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Thursday, April 26, 2007

Two kidnapped PSP supporters killed

There has been a lot of talk lately about the two PSP partisans kidnapped. The word in the Shouf is that they were kidnapped by Shi'a (Hezbollah or Amal, no one is saying) forces in retaliation for the killing of a Hezbollah supporter last January during the sectarian clashes at the Arab University.

I just heard from my Druze friends in the Shouf that the two were found dead. While one was 25, the other was only 12. Ya haram.


UPDATE: Al Jazeera is reporting that the kidnapping and killings seem to be clan-based rather than party-based.

Last night, some friends and I were giving another friend a ride home. The army was out in droves, and we got picked to pull over and have ourselves and the car searched. However, when one of the two soldiers saw that two of my friends were Druze from a neighboring village of his, he called off the search. He told his colleague that he didn't need to search us and asked my Druze friends if there was anything he could to for them.

We laugh about this sort of tribalism when it comes from the guy selling us a fridge in Nabah. But it's a little disconcerting when coming from an armed soldier at a checkpoint.

UPDATE:I wrote earlier that the young man and the kid were Druze, but they were actually Sunni, although their families were supporter's of Jumblatt's PSP.

Israeli soldiers using Palestinians as human shields

I was watching CNN International earlier with my roommate, and there was a segment on about Israeli soldiers using Palestinians as human shields during military raids in the West Bank. They showed footage of Israeli soldiers pushing a young Palestinian in front of them as they had their weapons out and stayed behind him in case there was a gunfight.

I made a comment that it's funny seeing this when the Israelis, and their supporters in the US, are constantly accusing Hezbollah of using human shields. Then my roommate looked at me and made this astute comment: "The difference is that if Hezbollah uses human shields, at least they use their own people."

This is one of the incidents the CNN segment reported on, but the video footage they showed was during a raid with brandished M16s, not forcing Palestinians to shield their vehicles from stone throwers.

China arming Sudan

Lee Feinstein has a piece in TPM's America Abroad outlining the relationship between China and Sudan. To answer a charge from comments that my evidence (also in comments) that China is still supplying Sudan with weapons was "google-y and anecdotal," here is what Feinstein has to say about Chinese arms in Sudan. (Incidentally, I'm not sure I even understand how coming across an article in the Sudan Times and a report from Amnesty International by using google is supposed to make those sources any less valid. Furthermore, I'm not sure how a report by Amnesty International is "anecdotal.")

China maintains a defense relationship with Sudan, despite the UN arms embargo that has been in place for Darfur since 2005. The Security Council imposed an embargo on all nongovernmental forces operating in Darfur in July 2004, and expanded it to include government forces as well in 2005. Sales to Khartoum are still permitted, although a UN panel, which visited Sudan in August 2005 to investigate violations of the embargo, recommended in April 2006 that the Security Council expand the embargo to the entire country.

Information about recent Chinese arms sales to Sudan is difficult to discern both because of China's secrecy and because of the inherent difficulty of tracking the flow of small arms, which are below most international reporting thresholds. The UN Panel of Experts reported spotting Chinese-made military trucks in the Port of Sudan that appeared similar to those used on Sudanese Army bases in Darfur. Non-governmental organizations have reported that small arms used by rebels, janjaweed, and government forces in Darfur are of Chinese origin. There are also reports that Khartoum supplied Chinese-made automatic grenade launchers to the United Front for Democratic Change, a Chadian rebel group that also operates out of bases in Darfur. Russia and France are also suppliers of arms and military equipment to Sudan. In the last six years, Russia reported to the United Nations deliveries of 33 attack helicopters to Khartoum, eight combat aircraft, and 30 armored combat. (Between 2001 and 2004, France exported over $1 million of mostly small arms, spare parts, and ammunition.)

Beijing defends its sales to Khartoum as legal, and says that it requires all of its buyers not to transfer arms to other parties, including guerilla groups, a claim which is difficult to confirm independently. Zhai Jun, China's Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs, said in March 2007, "With Sudan, we have cooperation in many aspects, including military cooperation. In this, we have nothing to hide."

In early April, China received Sudan's Joint Chief of Staff. The Chinese Minister of Defense told his Sudanese counterpart that China was "willing to further develop cooperation between the two militaries in every sphere."

Feinstein isn't offering up anything new or salacious in this short piece, but it's a decent outline of the economic, political and military relationship between Sudan and China.

For more on China and Sudan, see the tireless and laudable Eric Reeves.

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Zapped

My first post on the French elections has somehow disappeared. I don't know what happened to it, but it was about how I was worried about Le Pen making it to the second round and that I didn't think that Sarkozy was taking as many votes from the FN as people thought.

Since then, Le Pen only managed to get 11 percent of the vote, a welcome surprise. I don't think, however, that this is due to fewer people voting for him. I think, rather, that it's because there was an increase of almost 3.5 million people registered to vote, and voter turnout was something like 27 percent higher than it was in 2002. (I can't find the exact figure, but I remember it being around 60 percent in 2002, compared to 87 percent this time.)

So I think that people who vote Front National generally vote, whereas the young and the poor and communities "issus de l'immigration" who don't usually vote and aren't likely to vote for Le Pen probably made up a considerable proportion of newly registered voters and voters who voted this time but didn't in 2002.

Monday, April 23, 2007

China in Africa

Al Jazeera gives us a good example of how China may be doing more harm than good in Africa with its value-neutral investment in the continent:

China has agreed to give Zimbabwe $25m worth of farm equipment to help revive the country's ailing tobacco industry.

But Beijing wants something in return – large quantities of Zimbabwe's tobacco.

Jia Qinglin, a senior Chinese Communist party official, presented the equipment, including 424 tractors and 50 trucks, to Robert Mugabe, the country's president, on Saturday in a deal to replace equipment damaged when Mugabe's government seized white-owned farms to resettle landless blacks.

But China wants all the tractors to go to tobacco farmers and expects Zimbabwe to deliver 30 million kilograms by the end of the year, Haru Mutasa, Al Jazeera's correspondent, said in Harare.

While the West is trying to pressure Mugabe into lessening his brutal crackdown on the government's opposition parties, China is offering aid. And the only strings attached are financial ones: the equipment given by China has to be used for cash crops. This in a country experiencing widespread hunger and poverty.

So at the end of the day, Beijing is showing Mugabe that even if he flagrantly violates human rights and the pitiful charade that passes for democracy in Zimbabwe, the Chinese will be there to offer assistance. So long as the price is right, of course.

So are we really surprised that Beijing is financially and diplomatically underwriting Khartoum's genocide in Darfur?

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Ségo makes it to the second round, Le Pen flounders

It looks like the turnout for this election is 87 percent, which is the highest in the Fifth Republic.

According to France 2, Sarko is at 29 percent and Ségo at 25 percent and Bayrou at 19 percent. Le Pen, fortunately, only managed 11 or 12 percent, so it looks like it'll be Sarko v. Ségo in the second round.

What a relief that Le Pen didn't make it to the second round.

Now let's hope that Ségo can beat out Sarkozy...

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Another brilliant idea from Kuperman

Alan Kuperman, whose work I've already taken issue with in the past has a piece in USA Today explaining his strategy for defeating al-Qaida in Iraq:

Because no option can stabilize Iraq quickly, we should refocus on our greatest achievable objective: preventing al-Qaeda from establishing a haven. This danger arises because Iraq's moderate Sunnis have allied with their extremist Sunni rivals. Why? They're trying to fend off domination and ethnic cleansing by the majority Shiites, who control Iraq's government, army and militias. Indeed, the U.S. strategy of bolstering and training Iraq's Shiite-controlled army drives Sunni moderates into extremist hands. The only way to defeat al-Qaeda in Iraq is to switch our primary allegiance to Iraq's moderate Sunnis.

The prospect of this dramatic shift in U.S. strategy raises several questions, including most fundamentally: Can we identify the moderates? Fortunately, two ready pools are available. First are the Sunni tribes the United States has attempted to recruit with little success. Until now, our offers have been too feeble, but serious military aid could do the trick.

The second source of recruits is Saddam's secular Sunni-led party, which was antithetical to al-Qaeda. Admittedly, some former Baathists are attacking U.S. forces and coordinating with Sunni extremists because they view our presence as an obstacle to their return to power, but this could change quickly if we offered to support these former enemies.

The sooner our self-styled experts on the Middle East realize that the enemy of our enemy is not necessarily our friend, the better off we'll be. While the Iraqi Sunni groups may be at odds with al-Qaida, they are also, and moreso, at odds with the American occupation. In this case, the enemy of our enemy is also our enemy.

For an informed opinion about this situation, I reccommend reading Marc Lynch's blog, where he has been discussing the schism in the Sunni insurgency for a few weeks now. He also has a piece in The American Prospect that's really worth reading:

Americans, eager for good news from Iraq and seizing upon rising public Sunni opposition to al-Qaeda, risk missing its real significance. Recent coverage of Anbar province has focused upon the growing willingness of tribal leaders to cooperate with American forces against al-Qaeda. It is true that, from Ramadi to Kirkuk, local Sunni leaders have indeed called for an "awakening," even an "intifada against al-Qaeda," in response to resentment over its behavior. That's not so new -- reports of tribes turning against al-Qaeda have been a staple of reporting from Iraq for years.

Far more importantly, last week the Islamic Army of Iraq, one of the most influential of the insurgency factions, issued a scathing public denunciation of the Islamic State of Iraq, calling on Osama bin Laden to intervene with his misguided Iraqi representatives. Al-Qaeda has taken this challenge seriously enough that its emir, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, released a lengthy and somewhat conciliatory audiotape responding to their concerns. His statement suggests that al-Qaeda is far more worried about this challenge by the insurgency than it is about the much-heralded tribal "awakening."

...While Sunni disenchantment with al-Qaeda is all to the good, it has little to do with American strategy and, crucially, even less to do with giving up on the anti-American insurgency.

French elections


Thursday, April 12, 2007

Cheney (fille) on Syria

Dick Cheney's eldest daughter, Liz, has a piece in the Post today about why the US shouldn't talk to Syria. She makes a point of listing the anti-Syrian Lebanese who have been killed in the last few years.

It is time to face facts. Talking to the Syrians emboldens and rewards them at the expense of America and our allies in the Middle East. It hasn't and won't change their behavior. They are an outlaw regime and should be isolated. Members of Congress and State Department officials should stop visiting Damascus. Arab leaders should stop receiving Bashar al-Assad. The U.N. Security Council should adopt a Chapter VII resolution mandating the establishment of an international tribunal for the Hariri murder.

The Security Council should also hold Syria accountable for its ongoing violations of existing resolutions. The U.S. government should implement all remaining elements of the Syria Accountability Act and launch an aggressive effort to empower the Syrian opposition. European governments should demonstrate that they value justice over profit and impose financial and travel sanctions on Syria's leaders.

...Conducting diplomacy with the regime in Damascus while they kill Lebanese democrats is not only irresponsible, it is shameful.

While Syria has been blamed for many of the assassinations in Lebanon, it seems unfair for a former member of the State Department to blame Syria before the investigations are finished or a tribunal has been held. Furthermore, her care for the Lebanese people seems suspect, given the current administration's stalling last summer that bought Israel more time to continue its pummeling of Lebanon. (In case anyone thought that it wasn't on purpose, Bolton has told us that not only did the US do its best to prevent an earlier cease-fire, but that he was "damned proud of what we did.")

Furthermore, it seems silly that Liz Cheney's criticism be leveled at Pelosi, whereas she remains silent about Republican Congressmen who visited Damascus the day before.

Finally, while I'm not going to go either way on Syrian involvement in the killing of Hariri, Kassir, Hawi and Tueni, I will say that it is not at all clear who killed Pierre Gemayel, so her remarks that Syria did it are disingenuous, unless of course, she's keeping some secret evidence of Damascus's involvement from the rest of us.

It just so happens that shortly after Gemayel's assassination, I spoke to Antoine Richa, the late Gemayel's advisor. He told me that his party, the Kataeb, didn't know who killed Gemayel. He mentioned that most of the people assassinated lately had been anti-Syria, but if Gemayel's advisor, part of the Kataeb's rank and file isn't sure that Damascus did it, what makes Cheney so sure?

Finally, all that is beside the point. Even if Syria is responsible for all the recent political assassinations in Lebanon, that's one reason more to engage in diplomacy with Assad. Given that the prospects of regime change in Damascus are currently slim-to-none, doesn't it seem wiser to try to change Syrian behavior through diplomacy rather than ignoring the regime and thus continuing the status quo?

Robert Malley's recent piece in the LA Times makes a convincing case:

If, as Israeli and U.S. officials assert, the regime's priority is self-preservation, it is unlikely to sponsor militant groups, jeopardize its newfound status, destabilize the region or threaten nascent economic ties for the sake of ideological purity once an agreement has been reached. Israeli and U.S. demands will not be satisfied as preconditions to negotiations, but there is at the very least solid reason to believe that they would be satisfied as part of a final deal.

Even assuming that Washington and Jerusalem are right and that Syria is more interested in the process than in the outcome, what is the downside of testing the sincerity of its intentions? To the contrary, the mere sight of Israeli and Syrian officials sitting side by side would carry dividends, producing ripple effects in a region where popular opinion is moving away from acceptance of the Jewish state's right to exist, and putting Syrian allies that oppose a negotiated settlement in an awkward position. It has gone largely unnoticed, but Assad has been at pains to differentiate his position from that of his Iranian ally, emphasizing that Syria's goal is to live in peace with Israel, not to wipe it off the face of the Earth. That is a distinction worth exploiting, not ignoring.

Rigidly rebuffing Syria is a mistake fast on its way to becoming a missed opportunity. The U.S. says it wants to see real change from Damascus, and it takes pleasure in faulting visitors -- Pelosi only the latest among them -- for returning empty-handed. Syria's response is that it will continue to assist militant groups, maintain close ties to Iran and let the U.S. flounder in Iraq for as long as Washington maintains its hostile policy and blocks peace talks. It also could change all of the above should the U.S. change its stance. That's a message Pelosi can hear and one she can deliver, but not one she can do much about. Rather than engage in political theatrics, the president should listen.

I couldn't agree more. Usually, the online comment section on American newspapers is full of support for attacking Arab countries and rigid support for Israel. Strangely, the comment section for this piece is less than kind to Dick's daughter, calling into question her credentials for having filled the newly-created post of Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs. And true enough, a comparison of her bio and that of that of her boss, one might indeed be forgiven for wondering if her last name had anything to do with her appointment. But that would be nepotism, and we all know that the current administration is above that.

"Israel does not want peace"

Ha'aretz has an opinion piece by Gideon Levy in which he argues that "Israel does not want peace."

The moment of truth has arrived, and it has to be said: Israel does not want peace. The arsenal of excuses has run out, and the chorus of Israeli rejection already rings hollow. Until recently, it was still possible to accept the Israeli refrain that "there is no partner" for peace and that "the time isn't right" to deal with our enemies. Today, the new reality before our eyes leaves no room for doubt and the tired refrain that "Israel supports peace" has been left shattered.

It's hard to determine when the breaking point occurred. Was it the absolute dismissal of the Saudi initiative? The refusal to acknowledge the Syrian initiative? Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's annual Passover interviews? The revulsion at the statements made by Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, in Damascus, alleging that Israel was ready to renew peace talks with Syria?

Who would have believed it? A high-ranking U.S. official says Israel wants peace talks to resume and instantly her president "severely" denies the veracity of her words. Is Israel even hearing these voices? Are we digesting the significance of these voices for peace? Seven million apathetic Israeli citizens prove that we are not.

This is a familiar refrain in the Arab world. When asked whether he thinks Israel will sign a peace treaty with Syria or accept Riyadh's plan, the man on the street here usually says, "Of course not, Israel doesn't want peace."

It's been easy enough for the "West" to dismiss this as Arab conspiracy theory, while accepting the Israeli line that the Jewish state would love nothing more than peace with its neighbors, if only there were a real "partner for peace." With the recent Israeli rebuffing of Syrian and Saudi-led Arab League peace initiatives, it's becoming harder and harder to disagree with the idea that finally, when all's said and done, Israel isn't really interested in peaceful relations with its neighbors in the region.

Who says Wolfowitz doesn't love Arabs?

According to the Post, Wolfowitz ordered a big pay raise for his Libyan girlfriend:

Wolfowitz's tenure, contentious from the start because of his earlier role as an architect of U.S. policy in Iraq, has been marred in recent months by a series of controversies. World Bank staffers disclosed that a woman with whom Wolfowitz is romantically involved received big pay raises from the bank. Sensitive board minutes regarding China have been leaked to the press, and blistering criticism has been leveled at Wolfowitz on an internal electronic bulletin board.

...Wolfowitz sought to defray questions about the pay raises in a briefing with reporters yesterday and to focus attention on his priorities, which he has defined as dealing seriously with environmental problems, rooting out governmental corruption and fighting poverty, particularly in Africa.

Wolfowitz noted that a committee has been appointed to review the situation involving Shaha Riza, to whom he has been romantically linked. "I'm comfortable with that, and that's all I have to say on that," Wolfowitz said. "I don't think its fair to the rest of the agenda to take up this valuable time with that."

Riza was transferred to the State Department shortly after Wolfowitz took over the World Bank in 2005, in accordance with conflict-of-interest rules. She is still paid by the bank and she has received raises that increased her pay to $193,590 from $132,660 after she was moved to the State Department in 2005, according to the bank's employee association. A Wolfowitz spokesman, who has previously said that Wolfowitz played no role in the raises, would not comment yesterday. Riza has made no public comment.

Mapping the violence in Baghdad

Continuing with online maps, the BBC has an interactive map of Baghdad that lets you chart bombings and see how the sectarian makeup of the city has changed in the last year or so.

Baghdad pre-2006






Baghdad today

US claims Iran is aiding Sunni insurgency

The Times reports that the US is now explicitly claiming that Iran is supporting Sunni groups in Iraq:

Arms that American military officials say appear to have been manufactured in Iran as recently as last year have turned up in the past week in a Sunni-majority area, the chief spokesman for the American military command in Iraq said Wednesday in a news conference.

The spokesman, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, said that detainees in American custody had indicated that Iranian intelligence operatives had given support to Sunni insurgents and that surrogates for the Iranian intelligence service were training Shiite extremists in Iran. He gave no further description of the detainees and did not say why they would have that information.

"We have in fact found some cases recently where Iranian intelligence sources have provided to Sunni insurgent groups some support," said General Caldwell, who sat near a table crowded with weapons that he said the military contended were largely of Iranian manufacture.

The weapons were found in a mostly Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad, he said, a rare instance of the American military suggesting any link between Iran and the Sunni insurgency. It has recently suggested a link with Shiite militants in Iraq.

...Critics have cast doubt on the American military statements about those bombs, saying the evidence linking them to Iran was circumstantial and inferential.

...It is unclear from the military's comments on Wednesday whether it is possible to draw conclusions about how the weapons that the military contends are of Iranian origin might have made their way into a predominantly Sunni area or why Shiite Iran would arm Sunni militants.

There are several possibilities, military officials who were not authorized to speak publicly for attribution said privately. One is that they came through Syria, long a transit route for Iranian-made weapons being funneled to the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah. Another possibility is that arms dealers are selling to every side in the conflict.

The weapons on the table next to General Caldwell were found two days ago, the general said, after a resident of the predominantly Sunni Arab neighborhood called Jihad, in western Baghdad, informed the local Joint Security Station run by Iraqi and American soldiers that there were illegal arms in the area.

The soldiers found a black Mercedes sedan and on its back seat, in plain view, a rocket of a type commonly made in China but repainted and labeled and sold by Iran, said Maj. Marty Weber, a master ordnance technician who joined General Caldwell at the briefing. In the trunk were mortar rounds marked "made in 2006."

In a nearby house and buried in the yard, the soldiers found more mortar rounds, 1,000 to 2,000 rounds of bullets, five hand grenades and a couple of Bulgarian-made rocket-propelled grenades, Major Weber said.

Interestingly enough, the US is not claiming that Bulgaria and China are supporting the insurgents. Likewise, many of the weapons used by groups like Islamic Jihad and Hamas in Palestine are made in the US and sold to Israel. Does anyone accuse the American or Israeli governments of supporting Islamic Jihad? Of course not.

If the US is going to claim that Tehran (and not Iranian or Iraqi arms dealers) is arming the Sunni insurgency, then it's going to have to do better than this.

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Mapping genocide

Via The Guardian, Google and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have come together to form the online mapping project, Crisis in Darfur:

Crisis in Darfur enables more than 200 million Google Earth users worldwide to visualize and better understand the genocide currently unfolding in Darfur, Sudan. The Museum has assembled content—photographs, data, and eyewitness testimony—from a number of sources that are brought together for the first time in Google Earth.

Crisis in Darfur is the first project of the Museum’s Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative that will over time include information on potential genocides allowing citizens, governments, and institutions to access information on atrocities in their nascent stages and respond.

Something rotten

Here's another genocide-related event in the international community, which gives me the impression that something's rotten in, well, the Hague:

Serbia, the heir to Yugoslavia, obtained the tribunal's permission to keep parts of the archives out of the public eye. Citing national security, its lawyers blacked out many sensitive -- those who have seen them say incriminating -- pages. Judges and lawyers at the war crimes tribunal could see the censored material, but it was barred from the tribunal’s public records.

Now, lawyers and others who were involved in Serbia's bid for secrecy say that, at the time, Belgrade made its true objective clear: to keep the full military archives from the International Court of Justice, where Bosnia was suing Serbia for genocide. And they say Belgrade’s goal was achieved in February, when the international court, which is also in The Hague, declared Serbia not guilty of genocide, and absolved it from paying potentially enormous damages.

Lawyers interviewed in The Hague and Belgrade said that the outcome might well have been different had the International Court of Justice pressed for access to the full archives, and legal scholars and human rights groups said it was deeply troubling that the judges did not subpoena the documents directly from Serbia. At one point, the court rebuffed a Bosnian request that it demand the full documents, saying that ample evidence was available in tribunal records.

"It's a question that nags loudly," Diane Orentlicher, a law professor at American University in Washington, said recently in The Hague. "Why didn’t the court request the full documents? The fact that they were blacked out clearly implies these passages would have made a difference."

The ruling -- which was binding and final -- was in many ways meticulous, and acknowledged that the 15 judges had not seen the censored archives. But it did not say why the court did not order Serbia to provide the full documents.

The first-hand experience I've had at the UN and what I know of the tribunals in the Hague and Arusha have convinced me that it would be naïve to think that there are no deals being made in the smoke-filled hotel rooms.

This probably has something to do with Serbia's wishes to join the EU and the fact that a guilty verdict would probably ruin the country financially. But still, this seems unacceptable to me.

Shame, shame

I've seen first hand how politics (office and international) can override common sense or even doing the right thing in a large bureaucracy. I shouldn't be surprised by stories like this anymore, and I guess I'm not.

But still. Shame on Ankara, and shame on the UN for kowtowing:

The United Nations dismantled an exhibit on the Rwandan genocide and postponed its scheduled opening by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Monday after the Turkish mission objected to references to the Armenian genocide in Turkey at the time of World War I.

The panels of graphics, photos and statements had been installed in the visitors lobby on Thursday by the British-based Aegis Trust. The trust campaigns for the prevention of genocide and runs a center in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, memorializing the 500,000 victims of the massacres there 13 years ago.

Hours after the show was assembled, however, a Turkish diplomat spotted offending words in a section entitled "What is genocide?" and raised objections.

The passage said that "following World War I, during which one million Armenians were murdered in Turkey," Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer credited with coining the word genocide, "urged the League of Nations to recognize crimes of barbarity as international crimes."

James Smith, the chief executive of Aegis, said he was told by the United Nations on Saturday night that the sentence would have to be eliminated or the exhibition would be struck.

...Mr. Smith said he was "very disappointed because this was supposed to talk about the lessons drawn from Rwanda and point up that what is happening in Darfur is the cost of inaction."

