confirms that Jordan is thinking about starting a nuclear program:

    "[T]he rules have changed on the nuclear subject throughout the whole region. Where I think Jordan was saying, 'we'd like to have a nuclear-free zone in the area,' after this summer, everybody's going for nuclear programs.

    "The Egyptians are looking for a nuclear program. The GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] are looking at one, and we are actually looking at nuclear power for peaceful and energy purposes. We've been discussing it with the West.

    "I personally believe that any country that has a nuclear program should conform to international regulations and should have international regulatory bodies that check to make sure that any nuclear program moves in the right direction."

    In other words, you're saying that you expect Israel to join the NPT [non-proliferation treaty].

    "What's expected from us should be a standard across the board. We want to make sure this is used for energy. What we don't want is an arms race to come out of this. As we become part of an international body and its international regulations are accepted by all of us, then we become a united front."

    This sort of a nuclear proliferation in the Middle East was obvious but not inevitable. (I've brought it up before here and here.) As I've mentioned before, the Middle East should be a nuclear free zone, but since Pakistan, India and Israel all have nuclear weapons (and Iran is most likely doing it's best join the club), it seems inevitable that the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and now Jordan will follow suit.

    Such an explosive region is already problematic, but I find the prospect of all the players being armed with nuclear weapons more than a little disconcerting.

    Friday, January 19, 2007

    Current reading

    I finished reading Vali Nasr's The Shia Revival the other day. It was a pretty good introduction on Shia and Sunni relations in the region, and while most of the Lebanese, Iranian and Iraqi parts were review for me, the sections on Bahrain and Pakistan made for new and interesting reading. Nasr does a good job of explaining the specifics of situations in various countries and then using them to draw a bigger picture of the direction that Shia politics are heading in the Middle East.

    Otherwise, I've just stared reading Rashid Khalidi's Resurrecting Empire. I'm only about 40 pages in, but the quotes that open chapter two were particularly interesting:

    Oh ye Egyptians, they may say to you that I have not made an expedition hither for any other object than that of abolishing your religion ... but tell the slanderers that I have not come to you except for the purpose of restoring your rights from the hands of the oppressors.
    --Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexandria, July 2, 1798

    Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators....It is the hope and desire of the British people and the nations in alliance with them that the Arab race may rise once more to greatness and renown among the peoples of the earth.
    --General F.S. Maude, Commander of British Forces, Baghdad, March 19, 1917

    Unlike many armies in the world, you came not to conquer, not to occupy, but to liberate, and the Iraqi people know this.
    --Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense, Baghdad, April 29, 2003

    The Arab blogosphere

    The Colombia Journalism Review has an piece on Arab bloggers, The New Arab Conversation. It talks about the explosion of new blogs in the Arab world. It focuses, of course, on blogs in English, but it's hard to fault them that, since I imagine none of them speak Arabic.

    Last summer was, in fact, a watershed moment for the Middle Eastern blogosphere. The conflict between Israel and Hezbollah not only brought attention to the many different Arab conversations that had taken place on homemade Web sites in the past two or three years, but also launched thousands more of them. And they were more than just a handful of aberrant voices. They reflected a new culture of openness, dialogue, and questioning. And unlike the neoconservative notion that these ideals can be dropped on a foreign population like so many bomblets, the push for change here is coming from within. Whether it is a Jordanian student discussing the taboo subject of the monarchy’s viability or a Saudi woman writing about her sexual experiences or an Egyptian commenting with sadness at an Israeli blogger’s description of a suicide bombing, each of these unprecedented acts is one small move toward opening up these societies.

    Another aspect of this "new conversation" is that it includes dialogue between Arabs and Israelis. This, of course, has sparked realizations on both sides of the divide that their enemies are people too.

    From Egypt:
    The blogger known as Egyptian Sandmonkey, the twenty-five-year-old son of a prominent member of Egypt's ruling National Democratic Party, is on the phone from Cairo and laughing. "I didn’t know there was such a thing as a poor Jew," he says. "What? Poor Jews? How did that happen? I thought that at your bar mitzvah you got full membership and the manual for how to rule the world. And then they give you your shares in the media. I keep telling my friends, if the Jews really control the media, they are some of the most self-hating Jews I've ever met in my life."

    Developing a complex picture of Jews, and of Israelis (the distinction between the two is not often made in the Arab world), is no easy task in Egypt. Even for someone like Sandmonkey, who comes from what he calls an "upper middle-class family," and was educated largely outside his birth country, the distorted perceptions run deep. "The Egyptians know nothing about the Israelis," he says. "We don't know anything about Israeli society. We don't know anything about their culture. And part of that has been our government trying to keep us away from the information. An Israeli can come into Egypt very easily. For an Egyptian to go to Israel, it's really, really hard to do. You have to go through a large bureaucratic process. And the point is to keep us in the dark. Don't humanize the people. It's easier to vilify the Jews in Israel."

    And from the Israeli side:

    Lirun Rabinowitz, who has been living in Israel for a year and a half ... shares his blog with a Lebanese woman and was recently invited to be a co-author on the United Arab Emirates community blog and, even more surprisingly, on an annual Ramadan blog, in which various bloggers write about how the Muslim holiday is celebrated in their countries. Recently, on the UAE blog, he was accused in the comments section of being needlessly provocative for putting the words "Tel Aviv" after his name at the end of his posts. To his surprise, a number of Arab readers rushed to his defense in the comments section.

    Rabinowitz says that perusing the Arab blogosphere has deepened his understanding of what is happening inside Arab society. "When I go to them, I see what are they worrying about, what are they wondering, how they are feeling, what level of analysis they are putting on things, how keen they are to see my side, and when they are only prepared to see their own. Is there room for bridging? And I learn a lot about what their knee-jerk reaction looks like, what their analysis looks like, what their fears look like." And to him, that added layer of knowledge is a rebuke to the other forces in Israeli society that he feels are trying to define the "enemy" for him. "You want to tell me that these people are stupid? Well, they're not," says Rabinowitz. "You want to tell me that these people want to live in a dictatorship? Well, they don't. You want to tell me that they can't be Muslim and tolerant and friendly at the same time? Well, it's wrong. You want to tell me that they hate me just because they're Muslim and I'm Jewish? Well that's wrong, too. And they prove that to me every day. And I get this amazing opportunity to dispel every demonic myth and every stupid stereotype that I could have ever thought of, and that's amazingly liberating."

    Of course, as the article admits, those who are blogging in the Arab world, and especially those doing so in English or French, are the elite and make up a very small percentage of the "Arab Street." But the fact remains that they are making a difference, and just because they're the elite, doesn't mean that they aren't also the vanguard of a larger movement towards homegrown democratic reform in the Arab world.

    Thursday, January 18, 2007

    Arming the Iraqi government

    Via Kevin, the Post reports that what Al-Maliki really wants is heavier arms for government forces.

    A few months ago, I was talking with an Iraqi friend of mine in the government about American pressure on Al Maliki to rein in Sadr's Mahdi Army. We were discussing how it might be political suicide for him to do so, since he depended on Sadr for some of his political support and how it would probably be physical suicide, since government troops don't have the firepower to take on the militias. My friend kept stressing to me that "the Americans won't give us the weapons to get rid of these guys!"

    Of course, concerns about American weapons ending up in the wrong hands are warranted, particularly since so much of the Ministry of the Interior has been infiltrated by the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigrade. But if the Iraqi government is ever going to be able to beat the militias politically, the state will have to have a monopoly on military force. And for this to be possible, it'll need additional firepower.

    Bush's speech

    The Times published a point-by-point analysis of Bush's speech. It's definitely worth a read, since not many people seem to have analyzed the actual speech, mostly because they knew the overall lines of what Bush was going to announce weeks in advance.

    Wednesday, January 17, 2007

    Secret unofficial peace deal between Syria and Israel

    I've been saying for a while that one of the best things America could do in the Middle East is broker a deal between Syria and Israel by negotiating a settlement for the Golan Heights. This would cut off the ground link between Iran and Hezbollah, help secure the Iraq-Syria border, and perhaps put some pressure on the military branch of Hamas to fall more in line with the political branch (although I'm not sure where Meshaal would go if Syria expelled him).

    Ha'aretz reported yesterday that there has been a secret session of private diplomacy between Syria and Israel. The plan is an exercise in creative thinking that would allow Syria the pride of getting the Golan Heights back but stop them from controlling the area's water sources or using the Heights militarily. The idea would be to create a natural park under Syrian sovereignty to which Israelis had access without a visa or Syrian approval.

    The main points of the understandings are as follows:

    An agreement of principles will be signed between the two countries, and following the fulfillment of all commitments, a peace agreement will be signed.

    As part of the agreement on principles, Israel will withdraw from the Golan Heights to the lines of 4 June, 1967. The timetable for the withdrawal remained open: Syria demanded the pullout be carried out over a five-year period, while Israel asked for the withdrawal to be spread out over 15 years.

    At the buffer zone, along Lake Kinneret, a park will be set up for joint use by Israelis and Syrians. The park will cover a significant portion of the Golan Heights. Israelis will be free to access the park and their presence will not be dependent on Syrian approval.

    Israel will retain control over the use of the waters of the Jordan River and Lake Kinneret.

    The border area will be demilitarized along a 1:4 ratio (in terms of territory) in Israel's favor.

    According to the terms, Syria will also agree to end its support for Hezbollah and Hamas and will distance itself from Iran.

    This is a good start, and I'm glad to see that there is some progress being made; however, I'm a little skeptical that Assad would accept such a deal, even if the Syrians were pressing to turn the private talks into official secret talks between Israeli and Syrian government members. An Iraqi diplomat friend of mine once told me that Bashar's father Hafez explained why he couldn't accept taking the Golan Heights and letting the Israeli's keep the water rights: Sadat had been killed for less.

    Tuesday, January 16, 2007

    Little mosque on the prairie

    The CBC has had a great idea with their new television sitcom Little Mosque on the Prairie. It's about a small Muslim community in, of all place, Saskatchewan that's trying to start a mosque in a local church's parish hall.

    I haven't watched it yet, but from what I've read, this is exactly the sort of show that should be played in the States, where Muslim actors generally only get to portray terrorists and bad guys.

    It looks like it's on bittorrent and can be downloaded here.


    UPDATE: I've just watched the show, and it's pretty cute. It's really similar to other sitcoms on television, except that there are Muslims, Muslims who are normal people. And to my mind, that is what makes this show so important.

    A Franco-British merger?

    In one of the most surprising things I've read in a while, the Guardian reported that PM Guy Mollet went to London in 1956 to discuss joining the United Kingdom with PM Anthony Eden, exploring the possibility of the Queen becoming the titular head of state in France. According to the Guardian,

    When Mr Mollet's request for a union failed, he quickly responded with another plan - that France be allowed to join the British commonwealth - which was said to have been met more warmly by Sir Anthony.