Sunday, April 08, 2007

Chutzpah

I was hanging laundry to dry yesterday while the TV was on in the background. It just so happened that CNN was on, and there was a discussion of the treatment of the captured British servicemen and woman and whether or not it amounted to torture.

Just now I tried to find an online version of the story and a google search for "cnn british captives torture iran" came back with this question: "Did you mean: cnn british captives torture iraq"?

That pretty much sums up my thoughts on the question. Terry Jones agrees.

Saturday, April 07, 2007

Jerusalem Post creepiness

Maybe I'm just being paranoid here, but I find it kind of disconcerting and creepy that the Jerusalem Post's website has a whole section entitled "Iranian Threat." It's right up there with Real Estate, Headlines, Travel & Leisure, International, Arts and Culture and Sports.

Go see for yourself.

Totten's trip to "Upper Galilee"

It's difficult to know where to start when picking apart Michael Totten's most recent article on Hezbollah. A good place to start, however, is this sentence: "We ventured deeper into the south, into the steep rolling hills that make up the region known as Upper Galilee." Known by whom as Upper Galilee, one might ask. The south of Lebanon is called "Upper Galilee" mostly by those who also talk of Eretz Ysrael. It reminds me of how Iraq's former prime minister Abdel Karim Qasim used to use the Turkish title qaimaqam to designate the ruling Sheikh of Kuwait as "district governor" of "that part of the Iraqi province of Basra known as Kuwait." In any case, this naming gives us an idea of where Totten is coming from.

Even if he's physically lived in Beirut, ideologically, Totten is without a doubt coming from the United States, via Israel. He and an American who writes for a magazine in Israel were shown around the south by a certain Said and Henry from an anti-Hezbollah organization made up mostly of Lebanese expatriates, whom Totten calls "professional enemies of Hizbullah." One of them tells Totten, "Since 1975 we have been fighting for the free world. ... We are on the front lines."

During his trip, he doesn't talk to any UNIFIL soldiers, presumably because he didn't bother to get UN permission to do so, and the only Lebanese civilians whom he talks to are a couple of people from the Christian village of Ein Ebel who provide Totten with the quotes he needs to "verify" the talking points that he'd already decided on -- Hezbollah uses civilians as "human shields":

He then said that 18 days after the start of the war a large group of civilians decided it was time to leave Ein Ebel and flee to the north. They were no longer willing to stay while Israel fired back at Hizbullah's rocket launchers. It was too dangerous, and Hizbullah insisted on staying and endangering those who lived there.

So they fled the area in a convoy of civilian vehicles. It was safer, they figured, to travel in a group than alone.

On their way out of the village, Hizbullah fighters stood on the side of the road and opened fire with machine guns on the fleeing civilians.

I was shocked, and I asked Alan to confirm this. Was it really true? Hizbullah opened fire on Lebanese civilians with machine guns? Alan confirmed this was true.

"Why?" I had an idea, but I wanted a local person to say it.

Because, Alan said, Hizbullah wanted to use the civilians of Ein Ebel as "human shields." I did not use the phrase "human shields." These were Alan's own words.

So according to Totten, Hezbollah opened fire on Lebanese civilians, because they were Christians, and Hezbollah wanted to use them as human shields. You see, he already knew what he wanted to write in the Jerusalem Post, but he "wanted a local person to say it."

If this were true, then Totten would have uncovered a huge story. Imagine the headlines in L'Orient le Jour! Imagine Michael Young's fiery indignation of Hezbollah's attack on helpless civilians fleeing the war last summer.

Color me skeptical. For some reason, I can't imagine that the same party that gave up defeated SLA militia members (who had been fighting with Israel during the latter's occupation of the south) to the government in Beirut for trial instead of dealing with them themselves would open fire on a convoy of Lebanese civilians. And I believe even less that no one would have heard about it until the intrepid American gumshoe Michael Totten uncovered the scoop during his travels in "Upper Galilee." Give me a break.

Earlier in his trip, he decided against talking to people in Shi'a areas. His escort did not "recommend" it, so Totten doesn't force the issue. After all, what good would talking to the Shi'a in the south be (or Hezbollah, or Amal or the UN for that matter), when you can be given the grand tour by "professional enemies of Hizbullah"?

Totten is the embodiment of a partisan hack who travels for rhetorical flair. His pieces usually have all the nuance of an IDF press release, and it's no wonder that the Jerusalem Post publishes his obtuse pap. To borrow a phrase from a friend of mine, Michael Totten doesn't know Shi'ite from shinola.


UPDATE: According to Totten's buddy Noah over at Azure: Ideas for the Jewish Nation, the two Lebanese guides who took them on a tour of the south were "Lebanese Christians, veterans of the Lebanese Forces army (sic)."

For those who aren't familiar with Lebanese politics, the Lebanese Forces are a Christian umbrella militia force cum political party that included the Phalange militia, which has its roots in a visit Pierre Gemayal took to Nazi Germany for the Olympic games in Berlin. The Lebanese Forces are now run by Samir Geagea, who was released from prison after serving 10 years for war crimes including political assassinations. According to Pollak, Totten's buddies from the Lebanese Forces had this to say (with a laugh) about Shi'a martyrdom: "The best way is to change them into real victims. This way they won’t be liars."

So Totten went on his trip with two (ex?) militia members and an American who enjoys feting the Lebanon that he would like to see come out on top:

...the Lebanon of the Christians, the moderate Sunnis, and the Druze, the Lebanon that earned Beirut the moniker of the Paris of the Middle East. This Lebanon looks West for inspiration and support, not East, and sustains a loathing for Hezbollah (and the Palestinians) that rivals Israel's.

So hats off to Micheal Totten, the self-styled "independent journalist" who gives us the real scoop in the Middle East -- as opposed to the obviously biased reporting done by the mainstream media. If you enjoy his evenhanded traipsing around in "Upper Galilee" with Christian militiamen, you should probably go to his site and donate some money via Paypal so he can keep fighting the good fight.

Thursday, April 05, 2007

Prisoner swap?

Over the last few days, I've been wondering about a possible prisoner swap between the Iranians and the Americans, but this hasn't come up that much in the press, and all governments involved (Iranian, British and American) have insisted that there would be no "quid pro quo." This entry from Harper's, however, seems to suggest otherwise:

Yesterday I spoke with a British diplomat who has some peripheral involvement in the current Persian Gulf crisis and asked a fairly obvious question: What were the prospects for a resolution of the current dilemma through a prisoner exchange -- namely the 15 British sailors and marines seized by Tehran for the six Iranians held by U.S. forces in Iraq? The question drew a broad smile and this comment: "If everything develops as I hope it will, then about a week from today people may very well be speculating that this is what has happened. They might very well think that. Of course, government representatives would be at pains to convince them that there is no relationship between the releases, because it is the position of each of the governments involved that there can be no quid pro quo when it comes to hostages." That's about as close as a wiley diplomat would come to saying “yes.” Shortly after that discussion, I noticed that one of the captured Iranians was released in Baghdad, and the AP reported that an Iranian diplomat was permitted to see the five Iranians held in Arbil. Both sides were careful to say that none of this had anything whatsoever to do with the case of the detained British service personnel.

The British soldiers have been released now. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the Iranians being held by American forces released in the next week or two.

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Untapped: Africa's oil

Slate has an interesting beginning to a 4-part piece on Africa's oil, excerpted from John Ghazvinian's new book, Untapped: The Scramble for Africa's Oil. Today's segment explains why you're hard pressed to buy a banana in Gabon:

I soon learned that it is extremely difficult to buy a banana in Gabon. During a week and a half in the country, I feasted on the most delicately prepared beef bourguignon and rack of lamb, always served with haricots verts or gratinée potatoes. But never did I manage to find a bunch of bananas for sale.

This is not to say there are no bananas in Gabon. Quite the contrary—there are literally millions. About half the country's tiny population lives in Libreville, while most of the rest reside in three or four towns that dot the jungle interior. Where the population centers stop, there is nothing but miles and miles of misty virgin rain-forest, inhabited by gorillas and lizards and thick with banana trees. All one has to do is walk to the edge of town, into where the bush begins, and there is no shortage of banana trees to choose from. The country is bursting with sweet, soft bananas.

So what happens to them? The ones that are not picked by chimpanzees and baboons turn yellow, then brown, then black, and then fall to the ground and fertilize the jungle floor. Before oil was discovered in Gabon, the country was self-sufficient in bananas. By 1981 it had become almost totally dependent on bananas imported from neighboring Cameroon. One could not ask for a more vivid image to associate with the Dutch disease than that of a vast jungle nation where there is no one available to pick bananas off the trees.

And it's not just the bananas. In the early 1980s, when Gabon was at the height of its oil production, and globally it seemed that cheap oil was a thing of the past, the country imported a staggering 96 percent of its food. Even eggs were flown in, as no one in this cash-flooded nation could be bothered to raise chickens. Today Gabon is dependent on imports for 60 percent of its food needs -- still an uncomfortably high figure in a country where the oil is beginning to run out.

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

McCain's peaceful stroll in Baghdad

Lately, I have had two pet peeves. The first is the group of so-called experts on certain regions of the world (these days, it's usually the Middle East) who have never been to that region nor even have a basic grasp of the language(s) spoken there. The airwaves and blogosphere are full of so-called experts on Islam and Arab society, many of whom couldn't order a coffee in Cairo or say a prayer in a mosque in Detroit. We would laugh if an "expert" on American affairs who'd never been to the states (or maybe had spent 3 days in New York) and didn't speak any English were being broadcast by Al Jazeera. Why do we accept the same from armchair Islamic "experts" on our own airwaves?

The second is people who make a show of going somewhere, but have no intention of actually letting the trip or the people they've met on that trip influence their opinion on the place. More succinctly, I hate people who travel for rhetorical flair instead of actual experience. Most American congressmen are such people. And John McCain has become one of the most egregious offenders. He took a trip to a Baghdadi souk three minutes outside of the green zone while he was covered by snipers and "100 American soldiers, with three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships overhead." All this so that he could wax optimistic on the new safety plan, with Mike Pence (R-IL), who likened the market to a "a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime":

"They asked about our conditions, and we told them the situation was bad," said Aboud Sharif Kadhoury, 63, who peddles prayer rugs at a sidewalk stand. He said he sold a small prayer rug worth less than $1 to a member of the Congressional delegation. (The official paid $20 and told Mr. Kadhoury to keep the change, the vendor said.)

Mr. Kadhoury said he lost more than $2,000 worth of merchandise in the triple bombing in February. "I was hit in the head and back with shrapnel," he recalled.

Ali Youssef, 39, who sells glassware from a sidewalk stand down the block from Mr. Kadhoury, recalled: "Everybody complained to them. We told them we were harmed."

He and other merchants used to keep their shops open until dusk, but with the dropoff in customers as a result of the attacks, and a nightly curfew, most shop owners close their businesses in the early afternoon.

"This area here is very dangerous," continued Mr. Youssef, who lost his shop in the February attack. "They cannot secure it."

But those conversations were not reflected in the congressmen's comments at the news conference on Sunday.

Instead, the politicians spoke of strolling through the marketplace, haggling with merchants and drinking tea. "The most deeply moving thing for me was to mix and mingle unfettered," Mr. Pence said.

Mr. McCain was asked about a comment he made on a radio program in which he said that he could walk freely through certain areas of Baghdad.

"I just came from one," he replied sharply. "Things are better and there are encouraging signs."

He added, "Never have I been able to go out into the city as I was today."

Told about Mr. McCain's assessment of the market, Abu Samer, a kitchenware and clothing wholesaler, scoffed: "He is just using this visit for publicity. He is just using it for himself. They’ll just take a photo of him at our market and they will just show it in the United States. He will win in America and we will have nothing."

So let's get this straight: the market is essentially "paralyzed" so a group of American lawmakers can come in, pay twenty times the actual price of a prayer mat, get photographed "on the ground," not listen to the problems that actual Iraqis have, and then send back a rose-tinted view of a Baghdad where Americans and Iraqis can haggle over the price of merchandise, while peacefully sipping tea together. This really turns my stomach.

But in case you're not willing to take the Iraqis' word on the bad situation there, please feel free to ask the corpses of workers from that same market:

The latest massacre of Iraqi children came as 21 Shia market workers were ambushed, bound and shot dead north of the capital.

The victims came from the Baghdad market visited the previous day by John McCain, the US presidential candidate, who said that an American security plan in the capital was starting to show signs of progress.

Like an Indiana market in summertime indeed.

But it's not just Pence and MacCain. Apparently two-thirds of House Republicans have indulged in at least one political junket to Iraq:

According to the Pentagon, as of mid-March, 365 members of Congress had visited the country since May 2003, when Mr. Bush declared the end of major combat operations. But it is unclear just how illuminating the trips have been.

The duration and scope of Congressional visits are tightly controlled. Lawmakers from opposing parties often travel together, but draw opposite conclusions from the same trip on the war’s progress. And while lawmakers say they are deeply moved by their experiences, they almost always return with their previous convictions firmly reinforced.

...Members rarely spend more than a night in Iraq, often flying back to Kuwait or Jordan at the end of the day. The trips are heavy on meetings with American military and embassy officials, with almost no opportunities for unscripted encounters with regular Iraqis.

Of course those currently expounding how safe Iraq is wouldn't actually want to test their theory by sleeping there -- not even in the Green Zone.

This sort of behavior annoys me even more than those who lecture us on the cultures of a country without ever having been there. They go to a place in bad faith, pretending to listen to the concerns of the "natives," while in reality they're only reinforcing their preconceived notions. I used to wonder why such people even bothered to travel in the first place, but I've come to realize that I was being naïve, because such a trip is obviously for rhetorical flair, not for actually informing one's opinion.

So McCain tries to score some political points for the surge, and 21 Iraqi Shia get killed. Maybe the timing of their murder was a coincidence, not aimed at following up the American visit to the souk. Probably not. But in either case, their deaths show just how hollow McCain's and Pence's rhetoric in Iraq rings.

Thursday, April 26, 2007

Two kidnapped PSP supporters killed

There has been a lot of talk lately about the two PSP partisans kidnapped. The word in the Shouf is that they were kidnapped by Shi'a (Hezbollah or Amal, no one is saying) forces in retaliation for the killing of a Hezbollah supporter last January during the sectarian clashes at the Arab University.

I just heard from my Druze friends in the Shouf that the two were found dead. While one was 25, the other was only 12. Ya haram.


UPDATE: Al Jazeera is reporting that the kidnapping and killings seem to be clan-based rather than party-based.

Last night, some friends and I were giving another friend a ride home. The army was out in droves, and we got picked to pull over and have ourselves and the car searched. However, when one of the two soldiers saw that two of my friends were Druze from a neighboring village of his, he called off the search. He told his colleague that he didn't need to search us and asked my Druze friends if there was anything he could to for them.

We laugh about this sort of tribalism when it comes from the guy selling us a fridge in Nabah. But it's a little disconcerting when coming from an armed soldier at a checkpoint.

UPDATE:I wrote earlier that the young man and the kid were Druze, but they were actually Sunni, although their families were supporter's of Jumblatt's PSP.

Israeli soldiers using Palestinians as human shields

I was watching CNN International earlier with my roommate, and there was a segment on about Israeli soldiers using Palestinians as human shields during military raids in the West Bank. They showed footage of Israeli soldiers pushing a young Palestinian in front of them as they had their weapons out and stayed behind him in case there was a gunfight.

I made a comment that it's funny seeing this when the Israelis, and their supporters in the US, are constantly accusing Hezbollah of using human shields. Then my roommate looked at me and made this astute comment: "The difference is that if Hezbollah uses human shields, at least they use their own people."

This is one of the incidents the CNN segment reported on, but the video footage they showed was during a raid with brandished M16s, not forcing Palestinians to shield their vehicles from stone throwers.

China arming Sudan

Lee Feinstein has a piece in TPM's America Abroad outlining the relationship between China and Sudan. To answer a charge from comments that my evidence (also in comments) that China is still supplying Sudan with weapons was "google-y and anecdotal," here is what Feinstein has to say about Chinese arms in Sudan. (Incidentally, I'm not sure I even understand how coming across an article in the Sudan Times and a report from Amnesty International by using google is supposed to make those sources any less valid. Furthermore, I'm not sure how a report by Amnesty International is "anecdotal.")

China maintains a defense relationship with Sudan, despite the UN arms embargo that has been in place for Darfur since 2005. The Security Council imposed an embargo on all nongovernmental forces operating in Darfur in July 2004, and expanded it to include government forces as well in 2005. Sales to Khartoum are still permitted, although a UN panel, which visited Sudan in August 2005 to investigate violations of the embargo, recommended in April 2006 that the Security Council expand the embargo to the entire country.

Information about recent Chinese arms sales to Sudan is difficult to discern both because of China's secrecy and because of the inherent difficulty of tracking the flow of small arms, which are below most international reporting thresholds. The UN Panel of Experts reported spotting Chinese-made military trucks in the Port of Sudan that appeared similar to those used on Sudanese Army bases in Darfur. Non-governmental organizations have reported that small arms used by rebels, janjaweed, and government forces in Darfur are of Chinese origin. There are also reports that Khartoum supplied Chinese-made automatic grenade launchers to the United Front for Democratic Change, a Chadian rebel group that also operates out of bases in Darfur. Russia and France are also suppliers of arms and military equipment to Sudan. In the last six years, Russia reported to the United Nations deliveries of 33 attack helicopters to Khartoum, eight combat aircraft, and 30 armored combat. (Between 2001 and 2004, France exported over $1 million of mostly small arms, spare parts, and ammunition.)

Beijing defends its sales to Khartoum as legal, and says that it requires all of its buyers not to transfer arms to other parties, including guerilla groups, a claim which is difficult to confirm independently. Zhai Jun, China's Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs, said in March 2007, "With Sudan, we have cooperation in many aspects, including military cooperation. In this, we have nothing to hide."

In early April, China received Sudan's Joint Chief of Staff. The Chinese Minister of Defense told his Sudanese counterpart that China was "willing to further develop cooperation between the two militaries in every sphere."

Feinstein isn't offering up anything new or salacious in this short piece, but it's a decent outline of the economic, political and military relationship between Sudan and China.

For more on China and Sudan, see the tireless and laudable Eric Reeves.

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Zapped

My first post on the French elections has somehow disappeared. I don't know what happened to it, but it was about how I was worried about Le Pen making it to the second round and that I didn't think that Sarkozy was taking as many votes from the FN as people thought.

Since then, Le Pen only managed to get 11 percent of the vote, a welcome surprise. I don't think, however, that this is due to fewer people voting for him. I think, rather, that it's because there was an increase of almost 3.5 million people registered to vote, and voter turnout was something like 27 percent higher than it was in 2002. (I can't find the exact figure, but I remember it being around 60 percent in 2002, compared to 87 percent this time.)

So I think that people who vote Front National generally vote, whereas the young and the poor and communities "issus de l'immigration" who don't usually vote and aren't likely to vote for Le Pen probably made up a considerable proportion of newly registered voters and voters who voted this time but didn't in 2002.

Monday, April 23, 2007

China in Africa

Al Jazeera gives us a good example of how China may be doing more harm than good in Africa with its value-neutral investment in the continent:

China has agreed to give Zimbabwe $25m worth of farm equipment to help revive the country's ailing tobacco industry.

But Beijing wants something in return – large quantities of Zimbabwe's tobacco.

Jia Qinglin, a senior Chinese Communist party official, presented the equipment, including 424 tractors and 50 trucks, to Robert Mugabe, the country's president, on Saturday in a deal to replace equipment damaged when Mugabe's government seized white-owned farms to resettle landless blacks.

But China wants all the tractors to go to tobacco farmers and expects Zimbabwe to deliver 30 million kilograms by the end of the year, Haru Mutasa, Al Jazeera's correspondent, said in Harare.

While the West is trying to pressure Mugabe into lessening his brutal crackdown on the government's opposition parties, China is offering aid. And the only strings attached are financial ones: the equipment given by China has to be used for cash crops. This in a country experiencing widespread hunger and poverty.

So at the end of the day, Beijing is showing Mugabe that even if he flagrantly violates human rights and the pitiful charade that passes for democracy in Zimbabwe, the Chinese will be there to offer assistance. So long as the price is right, of course.

So are we really surprised that Beijing is financially and diplomatically underwriting Khartoum's genocide in Darfur?

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Ségo makes it to the second round, Le Pen flounders

It looks like the turnout for this election is 87 percent, which is the highest in the Fifth Republic.

According to France 2, Sarko is at 29 percent and Ségo at 25 percent and Bayrou at 19 percent. Le Pen, fortunately, only managed 11 or 12 percent, so it looks like it'll be Sarko v. Ségo in the second round.

What a relief that Le Pen didn't make it to the second round.

Now let's hope that Ségo can beat out Sarkozy...

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Another brilliant idea from Kuperman

Alan Kuperman, whose work I've already taken issue with in the past has a piece in USA Today explaining his strategy for defeating al-Qaida in Iraq:

Because no option can stabilize Iraq quickly, we should refocus on our greatest achievable objective: preventing al-Qaeda from establishing a haven. This danger arises because Iraq's moderate Sunnis have allied with their extremist Sunni rivals. Why? They're trying to fend off domination and ethnic cleansing by the majority Shiites, who control Iraq's government, army and militias. Indeed, the U.S. strategy of bolstering and training Iraq's Shiite-controlled army drives Sunni moderates into extremist hands. The only way to defeat al-Qaeda in Iraq is to switch our primary allegiance to Iraq's moderate Sunnis.

The prospect of this dramatic shift in U.S. strategy raises several questions, including most fundamentally: Can we identify the moderates? Fortunately, two ready pools are available. First are the Sunni tribes the United States has attempted to recruit with little success. Until now, our offers have been too feeble, but serious military aid could do the trick.

The second source of recruits is Saddam's secular Sunni-led party, which was antithetical to al-Qaeda. Admittedly, some former Baathists are attacking U.S. forces and coordinating with Sunni extremists because they view our presence as an obstacle to their return to power, but this could change quickly if we offered to support these former enemies.

The sooner our self-styled experts on the Middle East realize that the enemy of our enemy is not necessarily our friend, the better off we'll be. While the Iraqi Sunni groups may be at odds with al-Qaida, they are also, and moreso, at odds with the American occupation. In this case, the enemy of our enemy is also our enemy.

For an informed opinion about this situation, I reccommend reading Marc Lynch's blog, where he has been discussing the schism in the Sunni insurgency for a few weeks now. He also has a piece in The American Prospect that's really worth reading:

Americans, eager for good news from Iraq and seizing upon rising public Sunni opposition to al-Qaeda, risk missing its real significance. Recent coverage of Anbar province has focused upon the growing willingness of tribal leaders to cooperate with American forces against al-Qaeda. It is true that, from Ramadi to Kirkuk, local Sunni leaders have indeed called for an "awakening," even an "intifada against al-Qaeda," in response to resentment over its behavior. That's not so new -- reports of tribes turning against al-Qaeda have been a staple of reporting from Iraq for years.

Far more importantly, last week the Islamic Army of Iraq, one of the most influential of the insurgency factions, issued a scathing public denunciation of the Islamic State of Iraq, calling on Osama bin Laden to intervene with his misguided Iraqi representatives. Al-Qaeda has taken this challenge seriously enough that its emir, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, released a lengthy and somewhat conciliatory audiotape responding to their concerns. His statement suggests that al-Qaeda is far more worried about this challenge by the insurgency than it is about the much-heralded tribal "awakening."

...While Sunni disenchantment with al-Qaeda is all to the good, it has little to do with American strategy and, crucially, even less to do with giving up on the anti-American insurgency.

French elections


Thursday, April 12, 2007

Cheney (fille) on Syria

Dick Cheney's eldest daughter, Liz, has a piece in the Post today about why the US shouldn't talk to Syria. She makes a point of listing the anti-Syrian Lebanese who have been killed in the last few years.