    A document dated September 28 1956 records a conversation between the prime minister and his cabinet secretary, Sir Norman Brook, saying:

    "The PM told him [Brook] on the telephone that he thought, in the light of his talks with the French:

  • That we should give immediate consideration to France joining the Commonwealth
  • That Monsieur Mollet had not thought there need be difficulty over France accepting the headship of her Majesty
  • That the French would welcome a common citizenship arrangement on the Irish basis."

  • Even if such unions are discussed to this day, between Sudan and Egypt and between Somalia and Ethiopia, for example, it seems unthinkable for this to happen as late as the 1950s between two major players like the UK and France. This news is kind of revelation must be a little embarrassing for France, and it just seems really, really odd considering French aversion to the idea of monarchy, not to mention Gallic pride.

    A British friend of mine in Paris sent this article to his French girlfriend, who responded this way:

    The UK was a "staunch French ally during the two world wars"? As far as I know the UK didn't want to back de Gaulle and sided with the US. And they sank all the French military boats stationed in the Channel so that the Germans wouldn't capture them and invade England - and they didn't even bother to warn the French about their upcoming air-raid on French boats so hundreds of Frenchmen died under British fire.

    Nope, really, not much of a staunch ally as far as this side of the sea is concerned...

    [Mollet] would have been hanged if he'd even mentioned this in France.

    Writing history in Lebanon

    About a week ago, the Times had an interesting article about Lebanon's truncated history:

    History classes across the globe serve two purposes — they educate the young and they shape national identity. They also often sidestep controversy to avoid offense.

    It is the same here as elsewhere, but the controversy being avoided is the vicious, 15-year civil war that started in 1975 in which Lebanon kidnapped, killed and bombed itself nearly into oblivion.

    The bizarre results are evident in any schoolbook here -- history seems simply to come to a halt in the early 1970s, Lebanon's heyday. With sectarian tensions once again boiling here, some educators fear that the failure to forge a common version of the events is dooming the young to repeat the past, with most of them learning contemporary history from their families, on the streets or from political leaders who may have their own agendas.

    "America used the school to create a melting pot; we used it to reinforce sectarian identity at the expense of the national identity," said Nemer Frayha, the former director of the Education Center for Research and Development, a research organization that develops Lebanon’s curriculum. "From the start, I am forming the student as a sectarian person, not as a citizen. And what's worse is that the people who are encouraging this are the intellectuals themselves."

    There is a serious lack of knowledge about the civil war in Lebanon. I've seen firsthand that many of the youth were abroad, because their families fled the war, and others that stayed have only the fragmented and fearful memories of a child who did not understand what was happening. So to the extent that the youth learn about the war at all, it's usually through sectarian lenses, a distrust or hatred of other Lebanese groups.

    And even ancient history can be very touchy in Lebanon. As the article mentions, Muslims tend to focus more on the Arab history of the country whereas Christians tend to relate more with the Phoenician period, so much so that many Christians I know don't consider themselves Arab. (Interestingly enough, the roots of secular pan-Arabism in Lebanon and Syria are mostly Christian in general and Greek Orthodox in particular.)

    According to Milhem Chaoul, a professor of sociology at the University of Lebanon, "Typically the victor writes the history. The problem with the civil war was that nobody won, and you still can't write its history because we are still not at peace."

    Wednesday, January 10, 2007

    So much for diplomacy


    The US has changed its policy of working through Somali warlords (previously) and the Ethiopian military (recently) by bombing a Somali fishing village near the border with Kenya where Somali Islamists were allegedly hiding, possibly with some local Al-Qaeda operatives.

    American officials said terrorists from Al Qaeda had been the target of the strike, which they said had killed about a dozen people. But the officials acknowledged that the identities of the victims were still unknown.

    Several residents of the area, in the southern part of the country, said dozens of civilians had been killed, and news of the attack immediately set off new waves of anti-American anger in Mogadishu, Somalia’s battle-scarred capital, where the United States has a complicated legacy.

    As was to be expected, this seems to have gone over like a lead balloon in Somalia, particularly as there have been reports that many civilian farmers and their livestock were killed in the bombing.

    Monday, January 08, 2007

    On Iraq and the Hippocratic oath

    James Traub's post over at TPM Cafe's America Abroad reflects some of the misgivings and ambivalence that I've felt about a full American withdrawal from Iraq.

    At least seven months ago the atrocities in Haditha helped me decide that the US was doing more harm than good in Iraq. I read about how Americans had become just one more militia in Iraq, killing Iraqis.

    The choice was a hard one. And I still had my doubts, despite the convincing prose of Luttwak's decision (two years ago) that we should leave:

    American forces continue to suffer casualties in combat against factions that should be confronting one another instead. Perhaps what the new Iraqi state needs in order to achieve stability is precisely a certain amount of civil war. Preventing it may impede a natural and perhaps very desirable political evolution. Americans would not today be happier if European Great Powers, horrified by the carnage of our own Civil War, had enforced an armistice between North and South that might endure still between two feeble states.

    Because even if Iraq needed to get a civil war out of its system, or dissolve itself in the process, who's to say that it would ever end? The war between the North and South of Sudan lasted for decades; sectarian bloodshed in Lebanon, where I live part of the year, was curbed only with Syria's heavy-handed and often violent intervention. Or we could look at Somalia.

    At the end of the day though, thinking that we could "fix Iraq" is what got America into this mess in the first place. Taking a long hard look at how things currently stand in Iraq and how little we know about the country, it would be hard to convince me that we can do, above all, anything but harm there.

    This also brings up the question of who should decide whether we stay or go. Should it be the American people? Should it be the American government? What about the Iraqis? Should it be the government or the people in that country?

    I'm inclined to believe that it ought to be the Iraqis who get to decide. They've had so little say in their lives for the last several decades, it's about time they got to make a decision about something. To my mind, a national referendum is in order. Let Iraqis stain their fingers purple and show us the door. This would permit the US to leave with a little more decorum (or less shame, you could say) while allowing the Iraqis the dignity of having a say in their country's fate, however terrible it may turn out to be.

    New Mexico governor meets with Sudanese president

    In an unexpected (by me) trip, New Mexico governor, Bill Richards, went to Khartoum to try to get Khartoum to allow UN peacekeepers in Darfur. He met separately with President Omar al-Bashir, former rebel leader Minni Minnowi and foreign minister Lam Akol:

    Richardson told an Associated Press reporter traveling with him that he and al-Bashir discussed the U.N. peacekeeping force, a cease-fire, protection for humanitarian groups working in the region, increasing sexual violence against refugees and a potential conference with rebel leaders.

    ...He discussed the [Abuja accord] later with Minni Minnawi, the leader of the rebel Sudan Liberation Movement that signed the agreement and subsequently became a presidential assistant. Minnawi expressed disappointment that the government has not yet disarmed the militias and told Richardson if the al-Bashir's government does not honor its commitments, there will be regime change.

    ...In Khartoum, Richardson also met with Sudanese foreign minister Lam Akol, bringing along humanitarian workers that included one representative of the Save Darfur Coalition. The coalition organized the trip and has been instrumental in bringing attention to the crisis and criticism on al-Bashir's government.

    According to the AP, this trip was meant to draw attention to Richardson's "extensive foreign policy background, including his tenure as U.S. envoy to the United Nations" in preparation for his "likely White House bid."

    Given how apathetic Americans are about the genocide in Darfur, I can't imagine that this sort of a trip could do much besides show voters that he's got enough clout to meet with a head of state (although it's a lot less controversial than a similar trip to Iraq, Iran or North Korea). In any case, if it's an attempt to garner future votes, it's certainly made me sympathetic to his platform.

    Let's hope he has some success in Sudan.

    A Middle East Summit


    Here's a great piece of Op-Art to be published in the San Francisco Chronicle. It was done by a"Kossack" over at the Daily Kos:

    "Kill me in Iraq."

    This segment on Al Jazeera (translated and edited by MEMRI), is more than a little disconcerting. The segment pits Sadeq al-Musawi, a Shia journalist, against Mishan al-Jabouri, the Sunni owner of the Iraqi satellite network, Al Zawraa. I'm not really exaggerating when I use the word "pit," because it's almost as though two cocks had been set in a hole to kill each other.

    Jabouri tells Musawi that he "should choose your words carefully, or else I will do things to you that you will not imagine, you Persian liar ... you are an Iranian shoe!"

    Musawi responds with, "Your father killed Kurds!"

    Finally, Jabouri advises Musawi against speaking ill of Saddam Hussein, to which Musawi tells him not to advise anything, but rather, "kill me in Iraq, send your militia to kill me."

    I've been reading Vali Nasr's The Shia Revival, and he writes a lot about how the Sunni regard the Shia as not being proper Arabs, because Shiism has had much influence from Iran and since some Shia in Lebanon and Iraq are the descendants of Persians who migrated centuries ago. Jabouri literally calls Musawi and Iranian (he says both Ajami and Irani), and brings some paperwork (which he proceeds to throw at his interlocutor) out to support his claims. And in the end, who knows whether Musawi is Iranian or not. Maybe he is, or maybe his family fled Iraq and he was born in Iran to Iraqi parents.

    But that's not really important. The important point is the internecine venom. Jabouri tells the Jazeera moderator, "The people who executed Saddam Hussein are the same people who killed Umar, the same people who killed Abu Bakr." Are these Iraqi militants? western viewers might ask. No, Umar and Abu Bakr are the first and second Caliphs, those who succeeded Mohammad in the 7th century. Umar ibn al-Khattab was poisoned by a Persian slave, and Abu Bakr either died of a cold or from being poisoned a year earlier, depending on your source. (The partisans of Ali, the Shi'at 'Ali, believed that Ali should have been Caliph instead of Abu Bakr and Umar.)

    I find it disconcerting that the Iraqi political discourse still hinges on the desert politics of Medina and Mecca nearly 1400 years ago. And seeing the historical complexities of the situation in Iraq, I find it even more disconcerting that most of the people who are paid to understand these historico-religious contexts don't even know the difference between the Sunni and the Shia.

    DiggIt and Del.icio.us and Reddit links...

    I've added links next to the comment section for DiggIt and Del.icio.us and Reddit in case anyone wants to add any of my posts to either of those sites...

    Just another Iraqi tribe?


    I was reading a back and forth in the London Review debating the source of anti-Semitic remarks that had been attributed (falsely it seems) to Hassan Nasrallah, all of which came in response to Charles Glass's recent piece about Hezbollah learning from its mistakes. This led me to go check out some of his previous writings, since he seems to be an interesting character who studied at the American University in Beirut and was kidnapped by Hezbollah in the 1987.

    While reading his piece in The Nation, From Beirut to Damascus, I came across this: "Kamal Salibi, Lebanon's historian laureate at the American University of Beirut, used to tell me the Palestinians had made the mistake of becoming another Lebanese tribe."

    And this started me to thinking, has the US become just another Iraqi tribe?