It is time to face facts. Talking to the Syrians emboldens and rewards them at the expense of America and our allies in the Middle East. It hasn't and won't change their behavior. They are an outlaw regime and should be isolated. Members of Congress and State Department officials should stop visiting Damascus. Arab leaders should stop receiving Bashar al-Assad. The U.N. Security Council should adopt a Chapter VII resolution mandating the establishment of an international tribunal for the Hariri murder.

The Security Council should also hold Syria accountable for its ongoing violations of existing resolutions. The U.S. government should implement all remaining elements of the Syria Accountability Act and launch an aggressive effort to empower the Syrian opposition. European governments should demonstrate that they value justice over profit and impose financial and travel sanctions on Syria's leaders.

...Conducting diplomacy with the regime in Damascus while they kill Lebanese democrats is not only irresponsible, it is shameful.

While Syria has been blamed for many of the assassinations in Lebanon, it seems unfair for a former member of the State Department to blame Syria before the investigations are finished or a tribunal has been held. Furthermore, her care for the Lebanese people seems suspect, given the current administration's stalling last summer that bought Israel more time to continue its pummeling of Lebanon. (In case anyone thought that it wasn't on purpose, Bolton has told us that not only did the US do its best to prevent an earlier cease-fire, but that he was "damned proud of what we did.")

Furthermore, it seems silly that Liz Cheney's criticism be leveled at Pelosi, whereas she remains silent about Republican Congressmen who visited Damascus the day before.

Finally, while I'm not going to go either way on Syrian involvement in the killing of Hariri, Kassir, Hawi and Tueni, I will say that it is not at all clear who killed Pierre Gemayel, so her remarks that Syria did it are disingenuous, unless of course, she's keeping some secret evidence of Damascus's involvement from the rest of us.

It just so happens that shortly after Gemayel's assassination, I spoke to Antoine Richa, the late Gemayel's advisor. He told me that his party, the Kataeb, didn't know who killed Gemayel. He mentioned that most of the people assassinated lately had been anti-Syria, but if Gemayel's advisor, part of the Kataeb's rank and file isn't sure that Damascus did it, what makes Cheney so sure?

Finally, all that is beside the point. Even if Syria is responsible for all the recent political assassinations in Lebanon, that's one reason more to engage in diplomacy with Assad. Given that the prospects of regime change in Damascus are currently slim-to-none, doesn't it seem wiser to try to change Syrian behavior through diplomacy rather than ignoring the regime and thus continuing the status quo?

Robert Malley's recent piece in the LA Times makes a convincing case:

If, as Israeli and U.S. officials assert, the regime's priority is self-preservation, it is unlikely to sponsor militant groups, jeopardize its newfound status, destabilize the region or threaten nascent economic ties for the sake of ideological purity once an agreement has been reached. Israeli and U.S. demands will not be satisfied as preconditions to negotiations, but there is at the very least solid reason to believe that they would be satisfied as part of a final deal.

Even assuming that Washington and Jerusalem are right and that Syria is more interested in the process than in the outcome, what is the downside of testing the sincerity of its intentions? To the contrary, the mere sight of Israeli and Syrian officials sitting side by side would carry dividends, producing ripple effects in a region where popular opinion is moving away from acceptance of the Jewish state's right to exist, and putting Syrian allies that oppose a negotiated settlement in an awkward position. It has gone largely unnoticed, but Assad has been at pains to differentiate his position from that of his Iranian ally, emphasizing that Syria's goal is to live in peace with Israel, not to wipe it off the face of the Earth. That is a distinction worth exploiting, not ignoring.

Rigidly rebuffing Syria is a mistake fast on its way to becoming a missed opportunity. The U.S. says it wants to see real change from Damascus, and it takes pleasure in faulting visitors -- Pelosi only the latest among them -- for returning empty-handed. Syria's response is that it will continue to assist militant groups, maintain close ties to Iran and let the U.S. flounder in Iraq for as long as Washington maintains its hostile policy and blocks peace talks. It also could change all of the above should the U.S. change its stance. That's a message Pelosi can hear and one she can deliver, but not one she can do much about. Rather than engage in political theatrics, the president should listen.

I couldn't agree more. Usually, the online comment section on American newspapers is full of support for attacking Arab countries and rigid support for Israel. Strangely, the comment section for this piece is less than kind to Dick's daughter, calling into question her credentials for having filled the newly-created post of Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs. And true enough, a comparison of her bio and that of that of her boss, one might indeed be forgiven for wondering if her last name had anything to do with her appointment. But that would be nepotism, and we all know that the current administration is above that.

"Israel does not want peace"

Ha'aretz has an opinion piece by Gideon Levy in which he argues that "Israel does not want peace."

The moment of truth has arrived, and it has to be said: Israel does not want peace. The arsenal of excuses has run out, and the chorus of Israeli rejection already rings hollow. Until recently, it was still possible to accept the Israeli refrain that "there is no partner" for peace and that "the time isn't right" to deal with our enemies. Today, the new reality before our eyes leaves no room for doubt and the tired refrain that "Israel supports peace" has been left shattered.

It's hard to determine when the breaking point occurred. Was it the absolute dismissal of the Saudi initiative? The refusal to acknowledge the Syrian initiative? Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's annual Passover interviews? The revulsion at the statements made by Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, in Damascus, alleging that Israel was ready to renew peace talks with Syria?

Who would have believed it? A high-ranking U.S. official says Israel wants peace talks to resume and instantly her president "severely" denies the veracity of her words. Is Israel even hearing these voices? Are we digesting the significance of these voices for peace? Seven million apathetic Israeli citizens prove that we are not.

This is a familiar refrain in the Arab world. When asked whether he thinks Israel will sign a peace treaty with Syria or accept Riyadh's plan, the man on the street here usually says, "Of course not, Israel doesn't want peace."

It's been easy enough for the "West" to dismiss this as Arab conspiracy theory, while accepting the Israeli line that the Jewish state would love nothing more than peace with its neighbors, if only there were a real "partner for peace." With the recent Israeli rebuffing of Syrian and Saudi-led Arab League peace initiatives, it's becoming harder and harder to disagree with the idea that finally, when all's said and done, Israel isn't really interested in peaceful relations with its neighbors in the region.

Who says Wolfowitz doesn't love Arabs?

According to the Post, Wolfowitz ordered a big pay raise for his Libyan girlfriend:

Wolfowitz's tenure, contentious from the start because of his earlier role as an architect of U.S. policy in Iraq, has been marred in recent months by a series of controversies. World Bank staffers disclosed that a woman with whom Wolfowitz is romantically involved received big pay raises from the bank. Sensitive board minutes regarding China have been leaked to the press, and blistering criticism has been leveled at Wolfowitz on an internal electronic bulletin board.

...Wolfowitz sought to defray questions about the pay raises in a briefing with reporters yesterday and to focus attention on his priorities, which he has defined as dealing seriously with environmental problems, rooting out governmental corruption and fighting poverty, particularly in Africa.

Wolfowitz noted that a committee has been appointed to review the situation involving Shaha Riza, to whom he has been romantically linked. "I'm comfortable with that, and that's all I have to say on that," Wolfowitz said. "I don't think its fair to the rest of the agenda to take up this valuable time with that."

Riza was transferred to the State Department shortly after Wolfowitz took over the World Bank in 2005, in accordance with conflict-of-interest rules. She is still paid by the bank and she has received raises that increased her pay to $193,590 from $132,660 after she was moved to the State Department in 2005, according to the bank's employee association. A Wolfowitz spokesman, who has previously said that Wolfowitz played no role in the raises, would not comment yesterday. Riza has made no public comment.

Mapping the violence in Baghdad

Continuing with online maps, the BBC has an interactive map of Baghdad that lets you chart bombings and see how the sectarian makeup of the city has changed in the last year or so.

Baghdad pre-2006






Baghdad today

US claims Iran is aiding Sunni insurgency

The Times reports that the US is now explicitly claiming that Iran is supporting Sunni groups in Iraq:

Arms that American military officials say appear to have been manufactured in Iran as recently as last year have turned up in the past week in a Sunni-majority area, the chief spokesman for the American military command in Iraq said Wednesday in a news conference.

The spokesman, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, said that detainees in American custody had indicated that Iranian intelligence operatives had given support to Sunni insurgents and that surrogates for the Iranian intelligence service were training Shiite extremists in Iran. He gave no further description of the detainees and did not say why they would have that information.

"We have in fact found some cases recently where Iranian intelligence sources have provided to Sunni insurgent groups some support," said General Caldwell, who sat near a table crowded with weapons that he said the military contended were largely of Iranian manufacture.

The weapons were found in a mostly Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad, he said, a rare instance of the American military suggesting any link between Iran and the Sunni insurgency. It has recently suggested a link with Shiite militants in Iraq.

...Critics have cast doubt on the American military statements about those bombs, saying the evidence linking them to Iran was circumstantial and inferential.

...It is unclear from the military's comments on Wednesday whether it is possible to draw conclusions about how the weapons that the military contends are of Iranian origin might have made their way into a predominantly Sunni area or why Shiite Iran would arm Sunni militants.

There are several possibilities, military officials who were not authorized to speak publicly for attribution said privately. One is that they came through Syria, long a transit route for Iranian-made weapons being funneled to the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah. Another possibility is that arms dealers are selling to every side in the conflict.

The weapons on the table next to General Caldwell were found two days ago, the general said, after a resident of the predominantly Sunni Arab neighborhood called Jihad, in western Baghdad, informed the local Joint Security Station run by Iraqi and American soldiers that there were illegal arms in the area.

The soldiers found a black Mercedes sedan and on its back seat, in plain view, a rocket of a type commonly made in China but repainted and labeled and sold by Iran, said Maj. Marty Weber, a master ordnance technician who joined General Caldwell at the briefing. In the trunk were mortar rounds marked "made in 2006."

In a nearby house and buried in the yard, the soldiers found more mortar rounds, 1,000 to 2,000 rounds of bullets, five hand grenades and a couple of Bulgarian-made rocket-propelled grenades, Major Weber said.

Interestingly enough, the US is not claiming that Bulgaria and China are supporting the insurgents. Likewise, many of the weapons used by groups like Islamic Jihad and Hamas in Palestine are made in the US and sold to Israel. Does anyone accuse the American or Israeli governments of supporting Islamic Jihad? Of course not.

If the US is going to claim that Tehran (and not Iranian or Iraqi arms dealers) is arming the Sunni insurgency, then it's going to have to do better than this.

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Mapping genocide

Via The Guardian, Google and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have come together to form the online mapping project, Crisis in Darfur:

Crisis in Darfur enables more than 200 million Google Earth users worldwide to visualize and better understand the genocide currently unfolding in Darfur, Sudan. The Museum has assembled content—photographs, data, and eyewitness testimony—from a number of sources that are brought together for the first time in Google Earth.

Crisis in Darfur is the first project of the Museum’s Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative that will over time include information on potential genocides allowing citizens, governments, and institutions to access information on atrocities in their nascent stages and respond.

Something rotten

Here's another genocide-related event in the international community, which gives me the impression that something's rotten in, well, the Hague:

Serbia, the heir to Yugoslavia, obtained the tribunal's permission to keep parts of the archives out of the public eye. Citing national security, its lawyers blacked out many sensitive -- those who have seen them say incriminating -- pages. Judges and lawyers at the war crimes tribunal could see the censored material, but it was barred from the tribunal’s public records.

Now, lawyers and others who were involved in Serbia's bid for secrecy say that, at the time, Belgrade made its true objective clear: to keep the full military archives from the International Court of Justice, where Bosnia was suing Serbia for genocide. And they say Belgrade’s goal was achieved in February, when the international court, which is also in The Hague, declared Serbia not guilty of genocide, and absolved it from paying potentially enormous damages.

Lawyers interviewed in The Hague and Belgrade said that the outcome might well have been different had the International Court of Justice pressed for access to the full archives, and legal scholars and human rights groups said it was deeply troubling that the judges did not subpoena the documents directly from Serbia. At one point, the court rebuffed a Bosnian request that it demand the full documents, saying that ample evidence was available in tribunal records.

"It's a question that nags loudly," Diane Orentlicher, a law professor at American University in Washington, said recently in The Hague. "Why didn’t the court request the full documents? The fact that they were blacked out clearly implies these passages would have made a difference."

The ruling -- which was binding and final -- was in many ways meticulous, and acknowledged that the 15 judges had not seen the censored archives. But it did not say why the court did not order Serbia to provide the full documents.

The first-hand experience I've had at the UN and what I know of the tribunals in the Hague and Arusha have convinced me that it would be naïve to think that there are no deals being made in the smoke-filled hotel rooms.

This probably has something to do with Serbia's wishes to join the EU and the fact that a guilty verdict would probably ruin the country financially. But still, this seems unacceptable to me.

Shame, shame

I've seen first hand how politics (office and international) can override common sense or even doing the right thing in a large bureaucracy. I shouldn't be surprised by stories like this anymore, and I guess I'm not.

But still. Shame on Ankara, and shame on the UN for kowtowing:

The United Nations dismantled an exhibit on the Rwandan genocide and postponed its scheduled opening by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Monday after the Turkish mission objected to references to the Armenian genocide in Turkey at the time of World War I.

The panels of graphics, photos and statements had been installed in the visitors lobby on Thursday by the British-based Aegis Trust. The trust campaigns for the prevention of genocide and runs a center in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, memorializing the 500,000 victims of the massacres there 13 years ago.

Hours after the show was assembled, however, a Turkish diplomat spotted offending words in a section entitled "What is genocide?" and raised objections.

The passage said that "following World War I, during which one million Armenians were murdered in Turkey," Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer credited with coining the word genocide, "urged the League of Nations to recognize crimes of barbarity as international crimes."

James Smith, the chief executive of Aegis, said he was told by the United Nations on Saturday night that the sentence would have to be eliminated or the exhibition would be struck.

...Mr. Smith said he was "very disappointed because this was supposed to talk about the lessons drawn from Rwanda and point up that what is happening in Darfur is the cost of inaction."

Sunday, April 08, 2007

Chutzpah

I was hanging laundry to dry yesterday while the TV was on in the background. It just so happened that CNN was on, and there was a discussion of the treatment of the captured British servicemen and woman and whether or not it amounted to torture.

Just now I tried to find an online version of the story and a google search for "cnn british captives torture iran" came back with this question: "Did you mean: cnn british captives torture iraq"?

That pretty much sums up my thoughts on the question. Terry Jones agrees.

Saturday, April 07, 2007

Jerusalem Post creepiness

Maybe I'm just being paranoid here, but I find it kind of disconcerting and creepy that the Jerusalem Post's website has a whole section entitled "Iranian Threat." It's right up there with Real Estate, Headlines, Travel & Leisure, International, Arts and Culture and Sports.

Go see for yourself.

Totten's trip to "Upper Galilee"

It's difficult to know where to start when picking apart Michael Totten's most recent article on Hezbollah. A good place to start, however, is this sentence: "We ventured deeper into the south, into the steep rolling hills that make up the region known as Upper Galilee." Known by whom as Upper Galilee, one might ask. The south of Lebanon is called "Upper Galilee" mostly by those who also talk of Eretz Ysrael. It reminds me of how Iraq's former prime minister Abdel Karim Qasim used to use the Turkish title qaimaqam to designate the ruling Sheikh of Kuwait as "district governor" of "that part of the Iraqi province of Basra known as Kuwait." In any case, this naming gives us an idea of where Totten is coming from.

Even if he's physically lived in Beirut, ideologically, Totten is without a doubt coming from the United States, via Israel. He and an American who writes for a magazine in Israel were shown around the south by a certain Said and Henry from an anti-Hezbollah organization made up mostly of Lebanese expatriates, whom Totten calls "professional enemies of Hizbullah." One of them tells Totten, "Since 1975 we have been fighting for the free world. ... We are on the front lines."

During his trip, he doesn't talk to any UNIFIL soldiers, presumably because he didn't bother to get UN permission to do so, and the only Lebanese civilians whom he talks to are a couple of people from the Christian village of Ein Ebel who provide Totten with the quotes he needs to "verify" the talking points that he'd already decided on -- Hezbollah uses civilians as "human shields":

He then said that 18 days after the start of the war a large group of civilians decided it was time to leave Ein Ebel and flee to the north. They were no longer willing to stay while Israel fired back at Hizbullah's rocket launchers. It was too dangerous, and Hizbullah insisted on staying and endangering those who lived there.

So they fled the area in a convoy of civilian vehicles. It was safer, they figured, to travel in a group than alone.

On their way out of the village, Hizbullah fighters stood on the side of the road and opened fire with machine guns on the fleeing civilians.

I was shocked, and I asked Alan to confirm this. Was it really true? Hizbullah opened fire on Lebanese civilians with machine guns? Alan confirmed this was true.

"Why?" I had an idea, but I wanted a local person to say it.

Because, Alan said, Hizbullah wanted to use the civilians of Ein Ebel as "human shields." I did not use the phrase "human shields." These were Alan's own words.

So according to Totten, Hezbollah opened fire on Lebanese civilians, because they were Christians, and Hezbollah wanted to use them as human shields. You see, he already knew what he wanted to write in the Jerusalem Post, but he "wanted a local person to say it."

If this were true, then Totten would have uncovered a huge story. Imagine the headlines in L'Orient le Jour! Imagine Michael Young's fiery indignation of Hezbollah's attack on helpless civilians fleeing the war last summer.

Color me skeptical. For some reason, I can't imagine that the same party that gave up defeated SLA militia members (who had been fighting with Israel during the latter's occupation of the south) to the government in Beirut for trial instead of dealing with them themselves would open fire on a convoy of Lebanese civilians. And I believe even less that no one would have heard about it until the intrepid American gumshoe Michael Totten uncovered the scoop during his travels in "Upper Galilee." Give me a break.

Earlier in his trip, he decided against talking to people in Shi'a areas. His escort did not "recommend" it, so Totten doesn't force the issue. After all, what good would talking to the Shi'a in the south be (or Hezbollah, or Amal or the UN for that matter), when you can be given the grand tour by "professional enemies of Hizbullah"?

Totten is the embodiment of a partisan hack who travels for rhetorical flair. His pieces usually have all the nuance of an IDF press release, and it's no wonder that the Jerusalem Post publishes his obtuse pap. To borrow a phrase from a friend of mine, Michael Totten doesn't know Shi'ite from shinola.


UPDATE: According to Totten's buddy Noah over at Azure: Ideas for the Jewish Nation, the two Lebanese guides who took them on a tour of the south were "Lebanese Christians, veterans of the Lebanese Forces army (sic)."

For those who aren't familiar with Lebanese politics, the Lebanese Forces are a Christian umbrella militia force cum political party that included the Phalange militia, which has its roots in a visit Pierre Gemayal took to Nazi Germany for the Olympic games in Berlin. The Lebanese Forces are now run by Samir Geagea, who was released from prison after serving 10 years for war crimes including political assassinations. According to Pollak, Totten's buddies from the Lebanese Forces had this to say (with a laugh) about Shi'a martyrdom: "The best way is to change them into real victims. This way they won’t be liars."

So Totten went on his trip with two (ex?) militia members and an American who enjoys feting the Lebanon that he would like to see come out on top:

...the Lebanon of the Christians, the moderate Sunnis, and the Druze, the Lebanon that earned Beirut the moniker of the Paris of the Middle East. This Lebanon looks West for inspiration and support, not East, and sustains a loathing for Hezbollah (and the Palestinians) that rivals Israel's.

So hats off to Micheal Totten, the self-styled "independent journalist" who gives us the real scoop in the Middle East -- as opposed to the obviously biased reporting done by the mainstream media. If you enjoy his evenhanded traipsing around in "Upper Galilee" with Christian militiamen, you should probably go to his site and donate some money via Paypal so he can keep fighting the good fight.

Thursday, April 05, 2007

Prisoner swap?

Over the last few days, I've been wondering about a possible prisoner swap between the Iranians and the Americans, but this hasn't come up that much in the press, and all governments involved (Iranian, British and American) have insisted that there would be no "quid pro quo." This entry from Harper's, however, seems to suggest otherwise:

Yesterday I spoke with a British diplomat who has some peripheral involvement in the current Persian Gulf crisis and asked a fairly obvious question: What were the prospects for a resolution of the current dilemma through a prisoner exchange -- namely the 15 British sailors and marines seized by Tehran for the six Iranians held by U.S. forces in Iraq? The question drew a broad smile and this comment: "If everything develops as I hope it will, then about a week from today people may very well be speculating that this is what has happened. They might very well think that. Of course, government representatives would be at pains to convince them that there is no relationship between the releases, because it is the position of each of the governments involved that there can be no quid pro quo when it comes to hostages." That's about as close as a wiley diplomat would come to saying “yes.” Shortly after that discussion, I noticed that one of the captured Iranians was released in Baghdad, and the AP reported that an Iranian diplomat was permitted to see the five Iranians held in Arbil. Both sides were careful to say that none of this had anything whatsoever to do with the case of the detained British service personnel.

The British soldiers have been released now. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the Iranians being held by American forces released in the next week or two.

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Untapped: Africa's oil

Slate has an interesting beginning to a 4-part piece on Africa's oil, excerpted from John Ghazvinian's new book, Untapped: The Scramble for Africa's Oil. Today's segment explains why you're hard pressed to buy a banana in Gabon:

I soon learned that it is extremely difficult to buy a banana in Gabon. During a week and a half in the country, I feasted on the most delicately prepared beef bourguignon and rack of lamb, always served with haricots verts or gratinée potatoes. But never did I manage to find a bunch of bananas for sale.

This is not to say there are no bananas in Gabon. Quite the contrary—there are literally millions. About half the country's tiny population lives in Libreville, while most of the rest reside in three or four towns that dot the jungle interior. Where the population centers stop, there is nothing but miles and miles of misty virgin rain-forest, inhabited by gorillas and lizards and thick with banana trees. All one has to do is walk to the edge of town, into where the bush begins, and there is no shortage of banana trees to choose from. The country is bursting with sweet, soft bananas.

So what happens to them? The ones that are not picked by chimpanzees and baboons turn yellow, then brown, then black, and then fall to the ground and fertilize the jungle floor. Before oil was discovered in Gabon, the country was self-sufficient in bananas. By 1981 it had become almost totally dependent on bananas imported from neighboring Cameroon. One could not ask for a more vivid image to associate with the Dutch disease than that of a vast jungle nation where there is no one available to pick bananas off the trees.

And it's not just the bananas. In the early 1980s, when Gabon was at the height of its oil production, and globally it seemed that cheap oil was a thing of the past, the country imported a staggering 96 percent of its food. Even eggs were flown in, as no one in this cash-flooded nation could be bothered to raise chickens. Today Gabon is dependent on imports for 60 percent of its food needs -- still an uncomfortably high figure in a country where the oil is beginning to run out.

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

McCain's peaceful stroll in Baghdad

Lately, I have had two pet peeves. The first is the group of so-called experts on certain regions of the world (these days, it's usually the Middle East) who have never been to that region nor even have a basic grasp of the language(s) spoken there. The airwaves and blogosphere are full of so-called experts on Islam and Arab society, many of whom couldn't order a coffee in Cairo or say a prayer in a mosque in Detroit. We would laugh if an "expert" on American affairs who'd never been to the states (or maybe had spent 3 days in New York) and didn't speak any English were being broadcast by Al Jazeera. Why do we accept the same from armchair Islamic "experts" on our own airwaves?

The second is people who make a show of going somewhere, but have no intention of actually letting the trip or the people they've met on that trip influence their opinion on the place. More succinctly, I hate people who travel for rhetorical flair instead of actual experience. Most American congressmen are such people. And John McCain has become one of the most egregious offenders. He took a trip to a Baghdadi souk three minutes outside of the green zone while he was covered by snipers and "100 American soldiers, with three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships overhead." All this so that he could wax optimistic on the new safety plan, with Mike Pence (R-IL), who likened the market to a "a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime":

"They asked about our conditions, and we told them the situation was bad," said Aboud Sharif Kadhoury, 63, who peddles prayer rugs at a sidewalk stand. He said he sold a small prayer rug worth less than $1 to a member of the Congressional delegation. (The official paid $20 and told Mr. Kadhoury to keep the change, the vendor said.)

Mr. Kadhoury said he lost more than $2,000 worth of merchandise in the triple bombing in February. "I was hit in the head and back with shrapnel," he recalled.

Ali Youssef, 39, who sells glassware from a sidewalk stand down the block from Mr. Kadhoury, recalled: "Everybody complained to them. We told them we were harmed."

He and other merchants used to keep their shops open until dusk, but with the dropoff in customers as a result of the attacks, and a nightly curfew, most shop owners close their businesses in the early afternoon.

"This area here is very dangerous," continued Mr. Youssef, who lost his shop in the February attack. "They cannot secure it."

But those conversations were not reflected in the congressmen's comments at the news conference on Sunday.

Instead, the politicians spoke of strolling through the marketplace, haggling with merchants and drinking tea. "The most deeply moving thing for me was to mix and mingle unfettered," Mr. Pence said.

Mr. McCain was asked about a comment he made on a radio program in which he said that he could walk freely through certain areas of Baghdad.

"I just came from one," he replied sharply. "Things are better and there are encouraging signs."

He added, "Never have I been able to go out into the city as I was today."

Told about Mr. McCain's assessment of the market, Abu Samer, a kitchenware and clothing wholesaler, scoffed: "He is just using this visit for publicity. He is just using it for himself. They’ll just take a photo of him at our market and they will just show it in the United States. He will win in America and we will have nothing."

So let's get this straight: the market is essentially "paralyzed" so a group of American lawmakers can come in, pay twenty times the actual price of a prayer mat, get photographed "on the ground," not listen to the problems that actual Iraqis have, and then send back a rose-tinted view of a Baghdad where Americans and Iraqis can haggle over the price of merchandise, while peacefully sipping tea together. This really turns my stomach.

But in case you're not willing to take the Iraqis' word on the bad situation there, please feel free to ask the corpses of workers from that same market:

The latest massacre of Iraqi children came as 21 Shia market workers were ambushed, bound and shot dead north of the capital.

The victims came from the Baghdad market visited the previous day by John McCain, the US presidential candidate, who said that an American security plan in the capital was starting to show signs of progress.

Like an Indiana market in summertime indeed.

But it's not just Pence and MacCain. Apparently two-thirds of House Republicans have indulged in at least one political junket to Iraq:

According to the Pentagon, as of mid-March, 365 members of Congress had visited the country since May 2003, when Mr. Bush declared the end of major combat operations. But it is unclear just how illuminating the trips have been.

The duration and scope of Congressional visits are tightly controlled. Lawmakers from opposing parties often travel together, but draw opposite conclusions from the same trip on the war’s progress. And while lawmakers say they are deeply moved by their experiences, they almost always return with their previous convictions firmly reinforced.

...Members rarely spend more than a night in Iraq, often flying back to Kuwait or Jordan at the end of the day. The trips are heavy on meetings with American military and embassy officials, with almost no opportunities for unscripted encounters with regular Iraqis.

Of course those currently expounding how safe Iraq is wouldn't actually want to test their theory by sleeping there -- not even in the Green Zone.

This sort of behavior annoys me even more than those who lecture us on the cultures of a country without ever having been there. They go to a place in bad faith, pretending to listen to the concerns of the "natives," while in reality they're only reinforcing their preconceived notions. I used to wonder why such people even bothered to travel in the first place, but I've come to realize that I was being naïve, because such a trip is obviously for rhetorical flair, not for actually informing one's opinion.

So McCain tries to score some political points for the surge, and 21 Iraqi Shia get killed. Maybe the timing of their murder was a coincidence, not aimed at following up the American visit to the souk. Probably not. But in either case, their deaths show just how hollow McCain's and Pence's rhetoric in Iraq rings.

Thursday, April 26, 2007

Two kidnapped PSP supporters killed

There has been a lot of talk lately about the two PSP partisans kidnapped. The word in the Shouf is that they were kidnapped by Shi'a (Hezbollah or Amal, no one is saying) forces in retaliation for the killing of a Hezbollah supporter last January during the sectarian clashes at the Arab University.

I just heard from my Druze friends in the Shouf that the two were found dead. While one was 25, the other was only 12. Ya haram.


UPDATE: Al Jazeera is reporting that the kidnapping and killings seem to be clan-based rather than party-based.

Last night, some friends and I were giving another friend a ride home. The army was out in droves, and we got picked to pull over and have ourselves and the car searched. However, when one of the two soldiers saw that two of my friends were Druze from a neighboring village of his, he called off the search. He told his colleague that he didn't need to search us and asked my Druze friends if there was anything he could to for them.

We laugh about this sort of tribalism when it comes from the guy selling us a fridge in Nabah. But it's a little disconcerting when coming from an armed soldier at a checkpoint.

UPDATE:I wrote earlier that the young man and the kid were Druze, but they were actually Sunni, although their families were supporter's of Jumblatt's PSP.

Israeli soldiers using Palestinians as human shields

I was watching CNN International earlier with my roommate, and there was a segment on about Israeli soldiers using Palestinians as human shields during military raids in the West Bank. They showed footage of Israeli soldiers pushing a young Palestinian in front of them as they had their weapons out and stayed behind him in case there was a gunfight.

I made a comment that it's funny seeing this when the Israelis, and their supporters in the US, are constantly accusing Hezbollah of using human shields. Then my roommate looked at me and made this astute comment: "The difference is that if Hezbollah uses human shields, at least they use their own people."

This is one of the incidents the CNN segment reported on, but the video footage they showed was during a raid with brandished M16s, not forcing Palestinians to shield their vehicles from stone throwers.

China arming Sudan

Lee Feinstein has a piece in TPM's America Abroad outlining the relationship between China and Sudan. To answer a charge from comments that my evidence (also in comments) that China is still supplying Sudan with weapons was "google-y and anecdotal," here is what Feinstein has to say about Chinese arms in Sudan. (Incidentally, I'm not sure I even understand how coming across an article in the Sudan Times and a report from Amnesty International by using google is supposed to make those sources any less valid. Furthermore, I'm not sure how a report by Amnesty International is "anecdotal.")

China maintains a defense relationship with Sudan, despite the UN arms embargo that has been in place for Darfur since 2005. The Security Council imposed an embargo on all nongovernmental forces operating in Darfur in July 2004, and expanded it to include government forces as well in 2005. Sales to Khartoum are still permitted, although a UN panel, which visited Sudan in August 2005 to investigate violations of the embargo, recommended in April 2006 that the Security Council expand the embargo to the entire country.

Information about recent Chinese arms sales to Sudan is difficult to discern both because of China's secrecy and because of the inherent difficulty of tracking the flow of small arms, which are below most international reporting thresholds. The UN Panel of Experts reported spotting Chinese-made military trucks in the Port of Sudan that appeared similar to those used on Sudanese Army bases in Darfur. Non-governmental organizations have reported that small arms used by rebels, janjaweed, and government forces in Darfur are of Chinese origin. There are also reports that Khartoum supplied Chinese-made automatic grenade launchers to the United Front for Democratic Change, a Chadian rebel group that also operates out of bases in Darfur. Russia and France are also suppliers of arms and military equipment to Sudan. In the last six years, Russia reported to the United Nations deliveries of 33 attack helicopters to Khartoum, eight combat aircraft, and 30 armored combat. (Between 2001 and 2004, France exported over $1 million of mostly small arms, spare parts, and ammunition.)

Beijing defends its sales to Khartoum as legal, and says that it requires all of its buyers not to transfer arms to other parties, including guerilla groups, a claim which is difficult to confirm independently. Zhai Jun, China's Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs, said in March 2007, "With Sudan, we have cooperation in many aspects, including military cooperation. In this, we have nothing to hide."

In early April, China received Sudan's Joint Chief of Staff. The Chinese Minister of Defense told his Sudanese counterpart that China was "willing to further develop cooperation between the two militaries in every sphere."

Feinstein isn't offering up anything new or salacious in this short piece, but it's a decent outline of the economic, political and military relationship between Sudan and China.

For more on China and Sudan, see the tireless and laudable Eric Reeves.

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Zapped

My first post on the French elections has somehow disappeared. I don't know what happened to it, but it was about how I was worried about Le Pen making it to the second round and that I didn't think that Sarkozy was taking as many votes from the FN as people thought.

Since then, Le Pen only managed to get 11 percent of the vote, a welcome surprise. I don't think, however, that this is due to fewer people voting for him. I think, rather, that it's because there was an increase of almost 3.5 million people registered to vote, and voter turnout was something like 27 percent higher than it was in 2002. (I can't find the exact figure, but I remember it being around 60 percent in 2002, compared to 87 percent this time.)

So I think that people who vote Front National generally vote, whereas the young and the poor and communities "issus de l'immigration" who don't usually vote and aren't likely to vote for Le Pen probably made up a considerable proportion of newly registered voters and voters who voted this time but didn't in 2002.

Monday, April 23, 2007

China in Africa

Al Jazeera gives us a good example of how China may be doing more harm than good in Africa with its value-neutral investment in the continent:

China has agreed to give Zimbabwe $25m worth of farm equipment to help revive the country's ailing tobacco industry.

But Beijing wants something in return – large quantities of Zimbabwe's tobacco.

Jia Qinglin, a senior Chinese Communist party official, presented the equipment, including 424 tractors and 50 trucks, to Robert Mugabe, the country's president, on Saturday in a deal to replace equipment damaged when Mugabe's government seized white-owned farms to resettle landless blacks.

But China wants all the tractors to go to tobacco farmers and expects Zimbabwe to deliver 30 million kilograms by the end of the year, Haru Mutasa, Al Jazeera's correspondent, said in Harare.

While the West is trying to pressure Mugabe into lessening his brutal crackdown on the government's opposition parties, China is offering aid. And the only strings attached are financial ones: the equipment given by China has to be used for cash crops. This in a country experiencing widespread hunger and poverty.

So at the end of the day, Beijing is showing Mugabe that even if he flagrantly violates human rights and the pitiful charade that passes for democracy in Zimbabwe, the Chinese will be there to offer assistance. So long as the price is right, of course.

So are we really surprised that Beijing is financially and diplomatically underwriting Khartoum's genocide in Darfur?

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Ségo makes it to the second round, Le Pen flounders

It looks like the turnout for this election is 87 percent, which is the highest in the Fifth Republic.

According to France 2, Sarko is at 29 percent and Ségo at 25 percent and Bayrou at 19 percent. Le Pen, fortunately, only managed 11 or 12 percent, so it looks like it'll be Sarko v. Ségo in the second round.

What a relief that Le Pen didn't make it to the second round.

Now let's hope that Ségo can beat out Sarkozy...

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Another brilliant idea from Kuperman

Alan Kuperman, whose work I've already taken issue with in the past has a piece in USA Today explaining his strategy for defeating al-Qaida in Iraq:

Because no option can stabilize Iraq quickly, we should refocus on our greatest achievable objective: preventing al-Qaeda from establishing a haven. This danger arises because Iraq's moderate Sunnis have allied with their extremist Sunni rivals. Why? They're trying to fend off domination and ethnic cleansing by the majority Shiites, who control Iraq's government, army and militias. Indeed, the U.S. strategy of bolstering and training Iraq's Shiite-controlled army drives Sunni moderates into extremist hands. The only way to defeat al-Qaeda in Iraq is to switch our primary allegiance to Iraq's moderate Sunnis.

The prospect of this dramatic shift in U.S. strategy raises several questions, including most fundamentally: Can we identify the moderates? Fortunately, two ready pools are available. First are the Sunni tribes the United States has attempted to recruit with little success. Until now, our offers have been too feeble, but serious military aid could do the trick.

The second source of recruits is Saddam's secular Sunni-led party, which was antithetical to al-Qaeda. Admittedly, some former Baathists are attacking U.S. forces and coordinating with Sunni extremists because they view our presence as an obstacle to their return to power, but this could change quickly if we offered to support these former enemies.

The sooner our self-styled experts on the Middle East realize that the enemy of our enemy is not necessarily our friend, the better off we'll be. While the Iraqi Sunni groups may be at odds with al-Qaida, they are also, and moreso, at odds with the American occupation. In this case, the enemy of our enemy is also our enemy.

For an informed opinion about this situation, I reccommend reading Marc Lynch's blog, where he has been discussing the schism in the Sunni insurgency for a few weeks now. He also has a piece in The American Prospect that's really worth reading:

Americans, eager for good news from Iraq and seizing upon rising public Sunni opposition to al-Qaeda, risk missing its real significance. Recent coverage of Anbar province has focused upon the growing willingness of tribal leaders to cooperate with American forces against al-Qaeda. It is true that, from Ramadi to Kirkuk, local Sunni leaders have indeed called for an "awakening," even an "intifada against al-Qaeda," in response to resentment over its behavior. That's not so new -- reports of tribes turning against al-Qaeda have been a staple of reporting from Iraq for years.

Far more importantly, last week the Islamic Army of Iraq, one of the most influential of the insurgency factions, issued a scathing public denunciation of the Islamic State of Iraq, calling on Osama bin Laden to intervene with his misguided Iraqi representatives. Al-Qaeda has taken this challenge seriously enough that its emir, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, released a lengthy and somewhat conciliatory audiotape responding to their concerns. His statement suggests that al-Qaeda is far more worried about this challenge by the insurgency than it is about the much-heralded tribal "awakening."

...While Sunni disenchantment with al-Qaeda is all to the good, it has little to do with American strategy and, crucially, even less to do with giving up on the anti-American insurgency.

French elections


Thursday, April 12, 2007

Cheney (fille) on Syria

Dick Cheney's eldest daughter, Liz, has a piece in the Post today about why the US shouldn't talk to Syria. She makes a point of listing the anti-Syrian Lebanese who have been killed in the last few years.

It is time to face facts. Talking to the Syrians emboldens and rewards them at the expense of America and our allies in the Middle East. It hasn't and won't change their behavior. They are an outlaw regime and should be isolated. Members of Congress and State Department officials should stop visiting Damascus. Arab leaders should stop receiving Bashar al-Assad. The U.N. Security Council should adopt a Chapter VII resolution mandating the establishment of an international tribunal for the Hariri murder.

The Security Council should also hold Syria accountable for its ongoing violations of existing resolutions. The U.S. government should implement all remaining elements of the Syria Accountability Act and launch an aggressive effort to empower the Syrian opposition. European governments should demonstrate that they value justice over profit and impose financial and travel sanctions on Syria's leaders.

...Conducting diplomacy with the regime in Damascus while they kill Lebanese democrats is not only irresponsible, it is shameful.

While Syria has been blamed for many of the assassinations in Lebanon, it seems unfair for a former member of the State Department to blame Syria before the investigations are finished or a tribunal has been held. Furthermore, her care for the Lebanese people seems suspect, given the current administration's stalling last summer that bought Israel more time to continue its pummeling of Lebanon. (In case anyone thought that it wasn't on purpose, Bolton has told us that not only did the US do its best to prevent an earlier cease-fire, but that he was "damned proud of what we did.")

Furthermore, it seems silly that Liz Cheney's criticism be leveled at Pelosi, whereas she remains silent about Republican Congressmen who visited Damascus the day before.

Finally, while I'm not going to go either way on Syrian involvement in the killing of Hariri, Kassir, Hawi and Tueni, I will say that it is not at all clear who killed Pierre Gemayel, so her remarks that Syria did it are disingenuous, unless of course, she's keeping some secret evidence of Damascus's involvement from the rest of us.

It just so happens that shortly after Gemayel's assassination, I spoke to Antoine Richa, the late Gemayel's advisor. He told me that his party, the Kataeb, didn't know who killed Gemayel. He mentioned that most of the people assassinated lately had been anti-Syria, but if Gemayel's advisor, part of the Kataeb's rank and file isn't sure that Damascus did it, what makes Cheney so sure?

Finally, all that is beside the point. Even if Syria is responsible for all the recent political assassinations in Lebanon, that's one reason more to engage in diplomacy with Assad. Given that the prospects of regime change in Damascus are currently slim-to-none, doesn't it seem wiser to try to change Syrian behavior through diplomacy rather than ignoring the regime and thus continuing the status quo?

Robert Malley's recent piece in the LA Times makes a convincing case:

If, as Israeli and U.S. officials assert, the regime's priority is self-preservation, it is unlikely to sponsor militant groups, jeopardize its newfound status, destabilize the region or threaten nascent economic ties for the sake of ideological purity once an agreement has been reached. Israeli and U.S. demands will not be satisfied as preconditions to negotiations, but there is at the very least solid reason to believe that they would be satisfied as part of a final deal.

Even assuming that Washington and Jerusalem are right and that Syria is more interested in the process than in the outcome, what is the downside of testing the sincerity of its intentions? To the contrary, the mere sight of Israeli and Syrian officials sitting side by side would carry dividends, producing ripple effects in a region where popular opinion is moving away from acceptance of the Jewish state's right to exist, and putting Syrian allies that oppose a negotiated settlement in an awkward position. It has gone largely unnoticed, but Assad has been at pains to differentiate his position from that of his Iranian ally, emphasizing that Syria's goal is to live in peace with Israel, not to wipe it off the face of the Earth. That is a distinction worth exploiting, not ignoring.

Rigidly rebuffing Syria is a mistake fast on its way to becoming a missed opportunity. The U.S. says it wants to see real change from Damascus, and it takes pleasure in faulting visitors -- Pelosi only the latest among them -- for returning empty-handed. Syria's response is that it will continue to assist militant groups, maintain close ties to Iran and let the U.S. flounder in Iraq for as long as Washington maintains its hostile policy and blocks peace talks. It also could change all of the above should the U.S. change its stance. That's a message Pelosi can hear and one she can deliver, but not one she can do much about. Rather than engage in political theatrics, the president should listen.

I couldn't agree more. Usually, the online comment section on American newspapers is full of support for attacking Arab countries and rigid support for Israel. Strangely, the comment section for this piece is less than kind to Dick's daughter, calling into question her credentials for having filled the newly-created post of Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs. And true enough, a comparison of her bio and that of that of her boss, one might indeed be forgiven for wondering if her last name had anything to do with her appointment. But that would be nepotism, and we all know that the current administration is above that.

"Israel does not want peace"

Ha'aretz has an opinion piece by Gideon Levy in which he argues that "Israel does not want peace."

The moment of truth has arrived, and it has to be said: Israel does not want peace. The arsenal of excuses has run out, and the chorus of Israeli rejection already rings hollow. Until recently, it was still possible to accept the Israeli refrain that "there is no partner" for peace and that "the time isn't right" to deal with our enemies. Today, the new reality before our eyes leaves no room for doubt and the tired refrain that "Israel supports peace" has been left shattered.

It's hard to determine when the breaking point occurred. Was it the absolute dismissal of the Saudi initiative? The refusal to acknowledge the Syrian initiative? Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's annual Passover interviews? The revulsion at the statements made by Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, in Damascus, alleging that Israel was ready to renew peace talks with Syria?

Who would have believed it? A high-ranking U.S. official says Israel wants peace talks to resume and instantly her president "severely" denies the veracity of her words. Is Israel even hearing these voices? Are we digesting the significance of these voices for peace? Seven million apathetic Israeli citizens prove that we are not.

This is a familiar refrain in the Arab world. When asked whether he thinks Israel will sign a peace treaty with Syria or accept Riyadh's plan, the man on the street here usually says, "Of course not, Israel doesn't want peace."

It's been easy enough for the "West" to dismiss this as Arab conspiracy theory, while accepting the Israeli line that the Jewish state would love nothing more than peace with its neighbors, if only there were a real "partner for peace." With the recent Israeli rebuffing of Syrian and Saudi-led Arab League peace initiatives, it's becoming harder and harder to disagree with the idea that finally, when all's said and done, Israel isn't really interested in peaceful relations with its neighbors in the region.

Who says Wolfowitz doesn't love Arabs?

According to the Post, Wolfowitz ordered a big pay raise for his Libyan girlfriend:

Wolfowitz's tenure, contentious from the start because of his earlier role as an architect of U.S. policy in Iraq, has been marred in recent months by a series of controversies. World Bank staffers disclosed that a woman with whom Wolfowitz is romantically involved received big pay raises from the bank. Sensitive board minutes regarding China have been leaked to the press, and blistering criticism has been leveled at Wolfowitz on an internal electronic bulletin board.

...Wolfowitz sought to defray questions about the pay raises in a briefing with reporters yesterday and to focus attention on his priorities, which he has defined as dealing seriously with environmental problems, rooting out governmental corruption and fighting poverty, particularly in Africa.

Wolfowitz noted that a committee has been appointed to review the situation involving Shaha Riza, to whom he has been romantically linked. "I'm comfortable with that, and that's all I have to say on that," Wolfowitz said. "I don't think its fair to the rest of the agenda to take up this valuable time with that."

Riza was transferred to the State Department shortly after Wolfowitz took over the World Bank in 2005, in accordance with conflict-of-interest rules. She is still paid by the bank and she has received raises that increased her pay to $193,590 from $132,660 after she was moved to the State Department in 2005, according to the bank's employee association. A Wolfowitz spokesman, who has previously said that Wolfowitz played no role in the raises, would not comment yesterday. Riza has made no public comment.

Mapping the violence in Baghdad

Continuing with online maps, the BBC has an interactive map of Baghdad that lets you chart bombings and see how the sectarian makeup of the city has changed in the last year or so.

Baghdad pre-2006






Baghdad today

US claims Iran is aiding Sunni insurgency

The Times reports that the US is now explicitly claiming that Iran is supporting Sunni groups in Iraq:

Arms that American military officials say appear to have been manufactured in Iran as recently as last year have turned up in the past week in a Sunni-majority area, the chief spokesman for the American military command in Iraq said Wednesday in a news conference.

The spokesman, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, said that detainees in American custody had indicated that Iranian intelligence operatives had given support to Sunni insurgents and that surrogates for the Iranian intelligence service were training Shiite extremists in Iran. He gave no further description of the detainees and did not say why they would have that information.

"We have in fact found some cases recently where Iranian intelligence sources have provided to Sunni insurgent groups some support," said General Caldwell, who sat near a table crowded with weapons that he said the military contended were largely of Iranian manufacture.

The weapons were found in a mostly Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad, he said, a rare instance of the American military suggesting any link between Iran and the Sunni insurgency. It has recently suggested a link with Shiite militants in Iraq.

...Critics have cast doubt on the American military statements about those bombs, saying the evidence linking them to Iran was circumstantial and inferential.

...It is unclear from the military's comments on Wednesday whether it is possible to draw conclusions about how the weapons that the military contends are of Iranian origin might have made their way into a predominantly Sunni area or why Shiite Iran would arm Sunni militants.

There are several possibilities, military officials who were not authorized to speak publicly for attribution said privately. One is that they came through Syria, long a transit route for Iranian-made weapons being funneled to the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah. Another possibility is that arms dealers are selling to every side in the conflict.

The weapons on the table next to General Caldwell were found two days ago, the general said, after a resident of the predominantly Sunni Arab neighborhood called Jihad, in western Baghdad, informed the local Joint Security Station run by Iraqi and American soldiers that there were illegal arms in the area.

The soldiers found a black Mercedes sedan and on its back seat, in plain view, a rocket of a type commonly made in China but repainted and labeled and sold by Iran, said Maj. Marty Weber, a master ordnance technician who joined General Caldwell at the briefing. In the trunk were mortar rounds marked "made in 2006."

In a nearby house and buried in the yard, the soldiers found more mortar rounds, 1,000 to 2,000 rounds of bullets, five hand grenades and a couple of Bulgarian-made rocket-propelled grenades, Major Weber said.

Interestingly enough, the US is not claiming that Bulgaria and China are supporting the insurgents. Likewise, many of the weapons used by groups like Islamic Jihad and Hamas in Palestine are made in the US and sold to Israel. Does anyone accuse the American or Israeli governments of supporting Islamic Jihad? Of course not.

If the US is going to claim that Tehran (and not Iranian or Iraqi arms dealers) is arming the Sunni insurgency, then it's going to have to do better than this.