    Using Diplomacy in Somalia


    There's a very good op-ed piece on Somalia in today's Times, A fleeting victory in Somalia. Jonathan Stevenson, at the United States Naval War College, argues, rightly in my opinion, that a robust round of diplomacy is needed to work out Somalia's problems, namely, a power-sharing plan with the Islamic Courts and the transitional government, an engagement of clan leaders and an agreement on the place of Islamic law in Somalia. He adds that the US should join efforts by the EU and Kenya to help broker an agreement, similar to the one that finally ended the war between Southern Sudan and Khartoum:

    The temptation in Washington will be to keep its distance and rely on Ethiopia, the European Union and Kenya for as long as possible. This attitude is myopic. Neither the American public nor the world believe that the Bush administration?s predominantly military approach to counterterrorism is working. Relying primarily on Ethiopian troops to tamp down Somali Islamism would represent a continuation of that flawed model, and of the corresponding risk of fueling the jihad.

    The United States' full participation in a diplomatic process in the Horn of Africa, on the other hand, would constitute a relatively low-cost way of signaling a new American approach to Islam and a re-engagement in sub-Saharan Africa, which has largely been left out of Washington's post-9/11 calculus. A result could be a small political victory in the Muslim world that would deprive Osama bin Laden and his followers of a new grievance rather than supplying them with one.

    He points out that any prolonged presence of Ethiopian troops could be very dangerous. Many Somalis are afraid of Ethiopian designs on the country and disconcerted by the recent comments of the transitional Interior Minister Hussein Mohammad Aideed (whose father was made famous by the "Black Hawk Down" incident) that Somalia and Ethiopia "should unite, just like the Europeans. One money. One passport. One security."

    The problem, then, lies in a tendency to rely on military force instead of negotiation. I tend to believe that it was a bad idea for the Ethiopians to invade; a better idea would have been negotiations in Yemen or Kenya to agree on a power-sharing deal, because even if the thought of another Islamic regime bothers me, the Courts did manage to bring some sort of stability and decrease the violence in the areas they controlled. Now, there is a risk that continued Ethiopian presence will rub Somalis the wrong way and that the spotty order of the Islamists will revert back to the reign of warlords and inter-clan violence.

    A local radio journalist summed up the problems of an Ethiopian presence in the country, as reported by the Times:

    With Somalia's longtime fears that Ethiopia might swallow it, the sooner [the Ethiopians' withdrawal] happens, the better. On Saturday, Nasteh Dahir Farah, a reporter for a Kismayo radio station, visited the town's airport with three foreign journalists. The foreigners were allowed in. Mr. Farah was not. He was shooed away by Ethiopian soldiers at the gate and told never to come back.

    "This is my country, not theirs," he said. "If I didn't have a job," Mr. Farah muttered, straightening himself up and smoothing the shirt where he had been poked in the chest, "I'd join the resistance."

    A little humiliation, it seems, goes a long, long way.

    And indeed it does, as we have seen throughout the Muslim world, but especially in Iraq.

    So while it seems imperative for negotiations to begin in good faith between the transitional government, the clan leaders and the Islamic Courts, I've got a sneaking suspicion that the transitional government has let their Ethiopian-backed success go to their head. And remarks by the transitional defense minister do little to reassure me:

    The big man in Kismayo is Barre Aadan Shire, the transitional government's defense minister and a former warlord, whose strong jaw, natty goatee and bald head lend him an uncanny resemblance to Lenin. He says many people in Kismayo have asked him to reach out to the Islamists, but he does not want to. The last of the Islamist fighters have retreated to the Kenya border, about 150 miles away.

    "If we were going to compromise," Mr. Shire said, "why go to war?"

    Saturday, January 06, 2007

    Disney hate radio and advertising


    Via Juan Cole, Daily Kos has the story of a blogger who contacted a talk radio station's advertisers to tell them that their products were being associated with and read by the same voices that call for torturing people and murdering Muslims. He sent advertisers polite informative letters and was subsequently slapped with a cease and desist letter by Disney's lawyers because he was providing audio recordings of the broadcasts to allow advertisers to hear the comments for themselves. It seems that this hit a nerve with Disney, particularly as Visa seems to have pulled their ads from the shows in question.

    Here's a copy of the letter he sent AT&T:


    To: Wendy Clark, VP-advertising, AT&T

    Dear Ms. Clark:

    Thanks to radio hosts from KSFO your brand is being associated with torturing and killing people. Would your marketing people be happy to hear your commercial ran after Lee Rogers said this about a black man in Lincoln, Nebraska?

    "Now you start with the Sear's Diehard the battery cables connected to his testi*les and you entertain him with that for awhile and then you blow his bleeping head off. " (Audio link)

    You should know the person calling for the execution and torture of the black man in that clip READS THE AT&T commercials on the air. Right now on KSFO Lee Rogers is THE VOICE of AT&T to the SF Bay area. (Audio Link)

    Sadly, calling for the death and torture of individuals and groups of people is a regular occurrence on KSFO 560 AM, owned by ABC Radio Disney.

    Another example: immediately after the 6 am ABC Radio news on October 27th:

    Lee Rogers: I say they catch the person, tie 'em to a post and burn 'em. Set 'em on fire.

    Officer Vic: Yeah.

    Lee Rogers: Let 'em know what it feels like.

    Melanie Morgan: Hog tie 'em first. That would be good.

    Next, Lee Rogers talks about a protester at a Cindy Sheehan event:

    "Whoever did that should have been stomped to death right there. Just stomp their bleeping guts out." (Audio link).

    Within three minutes they called for someone to be burned alive and a protester to be stomped to death. If you dismissed the first clip as a "joke", note that in this clip they were clearly not joking:

    Melanie Morgan famously called for Bill Keller of the New York Times (and nine editors from other papers) to be hanged.  (Audio link)

    On Nov. 14th  Melanie Morgan said this about Nancy Pelosi:

    "We've got a bulls-eye painted on her big laughing eyes." (Audio link)

    Also note that Morgan reads the Cingular Wireless commercials on KSFO.

    Of course political speech is protected, but I believe the FBI and the FCC frown on targeting elected officials for death or inciting violence toward leaders of any political party.

    Because of how ads are purchased, your ad placement agency probably didn't know that Tom Brenner (the "comic relief" called Officer Vic) regularly mocks advertiser's products.  Listen as he:


  • calls Chevrolet's product "shi**y" (audio link)
  • suggests an anti-virus product is part of a protection racket (audio link)
  • pretends a cold pill is really a suppository (audio link)

    The odds are your product will be mocked. If they don't respect a big client like Chevrolet, will they respect your brand?

    And it's not simply calls for killing specific people or mocking products, the radio hosts at KSFO proudly talk about their anti-Muslim views. Based on my research, your business has rules about discrimination against people of other religions, so what message are you sending when your employees or customers hear your advertisements right after Brian Sussman demands of a caller:

    "Say Allah is a Wh*re!" (audio link)

    Or when Lee Rogers says,

    "Indonesia is really just another enemy Muslim nation. ... You keep screwing around with stuff like this we are going to kill a bunch of you. Millions of you. "   (audio link)

    Maybe you haven't heard any complaints. Would KSFO management let you know about complaints?  Doubtful. Morgan's husband, Jack Swanson, is KSFO's operations manager. The president of KSFO, Mickey Luckoff, started the station format and has a history of defending hosts like Michael Savage until he was forced to fire him.

    I understand you can't listen to all the shows you advertise on - no one can. You rely on the accurate representation of the sales reps and the show description. But you don't need to take my word, listen to the programs. You probably won't have to listen long to hear something that offends or disgusts you.  If you wish to hear the complete context on any clip or the audio during a date your ad ran contact me I have an educational archive of audio clips, I've listed a few below.

    I want to emphasize that if you withdrawal your ads you aren't limiting their free speech, just removing your paid support of it. Some other company without the values you describe on the AT&T website can support them. You can choose to advertise elsewhere. This is really about YOU. Do YOU want to be associated with these comments? Do you want your company and brand to be associated with these comments?

    I urge you to discontinue advertising on KSFO during the shows hosted by Melanie Morgan, Lee Rogers, Tom Brenner and Brian Sussman.

    If you want to contact KSFO here is a link to their website. If you wish to express your displeasure to their parent company contact Zenia Mucha, Senior Vice President, Corporate Communications, The Walt Disney Company PHONE: (818) 560-5300 CA, (212) 456-7255 NY or email Heather Rim, Vice President, Communications, ABC, Inc.  heather.rim@abc.com.

    Sincerely,

    P.S.  I would appreciate hearing your final determination in this matter.

  • Read the Daily Kos write up for the full story.

    Friday, January 05, 2007

    Ordinary Iraqis and extraordinary rendition


    The New York Review has articles about torture and extraordinary rendition (subscription only) and ordinary Iraqis. The latter reviews Anthony Shadid's book Night Draws Near, which was recommended to me by an Iraqi diplomat friend of mine. I recently met Shadid in Beirut, and he's an extremely nice guy, and judging from his recent coverage of Lebanon, I can understand why his book would be really good. (Unfortunately, I haven't picked it up yet.)

    The piece on extraordinary rendition helpfully brings together the stories of some of the more publicized victims of the Bush Administration's policy as well as some of the reporting done by CIA plane watchers who helped uncover the story of the "black sites" in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Under review are the Canadian Government's report on the rendition to Syria and subsequent torture of Canadian citizen Maher Arar and Steven Grey's Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program:

    Edward Walker Jr., a career diplomat, was the US ambassador in Egypt between 1994 and 1997 when some of the first renditions took place. According to Walker, there were only a few occasions when the procedure was used, and they concerned men who were wanted by the Egyptians for terrorist acts allegedly committed there. Walker thought it was a good policy. "They were bad guys, and they were set on causing harm. And you know it's not a perfect world," he told Grey. But he was under no illusions about how they would be treated. "I cannot believe that anybody that was involved in this," he said, "didn't in his heart of hearts, if he was halfway intelligent, think that they were getting abusive interrogation techniques that were tantamount to torture."

    Grey asked Walker: "When Condoleezza Rice and the President now stand in front of people and say we don't send people to countries where they torture, are they telling the truth?"

    Walker replied: "No, they're not telling the truth."

    A former CIA officer was more colorful. "Coming out and saying 'we don't do torture' is as bad as President Clinton saying, 'I didn't have sex with that woman.'" he told Grey. "It's a bare-faced lie. Of course we do torture. Imagine putting President Bush's head under water and telling him to raise his hand when he thinks he's being tortured. Give him the water-board treatment, and he'd be raising his hand straightaway."

    Wednesday, January 03, 2007

    Media coverage of Iraq


    Al Jazeera has an interesting article about the Western media coverage of Iraq, and Iraq's sectarian makeup in particular.

    Among the complaints about Western coverage is the claim by Tariq al-Hashimi, Iraq's Sunni Arab vice-president, that the media overestimates the number of Shia in the country:

    Western media often refer to Iraq as being "overwhelmingly Shia", or use other phrases to imply a large Shia majority. This, [al-Hashimi] says, is wrong -- and it has resulted in over-representation of Shia parties in the Iraqi government at the expense of Sunni Arabs.

    Al-Hashimi said: "The false allegations promoted by Western media have resulted in an [inappropriate] political process, and everyone is paying the price for its wrong foundations."