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Mapping genocide

Via The Guardian, Google and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have come together to form the online mapping project, Crisis in Darfur:

Crisis in Darfur enables more than 200 million Google Earth users worldwide to visualize and better understand the genocide currently unfolding in Darfur, Sudan. The Museum has assembled content—photographs, data, and eyewitness testimony—from a number of sources that are brought together for the first time in Google Earth.

Crisis in Darfur is the first project of the Museum’s Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative that will over time include information on potential genocides allowing citizens, governments, and institutions to access information on atrocities in their nascent stages and respond.

Something rotten

Here's another genocide-related event in the international community, which gives me the impression that something's rotten in, well, the Hague:

Serbia, the heir to Yugoslavia, obtained the tribunal's permission to keep parts of the archives out of the public eye. Citing national security, its lawyers blacked out many sensitive -- those who have seen them say incriminating -- pages. Judges and lawyers at the war crimes tribunal could see the censored material, but it was barred from the tribunal’s public records.

Now, lawyers and others who were involved in Serbia's bid for secrecy say that, at the time, Belgrade made its true objective clear: to keep the full military archives from the International Court of Justice, where Bosnia was suing Serbia for genocide. And they say Belgrade’s goal was achieved in February, when the international court, which is also in The Hague, declared Serbia not guilty of genocide, and absolved it from paying potentially enormous damages.

Lawyers interviewed in The Hague and Belgrade said that the outcome might well have been different had the International Court of Justice pressed for access to the full archives, and legal scholars and human rights groups said it was deeply troubling that the judges did not subpoena the documents directly from Serbia. At one point, the court rebuffed a Bosnian request that it demand the full documents, saying that ample evidence was available in tribunal records.

"It's a question that nags loudly," Diane Orentlicher, a law professor at American University in Washington, said recently in The Hague. "Why didn’t the court request the full documents? The fact that they were blacked out clearly implies these passages would have made a difference."

The ruling -- which was binding and final -- was in many ways meticulous, and acknowledged that the 15 judges had not seen the censored archives. But it did not say why the court did not order Serbia to provide the full documents.

The first-hand experience I've had at the UN and what I know of the tribunals in the Hague and Arusha have convinced me that it would be naïve to think that there are no deals being made in the smoke-filled hotel rooms.

This probably has something to do with Serbia's wishes to join the EU and the fact that a guilty verdict would probably ruin the country financially. But still, this seems unacceptable to me.

Shame, shame

I've seen first hand how politics (office and international) can override common sense or even doing the right thing in a large bureaucracy. I shouldn't be surprised by stories like this anymore, and I guess I'm not.

But still. Shame on Ankara, and shame on the UN for kowtowing:

The United Nations dismantled an exhibit on the Rwandan genocide and postponed its scheduled opening by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Monday after the Turkish mission objected to references to the Armenian genocide in Turkey at the time of World War I.

The panels of graphics, photos and statements had been installed in the visitors lobby on Thursday by the British-based Aegis Trust. The trust campaigns for the prevention of genocide and runs a center in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, memorializing the 500,000 victims of the massacres there 13 years ago.

Hours after the show was assembled, however, a Turkish diplomat spotted offending words in a section entitled "What is genocide?" and raised objections.

The passage said that "following World War I, during which one million Armenians were murdered in Turkey," Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer credited with coining the word genocide, "urged the League of Nations to recognize crimes of barbarity as international crimes."

James Smith, the chief executive of Aegis, said he was told by the United Nations on Saturday night that the sentence would have to be eliminated or the exhibition would be struck.

...Mr. Smith said he was "very disappointed because this was supposed to talk about the lessons drawn from Rwanda and point up that what is happening in Darfur is the cost of inaction."

Sunday, April 08, 2007

Chutzpah

I was hanging laundry to dry yesterday while the TV was on in the background. It just so happened that CNN was on, and there was a discussion of the treatment of the captured British servicemen and woman and whether or not it amounted to torture.

Just now I tried to find an online version of the story and a google search for "cnn british captives torture iran" came back with this question: "Did you mean: cnn british captives torture iraq"?

That pretty much sums up my thoughts on the question. Terry Jones agrees.

Saturday, April 07, 2007

Jerusalem Post creepiness

Maybe I'm just being paranoid here, but I find it kind of disconcerting and creepy that the Jerusalem Post's website has a whole section entitled "Iranian Threat." It's right up there with Real Estate, Headlines, Travel & Leisure, International, Arts and Culture and Sports.

Go see for yourself.

Totten's trip to "Upper Galilee"

It's difficult to know where to start when picking apart Michael Totten's most recent article on Hezbollah. A good place to start, however, is this sentence: "We ventured deeper into the south, into the steep rolling hills that make up the region known as Upper Galilee." Known by whom as Upper Galilee, one might ask. The south of Lebanon is called "Upper Galilee" mostly by those who also talk of Eretz Ysrael. It reminds me of how Iraq's former prime minister Abdel Karim Qasim used to use the Turkish title qaimaqam to designate the ruling Sheikh of Kuwait as "district governor" of "that part of the Iraqi province of Basra known as Kuwait." In any case, this naming gives us an idea of where Totten is coming from.

Even if he's physically lived in Beirut, ideologically, Totten is without a doubt coming from the United States, via Israel. He and an American who writes for a magazine in Israel were shown around the south by a certain Said and Henry from an anti-Hezbollah organization made up mostly of Lebanese expatriates, whom Totten calls "professional enemies of Hizbullah." One of them tells Totten, "Since 1975 we have been fighting for the free world. ... We are on the front lines."

During his trip, he doesn't talk to any UNIFIL soldiers, presumably because he didn't bother to get UN permission to do so, and the only Lebanese civilians whom he talks to are a couple of people from the Christian village of Ein Ebel who provide Totten with the quotes he needs to "verify" the talking points that he'd already decided on -- Hezbollah uses civilians as "human shields":

He then said that 18 days after the start of the war a large group of civilians decided it was time to leave Ein Ebel and flee to the north. They were no longer willing to stay while Israel fired back at Hizbullah's rocket launchers. It was too dangerous, and Hizbullah insisted on staying and endangering those who lived there.

So they fled the area in a convoy of civilian vehicles. It was safer, they figured, to travel in a group than alone.

On their way out of the village, Hizbullah fighters stood on the side of the road and opened fire with machine guns on the fleeing civilians.

I was shocked, and I asked Alan to confirm this. Was it really true? Hizbullah opened fire on Lebanese civilians with machine guns? Alan confirmed this was true.

"Why?" I had an idea, but I wanted a local person to say it.

Because, Alan said, Hizbullah wanted to use the civilians of Ein Ebel as "human shields." I did not use the phrase "human shields." These were Alan's own words.

So according to Totten, Hezbollah opened fire on Lebanese civilians, because they were Christians, and Hezbollah wanted to use them as human shields. You see, he already knew what he wanted to write in the Jerusalem Post, but he "wanted a local person to say it."

If this were true, then Totten would have uncovered a huge story. Imagine the headlines in L'Orient le Jour! Imagine Michael Young's fiery indignation of Hezbollah's attack on helpless civilians fleeing the war last summer.

Color me skeptical. For some reason, I can't imagine that the same party that gave up defeated SLA militia members (who had been fighting with Israel during the latter's occupation of the south) to the government in Beirut for trial instead of dealing with them themselves would open fire on a convoy of Lebanese civilians. And I believe even less that no one would have heard about it until the intrepid American gumshoe Michael Totten uncovered the scoop during his travels in "Upper Galilee." Give me a break.

Earlier in his trip, he decided against talking to people in Shi'a areas. His escort did not "recommend" it, so Totten doesn't force the issue. After all, what good would talking to the Shi'a in the south be (or Hezbollah, or Amal or the UN for that matter), when you can be given the grand tour by "professional enemies of Hizbullah"?

Totten is the embodiment of a partisan hack who travels for rhetorical flair. His pieces usually have all the nuance of an IDF press release, and it's no wonder that the Jerusalem Post publishes his obtuse pap. To borrow a phrase from a friend of mine, Michael Totten doesn't know Shi'ite from shinola.


UPDATE: According to Totten's buddy Noah over at Azure: Ideas for the Jewish Nation, the two Lebanese guides who took them on a tour of the south were "Lebanese Christians, veterans of the Lebanese Forces army (sic)."

For those who aren't familiar with Lebanese politics, the Lebanese Forces are a Christian umbrella militia force cum political party that included the Phalange militia, which has its roots in a visit Pierre Gemayal took to Nazi Germany for the Olympic games in Berlin. The Lebanese Forces are now run by Samir Geagea, who was released from prison after serving 10 years for war crimes including political assassinations. According to Pollak, Totten's buddies from the Lebanese Forces had this to say (with a laugh) about Shi'a martyrdom: "The best way is to change them into real victims. This way they won’t be liars."

So Totten went on his trip with two (ex?) militia members and an American who enjoys feting the Lebanon that he would like to see come out on top:

...the Lebanon of the Christians, the moderate Sunnis, and the Druze, the Lebanon that earned Beirut the moniker of the Paris of the Middle East. This Lebanon looks West for inspiration and support, not East, and sustains a loathing for Hezbollah (and the Palestinians) that rivals Israel's.

So hats off to Micheal Totten, the self-styled "independent journalist" who gives us the real scoop in the Middle East -- as opposed to the obviously biased reporting done by the mainstream media. If you enjoy his evenhanded traipsing around in "Upper Galilee" with Christian militiamen, you should probably go to his site and donate some money via Paypal so he can keep fighting the good fight.

Thursday, April 05, 2007

Prisoner swap?

Over the last few days, I've been wondering about a possible prisoner swap between the Iranians and the Americans, but this hasn't come up that much in the press, and all governments involved (Iranian, British and American) have insisted that there would be no "quid pro quo." This entry from Harper's, however, seems to suggest otherwise:

Yesterday I spoke with a British diplomat who has some peripheral involvement in the current Persian Gulf crisis and asked a fairly obvious question: What were the prospects for a resolution of the current dilemma through a prisoner exchange -- namely the 15 British sailors and marines seized by Tehran for the six Iranians held by U.S. forces in Iraq? The question drew a broad smile and this comment: "If everything develops as I hope it will, then about a week from today people may very well be speculating that this is what has happened. They might very well think that. Of course, government representatives would be at pains to convince them that there is no relationship between the releases, because it is the position of each of the governments involved that there can be no quid pro quo when it comes to hostages." That's about as close as a wiley diplomat would come to saying “yes.” Shortly after that discussion, I noticed that one of the captured Iranians was released in Baghdad, and the AP reported that an Iranian diplomat was permitted to see the five Iranians held in Arbil. Both sides were careful to say that none of this had anything whatsoever to do with the case of the detained British service personnel.

The British soldiers have been released now. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the Iranians being held by American forces released in the next week or two.

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Untapped: Africa's oil

Slate has an interesting beginning to a 4-part piece on Africa's oil, excerpted from John Ghazvinian's new book, Untapped: The Scramble for Africa's Oil. Today's segment explains why you're hard pressed to buy a banana in Gabon:

I soon learned that it is extremely difficult to buy a banana in Gabon. During a week and a half in the country, I feasted on the most delicately prepared beef bourguignon and rack of lamb, always served with haricots verts or gratinée potatoes. But never did I manage to find a bunch of bananas for sale.

This is not to say there are no bananas in Gabon. Quite the contrary—there are literally millions. About half the country's tiny population lives in Libreville, while most of the rest reside in three or four towns that dot the jungle interior. Where the population centers stop, there is nothing but miles and miles of misty virgin rain-forest, inhabited by gorillas and lizards and thick with banana trees. All one has to do is walk to the edge of town, into where the bush begins, and there is no shortage of banana trees to choose from. The country is bursting with sweet, soft bananas.

So what happens to them? The ones that are not picked by chimpanzees and baboons turn yellow, then brown, then black, and then fall to the ground and fertilize the jungle floor. Before oil was discovered in Gabon, the country was self-sufficient in bananas. By 1981 it had become almost totally dependent on bananas imported from neighboring Cameroon. One could not ask for a more vivid image to associate with the Dutch disease than that of a vast jungle nation where there is no one available to pick bananas off the trees.

And it's not just the bananas. In the early 1980s, when Gabon was at the height of its oil production, and globally it seemed that cheap oil was a thing of the past, the country imported a staggering 96 percent of its food. Even eggs were flown in, as no one in this cash-flooded nation could be bothered to raise chickens. Today Gabon is dependent on imports for 60 percent of its food needs -- still an uncomfortably high figure in a country where the oil is beginning to run out.

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

McCain's peaceful stroll in Baghdad

Lately, I have had two pet peeves. The first is the group of so-called experts on certain regions of the world (these days, it's usually the Middle East) who have never been to that region nor even have a basic grasp of the language(s) spoken there. The airwaves and blogosphere are full of so-called experts on Islam and Arab society, many of whom couldn't order a coffee in Cairo or say a prayer in a mosque in Detroit. We would laugh if an "expert" on American affairs who'd never been to the states (or maybe had spent 3 days in New York) and didn't speak any English were being broadcast by Al Jazeera. Why do we accept the same from armchair Islamic "experts" on our own airwaves?

The second is people who make a show of going somewhere, but have no intention of actually letting the trip or the people they've met on that trip influence their opinion on the place. More succinctly, I hate people who travel for rhetorical flair instead of actual experience. Most American congressmen are such people. And John McCain has become one of the most egregious offenders. He took a trip to a Baghdadi souk three minutes outside of the green zone while he was covered by snipers and "100 American soldiers, with three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships overhead." All this so that he could wax optimistic on the new safety plan, with Mike Pence (R-IL), who likened the market to a "a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime":

"They asked about our conditions, and we told them the situation was bad," said Aboud Sharif Kadhoury, 63, who peddles prayer rugs at a sidewalk stand. He said he sold a small prayer rug worth less than $1 to a member of the Congressional delegation. (The official paid $20 and told Mr. Kadhoury to keep the change, the vendor said.)

Mr. Kadhoury said he lost more than $2,000 worth of merchandise in the triple bombing in February. "I was hit in the head and back with shrapnel," he recalled.

Ali Youssef, 39, who sells glassware from a sidewalk stand down the block from Mr. Kadhoury, recalled: "Everybody complained to them. We told them we were harmed."

He and other merchants used to keep their shops open until dusk, but with the dropoff in customers as a result of the attacks, and a nightly curfew, most shop owners close their businesses in the early afternoon.

"This area here is very dangerous," continued Mr. Youssef, who lost his shop in the February attack. "They cannot secure it."

But those conversations were not reflected in the congressmen's comments at the news conference on Sunday.

Instead, the politicians spoke of strolling through the marketplace, haggling with merchants and drinking tea. "The most deeply moving thing for me was to mix and mingle unfettered," Mr. Pence said.

Mr. McCain was asked about a comment he made on a radio program in which he said that he could walk freely through certain areas of Baghdad.

"I just came from one," he replied sharply. "Things are better and there are encouraging signs."

He added, "Never have I been able to go out into the city as I was today."

Told about Mr. McCain's assessment of the market, Abu Samer, a kitchenware and clothing wholesaler, scoffed: "He is just using this visit for publicity. He is just using it for himself. They’ll just take a photo of him at our market and they will just show it in the United States. He will win in America and we will have nothing."

So let's get this straight: the market is essentially "paralyzed" so a group of American lawmakers can come in, pay twenty times the actual price of a prayer mat, get photographed "on the ground," not listen to the problems that actual Iraqis have, and then send back a rose-tinted view of a Baghdad where Americans and Iraqis can haggle over the price of merchandise, while peacefully sipping tea together. This really turns my stomach.

But in case you're not willing to take the Iraqis' word on the bad situation there, please feel free to ask the corpses of workers from that same market:

The latest massacre of Iraqi children came as 21 Shia market workers were ambushed, bound and shot dead north of the capital.

The victims came from the Baghdad market visited the previous day by John McCain, the US presidential candidate, who said that an American security plan in the capital was starting to show signs of progress.

Like an Indiana market in summertime indeed.

But it's not just Pence and MacCain. Apparently two-thirds of House Republicans have indulged in at least one political junket to Iraq:

According to the Pentagon, as of mid-March, 365 members of Congress had visited the country since May 2003, when Mr. Bush declared the end of major combat operations. But it is unclear just how illuminating the trips have been.

The duration and scope of Congressional visits are tightly controlled. Lawmakers from opposing parties often travel together, but draw opposite conclusions from the same trip on the war’s progress. And while lawmakers say they are deeply moved by their experiences, they almost always return with their previous convictions firmly reinforced.

...Members rarely spend more than a night in Iraq, often flying back to Kuwait or Jordan at the end of the day. The trips are heavy on meetings with American military and embassy officials, with almost no opportunities for unscripted encounters with regular Iraqis.

Of course those currently expounding how safe Iraq is wouldn't actually want to test their theory by sleeping there -- not even in the Green Zone.

This sort of behavior annoys me even more than those who lecture us on the cultures of a country without ever having been there. They go to a place in bad faith, pretending to listen to the concerns of the "natives," while in reality they're only reinforcing their preconceived notions. I used to wonder why such people even bothered to travel in the first place, but I've come to realize that I was being naïve, because such a trip is obviously for rhetorical flair, not for actually informing one's opinion.

So McCain tries to score some political points for the surge, and 21 Iraqi Shia get killed. Maybe the timing of their murder was a coincidence, not aimed at following up the American visit to the souk. Probably not. But in either case, their deaths show just how hollow McCain's and Pence's rhetoric in Iraq rings.

Thursday, April 26, 2007

Two kidnapped PSP supporters killed

There has been a lot of talk lately about the two PSP partisans kidnapped. The word in the Shouf is that they were kidnapped by Shi'a (Hezbollah or Amal, no one is saying) forces in retaliation for the killing of a Hezbollah supporter last January during the sectarian clashes at the Arab University.

I just heard from my Druze friends in the Shouf that the two were found dead. While one was 25, the other was only 12. Ya haram.


UPDATE: Al Jazeera is reporting that the kidnapping and killings seem to be clan-based rather than party-based.

Last night, some friends and I were giving another friend a ride home. The army was out in droves, and we got picked to pull over and have ourselves and the car searched. However, when one of the two soldiers saw that two of my friends were Druze from a neighboring village of his, he called off the search. He told his colleague that he didn't need to search us and asked my Druze friends if there was anything he could to for them.

We laugh about this sort of tribalism when it comes from the guy selling us a fridge in Nabah. But it's a little disconcerting when coming from an armed soldier at a checkpoint.

UPDATE:I wrote earlier that the young man and the kid were Druze, but they were actually Sunni, although their families were supporter's of Jumblatt's PSP.

Israeli soldiers using Palestinians as human shields

I was watching CNN International earlier with my roommate, and there was a segment on about Israeli soldiers using Palestinians as human shields during military raids in the West Bank. They showed footage of Israeli soldiers pushing a young Palestinian in front of them as they had their weapons out and stayed behind him in case there was a gunfight.

I made a comment that it's funny seeing this when the Israelis, and their supporters in the US, are constantly accusing Hezbollah of using human shields. Then my roommate looked at me and made this astute comment: "The difference is that if Hezbollah uses human shields, at least they use their own people."

This is one of the incidents the CNN segment reported on, but the video footage they showed was during a raid with brandished M16s, not forcing Palestinians to shield their vehicles from stone throwers.

China arming Sudan

Lee Feinstein has a piece in TPM's America Abroad outlining the relationship between China and Sudan. To answer a charge from comments that my evidence (also in comments) that China is still supplying Sudan with weapons was "google-y and anecdotal," here is what Feinstein has to say about Chinese arms in Sudan. (Incidentally, I'm not sure I even understand how coming across an article in the Sudan Times and a report from Amnesty International by using google is supposed to make those sources any less valid. Furthermore, I'm not sure how a report by Amnesty International is "anecdotal.")

China maintains a defense relationship with Sudan, despite the UN arms embargo that has been in place for Darfur since 2005. The Security Council imposed an embargo on all nongovernmental forces operating in Darfur in July 2004, and expanded it to include government forces as well in 2005. Sales to Khartoum are still permitted, although a UN panel, which visited Sudan in August 2005 to investigate violations of the embargo, recommended in April 2006 that the Security Council expand the embargo to the entire country.

Information about recent Chinese arms sales to Sudan is difficult to discern both because of China's secrecy and because of the inherent difficulty of tracking the flow of small arms, which are below most international reporting thresholds. The UN Panel of Experts reported spotting Chinese-made military trucks in the Port of Sudan that appeared similar to those used on Sudanese Army bases in Darfur. Non-governmental organizations have reported that small arms used by rebels, janjaweed, and government forces in Darfur are of Chinese origin. There are also reports that Khartoum supplied Chinese-made automatic grenade launchers to the United Front for Democratic Change, a Chadian rebel group that also operates out of bases in Darfur. Russia and France are also suppliers of arms and military equipment to Sudan. In the last six years, Russia reported to the United Nations deliveries of 33 attack helicopters to Khartoum, eight combat aircraft, and 30 armored combat. (Between 2001 and 2004, France exported over $1 million of mostly small arms, spare parts, and ammunition.)

Beijing defends its sales to Khartoum as legal, and says that it requires all of its buyers not to transfer arms to other parties, including guerilla groups, a claim which is difficult to confirm independently. Zhai Jun, China's Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs, said in March 2007, "With Sudan, we have cooperation in many aspects, including military cooperation. In this, we have nothing to hide."

In early April, China received Sudan's Joint Chief of Staff. The Chinese Minister of Defense told his Sudanese counterpart that China was "willing to further develop cooperation between the two militaries in every sphere."

Feinstein isn't offering up anything new or salacious in this short piece, but it's a decent outline of the economic, political and military relationship between Sudan and China.

For more on China and Sudan, see the tireless and laudable Eric Reeves.

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Zapped

My first post on the French elections has somehow disappeared. I don't know what happened to it, but it was about how I was worried about Le Pen making it to the second round and that I didn't think that Sarkozy was taking as many votes from the FN as people thought.

Since then, Le Pen only managed to get 11 percent of the vote, a welcome surprise. I don't think, however, that this is due to fewer people voting for him. I think, rather, that it's because there was an increase of almost 3.5 million people registered to vote, and voter turnout was something like 27 percent higher than it was in 2002. (I can't find the exact figure, but I remember it being around 60 percent in 2002, compared to 87 percent this time.)

So I think that people who vote Front National generally vote, whereas the young and the poor and communities "issus de l'immigration" who don't usually vote and aren't likely to vote for Le Pen probably made up a considerable proportion of newly registered voters and voters who voted this time but didn't in 2002.

Monday, April 23, 2007

China in Africa

Al Jazeera gives us a good example of how China may be doing more harm than good in Africa with its value-neutral investment in the continent:

China has agreed to give Zimbabwe $25m worth of farm equipment to help revive the country's ailing tobacco industry.

But Beijing wants something in return – large quantities of Zimbabwe's tobacco.

Jia Qinglin, a senior Chinese Communist party official, presented the equipment, including 424 tractors and 50 trucks, to Robert Mugabe, the country's president, on Saturday in a deal to replace equipment damaged when Mugabe's government seized white-owned farms to resettle landless blacks.

But China wants all the tractors to go to tobacco farmers and expects Zimbabwe to deliver 30 million kilograms by the end of the year, Haru Mutasa, Al Jazeera's correspondent, said in Harare.

While the West is trying to pressure Mugabe into lessening his brutal crackdown on the government's opposition parties, China is offering aid. And the only strings attached are financial ones: the equipment given by China has to be used for cash crops. This in a country experiencing widespread hunger and poverty.

So at the end of the day, Beijing is showing Mugabe that even if he flagrantly violates human rights and the pitiful charade that passes for democracy in Zimbabwe, the Chinese will be there to offer assistance. So long as the price is right, of course.

So are we really surprised that Beijing is financially and diplomatically underwriting Khartoum's genocide in Darfur?

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Ségo makes it to the second round, Le Pen flounders

It looks like the turnout for this election is 87 percent, which is the highest in the Fifth Republic.

According to France 2, Sarko is at 29 percent and Ségo at 25 percent and Bayrou at 19 percent. Le Pen, fortunately, only managed 11 or 12 percent, so it looks like it'll be Sarko v. Ségo in the second round.

What a relief that Le Pen didn't make it to the second round.

Now let's hope that Ségo can beat out Sarkozy...

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Another brilliant idea from Kuperman

Alan Kuperman, whose work I've already taken issue with in the past has a piece in USA Today explaining his strategy for defeating al-Qaida in Iraq:

Because no option can stabilize Iraq quickly, we should refocus on our greatest achievable objective: preventing al-Qaeda from establishing a haven. This danger arises because Iraq's moderate Sunnis have allied with their extremist Sunni rivals. Why? They're trying to fend off domination and ethnic cleansing by the majority Shiites, who control Iraq's government, army and militias. Indeed, the U.S. strategy of bolstering and training Iraq's Shiite-controlled army drives Sunni moderates into extremist hands. The only way to defeat al-Qaeda in Iraq is to switch our primary allegiance to Iraq's moderate Sunnis.

The prospect of this dramatic shift in U.S. strategy raises several questions, including most fundamentally: Can we identify the moderates? Fortunately, two ready pools are available. First are the Sunni tribes the United States has attempted to recruit with little success. Until now, our offers have been too feeble, but serious military aid could do the trick.

The second source of recruits is Saddam's secular Sunni-led party, which was antithetical to al-Qaeda. Admittedly, some former Baathists are attacking U.S. forces and coordinating with Sunni extremists because they view our presence as an obstacle to their return to power, but this could change quickly if we offered to support these former enemies.

The sooner our self-styled experts on the Middle East realize that the enemy of our enemy is not necessarily our friend, the better off we'll be. While the Iraqi Sunni groups may be at odds with al-Qaida, they are also, and moreso, at odds with the American occupation. In this case, the enemy of our enemy is also our enemy.

For an informed opinion about this situation, I reccommend reading Marc Lynch's blog, where he has been discussing the schism in the Sunni insurgency for a few weeks now. He also has a piece in The American Prospect that's really worth reading:

Americans, eager for good news from Iraq and seizing upon rising public Sunni opposition to al-Qaeda, risk missing its real significance. Recent coverage of Anbar province has focused upon the growing willingness of tribal leaders to cooperate with American forces against al-Qaeda. It is true that, from Ramadi to Kirkuk, local Sunni leaders have indeed called for an "awakening," even an "intifada against al-Qaeda," in response to resentment over its behavior. That's not so new -- reports of tribes turning against al-Qaeda have been a staple of reporting from Iraq for years.

Far more importantly, last week the Islamic Army of Iraq, one of the most influential of the insurgency factions, issued a scathing public denunciation of the Islamic State of Iraq, calling on Osama bin Laden to intervene with his misguided Iraqi representatives. Al-Qaeda has taken this challenge seriously enough that its emir, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, released a lengthy and somewhat conciliatory audiotape responding to their concerns. His statement suggests that al-Qaeda is far more worried about this challenge by the insurgency than it is about the much-heralded tribal "awakening."

...While Sunni disenchantment with al-Qaeda is all to the good, it has little to do with American strategy and, crucially, even less to do with giving up on the anti-American insurgency.

French elections


Thursday, April 12, 2007

Cheney (fille) on Syria

Dick Cheney's eldest daughter, Liz, has a piece in the Post today about why the US shouldn't talk to Syria. She makes a point of listing the anti-Syrian Lebanese who have been killed in the last few years.

It is time to face facts. Talking to the Syrians emboldens and rewards them at the expense of America and our allies in the Middle East. It hasn't and won't change their behavior. They are an outlaw regime and should be isolated. Members of Congress and State Department officials should stop visiting Damascus. Arab leaders should stop receiving Bashar al-Assad. The U.N. Security Council should adopt a Chapter VII resolution mandating the establishment of an international tribunal for the Hariri murder.

The Security Council should also hold Syria accountable for its ongoing violations of existing resolutions. The U.S. government should implement all remaining elements of the Syria Accountability Act and launch an aggressive effort to empower the Syrian opposition. European governments should demonstrate that they value justice over profit and impose financial and travel sanctions on Syria's leaders.

...Conducting diplomacy with the regime in Damascus while they kill Lebanese democrats is not only irresponsible, it is shameful.

While Syria has been blamed for many of the assassinations in Lebanon, it seems unfair for a former member of the State Department to blame Syria before the investigations are finished or a tribunal has been held. Furthermore, her care for the Lebanese people seems suspect, given the current administration's stalling last summer that bought Israel more time to continue its pummeling of Lebanon. (In case anyone thought that it wasn't on purpose, Bolton has told us that not only did the US do its best to prevent an earlier cease-fire, but that he was "damned proud of what we did.")

Furthermore, it seems silly that Liz Cheney's criticism be leveled at Pelosi, whereas she remains silent about Republican Congressmen who visited Damascus the day before.

Finally, while I'm not going to go either way on Syrian involvement in the killing of Hariri, Kassir, Hawi and Tueni, I will say that it is not at all clear who killed Pierre Gemayel, so her remarks that Syria did it are disingenuous, unless of course, she's keeping some secret evidence of Damascus's involvement from the rest of us.

It just so happens that shortly after Gemayel's assassination, I spoke to Antoine Richa, the late Gemayel's advisor. He told me that his party, the Kataeb, didn't know who killed Gemayel. He mentioned that most of the people assassinated lately had been anti-Syria, but if Gemayel's advisor, part of the Kataeb's rank and file isn't sure that Damascus did it, what makes Cheney so sure?

Finally, all that is beside the point. Even if Syria is responsible for all the recent political assassinations in Lebanon, that's one reason more to engage in diplomacy with Assad. Given that the prospects of regime change in Damascus are currently slim-to-none, doesn't it seem wiser to try to change Syrian behavior through diplomacy rather than ignoring the regime and thus continuing the status quo?

Robert Malley's recent piece in the LA Times makes a convincing case:

If, as Israeli and U.S. officials assert, the regime's priority is self-preservation, it is unlikely to sponsor militant groups, jeopardize its newfound status, destabilize the region or threaten nascent economic ties for the sake of ideological purity once an agreement has been reached. Israeli and U.S. demands will not be satisfied as preconditions to negotiations, but there is at the very least solid reason to believe that they would be satisfied as part of a final deal.

Even assuming that Washington and Jerusalem are right and that Syria is more interested in the process than in the outcome, what is the downside of testing the sincerity of its intentions? To the contrary, the mere sight of Israeli and Syrian officials sitting side by side would carry dividends, producing ripple effects in a region where popular opinion is moving away from acceptance of the Jewish state's right to exist, and putting Syrian allies that oppose a negotiated settlement in an awkward position. It has gone largely unnoticed, but Assad has been at pains to differentiate his position from that of his Iranian ally, emphasizing that Syria's goal is to live in peace with Israel, not to wipe it off the face of the Earth. That is a distinction worth exploiting, not ignoring.

Rigidly rebuffing Syria is a mistake fast on its way to becoming a missed opportunity. The U.S. says it wants to see real change from Damascus, and it takes pleasure in faulting visitors -- Pelosi only the latest among them -- for returning empty-handed. Syria's response is that it will continue to assist militant groups, maintain close ties to Iran and let the U.S. flounder in Iraq for as long as Washington maintains its hostile policy and blocks peace talks. It also could change all of the above should the U.S. change its stance. That's a message Pelosi can hear and one she can deliver, but not one she can do much about. Rather than engage in political theatrics, the president should listen.

I couldn't agree more. Usually, the online comment section on American newspapers is full of support for attacking Arab countries and rigid support for Israel. Strangely, the comment section for this piece is less than kind to Dick's daughter, calling into question her credentials for having filled the newly-created post of Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs. And true enough, a comparison of her bio and that of that of her boss, one might indeed be forgiven for wondering if her last name had anything to do with her appointment. But that would be nepotism, and we all know that the current administration is above that.

"Israel does not want peace"

Ha'aretz has an opinion piece by Gideon Levy in which he argues that "Israel does not want peace."

The moment of truth has arrived, and it has to be said: Israel does not want peace. The arsenal of excuses has run out, and the chorus of Israeli rejection already rings hollow. Until recently, it was still possible to accept the Israeli refrain that "there is no partner" for peace and that "the time isn't right" to deal with our enemies. Today, the new reality before our eyes leaves no room for doubt and the tired refrain that "Israel supports peace" has been left shattered.

It's hard to determine when the breaking point occurred. Was it the absolute dismissal of the Saudi initiative? The refusal to acknowledge the Syrian initiative? Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's annual Passover interviews? The revulsion at the statements made by Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, in Damascus, alleging that Israel was ready to renew peace talks with Syria?

Who would have believed it? A high-ranking U.S. official says Israel wants peace talks to resume and instantly her president "severely" denies the veracity of her words. Is Israel even hearing these voices? Are we digesting the significance of these voices for peace? Seven million apathetic Israeli citizens prove that we are not.

This is a familiar refrain in the Arab world. When asked whether he thinks Israel will sign a peace treaty with Syria or accept Riyadh's plan, the man on the street here usually says, "Of course not, Israel doesn't want peace."

It's been easy enough for the "West" to dismiss this as Arab conspiracy theory, while accepting the Israeli line that the Jewish state would love nothing more than peace with its neighbors, if only there were a real "partner for peace." With the recent Israeli rebuffing of Syrian and Saudi-led Arab League peace initiatives, it's becoming harder and harder to disagree with the idea that finally, when all's said and done, Israel isn't really interested in peaceful relations with its neighbors in the region.

Who says Wolfowitz doesn't love Arabs?

According to the Post, Wolfowitz ordered a big pay raise for his Libyan girlfriend:

Wolfowitz's tenure, contentious from the start because of his earlier role as an architect of U.S. policy in Iraq, has been marred in recent months by a series of controversies. World Bank staffers disclosed that a woman with whom Wolfowitz is romantically involved received big pay raises from the bank. Sensitive board minutes regarding China have been leaked to the press, and blistering criticism has been leveled at Wolfowitz on an internal electronic bulletin board.

...Wolfowitz sought to defray questions about the pay raises in a briefing with reporters yesterday and to focus attention on his priorities, which he has defined as dealing seriously with environmental problems, rooting out governmental corruption and fighting poverty, particularly in Africa.

Wolfowitz noted that a committee has been appointed to review the situation involving Shaha Riza, to whom he has been romantically linked. "I'm comfortable with that, and that's all I have to say on that," Wolfowitz said. "I don't think its fair to the rest of the agenda to take up this valuable time with that."

Riza was transferred to the State Department shortly after Wolfowitz took over the World Bank in 2005, in accordance with conflict-of-interest rules. She is still paid by the bank and she has received raises that increased her pay to $193,590 from $132,660 after she was moved to the State Department in 2005, according to the bank's employee association. A Wolfowitz spokesman, who has previously said that Wolfowitz played no role in the raises, would not comment yesterday. Riza has made no public comment.

Mapping the violence in Baghdad

Continuing with online maps, the BBC has an interactive map of Baghdad that lets you chart bombings and see how the sectarian makeup of the city has changed in the last year or so.

Baghdad pre-2006






Baghdad today

US claims Iran is aiding Sunni insurgency

The Times reports that the US is now explicitly claiming that Iran is supporting Sunni groups in Iraq:

Arms that American military officials say appear to have been manufactured in Iran as recently as last year have turned up in the past week in a Sunni-majority area, the chief spokesman for the American military command in Iraq said Wednesday in a news conference.

The spokesman, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, said that detainees in American custody had indicated that Iranian intelligence operatives had given support to Sunni insurgents and that surrogates for the Iranian intelligence service were training Shiite extremists in Iran. He gave no further description of the detainees and did not say why they would have that information.

"We have in fact found some cases recently where Iranian intelligence sources have provided to Sunni insurgent groups some support," said General Caldwell, who sat near a table crowded with weapons that he said the military contended were largely of Iranian manufacture.

The weapons were found in a mostly Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad, he said, a rare instance of the American military suggesting any link between Iran and the Sunni insurgency. It has recently suggested a link with Shiite militants in Iraq.

...Critics have cast doubt on the American military statements about those bombs, saying the evidence linking them to Iran was circumstantial and inferential.

...It is unclear from the military's comments on Wednesday whether it is possible to draw conclusions about how the weapons that the military contends are of Iranian origin might have made their way into a predominantly Sunni area or why Shiite Iran would arm Sunni militants.

There are several possibilities, military officials who were not authorized to speak publicly for attribution said privately. One is that they came through Syria, long a transit route for Iranian-made weapons being funneled to the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah. Another possibility is that arms dealers are selling to every side in the conflict.

The weapons on the table next to General Caldwell were found two days ago, the general said, after a resident of the predominantly Sunni Arab neighborhood called Jihad, in western Baghdad, informed the local Joint Security Station run by Iraqi and American soldiers that there were illegal arms in the area.

The soldiers found a black Mercedes sedan and on its back seat, in plain view, a rocket of a type commonly made in China but repainted and labeled and sold by Iran, said Maj. Marty Weber, a master ordnance technician who joined General Caldwell at the briefing. In the trunk were mortar rounds marked "made in 2006."

In a nearby house and buried in the yard, the soldiers found more mortar rounds, 1,000 to 2,000 rounds of bullets, five hand grenades and a couple of Bulgarian-made rocket-propelled grenades, Major Weber said.

Interestingly enough, the US is not claiming that Bulgaria and China are supporting the insurgents. Likewise, many of the weapons used by groups like Islamic Jihad and Hamas in Palestine are made in the US and sold to Israel. Does anyone accuse the American or Israeli governments of supporting Islamic Jihad? Of course not.

If the US is going to claim that Tehran (and not Iranian or Iraqi arms dealers) is arming the Sunni insurgency, then it's going to have to do better than this.

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Mapping genocide

Via The Guardian, Google and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have come together to form the online mapping project, Crisis in Darfur:

Crisis in Darfur enables more than 200 million Google Earth users worldwide to visualize and better understand the genocide currently unfolding in Darfur, Sudan. The Museum has assembled content—photographs, data, and eyewitness testimony—from a number of sources that are brought together for the first time in Google Earth.

Crisis in Darfur is the first project of the Museum’s Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative that will over time include information on potential genocides allowing citizens, governments, and institutions to access information on atrocities in their nascent stages and respond.

Something rotten

Here's another genocide-related event in the international community, which gives me the impression that something's rotten in, well, the Hague:

Serbia, the heir to Yugoslavia, obtained the tribunal's permission to keep parts of the archives out of the public eye. Citing national security, its lawyers blacked out many sensitive -- those who have seen them say incriminating -- pages. Judges and lawyers at the war crimes tribunal could see the censored material, but it was barred from the tribunal’s public records.

Now, lawyers and others who were involved in Serbia's bid for secrecy say that, at the time, Belgrade made its true objective clear: to keep the full military archives from the International Court of Justice, where Bosnia was suing Serbia for genocide. And they say Belgrade’s goal was achieved in February, when the international court, which is also in The Hague, declared Serbia not guilty of genocide, and absolved it from paying potentially enormous damages.

Lawyers interviewed in The Hague and Belgrade said that the outcome might well have been different had the International Court of Justice pressed for access to the full archives, and legal scholars and human rights groups said it was deeply troubling that the judges did not subpoena the documents directly from Serbia. At one point, the court rebuffed a Bosnian request that it demand the full documents, saying that ample evidence was available in tribunal records.

"It's a question that nags loudly," Diane Orentlicher, a law professor at American University in Washington, said recently in The Hague. "Why didn’t the court request the full documents? The fact that they were blacked out clearly implies these passages would have made a difference."

The ruling -- which was binding and final -- was in many ways meticulous, and acknowledged that the 15 judges had not seen the censored archives. But it did not say why the court did not order Serbia to provide the full documents.

The first-hand experience I've had at the UN and what I know of the tribunals in the Hague and Arusha have convinced me that it would be naïve to think that there are no deals being made in the smoke-filled hotel rooms.

This probably has something to do with Serbia's wishes to join the EU and the fact that a guilty verdict would probably ruin the country financially. But still, this seems unacceptable to me.

Shame, shame

I've seen first hand how politics (office and international) can override common sense or even doing the right thing in a large bureaucracy. I shouldn't be surprised by stories like this anymore, and I guess I'm not.

But still. Shame on Ankara, and shame on the UN for kowtowing:

The United Nations dismantled an exhibit on the Rwandan genocide and postponed its scheduled opening by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Monday after the Turkish mission objected to references to the Armenian genocide in Turkey at the time of World War I.

The panels of graphics, photos and statements had been installed in the visitors lobby on Thursday by the British-based Aegis Trust. The trust campaigns for the prevention of genocide and runs a center in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, memorializing the 500,000 victims of the massacres there 13 years ago.

Hours after the show was assembled, however, a Turkish diplomat spotted offending words in a section entitled "What is genocide?" and raised objections.

The passage said that "following World War I, during which one million Armenians were murdered in Turkey," Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer credited with coining the word genocide, "urged the League of Nations to recognize crimes of barbarity as international crimes."

James Smith, the chief executive of Aegis, said he was told by the United Nations on Saturday night that the sentence would have to be eliminated or the exhibition would be struck.

...Mr. Smith said he was "very disappointed because this was supposed to talk about the lessons drawn from Rwanda and point up that what is happening in Darfur is the cost of inaction."

Sunday, April 08, 2007

Chutzpah

I was hanging laundry to dry yesterday while the TV was on in the background. It just so happened that CNN was on, and there was a discussion of the treatment of the captured British servicemen and woman and whether or not it amounted to torture.

Just now I tried to find an online version of the story and a google search for "cnn british captives torture iran" came back with this question: "Did you mean: cnn british captives torture iraq"?

That pretty much sums up my thoughts on the question. Terry Jones agrees.

Saturday, April 07, 2007

Jerusalem Post creepiness

Maybe I'm just being paranoid here, but I find it kind of disconcerting and creepy that the Jerusalem Post's website has a whole section entitled "Iranian Threat." It's right up there with Real Estate, Headlines, Travel & Leisure, International, Arts and Culture and Sports.

Go see for yourself.

Totten's trip to "Upper Galilee"

It's difficult to know where to start when picking apart Michael Totten's most recent article on Hezbollah. A good place to start, however, is this sentence: "We ventured deeper into the south, into the steep rolling hills that make up the region known as Upper Galilee." Known by whom as Upper Galilee, one might ask. The south of Lebanon is called "Upper Galilee" mostly by those who also talk of Eretz Ysrael. It reminds me of how Iraq's former prime minister Abdel Karim Qasim used to use the Turkish title qaimaqam to designate the ruling Sheikh of Kuwait as "district governor" of "that part of the Iraqi province of Basra known as Kuwait." In any case, this naming gives us an idea of where Totten is coming from.

Even if he's physically lived in Beirut, ideologically, Totten is without a doubt coming from the United States, via Israel. He and an American who writes for a magazine in Israel were shown around the south by a certain Said and Henry from an anti-Hezbollah organization made up mostly of Lebanese expatriates, whom Totten calls "professional enemies of Hizbullah." One of them tells Totten, "Since 1975 we have been fighting for the free world. ... We are on the front lines."

During his trip, he doesn't talk to any UNIFIL soldiers, presumably because he didn't bother to get UN permission to do so, and the only Lebanese civilians whom he talks to are a couple of people from the Christian village of Ein Ebel who provide Totten with the quotes he needs to "verify" the talking points that he'd already decided on -- Hezbollah uses civilians as "human shields":

He then said that 18 days after the start of the war a large group of civilians decided it was time to leave Ein Ebel and flee to the north. They were no longer willing to stay while Israel fired back at Hizbullah's rocket launchers. It was too dangerous, and Hizbullah insisted on staying and endangering those who lived there.

So they fled the area in a convoy of civilian vehicles. It was safer, they figured, to travel in a group than alone.

On their way out of the village, Hizbullah fighters stood on the side of the road and opened fire with machine guns on the fleeing civilians.

I was shocked, and I asked Alan to confirm this. Was it really true? Hizbullah opened fire on Lebanese civilians with machine guns? Alan confirmed this was true.

"Why?" I had an idea, but I wanted a local person to say it.

Because, Alan said, Hizbullah wanted to use the civilians of Ein Ebel as "human shields." I did not use the phrase "human shields." These were Alan's own words.

So according to Totten, Hezbollah opened fire on Lebanese civilians, because they were Christians, and Hezbollah wanted to use them as human shields. You see, he already knew what he wanted to write in the Jerusalem Post, but he "wanted a local person to say it."

If this were true, then Totten would have uncovered a huge story. Imagine the headlines in L'Orient le Jour! Imagine Michael Young's fiery indignation of Hezbollah's attack on helpless civilians fleeing the war last summer.

Color me skeptical. For some reason, I can't imagine that the same party that gave up defeated SLA militia members (who had been fighting with Israel during the latter's occupation of the south) to the government in Beirut for trial instead of dealing with them themselves would open fire on a convoy of Lebanese civilians. And I believe even less that no one would have heard about it until the intrepid American gumshoe Michael Totten uncovered the scoop during his travels in "Upper Galilee." Give me a break.

Earlier in his trip, he decided against talking to people in Shi'a areas. His escort did not "recommend" it, so Totten doesn't force the issue. After all, what good would talking to the Shi'a in the south be (or Hezbollah, or Amal or the UN for that matter), when you can be given the grand tour by "professional enemies of Hizbullah"?

Totten is the embodiment of a partisan hack who travels for rhetorical flair. His pieces usually have all the nuance of an IDF press release, and it's no wonder that the Jerusalem Post publishes his obtuse pap. To borrow a phrase from a friend of mine, Michael Totten doesn't know Shi'ite from shinola.


UPDATE: According to Totten's buddy Noah over at Azure: Ideas for the Jewish Nation, the two Lebanese guides who took them on a tour of the south were "Lebanese Christians, veterans of the Lebanese Forces army (sic)."

For those who aren't familiar with Lebanese politics, the Lebanese Forces are a Christian umbrella militia force cum political party that included the Phalange militia, which has its roots in a visit Pierre Gemayal took to Nazi Germany for the Olympic games in Berlin. The Lebanese Forces are now run by Samir Geagea, who was released from prison after serving 10 years for war crimes including political assassinations. According to Pollak, Totten's buddies from the Lebanese Forces had this to say (with a laugh) about Shi'a martyrdom: "The best way is to change them into real victims. This way they won’t be liars."

So Totten went on his trip with two (ex?) militia members and an American who enjoys feting the Lebanon that he would like to see come out on top:

...the Lebanon of the Christians, the moderate Sunnis, and the Druze, the Lebanon that earned Beirut the moniker of the Paris of the Middle East. This Lebanon looks West for inspiration and support, not East, and sustains a loathing for Hezbollah (and the Palestinians) that rivals Israel's.

So hats off to Micheal Totten, the self-styled "independent journalist" who gives us the real scoop in the Middle East -- as opposed to the obviously biased reporting done by the mainstream media. If you enjoy his evenhanded traipsing around in "Upper Galilee" with Christian militiamen, you should probably go to his site and donate some money via Paypal so he can keep fighting the good fight.

Thursday, April 05, 2007

Prisoner swap?

Over the last few days, I've been wondering about a possible prisoner swap between the Iranians and the Americans, but this hasn't come up that much in the press, and all governments involved (Iranian, British and American) have insisted that there would be no "quid pro quo." This entry from Harper's, however, seems to suggest otherwise:

Yesterday I spoke with a British diplomat who has some peripheral involvement in the current Persian Gulf crisis and asked a fairly obvious question: What were the prospects for a resolution of the current dilemma through a prisoner exchange -- namely the 15 British sailors and marines seized by Tehran for the six Iranians held by U.S. forces in Iraq? The question drew a broad smile and this comment: "If everything develops as I hope it will, then about a week from today people may very well be speculating that this is what has happened. They might very well think that. Of course, government representatives would be at pains to convince them that there is no relationship between the releases, because it is the position of each of the governments involved that there can be no quid pro quo when it comes to hostages." That's about as close as a wiley diplomat would come to saying “yes.” Shortly after that discussion, I noticed that one of the captured Iranians was released in Baghdad, and the AP reported that an Iranian diplomat was permitted to see the five Iranians held in Arbil. Both sides were careful to say that none of this had anything whatsoever to do with the case of the detained British service personnel.