    Where the figures came from to back up assertions of a large Shia majority are unclear: no Iraqi census in modern history has ever included sect.

    Sources such as Encyclopaedia Britannica put the Shia population in Iraq at 52 per cent of the total in 2001. However, figures circulated by the US military, which invaded Iraq in 2003, put the figure at 60 per cent.

    The CIA's World Factbook puts the Shia at 60 to 65 percent of the Iraqi population.

    Other complaints include the characterization of the insurgency as essentially Sunni and the assertion that the Baath party was a Sunni-run apparatus that persecuted the Shia. According to the current Baath spokesperson,

    "Actually, sect was never an issue in Iraq. I am a Shia and I have been a senior Baath official ... No Baath party official -- no Iraqi official -- ever asked me about my sect.

    "When the US army occupied Iraq they issued a list of 55 wanted top Iraqi officials, starting with President Saddam Hussein; half of those senior officials were Shia.

    "The Committee of Debaathification issued a list of 100,000 senior Iraqi Baathists who would not be allowed to enjoy governmental posts, 66,000 of them were Shia - so how is the Baath party a Sunni party?

    ...Abu Muhammad voiced resentment at the the term "Sunni insurgency", saying that Iraqis from different backgrounds are fighting the foreign presence in Iraq.

    "This term plays down Iraqi nationalism," he said. "I repeat, I am a Shia and I am resisting the US forces in Iraq, and we know for sure that resistance fighters from all background are fighting. Why do the Western agencies insist that only Sunni are fighting? Big question mark, I think."


    On the other hand, there are those who disagree:

    However, Karim Bader, an independent Iraqi politician, said that Western media had done a decent job on reporting what had occurred under Saddam's rule.

    He said one had to look only at the senior army commanders and intelligence officers in Saddam's day, all of whom he said were Sunni. Or to look at the sizes of houses in Shia suburbs - small and overcrowded - or in Sunni areas, where houses were far larger but with fewer occupants.

    Bader said: "I think there was sectarianism under Saddam and the Western media reflected that, but the question is, should we hold the Sunni sect responsible for that? I think Iraqis must be careful in answering this question."

    Updates


    A lot has happened while I was away. I woke up the other morning to hear that Saddam Hussein had been executed; and on the same day while on my way back to Spain, I heard that the airport had been bombed by ETA, the militant Basque separatist group; then I saw that Bangkok had been rocked by bomb blasts on new year's eve. Besides that, Addis Ababa sent troops to Somalia to rout the Islamic Courts.

    First things first: I'm generally against the death penalty, but I might be convinced to accept it for those guilty of genocide or other crimes against humanity. However, if Iraq was trying to show the world that it has a modern functioning government, this execution was a poor showing for al-Malaki's goverment: it was decidedly neither solemn nor professional and was carried out on the first day of Eid.

    As for the ETA bombing, I saw the results first hand, because I left Madrid from the terminal that was bombed the next day. The bomb did some pretty serious damage and has probably left two people dead. It looks like this is going to cripple if not kill the peace talks between ETA and the Spanish Government. They haven't seemed to explain why they broke a cease-fire. Although I hadn't been following the talks closely at all, I remember that there was an Irish priest that had been called in to mediate, and I had the impression that progress was being made.

    In Thailand, my first fear was that it was Muslims from the south, but it seems that the bombings are being blamed on supporters of ousted PM Shinawatra.

    In Somalia, I've been afraid of an Ethiopian campaign for a while, since such explicit attacks might lead to an Eritrean invasion on behalf of its Islamist allies, rekindling the war between those two countries and making Somalia a battleground for a regional war. However, the Eritreans seem to have stayed out of it, and the Islamic Courts were routed surprisingly fast. However, as soon as the Courts moved out of Mogadishu, looting was rampant and order was on short supply in Somalia's capital. Furthermore, I wouldn't be surprised to see a guerrilla resurgence of Islamist forces in Somalia, which brings me to the point that a negotiated settlement that brought the Islamic Courts into the government would be the best solution. The last thing Somalia needs is for Eritrea and Ethiopia to have a little war on Somali territory. In some good news, Kenya has called for a ceasefire and a brokered peace in Somalia, which may or may not be fueled by their fear of more Somali refugees.

    Wednesday, January 31, 2007

    Our responsibility to Iraqi refugees

    I've been hearing a bit about Iraqi refugees lately, and when I was in Amman, Jordan last year, they were impossible to ignore. And even if they're less visible in Syria, it seems that there are also many Iraqis who have taken refuge in Damascus as well. The numbers are alarming: 1.8 million internally displaced Iraqis and 2 million who have sought refuge abroad.

    So what has the US's response been? To take in fewer than 500 Iraqis and to set up a program that allows Afghans and Iraqis who have worked with the American military to immigrate to the US. The maximum limit of people accepted into this program each year: 50 people.

    There has not been enough media coverage of this problem, which is why I am glad to see that the Times has an op-ed today about our responsibility to Iraqi refugees:

    To calculate the price that Iraqis have paid for the American misadventure in their country, you have to deal in big, round, horrifying numbers. Civilians killed last year: 34,000. Driven from their homes within Iraq: 1.8 million. Fled to other countries: an additional 2 million, and growing. The number of Iraqis who have found refuge in the United States is easier to pin down. This country has admitted a grand total of 466 Iraqi refugees since 2003.

    However President Bush tries to manage the endgame of his dismal war, America has an obligation to the Iraqis whose lives it has upended. It owes a particular debt to those who have faced incredible dangers working with American forces as interpreters, guides and contractors. These allies -- and their families -- have become a haunted and hunted group, branded as traitors and targeted for kidnapping and assassination by insurgents and militias.

    By any measure, the Bush administration is failing them. The current price tag for the war is $8 billion a month, yet the State Department plans to spend only $20 million in the coming fiscal year to help shelter Iraqi refugees overseas and to resettle them here. A special visa program to resettle Iraqi and Afghan military translators has been capped at 50 people a year and has a six-year waiting list.

    NPR has had some good coverage of the refugee issue, as well as on congressional hearings on ameliorating the situation and the individual faces of the crisis, as seen in the story of an Iraqi translator forced to flee after working with the Americans. NPR also has a segment on the differences between the policies toward Vietnamese and Iraqi refugees.

    According to an interview with Ropert Green, UN High Commission for Refugees representative in Jordan (most UN Iraq offices are in Amman since Iraq is too dangerous), based on an agreement with the Government of Jordan, they are "restricted in how we can actually apply that refugee title" to Iraqis. The Jordanian agreement requires UNHCR to find a third country of resettlement willing to host each Iraqi who has been labeled a refugee, which is why only 600 out of the over 700,000 refugees in Iraq have been officially designated as refugees.

    Tuesday, January 30, 2007

    Troop surge in Afghanistan

    The Onion has the scoop on the surge deployment of the 325th Marine Expeditionary Brigade in Kandahar province:

    In an effort to display his administration's willingness to fight on all fronts in the War on Terror, President Bush said at a press conference Monday that American ground forces in Afghanistan will be aided by the immediate deployment of Marine Pfc. Tim Ekenberg of Camp Lejeune, NC.

    ...The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, 2nd Lt. Jon Pinard, said that Ekenberg will be a valuable addition to his existing military assets.

    "Our Marines are the best-equipped and best-trained in the world, and I have it on good authority that Tim is an especially well-trained Marine," Pinard said. "We have requested that he receive full logistical support while deployed in this theater. We've been told that his body armor will be arriving within six months of his reporting for duty, budget permitting."

    Friday, January 26, 2007

    Escalation with Iran

    According to Reuters, Bush has authorized the killing or capturing of Iranians in Iraq. This goes for intelligence agents or members of the Revolutionary Guard, but not, apparently, for diplomats or civilians.

    First of all, this seems like an obvious escalation in the conflict between Iran and the US, and I think if something comes of it, then Washington will see that Tehran can be very, very nasty: look for the capture of American contractors or soldiers as a reaction. Furthermore, the problem with the distinction between civilians/diplomats and intelligence/revolutionary guards is that it is standard practice for countries to give intelligence officers diplomatic or civilian cover. For example, many CIA operations are run from American embassies abroad.

    Mark my words: The first Iranian that gets killed in Iraq will mean bad news for everyone. I can't help but wonder if this is not just a tactic by the Bush administration to goad Tehran into doing something that will give the US an "excuse" to bomb Iranian nuclear plants.

    Wednesday, January 24, 2007

    Obama and his madrasa

    The Moon and Murdoch media outlets have been in a frenzy about claims that Barack Obama went to a "madrasa" when he was a child in Indonesia. CNN investigated the claim and showed it to be another case of attempted character assassination. The latter says that Obama did not got to a madrasa, which is both true and false.

    You see, in Arabic, the word madrasa (مدرسة) comes from the three-letter root "d-r-s" (درس) which means to study. In Arabic, most words are derived from adding prefixes, infixes and suffixes to an original three-letter root verb. For example, when you add the prefix "ma," to a root verb, you get the place where that verb is done. In the case of "d-r-s," this gets you the place where one studies, or madrasa.

    In Arabic, any school from elementary to high school is called a madrasa. Indonesia is a predominantly Muslim country, which means that it has a lot of Arabic loan words. Madrasa is one of them.

    The confusion arises because of the media's use of the word madrasa to describe a madrasat al-ulum, which is a religious seminary, the likes of which we've heard about so much in coverage of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

    So did Obama go to a madrasa? If by that you mean elementary or high school, then yes, of course he did. If by that you mean a deobandi or wahhabi religious seminary, then no. And of course, the latter charge is patently absurd, seeing as how he was six when he lived in Indonesia.

    This stems from the media's ignorance of all things Arab or Muslim. So we get people throwing around words like shaheed, madrasa and jihad in order to give their writing a veneer of credibility, when in most cases, these words are used incorrectly. Likewise, I often laugh when I see American writers, "haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones," throw in French phrases to make themselves seem more intellectual or better read.

    All this makes me think of George Orwell's little essay, Politics and the English Language. I think more people ought to follow his simple advice on this subject: "Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent."

    UPDATE: According to Chad in comments, in Indonesia, only a religious school, like a Catholic school in the US, is called a madrasa in Indonesia. He says that some are normal public-funded schools, like the public school Obama went to, whereas others are private. I'll double check this with an Indonesian colleague, in any case.

    Temperature rises in Lebanon

    The opposition led by Hezbollah and General Aoun held a general strike yesterday that included blocking the road to the airport and degenerated into street clashes between pro-government and opposition supporters. What this means is that Sunni and Shia groups have been clashing, as well as Christian supporters of Geagea (pro-government) and Aoun (opposition):

    Violent clashes erupted across the country, with two areas witnessing the return of old "fault lines" from the 1975-1990 Lebanese Civil War.

    The Shiite supporters of Hizbullah and Amal clashed with the Future Movement's Sunni supporters in the predominantly Sunni area of Corniche al-Mazraa. Stone-throwing and fistfights injured dozens of people and wreaked damage on cars and private property.