The British soldiers have been released now. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the Iranians being held by American forces released in the next week or two.

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Untapped: Africa's oil

Slate has an interesting beginning to a 4-part piece on Africa's oil, excerpted from John Ghazvinian's new book, Untapped: The Scramble for Africa's Oil. Today's segment explains why you're hard pressed to buy a banana in Gabon:

I soon learned that it is extremely difficult to buy a banana in Gabon. During a week and a half in the country, I feasted on the most delicately prepared beef bourguignon and rack of lamb, always served with haricots verts or gratinée potatoes. But never did I manage to find a bunch of bananas for sale.

This is not to say there are no bananas in Gabon. Quite the contrary—there are literally millions. About half the country's tiny population lives in Libreville, while most of the rest reside in three or four towns that dot the jungle interior. Where the population centers stop, there is nothing but miles and miles of misty virgin rain-forest, inhabited by gorillas and lizards and thick with banana trees. All one has to do is walk to the edge of town, into where the bush begins, and there is no shortage of banana trees to choose from. The country is bursting with sweet, soft bananas.

So what happens to them? The ones that are not picked by chimpanzees and baboons turn yellow, then brown, then black, and then fall to the ground and fertilize the jungle floor. Before oil was discovered in Gabon, the country was self-sufficient in bananas. By 1981 it had become almost totally dependent on bananas imported from neighboring Cameroon. One could not ask for a more vivid image to associate with the Dutch disease than that of a vast jungle nation where there is no one available to pick bananas off the trees.

And it's not just the bananas. In the early 1980s, when Gabon was at the height of its oil production, and globally it seemed that cheap oil was a thing of the past, the country imported a staggering 96 percent of its food. Even eggs were flown in, as no one in this cash-flooded nation could be bothered to raise chickens. Today Gabon is dependent on imports for 60 percent of its food needs -- still an uncomfortably high figure in a country where the oil is beginning to run out.

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

McCain's peaceful stroll in Baghdad

Lately, I have had two pet peeves. The first is the group of so-called experts on certain regions of the world (these days, it's usually the Middle East) who have never been to that region nor even have a basic grasp of the language(s) spoken there. The airwaves and blogosphere are full of so-called experts on Islam and Arab society, many of whom couldn't order a coffee in Cairo or say a prayer in a mosque in Detroit. We would laugh if an "expert" on American affairs who'd never been to the states (or maybe had spent 3 days in New York) and didn't speak any English were being broadcast by Al Jazeera. Why do we accept the same from armchair Islamic "experts" on our own airwaves?

The second is people who make a show of going somewhere, but have no intention of actually letting the trip or the people they've met on that trip influence their opinion on the place. More succinctly, I hate people who travel for rhetorical flair instead of actual experience. Most American congressmen are such people. And John McCain has become one of the most egregious offenders. He took a trip to a Baghdadi souk three minutes outside of the green zone while he was covered by snipers and "100 American soldiers, with three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships overhead." All this so that he could wax optimistic on the new safety plan, with Mike Pence (R-IL), who likened the market to a "a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime":

"They asked about our conditions, and we told them the situation was bad," said Aboud Sharif Kadhoury, 63, who peddles prayer rugs at a sidewalk stand. He said he sold a small prayer rug worth less than $1 to a member of the Congressional delegation. (The official paid $20 and told Mr. Kadhoury to keep the change, the vendor said.)

Mr. Kadhoury said he lost more than $2,000 worth of merchandise in the triple bombing in February. "I was hit in the head and back with shrapnel," he recalled.

Ali Youssef, 39, who sells glassware from a sidewalk stand down the block from Mr. Kadhoury, recalled: "Everybody complained to them. We told them we were harmed."

He and other merchants used to keep their shops open until dusk, but with the dropoff in customers as a result of the attacks, and a nightly curfew, most shop owners close their businesses in the early afternoon.

"This area here is very dangerous," continued Mr. Youssef, who lost his shop in the February attack. "They cannot secure it."

But those conversations were not reflected in the congressmen's comments at the news conference on Sunday.

Instead, the politicians spoke of strolling through the marketplace, haggling with merchants and drinking tea. "The most deeply moving thing for me was to mix and mingle unfettered," Mr. Pence said.

Mr. McCain was asked about a comment he made on a radio program in which he said that he could walk freely through certain areas of Baghdad.

"I just came from one," he replied sharply. "Things are better and there are encouraging signs."

He added, "Never have I been able to go out into the city as I was today."

Told about Mr. McCain's assessment of the market, Abu Samer, a kitchenware and clothing wholesaler, scoffed: "He is just using this visit for publicity. He is just using it for himself. They’ll just take a photo of him at our market and they will just show it in the United States. He will win in America and we will have nothing."

So let's get this straight: the market is essentially "paralyzed" so a group of American lawmakers can come in, pay twenty times the actual price of a prayer mat, get photographed "on the ground," not listen to the problems that actual Iraqis have, and then send back a rose-tinted view of a Baghdad where Americans and Iraqis can haggle over the price of merchandise, while peacefully sipping tea together. This really turns my stomach.

But in case you're not willing to take the Iraqis' word on the bad situation there, please feel free to ask the corpses of workers from that same market:

The latest massacre of Iraqi children came as 21 Shia market workers were ambushed, bound and shot dead north of the capital.

The victims came from the Baghdad market visited the previous day by John McCain, the US presidential candidate, who said that an American security plan in the capital was starting to show signs of progress.

Like an Indiana market in summertime indeed.

But it's not just Pence and MacCain. Apparently two-thirds of House Republicans have indulged in at least one political junket to Iraq:

According to the Pentagon, as of mid-March, 365 members of Congress had visited the country since May 2003, when Mr. Bush declared the end of major combat operations. But it is unclear just how illuminating the trips have been.

The duration and scope of Congressional visits are tightly controlled. Lawmakers from opposing parties often travel together, but draw opposite conclusions from the same trip on the war’s progress. And while lawmakers say they are deeply moved by their experiences, they almost always return with their previous convictions firmly reinforced.

...Members rarely spend more than a night in Iraq, often flying back to Kuwait or Jordan at the end of the day. The trips are heavy on meetings with American military and embassy officials, with almost no opportunities for unscripted encounters with regular Iraqis.

Of course those currently expounding how safe Iraq is wouldn't actually want to test their theory by sleeping there -- not even in the Green Zone.

This sort of behavior annoys me even more than those who lecture us on the cultures of a country without ever having been there. They go to a place in bad faith, pretending to listen to the concerns of the "natives," while in reality they're only reinforcing their preconceived notions. I used to wonder why such people even bothered to travel in the first place, but I've come to realize that I was being naïve, because such a trip is obviously for rhetorical flair, not for actually informing one's opinion.

So McCain tries to score some political points for the surge, and 21 Iraqi Shia get killed. Maybe the timing of their murder was a coincidence, not aimed at following up the American visit to the souk. Probably not. But in either case, their deaths show just how hollow McCain's and Pence's rhetoric in Iraq rings.

Thursday, April 26, 2007

Two kidnapped PSP supporters killed

There has been a lot of talk lately about the two PSP partisans kidnapped. The word in the Shouf is that they were kidnapped by Shi'a (Hezbollah or Amal, no one is saying) forces in retaliation for the killing of a Hezbollah supporter last January during the sectarian clashes at the Arab University.

I just heard from my Druze friends in the Shouf that the two were found dead. While one was 25, the other was only 12. Ya haram.


UPDATE: Al Jazeera is reporting that the kidnapping and killings seem to be clan-based rather than party-based.

Last night, some friends and I were giving another friend a ride home. The army was out in droves, and we got picked to pull over and have ourselves and the car searched. However, when one of the two soldiers saw that two of my friends were Druze from a neighboring village of his, he called off the search. He told his colleague that he didn't need to search us and asked my Druze friends if there was anything he could to for them.

We laugh about this sort of tribalism when it comes from the guy selling us a fridge in Nabah. But it's a little disconcerting when coming from an armed soldier at a checkpoint.

UPDATE:I wrote earlier that the young man and the kid were Druze, but they were actually Sunni, although their families were supporter's of Jumblatt's PSP.

Israeli soldiers using Palestinians as human shields

I was watching CNN International earlier with my roommate, and there was a segment on about Israeli soldiers using Palestinians as human shields during military raids in the West Bank. They showed footage of Israeli soldiers pushing a young Palestinian in front of them as they had their weapons out and stayed behind him in case there was a gunfight.

I made a comment that it's funny seeing this when the Israelis, and their supporters in the US, are constantly accusing Hezbollah of using human shields. Then my roommate looked at me and made this astute comment: "The difference is that if Hezbollah uses human shields, at least they use their own people."

This is one of the incidents the CNN segment reported on, but the video footage they showed was during a raid with brandished M16s, not forcing Palestinians to shield their vehicles from stone throwers.

China arming Sudan

Lee Feinstein has a piece in TPM's America Abroad outlining the relationship between China and Sudan. To answer a charge from comments that my evidence (also in comments) that China is still supplying Sudan with weapons was "google-y and anecdotal," here is what Feinstein has to say about Chinese arms in Sudan. (Incidentally, I'm not sure I even understand how coming across an article in the Sudan Times and a report from Amnesty International by using google is supposed to make those sources any less valid. Furthermore, I'm not sure how a report by Amnesty International is "anecdotal.")

China maintains a defense relationship with Sudan, despite the UN arms embargo that has been in place for Darfur since 2005. The Security Council imposed an embargo on all nongovernmental forces operating in Darfur in July 2004, and expanded it to include government forces as well in 2005. Sales to Khartoum are still permitted, although a UN panel, which visited Sudan in August 2005 to investigate violations of the embargo, recommended in April 2006 that the Security Council expand the embargo to the entire country.

Information about recent Chinese arms sales to Sudan is difficult to discern both because of China's secrecy and because of the inherent difficulty of tracking the flow of small arms, which are below most international reporting thresholds. The UN Panel of Experts reported spotting Chinese-made military trucks in the Port of Sudan that appeared similar to those used on Sudanese Army bases in Darfur. Non-governmental organizations have reported that small arms used by rebels, janjaweed, and government forces in Darfur are of Chinese origin. There are also reports that Khartoum supplied Chinese-made automatic grenade launchers to the United Front for Democratic Change, a Chadian rebel group that also operates out of bases in Darfur. Russia and France are also suppliers of arms and military equipment to Sudan. In the last six years, Russia reported to the United Nations deliveries of 33 attack helicopters to Khartoum, eight combat aircraft, and 30 armored combat. (Between 2001 and 2004, France exported over $1 million of mostly small arms, spare parts, and ammunition.)

Beijing defends its sales to Khartoum as legal, and says that it requires all of its buyers not to transfer arms to other parties, including guerilla groups, a claim which is difficult to confirm independently. Zhai Jun, China's Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs, said in March 2007, "With Sudan, we have cooperation in many aspects, including military cooperation. In this, we have nothing to hide."

In early April, China received Sudan's Joint Chief of Staff. The Chinese Minister of Defense told his Sudanese counterpart that China was "willing to further develop cooperation between the two militaries in every sphere."

Feinstein isn't offering up anything new or salacious in this short piece, but it's a decent outline of the economic, political and military relationship between Sudan and China.

For more on China and Sudan, see the tireless and laudable Eric Reeves.

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Zapped

My first post on the French elections has somehow disappeared. I don't know what happened to it, but it was about how I was worried about Le Pen making it to the second round and that I didn't think that Sarkozy was taking as many votes from the FN as people thought.

Since then, Le Pen only managed to get 11 percent of the vote, a welcome surprise. I don't think, however, that this is due to fewer people voting for him. I think, rather, that it's because there was an increase of almost 3.5 million people registered to vote, and voter turnout was something like 27 percent higher than it was in 2002. (I can't find the exact figure, but I remember it being around 60 percent in 2002, compared to 87 percent this time.)

So I think that people who vote Front National generally vote, whereas the young and the poor and communities "issus de l'immigration" who don't usually vote and aren't likely to vote for Le Pen probably made up a considerable proportion of newly registered voters and voters who voted this time but didn't in 2002.

Monday, April 23, 2007

China in Africa

Al Jazeera gives us a good example of how China may be doing more harm than good in Africa with its value-neutral investment in the continent:

China has agreed to give Zimbabwe $25m worth of farm equipment to help revive the country's ailing tobacco industry.

But Beijing wants something in return – large quantities of Zimbabwe's tobacco.

Jia Qinglin, a senior Chinese Communist party official, presented the equipment, including 424 tractors and 50 trucks, to Robert Mugabe, the country's president, on Saturday in a deal to replace equipment damaged when Mugabe's government seized white-owned farms to resettle landless blacks.

But China wants all the tractors to go to tobacco farmers and expects Zimbabwe to deliver 30 million kilograms by the end of the year, Haru Mutasa, Al Jazeera's correspondent, said in Harare.

While the West is trying to pressure Mugabe into lessening his brutal crackdown on the government's opposition parties, China is offering aid. And the only strings attached are financial ones: the equipment given by China has to be used for cash crops. This in a country experiencing widespread hunger and poverty.

So at the end of the day, Beijing is showing Mugabe that even if he flagrantly violates human rights and the pitiful charade that passes for democracy in Zimbabwe, the Chinese will be there to offer assistance. So long as the price is right, of course.

So are we really surprised that Beijing is financially and diplomatically underwriting Khartoum's genocide in Darfur?

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Ségo makes it to the second round, Le Pen flounders

It looks like the turnout for this election is 87 percent, which is the highest in the Fifth Republic.

According to France 2, Sarko is at 29 percent and Ségo at 25 percent and Bayrou at 19 percent. Le Pen, fortunately, only managed 11 or 12 percent, so it looks like it'll be Sarko v. Ségo in the second round.

What a relief that Le Pen didn't make it to the second round.

Now let's hope that Ségo can beat out Sarkozy...

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Another brilliant idea from Kuperman

Alan Kuperman, whose work I've already taken issue with in the past has a piece in USA Today explaining his strategy for defeating al-Qaida in Iraq:

Because no option can stabilize Iraq quickly, we should refocus on our greatest achievable objective: preventing al-Qaeda from establishing a haven. This danger arises because Iraq's moderate Sunnis have allied with their extremist Sunni rivals. Why? They're trying to fend off domination and ethnic cleansing by the majority Shiites, who control Iraq's government, army and militias. Indeed, the U.S. strategy of bolstering and training Iraq's Shiite-controlled army drives Sunni moderates into extremist hands. The only way to defeat al-Qaeda in Iraq is to switch our primary allegiance to Iraq's moderate Sunnis.

The prospect of this dramatic shift in U.S. strategy raises several questions, including most fundamentally: Can we identify the moderates? Fortunately, two ready pools are available. First are the Sunni tribes the United States has attempted to recruit with little success. Until now, our offers have been too feeble, but serious military aid could do the trick.

The second source of recruits is Saddam's secular Sunni-led party, which was antithetical to al-Qaeda. Admittedly, some former Baathists are attacking U.S. forces and coordinating with Sunni extremists because they view our presence as an obstacle to their return to power, but this could change quickly if we offered to support these former enemies.

The sooner our self-styled experts on the Middle East realize that the enemy of our enemy is not necessarily our friend, the better off we'll be. While the Iraqi Sunni groups may be at odds with al-Qaida, they are also, and moreso, at odds with the American occupation. In this case, the enemy of our enemy is also our enemy.

For an informed opinion about this situation, I reccommend reading Marc Lynch's blog, where he has been discussing the schism in the Sunni insurgency for a few weeks now. He also has a piece in The American Prospect that's really worth reading:

Americans, eager for good news from Iraq and seizing upon rising public Sunni opposition to al-Qaeda, risk missing its real significance. Recent coverage of Anbar province has focused upon the growing willingness of tribal leaders to cooperate with American forces against al-Qaeda. It is true that, from Ramadi to Kirkuk, local Sunni leaders have indeed called for an "awakening," even an "intifada against al-Qaeda," in response to resentment over its behavior. That's not so new -- reports of tribes turning against al-Qaeda have been a staple of reporting from Iraq for years.

Far more importantly, last week the Islamic Army of Iraq, one of the most influential of the insurgency factions, issued a scathing public denunciation of the Islamic State of Iraq, calling on Osama bin Laden to intervene with his misguided Iraqi representatives. Al-Qaeda has taken this challenge seriously enough that its emir, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, released a lengthy and somewhat conciliatory audiotape responding to their concerns. His statement suggests that al-Qaeda is far more worried about this challenge by the insurgency than it is about the much-heralded tribal "awakening."

...While Sunni disenchantment with al-Qaeda is all to the good, it has little to do with American strategy and, crucially, even less to do with giving up on the anti-American insurgency.

French elections


Thursday, April 12, 2007

Cheney (fille) on Syria

Dick Cheney's eldest daughter, Liz, has a piece in the Post today about why the US shouldn't talk to Syria. She makes a point of listing the anti-Syrian Lebanese who have been killed in the last few years.

It is time to face facts. Talking to the Syrians emboldens and rewards them at the expense of America and our allies in the Middle East. It hasn't and won't change their behavior. They are an outlaw regime and should be isolated. Members of Congress and State Department officials should stop visiting Damascus. Arab leaders should stop receiving Bashar al-Assad. The U.N. Security Council should adopt a Chapter VII resolution mandating the establishment of an international tribunal for the Hariri murder.

The Security Council should also hold Syria accountable for its ongoing violations of existing resolutions. The U.S. government should implement all remaining elements of the Syria Accountability Act and launch an aggressive effort to empower the Syrian opposition. European governments should demonstrate that they value justice over profit and impose financial and travel sanctions on Syria's leaders.

...Conducting diplomacy with the regime in Damascus while they kill Lebanese democrats is not only irresponsible, it is shameful.

While Syria has been blamed for many of the assassinations in Lebanon, it seems unfair for a former member of the State Department to blame Syria before the investigations are finished or a tribunal has been held. Furthermore, her care for the Lebanese people seems suspect, given the current administration's stalling last summer that bought Israel more time to continue its pummeling of Lebanon. (In case anyone thought that it wasn't on purpose, Bolton has told us that not only did the US do its best to prevent an earlier cease-fire, but that he was "damned proud of what we did.")

Furthermore, it seems silly that Liz Cheney's criticism be leveled at Pelosi, whereas she remains silent about Republican Congressmen who visited Damascus the day before.

Finally, while I'm not going to go either way on Syrian involvement in the killing of Hariri, Kassir, Hawi and Tueni, I will say that it is not at all clear who killed Pierre Gemayel, so her remarks that Syria did it are disingenuous, unless of course, she's keeping some secret evidence of Damascus's involvement from the rest of us.

It just so happens that shortly after Gemayel's assassination, I spoke to Antoine Richa, the late Gemayel's advisor. He told me that his party, the Kataeb, didn't know who killed Gemayel. He mentioned that most of the people assassinated lately had been anti-Syria, but if Gemayel's advisor, part of the Kataeb's rank and file isn't sure that Damascus did it, what makes Cheney so sure?

Finally, all that is beside the point. Even if Syria is responsible for all the recent political assassinations in Lebanon, that's one reason more to engage in diplomacy with Assad. Given that the prospects of regime change in Damascus are currently slim-to-none, doesn't it seem wiser to try to change Syrian behavior through diplomacy rather than ignoring the regime and thus continuing the status quo?

Robert Malley's recent piece in the LA Times makes a convincing case:

If, as Israeli and U.S. officials assert, the regime's priority is self-preservation, it is unlikely to sponsor militant groups, jeopardize its newfound status, destabilize the region or threaten nascent economic ties for the sake of ideological purity once an agreement has been reached. Israeli and U.S. demands will not be satisfied as preconditions to negotiations, but there is at the very least solid reason to believe that they would be satisfied as part of a final deal.

Even assuming that Washington and Jerusalem are right and that Syria is more interested in the process than in the outcome, what is the downside of testing the sincerity of its intentions? To the contrary, the mere sight of Israeli and Syrian officials sitting side by side would carry dividends, producing ripple effects in a region where popular opinion is moving away from acceptance of the Jewish state's right to exist, and putting Syrian allies that oppose a negotiated settlement in an awkward position. It has gone largely unnoticed, but Assad has been at pains to differentiate his position from that of his Iranian ally, emphasizing that Syria's goal is to live in peace with Israel, not to wipe it off the face of the Earth. That is a distinction worth exploiting, not ignoring.

Rigidly rebuffing Syria is a mistake fast on its way to becoming a missed opportunity. The U.S. says it wants to see real change from Damascus, and it takes pleasure in faulting visitors -- Pelosi only the latest among them -- for returning empty-handed. Syria's response is that it will continue to assist militant groups, maintain close ties to Iran and let the U.S. flounder in Iraq for as long as Washington maintains its hostile policy and blocks peace talks. It also could change all of the above should the U.S. change its stance. That's a message Pelosi can hear and one she can deliver, but not one she can do much about. Rather than engage in political theatrics, the president should listen.

I couldn't agree more. Usually, the online comment section on American newspapers is full of support for attacking Arab countries and rigid support for Israel. Strangely, the comment section for this piece is less than kind to Dick's daughter, calling into question her credentials for having filled the newly-created post of Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs. And true enough, a comparison of her bio and that of that of her boss, one might indeed be forgiven for wondering if her last name had anything to do with her appointment. But that would be nepotism, and we all know that the current administration is above that.

"Israel does not want peace"

Ha'aretz has an opinion piece by Gideon Levy in which he argues that "Israel does not want peace."

The moment of truth has arrived, and it has to be said: Israel does not want peace. The arsenal of excuses has run out, and the chorus of Israeli rejection already rings hollow. Until recently, it was still possible to accept the Israeli refrain that "there is no partner" for peace and that "the time isn't right" to deal with our enemies. Today, the new reality before our eyes leaves no room for doubt and the tired refrain that "Israel supports peace" has been left shattered.

It's hard to determine when the breaking point occurred. Was it the absolute dismissal of the Saudi initiative? The refusal to acknowledge the Syrian initiative? Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's annual Passover interviews? The revulsion at the statements made by Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, in Damascus, alleging that Israel was ready to renew peace talks with Syria?

Who would have believed it? A high-ranking U.S. official says Israel wants peace talks to resume and instantly her president "severely" denies the veracity of her words. Is Israel even hearing these voices? Are we digesting the significance of these voices for peace? Seven million apathetic Israeli citizens prove that we are not.

This is a familiar refrain in the Arab world. When asked whether he thinks Israel will sign a peace treaty with Syria or accept Riyadh's plan, the man on the street here usually says, "Of course not, Israel doesn't want peace."

It's been easy enough for the "West" to dismiss this as Arab conspiracy theory, while accepting the Israeli line that the Jewish state would love nothing more than peace with its neighbors, if only there were a real "partner for peace." With the recent Israeli rebuffing of Syrian and Saudi-led Arab League peace initiatives, it's becoming harder and harder to disagree with the idea that finally, when all's said and done, Israel isn't really interested in peaceful relations with its neighbors in the region.

Who says Wolfowitz doesn't love Arabs?

According to the Post, Wolfowitz ordered a big pay raise for his Libyan girlfriend:

Wolfowitz's tenure, contentious from the start because of his earlier role as an architect of U.S. policy in Iraq, has been marred in recent months by a series of controversies. World Bank staffers disclosed that a woman with whom Wolfowitz is romantically involved received big pay raises from the bank. Sensitive board minutes regarding China have been leaked to the press, and blistering criticism has been leveled at Wolfowitz on an internal electronic bulletin board.