    At the same time, supporters of Christian opposition leader Michel Aoun clashed with followers of Lebanese Forces chief Samir Geagea in several predominantly Christian areas, in fights recalling the leaders' bitter rivalry in the late 1980s.

    Lebanese officials were quoted as warning that the Aoun-Geagea struggle may turn into "a war of elimination."

    This is obviously bad news for Lebanon, and I'm surprised that it's taking so long to come up with a compromise package deal that would get the government up and running again as national unity government. Of course there are a lot of things to be settled, including the presidency, expanding the cabinet, the Hariri tribunal and the Paris III economic deal, but I don't think that these are unbridgeable gaps.

    Hezbollah has said that yesterday was a taste of what it's capable of, and I don't think anyone doubts their resolve or power.

    Washington opposition to peace between Israel and Syria?

    The Times has an op-ed today by Michael Oren, the Israeli author of a new book on American involvement in the Middle East, about the possibility of an peace between Israel and Syria.

    I mentioned these secret talks earlier and maintain that the smartest move the US could make would be to broker a settlement between Syria and Israel (but not at the expense of Lebanon). Oren seems to think, however, that the US is against these talks and that a peace between Syria and Israel would be opposed by Washington:

    The last thing Washington wants is a Syrian-Israeli treaty that would transform Mr. Assad from pariah to peacemaker and lend him greater latitude in promoting terrorism and quashing Lebanon’s freedom. Some Israeli officials, by contrast, see substantive benefits in ending their nation's 60-year conflict with Syria. An accord would invariably provide for the cessation of Syrian aid to Hamas and Hezbollah, which endanger Israel’s northern and southern sectors.

    More crucial still, by detaching Syria from Iran's orbit, Israel will be able to address the Iranian nuclear threat -- perhaps by military means -- without fear of retribution from Syrian ground forces and missiles. Forfeiting the Golan Heights, for these Israelis, seems to be a sufferable price to pay to avoid conventional and ballistic attacks across most of Israel’s borders.

    The potentially disparate positions of Israel and the United States on the question of peace with Syria could trigger a significant crisis between the two countries — the first of Mr. Bush's expressly pro-Israel presidency. And yet, facing opposition from a peace-minded Democratic Congress and from members of his own party who have advocated a more robust American role in Middle East mediation, Mr. Bush would have difficulty in withholding approval from a comprehensive Syrian-Israeli agreement.

    I tend to believe that the Assad regime wants first and foremost to stay in power and regain the Golan Heights. Yes, Damascus has been bruised by being thrown out of Lebanon, but it's entirely possible that Assad wanted to leave and is fighting an internal battle with the remnants of his father's security regime. The problem is that the decision-making process is so opaque in Damascus that it's very difficult to see who's making which calls.

    Tuesday, January 23, 2007

    More on Iran and the bomb

    The London Review of Books has another article by Norman Dombey, Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics at Sussex University, on Iran and the bomb. He looks at historical precedents, especially when Israel bombed the Iraqi Osirak reactor in 1981 while looking a little into the nuts and bolts of Iran's nuclear programs:

    The Arak reactor is certainly more suitable for producing plutonium than Osirak would have been: it can run on natural uranium fuel (0.7 per cent U-235, 99.3 per cent U-238), so the irradiated fuel rods would be good sources of plutonium. Israel and India obtained plutonium for their weapons programmes from this type of reactor. Arak is not due to be finished until 2009 at the earliest and it will need to run for at least one year before its fuel rods can be withdrawn and plutonium extracted. Nevertheless, when constructed, the reactor is expected to be inspected regularly by the IAEA, specifically in order to detect any diversion of nuclear material for potential weapon use.

    So, until or unless Iran withdraws from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the facilities at Natanz and Arak are safeguarded by the IAEA. Cameras are installed at Natanz (they function continuously), and there are monthly inspections. Similar arrangements will be made for Arak. Any enriched uranium or plutonium made will be under IAEA seal and will not be available for casting into the core of a weapon. There is no pressing nuclear threat from Iran at the moment; nor does there appear to be a tipping point in sight, beyond which it would be impossible to prevent the country from acquiring weapons.

    Sources close to the US and Israeli governments nevertheless insist that Iran represents a significant threat, which needs to be dealt with without delay. They assert that Iran has a clandestine programme in addition to its declared programme, as Iraq had. Israeli intelligence claims that Iran is close to having an implosion capability, which it will need to make compact weapons. Yet according to Seymour Hersh, writing in the New Yorker in November, the CIA recently completed an assessment of the evidence for the existence of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons programme. The report, which was based on satellite and other data, concluded that there was no evidence of a secret programme. Nor can it be assumed that Iran could make weapons small enough to fit into missiles without testing: the dud North Korean test shows that even with testing success cannot be taken for granted.

    A diplomatic solution is available, but the US and its EU allies do not want to consider it. It is the same deal I have mentioned in these pages before, whereby Iran would be allowed limited enrichment rights (say, up to 5 per cent enrichment), together with security guarantees and technical help. Richard Haass, who was director of policy planning at the State Department until 2003, believes that 'Iran should be offered an array of economic, political and security incentives', including 'a highly limited uranium-enrichment pilot programme so long as it accepts highly intrusive inspections'.

    Hrant Dink's last column

    The tragic assassination of Hrant Dink seems to be leading to somesmall but symbolic conciliation between Armenia and Turkey.

    Meanwhile, the BBC has an excerpt of Dink's last column about his trial for "insulting Turkishness," published the day he was shot dead in the streets of Istanbul:

    The memory of my computer is filled with angry, threatening lines sent by citizens from this sector...

    How real are these threats? To be honest, it is impossible for me to know for sure.

    What is truly threatening and unbearable for me is the psychological torture I place myself in. The question that really gets to me, is: 'What are these people thinking about me?'

    Unfortunately I am now better-known than before and I feel people looking at me, thinking: 'Oh, look, isn't he that Armenian guy?'

    I am just like a pigeon, equally obsessed by what goes-on on my left and right, front and back. My head is just as mobile and fast.

    ... Do you ministers know the price of making someone as scared as a pigeon?

    What my family and I have been through has not been easy. I have considered leaving this country at times...

    But leaving a 'boiling hell' to run to a 'heaven' is not for me. I wanted to turn this hell into heaven.

    We stayed in Turkey because that was what we wanted - and out of respect for the thousands of people here who supported me in my fight for democracy...

    I am now applying to the European Court of Human Rights. I don't know how long the case will take, but what I do know is that I will continue living here in Turkey until the case is finalised.

    And if the court rules in my favour I will be very happy and will never have to leave my country.

    2007 will probably be an even harder year for me. The court cases will continue, new ones will be initiated and God knows what kind of additional injustices I will have to face.

    I may see myself as frightened as a pigeon, but I know that in this country people do not touch pigeons.

    Pigeons can live in cities, even in crowds. A little scared perhaps, but free.

    Saturday, January 20, 2007

    A nuclear Middle East

    Ha'aretz has an interview with King Abdullah of Jordan. In it, he confirms that Jordan is thinking about starting a nuclear program:

    "[T]he rules have changed on the nuclear subject throughout the whole region. Where I think Jordan was saying, 'we'd like to have a nuclear-free zone in the area,' after this summer, everybody's going for nuclear programs.

    "The Egyptians are looking for a nuclear program. The GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] are looking at one, and we are actually looking at nuclear power for peaceful and energy purposes. We've been discussing it with the West.

    "I personally believe that any country that has a nuclear program should conform to international regulations and should have international regulatory bodies that check to make sure that any nuclear program moves in the right direction."

    In other words, you're saying that you expect Israel to join the NPT [non-proliferation treaty].

    "What's expected from us should be a standard across the board. We want to make sure this is used for energy. What we don't want is an arms race to come out of this. As we become part of an international body and its international regulations are accepted by all of us, then we become a united front."

    This sort of a nuclear proliferation in the Middle East was obvious but not inevitable. (I've brought it up before here and here.) As I've mentioned before, the Middle East should be a nuclear free zone, but since Pakistan, India and Israel all have nuclear weapons (and Iran is most likely doing it's best join the club), it seems inevitable that the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and now Jordan will follow suit.

    Such an explosive region is already problematic, but I find the prospect of all the players being armed with nuclear weapons more than a little disconcerting.

    Friday, January 19, 2007

    Current reading

    I finished reading Vali Nasr's The Shia Revival the other day. It was a pretty good introduction on Shia and Sunni relations in the region, and while most of the Lebanese, Iranian and Iraqi parts were review for me, the sections on Bahrain and Pakistan made for new and interesting reading. Nasr does a good job of explaining the specifics of situations in various countries and then using them to draw a bigger picture of the direction that Shia politics are heading in the Middle East.

    Otherwise, I've just stared reading Rashid Khalidi's Resurrecting Empire. I'm only about 40 pages in, but the quotes that open chapter two were particularly interesting:

    Oh ye Egyptians, they may say to you that I have not made an expedition hither for any other object than that of abolishing your religion ... but tell the slanderers that I have not come to you except for the purpose of restoring your rights from the hands of the oppressors.
    --Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexandria, July 2, 1798

    Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators....It is the hope and desire of the British people and the nations in alliance with them that the Arab race may rise once more to greatness and renown among the peoples of the earth.
    --General F.S. Maude, Commander of British Forces, Baghdad, March 19, 1917

    Unlike many armies in the world, you came not to conquer, not to occupy, but to liberate, and the Iraqi people know this.
    --Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense, Baghdad, April 29, 2003

    The Arab blogosphere

    The Colombia Journalism Review has an piece on Arab bloggers, The New Arab Conversation. It talks about the explosion of new blogs in the Arab world. It focuses, of course, on blogs in English, but it's hard to fault them that, since I imagine none of them speak Arabic.

    Last summer was, in fact, a watershed moment for the Middle Eastern blogosphere. The conflict between Israel and Hezbollah not only brought attention to the many different Arab conversations that had taken place on homemade Web sites in the past two or three years, but also launched thousands more of them. And they were more than just a handful of aberrant voices. They reflected a new culture of openness, dialogue, and questioning. And unlike the neoconservative notion that these ideals can be dropped on a foreign population like so many bomblets, the push for change here is coming from within. Whether it is a Jordanian student discussing the taboo subject of the monarchy’s viability or a Saudi woman writing about her sexual experiences or an Egyptian commenting with sadness at an Israeli blogger’s description of a suicide bombing, each of these unprecedented acts is one small move toward opening up these societies.

    Another aspect of this "new conversation" is that it includes dialogue between Arabs and Israelis. This, of course, has sparked realizations on both sides of the divide that their enemies are people too.

    From Egypt:
    The blogger known as Egyptian Sandmonkey, the twenty-five-year-old son of a prominent member of Egypt's ruling National Democratic Party, is on the phone from Cairo and laughing. "I didn’t know there was such a thing as a poor Jew," he says. "What? Poor Jews? How did that happen? I thought that at your bar mitzvah you got full membership and the manual for how to rule the world. And then they give you your shares in the media. I keep telling my friends, if the Jews really control the media, they are some of the most self-hating Jews I've ever met in my life."

    Developing a complex picture of Jews, and of Israelis (the distinction between the two is not often made in the Arab world), is no easy task in Egypt. Even for someone like Sandmonkey, who comes from what he calls an "upper middle-class family," and was educated largely outside his birth country, the distorted perceptions run deep. "The Egyptians know nothing about the Israelis," he says. "We don't know anything about Israeli society. We don't know anything about their culture. And part of that has been our government trying to keep us away from the information. An Israeli can come into Egypt very easily. For an Egyptian to go to Israel, it's really, really hard to do. You have to go through a large bureaucratic process. And the point is to keep us in the dark. Don't humanize the people. It's easier to vilify the Jews in Israel."

    And from the Israeli side:

    Lirun Rabinowitz, who has been living in Israel for a year and a half ... shares his blog with a Lebanese woman and was recently invited to be a co-author on the United Arab Emirates community blog and, even more surprisingly, on an annual Ramadan blog, in which various bloggers write about how the Muslim holiday is celebrated in their countries. Recently, on the UAE blog, he was accused in the comments section of being needlessly provocative for putting the words "Tel Aviv" after his name at the end of his posts. To his surprise, a number of Arab readers rushed to his defense in the comments section.

    Rabinowitz says that perusing the Arab blogosphere has deepened his understanding of what is happening inside Arab society. "When I go to them, I see what are they worrying about, what are they wondering, how they are feeling, what level of analysis they are putting on things, how keen they are to see my side, and when they are only prepared to see their own. Is there room for bridging? And I learn a lot about what their knee-jerk reaction looks like, what their analysis looks like, what their fears look like." And to him, that added layer of knowledge is a rebuke to the other forces in Israeli society that he feels are trying to define the "enemy" for him. "You want to tell me that these people are stupid? Well, they're not," says Rabinowitz. "You want to tell me that these people want to live in a dictatorship? Well, they don't. You want to tell me that they can't be Muslim and tolerant and friendly at the same time? Well, it's wrong. You want to tell me that they hate me just because they're Muslim and I'm Jewish? Well that's wrong, too. And they prove that to me every day. And I get this amazing opportunity to dispel every demonic myth and every stupid stereotype that I could have ever thought of, and that's amazingly liberating."

    Of course, as the article admits, those who are blogging in the Arab world, and especially those doing so in English or French, are the elite and make up a very small percentage of the "Arab Street." But the fact remains that they are making a difference, and just because they're the elite, doesn't mean that they aren't also the vanguard of a larger movement towards homegrown democratic reform in the Arab world.

    Thursday, January 18, 2007

    Arming the Iraqi government

    Via Kevin, the Post reports that what Al-Maliki really wants is heavier arms for government forces.

    A few months ago, I was talking with an Iraqi friend of mine in the government about American pressure on Al Maliki to rein in Sadr's Mahdi Army. We were discussing how it might be political suicide for him to do so, since he depended on Sadr for some of his political support and how it would probably be physical suicide, since government troops don't have the firepower to take on the militias. My friend kept stressing to me that "the Americans won't give us the weapons to get rid of these guys!"

    Of course, concerns about American weapons ending up in the wrong hands are warranted, particularly since so much of the Ministry of the Interior has been infiltrated by the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigrade. But if the Iraqi government is ever going to be able to beat the militias politically, the state will have to have a monopoly on military force. And for this to be possible, it'll need additional firepower.

    Bush's speech

    The Times published a point-by-point analysis of Bush's speech. It's definitely worth a read, since not many people seem to have analyzed the actual speech, mostly because they knew the overall lines of what Bush was going to announce weeks in advance.

    Wednesday, January 17, 2007

    Secret unofficial peace deal between Syria and Israel

    I've been saying for a while that one of the best things America could do in the Middle East is broker a deal between Syria and Israel by negotiating a settlement for the Golan Heights. This would cut off the ground link between Iran and Hezbollah, help secure the Iraq-Syria border, and perhaps put some pressure on the military branch of Hamas to fall more in line with the political branch (although I'm not sure where Meshaal would go if Syria expelled him).

    Ha'aretz reported yesterday that there has been a secret session of private diplomacy between Syria and Israel. The plan is an exercise in creative thinking that would allow Syria the pride of getting the Golan Heights back but stop them from controlling the area's water sources or using the Heights militarily. The idea would be to create a natural park under Syrian sovereignty to which Israelis had access without a visa or Syrian approval.

    The main points of the understandings are as follows:

    An agreement of principles will be signed between the two countries, and following the fulfillment of all commitments, a peace agreement will be signed.

    As part of the agreement on principles, Israel will withdraw from the Golan Heights to the lines of 4 June, 1967. The timetable for the withdrawal remained open: Syria demanded the pullout be carried out over a five-year period, while Israel asked for the withdrawal to be spread out over 15 years.

    At the buffer zone, along Lake Kinneret, a park will be set up for joint use by Israelis and Syrians. The park will cover a significant portion of the Golan Heights. Israelis will be free to access the park and their presence will not be dependent on Syrian approval.

    Israel will retain control over the use of the waters of the Jordan River and Lake Kinneret.

    The border area will be demilitarized along a 1:4 ratio (in terms of territory) in Israel's favor.

    According to the terms, Syria will also agree to end its support for Hezbollah and Hamas and will distance itself from Iran.

    This is a good start, and I'm glad to see that there is some progress being made; however, I'm a little skeptical that Assad would accept such a deal, even if the Syrians were pressing to turn the private talks into official secret talks between Israeli and Syrian government members. An Iraqi diplomat friend of mine once told me that Bashar's father Hafez explained why he couldn't accept taking the Golan Heights and letting the Israeli's keep the water rights: Sadat had been killed for less.

    Tuesday, January 16, 2007

    Little mosque on the prairie

    The CBC has had a great idea with their new television sitcom Little Mosque on the Prairie. It's about a small Muslim community in, of all place, Saskatchewan that's trying to start a mosque in a local church's parish hall.

    I haven't watched it yet, but from what I've read, this is exactly the sort of show that should be played in the States, where Muslim actors generally only get to portray terrorists and bad guys.

    It looks like it's on bittorrent and can be downloaded here.


    UPDATE: I've just watched the show, and it's pretty cute. It's really similar to other sitcoms on television, except that there are Muslims, Muslims who are normal people. And to my mind, that is what makes this show so important.

    A Franco-British merger?

    In one of the most surprising things I've read in a while, the Guardian reported that PM Guy Mollet went to London in 1956 to discuss joining the United Kingdom with PM Anthony Eden, exploring the possibility of the Queen becoming the titular head of state in France. According to the Guardian,

    When Mr Mollet's request for a union failed, he quickly responded with another plan - that France be allowed to join the British commonwealth - which was said to have been met more warmly by Sir Anthony.

    A document dated September 28 1956 records a conversation between the prime minister and his cabinet secretary, Sir Norman Brook, saying:

    "The PM told him [Brook] on the telephone that he thought, in the light of his talks with the French:

  • That we should give immediate consideration to France joining the Commonwealth
  • That Monsieur Mollet had not thought there need be difficulty over France accepting the headship of her Majesty
  • That the French would welcome a common citizenship arrangement on the Irish basis."

  • Even if such unions are discussed to this day, between Sudan and Egypt and between Somalia and Ethiopia, for example, it seems unthinkable for this to happen as late as the 1950s between two major players like the UK and France. This news is kind of revelation must be a little embarrassing for France, and it just seems really, really odd considering French aversion to the idea of monarchy, not to mention Gallic pride.

    A British friend of mine in Paris sent this article to his French girlfriend, who responded this way:

    The UK was a "staunch French ally during the two world wars"? As far as I know the UK didn't want to back de Gaulle and sided with the US. And they sank all the French military boats stationed in the Channel so that the Germans wouldn't capture them and invade England - and they didn't even bother to warn the French about their upcoming air-raid on French boats so hundreds of Frenchmen died under British fire.

    Nope, really, not much of a staunch ally as far as this side of the sea is concerned...

    [Mollet] would have been hanged if he'd even mentioned this in France.

    Writing history in Lebanon

    About a week ago, the Times had an interesting article about Lebanon's truncated history:

    History classes across the globe serve two purposes — they educate the young and they shape national identity. They also often sidestep controversy to avoid offense.

    It is the same here as elsewhere, but the controversy being avoided is the vicious, 15-year civil war that started in 1975 in which Lebanon kidnapped, killed and bombed itself nearly into oblivion.

    The bizarre results are evident in any schoolbook here -- history seems simply to come to a halt in the early 1970s, Lebanon's heyday. With sectarian tensions once again boiling here, some educators fear that the failure to forge a common version of the events is dooming the young to repeat the past, with most of them learning contemporary history from their families, on the streets or from political leaders who may have their own agendas.

    "America used the school to create a melting pot; we used it to reinforce sectarian identity at the expense of the national identity," said Nemer Frayha, the former director of the Education Center for Research and Development, a research organization that develops Lebanon’s curriculum. "From the start, I am forming the student as a sectarian person, not as a citizen. And what's worse is that the people who are encouraging this are the intellectuals themselves."

    There is a serious lack of knowledge about the civil war in Lebanon. I've seen firsthand that many of the youth were abroad, because their families fled the war, and others that stayed have only the fragmented and fearful memories of a child who did not understand what was happening. So to the extent that the youth learn about the war at all, it's usually through sectarian lenses, a distrust or hatred of other Lebanese groups.

    And even ancient history can be very touchy in Lebanon. As the article mentions, Muslims tend to focus more on the Arab history of the country whereas Christians tend to relate more with the Phoenician period, so much so that many Christians I know don't consider themselves Arab. (Interestingly enough, the roots of secular pan-Arabism in Lebanon and Syria are mostly Christian in general and Greek Orthodox in particular.)

    According to Milhem Chaoul, a professor of sociology at the University of Lebanon, "Typically the victor writes the history. The problem with the civil war was that nobody won, and you still can't write its history because we are still not at peace."

    Wednesday, January 10, 2007

    So much for diplomacy


    The US has changed its policy of working through Somali warlords (previously) and the Ethiopian military (recently) by bombing a Somali fishing village near the border with Kenya where Somali Islamists were allegedly hiding, possibly with some local Al-Qaeda operatives.

    American officials said terrorists from Al Qaeda had been the target of the strike, which they said had killed about a dozen people. But the officials acknowledged that the identities of the victims were still unknown.

    Several residents of the area, in the southern part of the country, said dozens of civilians had been killed, and news of the attack immediately set off new waves of anti-American anger in Mogadishu, Somalia’s battle-scarred capital, where the United States has a complicated legacy.

    As was to be expected, this seems to have gone over like a lead balloon in Somalia, particularly as there have been reports that many civilian farmers and their livestock were killed in the bombing.

    Monday, January 08, 2007

    On Iraq and the Hippocratic oath

    James Traub's post over at TPM Cafe's America Abroad reflects some of the misgivings and ambivalence that I've felt about a full American withdrawal from Iraq.

    At least seven months ago the atrocities in Haditha helped me decide that the US was doing more harm than good in Iraq. I read about how Americans had become just one more militia in Iraq, killing Iraqis.

    The choice was a hard one. And I still had my doubts, despite the convincing prose of Luttwak's decision (two years ago) that we should leave:

    American forces continue to suffer casualties in combat against factions that should be confronting one another instead. Perhaps what the new Iraqi state needs in order to achieve stability is precisely a certain amount of civil war. Preventing it may impede a natural and perhaps very desirable political evolution. Americans would not today be happier if European Great Powers, horrified by the carnage of our own Civil War, had enforced an armistice between North and South that might endure still between two feeble states.

    Because even if Iraq needed to get a civil war out of its system, or dissolve itself in the process, who's to say that it would ever end? The war between the North and South of Sudan lasted for decades; sectarian bloodshed in Lebanon, where I live part of the year, was curbed only with Syria's heavy-handed and often violent intervention. Or we could look at Somalia.

    At the end of the day though, thinking that we could "fix Iraq" is what got America into this mess in the first place. Taking a long hard look at how things currently stand in Iraq and how little we know about the country, it would be hard to convince me that we can do, above all, anything but harm there.

    This also brings up the question of who should decide whether we stay or go. Should it be the American people? Should it be the American government? What about the Iraqis? Should it be the government or the people in that country?

    I'm inclined to believe that it ought to be the Iraqis who get to decide. They've had so little say in their lives for the last several decades, it's about time they got to make a decision about something. To my mind, a national referendum is in order. Let Iraqis stain their fingers purple and show us the door. This would permit the US to leave with a little more decorum (or less shame, you could say) while allowing the Iraqis the dignity of having a say in their country's fate, however terrible it may turn out to be.

    New Mexico governor meets with Sudanese president

    In an unexpected (by me) trip, New Mexico governor, Bill Richards, went to Khartoum to try to get Khartoum to allow UN peacekeepers in Darfur. He met separately with President Omar al-Bashir, former rebel leader Minni Minnowi and foreign minister Lam Akol:

    Richardson told an Associated Press reporter traveling with him that he and al-Bashir discussed the U.N. peacekeeping force, a cease-fire, protection for humanitarian groups working in the region, increasing sexual violence against refugees and a potential conference with rebel leaders.

    ...He discussed the [Abuja accord] later with Minni Minnawi, the leader of the rebel Sudan Liberation Movement that signed the agreement and subsequently became a presidential assistant. Minnawi expressed disappointment that the government has not yet disarmed the militias and told Richardson if the al-Bashir's government does not honor its commitments, there will be regime change.

    ...In Khartoum, Richardson also met with Sudanese foreign minister Lam Akol, bringing along humanitarian workers that included one representative of the Save Darfur Coalition. The coalition organized the trip and has been instrumental in bringing attention to the crisis and criticism on al-Bashir's government.

    According to the AP, this trip was meant to draw attention to Richardson's "extensive foreign policy background, including his tenure as U.S. envoy to the United Nations" in preparation for his "likely White House bid."

    Given how apathetic Americans are about the genocide in Darfur, I can't imagine that this sort of a trip could do much besides show voters that he's got enough clout to meet with a head of state (although it's a lot less controversial than a similar trip to Iraq, Iran or North Korea). In any case, if it's an attempt to garner future votes, it's certainly made me sympathetic to his platform.

    Let's hope he has some success in Sudan.

    A Middle East Summit


    Here's a great piece of Op-Art to be published in the San Francisco Chronicle. It was done by a"Kossack" over at the Daily Kos:

    "Kill me in Iraq."

    This segment on Al Jazeera (translated and edited by MEMRI), is more than a little disconcerting. The segment pits Sadeq al-Musawi, a Shia journalist, against Mishan al-Jabouri, the Sunni owner of the Iraqi satellite network, Al Zawraa. I'm not really exaggerating when I use the word "pit," because it's almost as though two cocks had been set in a hole to kill each other.

    Jabouri tells Musawi that he "should choose your words carefully, or else I will do things to you that you will not imagine, you Persian liar ... you are an Iranian shoe!"

    Musawi responds with, "Your father killed Kurds!"

    Finally, Jabouri advises Musawi against speaking ill of Saddam Hussein, to which Musawi tells him not to advise anything, but rather, "kill me in Iraq, send your militia to kill me."

    I've been reading Vali Nasr's The Shia Revival, and he writes a lot about how the Sunni regard the Shia as not being proper Arabs, because Shiism has had much influence from Iran and since some Shia in Lebanon and Iraq are the descendants of Persians who migrated centuries ago. Jabouri literally calls Musawi and Iranian (he says both Ajami and Irani), and brings some paperwork (which he proceeds to throw at his interlocutor) out to support his claims. And in the end, who knows whether Musawi is Iranian or not. Maybe he is, or maybe his family fled Iraq and he was born in Iran to Iraqi parents.

    But that's not really important. The important point is the internecine venom. Jabouri tells the Jazeera moderator, "The people who executed Saddam Hussein are the same people who killed Umar, the same people who killed Abu Bakr." Are these Iraqi militants? western viewers might ask. No, Umar and Abu Bakr are the first and second Caliphs, those who succeeded Mohammad in the 7th century. Umar ibn al-Khattab was poisoned by a Persian slave, and Abu Bakr either died of a cold or from being poisoned a year earlier, depending on your source. (The partisans of Ali, the Shi'at 'Ali, believed that Ali should have been Caliph instead of Abu Bakr and Umar.)

    I find it disconcerting that the Iraqi political discourse still hinges on the desert politics of Medina and Mecca nearly 1400 years ago. And seeing the historical complexities of the situation in Iraq, I find it even more disconcerting that most of the people who are paid to understand these historico-religious contexts don't even know the difference between the Sunni and the Shia.

    DiggIt and Del.icio.us and Reddit links...

    I've added links next to the comment section for DiggIt and Del.icio.us and Reddit in case anyone wants to add any of my posts to either of those sites...

    Just another Iraqi tribe?


    I was reading a back and forth in the London Review debating the source of anti-Semitic remarks that had been attributed (falsely it seems) to Hassan Nasrallah, all of which came in response to Charles Glass's recent piece about Hezbollah learning from its mistakes. This led me to go check out some of his previous writings, since he seems to be an interesting character who studied at the American University in Beirut and was kidnapped by Hezbollah in the 1987.

    While reading his piece in The Nation, From Beirut to Damascus, I came across this: "Kamal Salibi, Lebanon's historian laureate at the American University of Beirut, used to tell me the Palestinians had made the mistake of becoming another Lebanese tribe."

    And this started me to thinking, has the US become just another Iraqi tribe?

    Using Diplomacy in Somalia


    There's a very good op-ed piece on Somalia in today's Times, A fleeting victory in Somalia. Jonathan Stevenson, at the United States Naval War College, argues, rightly in my opinion, that a robust round of diplomacy is needed to work out Somalia's problems, namely, a power-sharing plan with the Islamic Courts and the transitional government, an engagement of clan leaders and an agreement on the place of Islamic law in Somalia. He adds that the US should join efforts by the EU and Kenya to help broker an agreement, similar to the one that finally ended the war between Southern Sudan and Khartoum:

    The temptation in Washington will be to keep its distance and rely on Ethiopia, the European Union and Kenya for as long as possible. This attitude is myopic. Neither the American public nor the world believe that the Bush administration?s predominantly military approach to counterterrorism is working. Relying primarily on Ethiopian troops to tamp down Somali Islamism would represent a continuation of that flawed model, and of the corresponding risk of fueling the jihad.

    The United States' full participation in a diplomatic process in the Horn of Africa, on the other hand, would constitute a relatively low-cost way of signaling a new American approach to Islam and a re-engagement in sub-Saharan Africa, which has largely been left out of Washington's post-9/11 calculus. A result could be a small political victory in the Muslim world that would deprive Osama bin Laden and his followers of a new grievance rather than supplying them with one.

    He points out that any prolonged presence of Ethiopian troops could be very dangerous. Many Somalis are afraid of Ethiopian designs on the country and disconcerted by the recent comments of the transitional Interior Minister Hussein Mohammad Aideed (whose father was made famous by the "Black Hawk Down" incident) that Somalia and Ethiopia "should unite, just like the Europeans. One money. One passport. One security."

    The problem, then, lies in a tendency to rely on military force instead of negotiation. I tend to believe that it was a bad idea for the Ethiopians to invade; a better idea would have been negotiations in Yemen or Kenya to agree on a power-sharing deal, because even if the thought of another Islamic regime bothers me, the Courts did manage to bring some sort of stability and decrease the violence in the areas they controlled. Now, there is a risk that continued Ethiopian presence will rub Somalis the wrong way and that the spotty order of the Islamists will revert back to the reign of warlords and inter-clan violence.

    A local radio journalist summed up the problems of an Ethiopian presence in the country, as reported by the Times:

    With Somalia's longtime fears that Ethiopia might swallow it, the sooner [the Ethiopians' withdrawal] happens, the better. On Saturday, Nasteh Dahir Farah, a reporter for a Kismayo radio station, visited the town's airport with three foreign journalists. The foreigners were allowed in. Mr. Farah was not. He was shooed away by Ethiopian soldiers at the gate and told never to come back.

    "This is my country, not theirs," he said. "If I didn't have a job," Mr. Farah muttered, straightening himself up and smoothing the shirt where he had been poked in the chest, "I'd join the resistance."

    A little humiliation, it seems, goes a long, long way.

    And indeed it does, as we have seen throughout the Muslim world, but especially in Iraq.

    So while it seems imperative for negotiations to begin in good faith between the transitional government, the clan leaders and the Islamic Courts, I've got a sneaking suspicion that the transitional government has let their Ethiopian-backed success go to their head. And remarks by the transitional defense minister do little to reassure me:

    The big man in Kismayo is Barre Aadan Shire, the transitional government's defense minister and a former warlord, whose strong jaw, natty goatee and bald head lend him an uncanny resemblance to Lenin. He says many people in Kismayo have asked him to reach out to the Islamists, but he does not want to. The last of the Islamist fighters have retreated to the Kenya border, about 150 miles away.

    "If we were going to compromise," Mr. Shire said, "why go to war?"

    Saturday, January 06, 2007

    Disney hate radio and advertising


    Via Juan Cole, Daily Kos has the story of a blogger who contacted a talk radio station's advertisers to tell them that their products were being associated with and read by the same voices that call for torturing people and murdering Muslims. He sent advertisers polite informative letters and was subsequently slapped with a cease and desist letter by Disney's lawyers because he was providing audio recordings of the broadcasts to allow advertisers to hear the comments for themselves. It seems that this hit a nerve with Disney, particularly as Visa seems to have pulled their ads from the shows in question.

    Here's a copy of the letter he sent AT&T:


    To: Wendy Clark, VP-advertising, AT&T

    Dear Ms. Clark:

    Thanks to radio hosts from KSFO your brand is being associated with torturing and killing people. Would your marketing people be happy to hear your commercial ran after Lee Rogers said this about a black man in Lincoln, Nebraska?

    "Now you start with the Sear's Diehard the battery cables connected to his testi*les and you entertain him with that for awhile and then you blow his bleeping head off. " (Audio link)

    You should know the person calling for the execution and torture of the black man in that clip READS THE AT&T commercials on the air. Right now on KSFO Lee Rogers is THE VOICE of AT&T to the SF Bay area. (Audio Link)

    Sadly, calling for the death and torture of individuals and groups of people is a regular occurrence on KSFO 560 AM, owned by ABC Radio Disney.

    Another example: immediately after the 6 am ABC Radio news on October 27th:

    Lee Rogers: I say they catch the person, tie 'em to a post and burn 'em. Set 'em on fire.

    Officer Vic: Yeah.

    Lee Rogers: Let 'em know what it feels like.

    Melanie Morgan: Hog tie 'em first. That would be good.

    Next, Lee Rogers talks about a protester at a Cindy Sheehan event:

    "Whoever did that should have been stomped to death right there. Just stomp their bleeping guts out." (Audio link).

    Within three minutes they called for someone to be burned alive and a protester to be stomped to death. If you dismissed the first clip as a "joke", note that in this clip they were clearly not joking:

    Melanie Morgan famously called for Bill Keller of the New York Times (and nine editors from other papers) to be hanged.  (Audio link)

    On Nov. 14th  Melanie Morgan said this about Nancy Pelosi:

    "We've got a bulls-eye painted on her big laughing eyes." (Audio link)

    Also note that Morgan reads the Cingular Wireless commercials on KSFO.

    Of course political speech is protected, but I believe the FBI and the FCC frown on targeting elected officials for death or inciting violence toward leaders of any political party.

    Because of how ads are purchased, your ad placement agency probably didn't know that Tom Brenner (the "comic relief" called Officer Vic) regularly mocks advertiser's products.  Listen as he:


  • calls Chevrolet's product "shi**y" (audio link)
  • suggests an anti-virus product is part of a protection racket (audio link)
  • pretends a cold pill is really a suppository (audio link)

    The odds are your product will be mocked. If they don't respect a big client like Chevrolet, will they respect your brand?

    And it's not simply calls for killing specific people or mocking products, the radio hosts at KSFO proudly talk about their anti-Muslim views. Based on my research, your business has rules about discrimination against people of other religions, so what message are you sending when your employees or customers hear your advertisements right after Brian Sussman demands of a caller:

    "Say Allah is a Wh*re!" (audio link)

    Or when Lee Rogers says,

    "Indonesia is really just another enemy Muslim nation. ... You keep screwing around with stuff like this we are going to kill a bunch of you. Millions of you. "   (audio link)

    Maybe you haven't heard any complaints. Would KSFO management let you know about complaints?  Doubtful. Morgan's husband, Jack Swanson, is KSFO's operations manager. The president of KSFO, Mickey Luckoff, started the station format and has a history of defending hosts like Michael Savage until he was forced to fire him.

    I understand you can't listen to all the shows you advertise on - no one can. You rely on the accurate representation of the sales reps and the show description. But you don't need to take my word, listen to the programs. You probably won't have to listen long to hear something that offends or disgusts you.  If you wish to hear the complete context on any clip or the audio during a date your ad ran contact me I have an educational archive of audio clips, I've listed a few below.

    I want to emphasize that if you withdrawal your ads you aren't limiting their free speech, just removing your paid support of it. Some other company without the values you describe on the AT&T website can support them. You can choose to advertise elsewhere. This is really about YOU. Do YOU want to be associated with these comments? Do you want your company and brand to be associated with these comments?

    I urge you to discontinue advertising on KSFO during the shows hosted by Melanie Morgan, Lee Rogers, Tom Brenner and Brian Sussman.

    If you want to contact KSFO here is a link to their website. If you wish to express your displeasure to their parent company contact Zenia Mucha, Senior Vice President, Corporate Communications, The Walt Disney Company PHONE: (818) 560-5300 CA, (212) 456-7255 NY or email Heather Rim, Vice President, Communications, ABC, Inc.  heather.rim@abc.com.

    Sincerely,

    P.S.  I would appreciate hearing your final determination in this matter.

  • Read the Daily Kos write up for the full story.

    Friday, January 05, 2007

    Ordinary Iraqis and extraordinary rendition


    The New York Review has articles about torture and extraordinary rendition (subscription only) and ordinary Iraqis. The latter reviews Anthony Shadid's book Night Draws Near, which was recommended to me by an Iraqi diplomat friend of mine. I recently met Shadid in Beirut, and he's an extremely nice guy, and judging from his recent coverage of Lebanon, I can understand why his book would be really good. (Unfortunately, I haven't picked it up yet.)

    The piece on extraordinary rendition helpfully brings together the stories of some of the more publicized victims of the Bush Administration's policy as well as some of the reporting done by CIA plane watchers who helped uncover the story of the "black sites" in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Under review are the Canadian Government's report on the rendition to Syria and subsequent torture of Canadian citizen Maher Arar and Steven Grey's Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program:

    Edward Walker Jr., a career diplomat, was the US ambassador in Egypt between 1994 and 1997 when some of the first renditions took place. According to Walker, there were only a few occasions when the procedure was used, and they concerned men who were wanted by the Egyptians for terrorist acts allegedly committed there. Walker thought it was a good policy. "They were bad guys, and they were set on causing harm. And you know it's not a perfect world," he told Grey. But he was under no illusions about how they would be treated. "I cannot believe that anybody that was involved in this," he said, "didn't in his heart of hearts, if he was halfway intelligent, think that they were getting abusive interrogation techniques that were tantamount to torture."

    Grey asked Walker: "When Condoleezza Rice and the President now stand in front of people and say we don't send people to countries where they torture, are they telling the truth?"

    Walker replied: "No, they're not telling the truth."

    A former CIA officer was more colorful. "Coming out and saying 'we don't do torture' is as bad as President Clinton saying, 'I didn't have sex with that woman.'" he told Grey. "It's a bare-faced lie. Of course we do torture. Imagine putting President Bush's head under water and telling him to raise his hand when he thinks he's being tortured. Give him the water-board treatment, and he'd be raising his hand straightaway."

    Wednesday, January 03, 2007

    Media coverage of Iraq


    Al Jazeera has an interesting article about the Western media coverage of Iraq, and Iraq's sectarian makeup in particular.

    Among the complaints about Western coverage is the claim by Tariq al-Hashimi, Iraq's Sunni Arab vice-president, that the media overestimates the number of Shia in the country:

    Western media often refer to Iraq as being "overwhelmingly Shia", or use other phrases to imply a large Shia majority. This, [al-Hashimi] says, is wrong -- and it has resulted in over-representation of Shia parties in the Iraqi government at the expense of Sunni Arabs.

    Al-Hashimi said: "The false allegations promoted by Western media have resulted in an [inappropriate] political process, and everyone is paying the price for its wrong foundations."

    Where the figures came from to back up assertions of a large Shia majority are unclear: no Iraqi census in modern history has ever included sect.

    Sources such as Encyclopaedia Britannica put the Shia population in Iraq at 52 per cent of the total in 2001. However, figures circulated by the US military, which invaded Iraq in 2003, put the figure at 60 per cent.

    The CIA's World Factbook puts the Shia at 60 to 65 percent of the Iraqi population.

    Other complaints include the characterization of the insurgency as essentially Sunni and the assertion that the Baath party was a Sunni-run apparatus that persecuted the Shia. According to the current Baath spokesperson,

    "Actually, sect was never an issue in Iraq. I am a Shia and I have been a senior Baath official ... No Baath party official -- no Iraqi official -- ever asked me about my sect.

    "When the US army occupied Iraq they issued a list of 55 wanted top Iraqi officials, starting with President Saddam Hussein; half of those senior officials were Shia.

    "The Committee of Debaathification issued a list of 100,000 senior Iraqi Baathists who would not be allowed to enjoy governmental posts, 66,000 of them were Shia - so how is the Baath party a Sunni party?

    ...Abu Muhammad voiced resentment at the the term "Sunni insurgency", saying that Iraqis from different backgrounds are fighting the foreign presence in Iraq.

    "This term plays down Iraqi nationalism," he said. "I repeat, I am a Shia and I am resisting the US forces in Iraq, and we know for sure that resistance fighters from all background are fighting. Why do the Western agencies insist that only Sunni are fighting? Big question mark, I think."


    On the other hand, there are those who disagree:

    However, Karim Bader, an independent Iraqi politician, said that Western media had done a decent job on reporting what had occurred under Saddam's rule.

    He said one had to look only at the senior army commanders and intelligence officers in Saddam's day, all of whom he said were Sunni. Or to look at the sizes of houses in Shia suburbs - small and overcrowded - or in Sunni areas, where houses were far larger but with fewer occupants.

    Bader said: "I think there was sectarianism under Saddam and the Western media reflected that, but the question is, should we hold the Sunni sect responsible for that? I think Iraqis must be careful in answering this question."

    Updates


    A lot has happened while I was away. I woke up the other morning to hear that Saddam Hussein had been executed; and on the same day while on my way back to Spain, I heard that the airport had been bombed by ETA, the militant Basque separatist group; then I saw that Bangkok had been rocked by bomb blasts on new year's eve. Besides that, Addis Ababa sent troops to Somalia to rout the Islamic Courts.

    First things first: I'm generally against the death penalty, but I might be convinced to accept it for those guilty of genocide or other crimes against humanity. However, if Iraq was trying to show the world that it has a modern functioning government, this execution was a poor showing for al-Malaki's goverment: it was decidedly neither solemn nor professional and was carried out on the first day of Eid.

    As for the ETA bombing, I saw the results first hand, because I left Madrid from the terminal that was bombed the next day. The bomb did some pretty serious damage and has probably left two people dead. It looks like this is going to cripple if not kill the peace talks between ETA and the Spanish Government. They haven't seemed to explain why they broke a cease-fire. Although I hadn't been following the talks closely at all, I remember that there was an Irish priest that had been called in to mediate, and I had the impression that progress was being made.

    In Thailand, my first fear was that it was Muslims from the south, but it seems that the bombings are being blamed on supporters of ousted PM Shinawatra.

    In Somalia, I've been afraid of an Ethiopian campaign for a while, since such explicit attacks might lead to an Eritrean invasion on behalf of its Islamist allies, rekindling the war between those two countries and making Somalia a battleground for a regional war. However, the Eritreans seem to have stayed out of it, and the Islamic Courts were routed surprisingly fast. However, as soon as the Courts moved out of Mogadishu, looting was rampant and order was on short supply in Somalia's capital. Furthermore, I wouldn't be surprised to see a guerrilla resurgence of Islamist forces in Somalia, which brings me to the point that a negotiated settlement that brought the Islamic Courts into the government would be the best solution. The last thing Somalia needs is for Eritrea and Ethiopia to have a little war on Somali territory. In some good news, Kenya has called for a ceasefire and a brokered peace in Somalia, which may or may not be fueled by their fear of more Somali refugees.