...Wolfowitz sought to defray questions about the pay raises in a briefing with reporters yesterday and to focus attention on his priorities, which he has defined as dealing seriously with environmental problems, rooting out governmental corruption and fighting poverty, particularly in Africa.

Wolfowitz noted that a committee has been appointed to review the situation involving Shaha Riza, to whom he has been romantically linked. "I'm comfortable with that, and that's all I have to say on that," Wolfowitz said. "I don't think its fair to the rest of the agenda to take up this valuable time with that."

Riza was transferred to the State Department shortly after Wolfowitz took over the World Bank in 2005, in accordance with conflict-of-interest rules. She is still paid by the bank and she has received raises that increased her pay to $193,590 from $132,660 after she was moved to the State Department in 2005, according to the bank's employee association. A Wolfowitz spokesman, who has previously said that Wolfowitz played no role in the raises, would not comment yesterday. Riza has made no public comment.

Mapping the violence in Baghdad

Continuing with online maps, the BBC has an interactive map of Baghdad that lets you chart bombings and see how the sectarian makeup of the city has changed in the last year or so.

Baghdad pre-2006






Baghdad today

US claims Iran is aiding Sunni insurgency

The Times reports that the US is now explicitly claiming that Iran is supporting Sunni groups in Iraq:

Arms that American military officials say appear to have been manufactured in Iran as recently as last year have turned up in the past week in a Sunni-majority area, the chief spokesman for the American military command in Iraq said Wednesday in a news conference.

The spokesman, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, said that detainees in American custody had indicated that Iranian intelligence operatives had given support to Sunni insurgents and that surrogates for the Iranian intelligence service were training Shiite extremists in Iran. He gave no further description of the detainees and did not say why they would have that information.

"We have in fact found some cases recently where Iranian intelligence sources have provided to Sunni insurgent groups some support," said General Caldwell, who sat near a table crowded with weapons that he said the military contended were largely of Iranian manufacture.

The weapons were found in a mostly Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad, he said, a rare instance of the American military suggesting any link between Iran and the Sunni insurgency. It has recently suggested a link with Shiite militants in Iraq.

...Critics have cast doubt on the American military statements about those bombs, saying the evidence linking them to Iran was circumstantial and inferential.

...It is unclear from the military's comments on Wednesday whether it is possible to draw conclusions about how the weapons that the military contends are of Iranian origin might have made their way into a predominantly Sunni area or why Shiite Iran would arm Sunni militants.

There are several possibilities, military officials who were not authorized to speak publicly for attribution said privately. One is that they came through Syria, long a transit route for Iranian-made weapons being funneled to the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah. Another possibility is that arms dealers are selling to every side in the conflict.

The weapons on the table next to General Caldwell were found two days ago, the general said, after a resident of the predominantly Sunni Arab neighborhood called Jihad, in western Baghdad, informed the local Joint Security Station run by Iraqi and American soldiers that there were illegal arms in the area.

The soldiers found a black Mercedes sedan and on its back seat, in plain view, a rocket of a type commonly made in China but repainted and labeled and sold by Iran, said Maj. Marty Weber, a master ordnance technician who joined General Caldwell at the briefing. In the trunk were mortar rounds marked "made in 2006."

In a nearby house and buried in the yard, the soldiers found more mortar rounds, 1,000 to 2,000 rounds of bullets, five hand grenades and a couple of Bulgarian-made rocket-propelled grenades, Major Weber said.

Interestingly enough, the US is not claiming that Bulgaria and China are supporting the insurgents. Likewise, many of the weapons used by groups like Islamic Jihad and Hamas in Palestine are made in the US and sold to Israel. Does anyone accuse the American or Israeli governments of supporting Islamic Jihad? Of course not.

If the US is going to claim that Tehran (and not Iranian or Iraqi arms dealers) is arming the Sunni insurgency, then it's going to have to do better than this.

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Mapping genocide

Via The Guardian, Google and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have come together to form the online mapping project, Crisis in Darfur:

Crisis in Darfur enables more than 200 million Google Earth users worldwide to visualize and better understand the genocide currently unfolding in Darfur, Sudan. The Museum has assembled content—photographs, data, and eyewitness testimony—from a number of sources that are brought together for the first time in Google Earth.

Crisis in Darfur is the first project of the Museum’s Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative that will over time include information on potential genocides allowing citizens, governments, and institutions to access information on atrocities in their nascent stages and respond.

Something rotten

Here's another genocide-related event in the international community, which gives me the impression that something's rotten in, well, the Hague:

Serbia, the heir to Yugoslavia, obtained the tribunal's permission to keep parts of the archives out of the public eye. Citing national security, its lawyers blacked out many sensitive -- those who have seen them say incriminating -- pages. Judges and lawyers at the war crimes tribunal could see the censored material, but it was barred from the tribunal’s public records.

Now, lawyers and others who were involved in Serbia's bid for secrecy say that, at the time, Belgrade made its true objective clear: to keep the full military archives from the International Court of Justice, where Bosnia was suing Serbia for genocide. And they say Belgrade’s goal was achieved in February, when the international court, which is also in The Hague, declared Serbia not guilty of genocide, and absolved it from paying potentially enormous damages.

Lawyers interviewed in The Hague and Belgrade said that the outcome might well have been different had the International Court of Justice pressed for access to the full archives, and legal scholars and human rights groups said it was deeply troubling that the judges did not subpoena the documents directly from Serbia. At one point, the court rebuffed a Bosnian request that it demand the full documents, saying that ample evidence was available in tribunal records.

"It's a question that nags loudly," Diane Orentlicher, a law professor at American University in Washington, said recently in The Hague. "Why didn’t the court request the full documents? The fact that they were blacked out clearly implies these passages would have made a difference."

The ruling -- which was binding and final -- was in many ways meticulous, and acknowledged that the 15 judges had not seen the censored archives. But it did not say why the court did not order Serbia to provide the full documents.

The first-hand experience I've had at the UN and what I know of the tribunals in the Hague and Arusha have convinced me that it would be naïve to think that there are no deals being made in the smoke-filled hotel rooms.

This probably has something to do with Serbia's wishes to join the EU and the fact that a guilty verdict would probably ruin the country financially. But still, this seems unacceptable to me.

Shame, shame

I've seen first hand how politics (office and international) can override common sense or even doing the right thing in a large bureaucracy. I shouldn't be surprised by stories like this anymore, and I guess I'm not.

But still. Shame on Ankara, and shame on the UN for kowtowing:

The United Nations dismantled an exhibit on the Rwandan genocide and postponed its scheduled opening by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Monday after the Turkish mission objected to references to the Armenian genocide in Turkey at the time of World War I.

The panels of graphics, photos and statements had been installed in the visitors lobby on Thursday by the British-based Aegis Trust. The trust campaigns for the prevention of genocide and runs a center in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, memorializing the 500,000 victims of the massacres there 13 years ago.

Hours after the show was assembled, however, a Turkish diplomat spotted offending words in a section entitled "What is genocide?" and raised objections.

The passage said that "following World War I, during which one million Armenians were murdered in Turkey," Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer credited with coining the word genocide, "urged the League of Nations to recognize crimes of barbarity as international crimes."

James Smith, the chief executive of Aegis, said he was told by the United Nations on Saturday night that the sentence would have to be eliminated or the exhibition would be struck.

...Mr. Smith said he was "very disappointed because this was supposed to talk about the lessons drawn from Rwanda and point up that what is happening in Darfur is the cost of inaction."

Sunday, April 08, 2007

Chutzpah

I was hanging laundry to dry yesterday while the TV was on in the background. It just so happened that CNN was on, and there was a discussion of the treatment of the captured British servicemen and woman and whether or not it amounted to torture.

Just now I tried to find an online version of the story and a google search for "cnn british captives torture iran" came back with this question: "Did you mean: cnn british captives torture iraq"?

That pretty much sums up my thoughts on the question. Terry Jones agrees.

Saturday, April 07, 2007

Jerusalem Post creepiness

Maybe I'm just being paranoid here, but I find it kind of disconcerting and creepy that the Jerusalem Post's website has a whole section entitled "Iranian Threat." It's right up there with Real Estate, Headlines, Travel & Leisure, International, Arts and Culture and Sports.

Go see for yourself.

Totten's trip to "Upper Galilee"

It's difficult to know where to start when picking apart Michael Totten's most recent article on Hezbollah. A good place to start, however, is this sentence: "We ventured deeper into the south, into the steep rolling hills that make up the region known as Upper Galilee." Known by whom as Upper Galilee, one might ask. The south of Lebanon is called "Upper Galilee" mostly by those who also talk of Eretz Ysrael. It reminds me of how Iraq's former prime minister Abdel Karim Qasim used to use the Turkish title qaimaqam to designate the ruling Sheikh of Kuwait as "district governor" of "that part of the Iraqi province of Basra known as Kuwait." In any case, this naming gives us an idea of where Totten is coming from.

Even if he's physically lived in Beirut, ideologically, Totten is without a doubt coming from the United States, via Israel. He and an American who writes for a magazine in Israel were shown around the south by a certain Said and Henry from an anti-Hezbollah organization made up mostly of Lebanese expatriates, whom Totten calls "professional enemies of Hizbullah." One of them tells Totten, "Since 1975 we have been fighting for the free world. ... We are on the front lines."

During his trip, he doesn't talk to any UNIFIL soldiers, presumably because he didn't bother to get UN permission to do so, and the only Lebanese civilians whom he talks to are a couple of people from the Christian village of Ein Ebel who provide Totten with the quotes he needs to "verify" the talking points that he'd already decided on -- Hezbollah uses civilians as "human shields":

He then said that 18 days after the start of the war a large group of civilians decided it was time to leave Ein Ebel and flee to the north. They were no longer willing to stay while Israel fired back at Hizbullah's rocket launchers. It was too dangerous, and Hizbullah insisted on staying and endangering those who lived there.

So they fled the area in a convoy of civilian vehicles. It was safer, they figured, to travel in a group than alone.

On their way out of the village, Hizbullah fighters stood on the side of the road and opened fire with machine guns on the fleeing civilians.

I was shocked, and I asked Alan to confirm this. Was it really true? Hizbullah opened fire on Lebanese civilians with machine guns? Alan confirmed this was true.

"Why?" I had an idea, but I wanted a local person to say it.

Because, Alan said, Hizbullah wanted to use the civilians of Ein Ebel as "human shields." I did not use the phrase "human shields." These were Alan's own words.

So according to Totten, Hezbollah opened fire on Lebanese civilians, because they were Christians, and Hezbollah wanted to use them as human shields. You see, he already knew what he wanted to write in the Jerusalem Post, but he "wanted a local person to say it."

If this were true, then Totten would have uncovered a huge story. Imagine the headlines in L'Orient le Jour! Imagine Michael Young's fiery indignation of Hezbollah's attack on helpless civilians fleeing the war last summer.

Color me skeptical. For some reason, I can't imagine that the same party that gave up defeated SLA militia members (who had been fighting with Israel during the latter's occupation of the south) to the government in Beirut for trial instead of dealing with them themselves would open fire on a convoy of Lebanese civilians. And I believe even less that no one would have heard about it until the intrepid American gumshoe Michael Totten uncovered the scoop during his travels in "Upper Galilee." Give me a break.

Earlier in his trip, he decided against talking to people in Shi'a areas. His escort did not "recommend" it, so Totten doesn't force the issue. After all, what good would talking to the Shi'a in the south be (or Hezbollah, or Amal or the UN for that matter), when you can be given the grand tour by "professional enemies of Hizbullah"?

Totten is the embodiment of a partisan hack who travels for rhetorical flair. His pieces usually have all the nuance of an IDF press release, and it's no wonder that the Jerusalem Post publishes his obtuse pap. To borrow a phrase from a friend of mine, Michael Totten doesn't know Shi'ite from shinola.


UPDATE: According to Totten's buddy Noah over at Azure: Ideas for the Jewish Nation, the two Lebanese guides who took them on a tour of the south were "Lebanese Christians, veterans of the Lebanese Forces army (sic)."

For those who aren't familiar with Lebanese politics, the Lebanese Forces are a Christian umbrella militia force cum political party that included the Phalange militia, which has its roots in a visit Pierre Gemayal took to Nazi Germany for the Olympic games in Berlin. The Lebanese Forces are now run by Samir Geagea, who was released from prison after serving 10 years for war crimes including political assassinations. According to Pollak, Totten's buddies from the Lebanese Forces had this to say (with a laugh) about Shi'a martyrdom: "The best way is to change them into real victims. This way they won’t be liars."

So Totten went on his trip with two (ex?) militia members and an American who enjoys feting the Lebanon that he would like to see come out on top:

...the Lebanon of the Christians, the moderate Sunnis, and the Druze, the Lebanon that earned Beirut the moniker of the Paris of the Middle East. This Lebanon looks West for inspiration and support, not East, and sustains a loathing for Hezbollah (and the Palestinians) that rivals Israel's.

So hats off to Micheal Totten, the self-styled "independent journalist" who gives us the real scoop in the Middle East -- as opposed to the obviously biased reporting done by the mainstream media. If you enjoy his evenhanded traipsing around in "Upper Galilee" with Christian militiamen, you should probably go to his site and donate some money via Paypal so he can keep fighting the good fight.

Thursday, April 05, 2007

Prisoner swap?

Over the last few days, I've been wondering about a possible prisoner swap between the Iranians and the Americans, but this hasn't come up that much in the press, and all governments involved (Iranian, British and American) have insisted that there would be no "quid pro quo." This entry from Harper's, however, seems to suggest otherwise:

Yesterday I spoke with a British diplomat who has some peripheral involvement in the current Persian Gulf crisis and asked a fairly obvious question: What were the prospects for a resolution of the current dilemma through a prisoner exchange -- namely the 15 British sailors and marines seized by Tehran for the six Iranians held by U.S. forces in Iraq? The question drew a broad smile and this comment: "If everything develops as I hope it will, then about a week from today people may very well be speculating that this is what has happened. They might very well think that. Of course, government representatives would be at pains to convince them that there is no relationship between the releases, because it is the position of each of the governments involved that there can be no quid pro quo when it comes to hostages." That's about as close as a wiley diplomat would come to saying “yes.” Shortly after that discussion, I noticed that one of the captured Iranians was released in Baghdad, and the AP reported that an Iranian diplomat was permitted to see the five Iranians held in Arbil. Both sides were careful to say that none of this had anything whatsoever to do with the case of the detained British service personnel.

The British soldiers have been released now. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the Iranians being held by American forces released in the next week or two.

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Untapped: Africa's oil

Slate has an interesting beginning to a 4-part piece on Africa's oil, excerpted from John Ghazvinian's new book, Untapped: The Scramble for Africa's Oil. Today's segment explains why you're hard pressed to buy a banana in Gabon:

I soon learned that it is extremely difficult to buy a banana in Gabon. During a week and a half in the country, I feasted on the most delicately prepared beef bourguignon and rack of lamb, always served with haricots verts or gratinée potatoes. But never did I manage to find a bunch of bananas for sale.

This is not to say there are no bananas in Gabon. Quite the contrary—there are literally millions. About half the country's tiny population lives in Libreville, while most of the rest reside in three or four towns that dot the jungle interior. Where the population centers stop, there is nothing but miles and miles of misty virgin rain-forest, inhabited by gorillas and lizards and thick with banana trees. All one has to do is walk to the edge of town, into where the bush begins, and there is no shortage of banana trees to choose from. The country is bursting with sweet, soft bananas.

So what happens to them? The ones that are not picked by chimpanzees and baboons turn yellow, then brown, then black, and then fall to the ground and fertilize the jungle floor. Before oil was discovered in Gabon, the country was self-sufficient in bananas. By 1981 it had become almost totally dependent on bananas imported from neighboring Cameroon. One could not ask for a more vivid image to associate with the Dutch disease than that of a vast jungle nation where there is no one available to pick bananas off the trees.

And it's not just the bananas. In the early 1980s, when Gabon was at the height of its oil production, and globally it seemed that cheap oil was a thing of the past, the country imported a staggering 96 percent of its food. Even eggs were flown in, as no one in this cash-flooded nation could be bothered to raise chickens. Today Gabon is dependent on imports for 60 percent of its food needs -- still an uncomfortably high figure in a country where the oil is beginning to run out.

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

McCain's peaceful stroll in Baghdad

Lately, I have had two pet peeves. The first is the group of so-called experts on certain regions of the world (these days, it's usually the Middle East) who have never been to that region nor even have a basic grasp of the language(s) spoken there. The airwaves and blogosphere are full of so-called experts on Islam and Arab society, many of whom couldn't order a coffee in Cairo or say a prayer in a mosque in Detroit. We would laugh if an "expert" on American affairs who'd never been to the states (or maybe had spent 3 days in New York) and didn't speak any English were being broadcast by Al Jazeera. Why do we accept the same from armchair Islamic "experts" on our own airwaves?

The second is people who make a show of going somewhere, but have no intention of actually letting the trip or the people they've met on that trip influence their opinion on the place. More succinctly, I hate people who travel for rhetorical flair instead of actual experience. Most American congressmen are such people. And John McCain has become one of the most egregious offenders. He took a trip to a Baghdadi souk three minutes outside of the green zone while he was covered by snipers and "100 American soldiers, with three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships overhead." All this so that he could wax optimistic on the new safety plan, with Mike Pence (R-IL), who likened the market to a "a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime":

"They asked about our conditions, and we told them the situation was bad," said Aboud Sharif Kadhoury, 63, who peddles prayer rugs at a sidewalk stand. He said he sold a small prayer rug worth less than $1 to a member of the Congressional delegation. (The official paid $20 and told Mr. Kadhoury to keep the change, the vendor said.)

Mr. Kadhoury said he lost more than $2,000 worth of merchandise in the triple bombing in February. "I was hit in the head and back with shrapnel," he recalled.

Ali Youssef, 39, who sells glassware from a sidewalk stand down the block from Mr. Kadhoury, recalled: "Everybody complained to them. We told them we were harmed."

He and other merchants used to keep their shops open until dusk, but with the dropoff in customers as a result of the attacks, and a nightly curfew, most shop owners close their businesses in the early afternoon.

"This area here is very dangerous," continued Mr. Youssef, who lost his shop in the February attack. "They cannot secure it."

But those conversations were not reflected in the congressmen's comments at the news conference on Sunday.

Instead, the politicians spoke of strolling through the marketplace, haggling with merchants and drinking tea. "The most deeply moving thing for me was to mix and mingle unfettered," Mr. Pence said.

Mr. McCain was asked about a comment he made on a radio program in which he said that he could walk freely through certain areas of Baghdad.

"I just came from one," he replied sharply. "Things are better and there are encouraging signs."

He added, "Never have I been able to go out into the city as I was today."

Told about Mr. McCain's assessment of the market, Abu Samer, a kitchenware and clothing wholesaler, scoffed: "He is just using this visit for publicity. He is just using it for himself. They’ll just take a photo of him at our market and they will just show it in the United States. He will win in America and we will have nothing."

So let's get this straight: the market is essentially "paralyzed" so a group of American lawmakers can come in, pay twenty times the actual price of a prayer mat, get photographed "on the ground," not listen to the problems that actual Iraqis have, and then send back a rose-tinted view of a Baghdad where Americans and Iraqis can haggle over the price of merchandise, while peacefully sipping tea together. This really turns my stomach.

But in case you're not willing to take the Iraqis' word on the bad situation there, please feel free to ask the corpses of workers from that same market:

The latest massacre of Iraqi children came as 21 Shia market workers were ambushed, bound and shot dead north of the capital.

The victims came from the Baghdad market visited the previous day by John McCain, the US presidential candidate, who said that an American security plan in the capital was starting to show signs of progress.

Like an Indiana market in summertime indeed.

But it's not just Pence and MacCain. Apparently two-thirds of House Republicans have indulged in at least one political junket to Iraq:

According to the Pentagon, as of mid-March, 365 members of Congress had visited the country since May 2003, when Mr. Bush declared the end of major combat operations. But it is unclear just how illuminating the trips have been.

The duration and scope of Congressional visits are tightly controlled. Lawmakers from opposing parties often travel together, but draw opposite conclusions from the same trip on the war’s progress. And while lawmakers say they are deeply moved by their experiences, they almost always return with their previous convictions firmly reinforced.

...Members rarely spend more than a night in Iraq, often flying back to Kuwait or Jordan at the end of the day. The trips are heavy on meetings with American military and embassy officials, with almost no opportunities for unscripted encounters with regular Iraqis.

Of course those currently expounding how safe Iraq is wouldn't actually want to test their theory by sleeping there -- not even in the Green Zone.

This sort of behavior annoys me even more than those who lecture us on the cultures of a country without ever having been there. They go to a place in bad faith, pretending to listen to the concerns of the "natives," while in reality they're only reinforcing their preconceived notions. I used to wonder why such people even bothered to travel in the first place, but I've come to realize that I was being naïve, because such a trip is obviously for rhetorical flair, not for actually informing one's opinion.

So McCain tries to score some political points for the surge, and 21 Iraqi Shia get killed. Maybe the timing of their murder was a coincidence, not aimed at following up the American visit to the souk. Probably not. But in either case, their deaths show just how hollow McCain's and Pence's rhetoric in Iraq rings.

Thursday, April 26, 2007

Two kidnapped PSP supporters killed

There has been a lot of talk lately about the two PSP partisans kidnapped. The word in the Shouf is that they were kidnapped by Shi'a (Hezbollah or Amal, no one is saying) forces in retaliation for the killing of a Hezbollah supporter last January during the sectarian clashes at the Arab University.

I just heard from my Druze friends in the Shouf that the two were found dead. While one was 25, the other was only 12. Ya haram.


UPDATE: Al Jazeera is reporting that the kidnapping and killings seem to be clan-based rather than party-based.

Last night, some friends and I were giving another friend a ride home. The army was out in droves, and we got picked to pull over and have ourselves and the car searched. However, when one of the two soldiers saw that two of my friends were Druze from a neighboring village of his, he called off the search. He told his colleague that he didn't need to search us and asked my Druze friends if there was anything he could to for them.

We laugh about this sort of tribalism when it comes from the guy selling us a fridge in Nabah. But it's a little disconcerting when coming from an armed soldier at a checkpoint.

UPDATE:I wrote earlier that the young man and the kid were Druze, but they were actually Sunni, although their families were supporter's of Jumblatt's PSP.

Israeli soldiers using Palestinians as human shields

I was watching CNN International earlier with my roommate, and there was a segment on about Israeli soldiers using Palestinians as human shields during military raids in the West Bank. They showed footage of Israeli soldiers pushing a young Palestinian in front of them as they had their weapons out and stayed behind him in case there was a gunfight.

I made a comment that it's funny seeing this when the Israelis, and their supporters in the US, are constantly accusing Hezbollah of using human shields. Then my roommate looked at me and made this astute comment: "The difference is that if Hezbollah uses human shields, at least they use their own people."

This is one of the incidents the CNN segment reported on, but the video footage they showed was during a raid with brandished M16s, not forcing Palestinians to shield their vehicles from stone throwers.

China arming Sudan

Lee Feinstein has a piece in TPM's America Abroad outlining the relationship between China and Sudan. To answer a charge from comments that my evidence (also in comments) that China is still supplying Sudan with weapons was "google-y and anecdotal," here is what Feinstein has to say about Chinese arms in Sudan. (Incidentally, I'm not sure I even understand how coming across an article in the Sudan Times and a report from Amnesty International by using google is supposed to make those sources any less valid. Furthermore, I'm not sure how a report by Amnesty International is "anecdotal.")

China maintains a defense relationship with Sudan, despite the UN arms embargo that has been in place for Darfur since 2005. The Security Council imposed an embargo on all nongovernmental forces operating in Darfur in July 2004, and expanded it to include government forces as well in 2005. Sales to Khartoum are still permitted, although a UN panel, which visited Sudan in August 2005 to investigate violations of the embargo, recommended in April 2006 that the Security Council expand the embargo to the entire country.

Information about recent Chinese arms sales to Sudan is difficult to discern both because of China's secrecy and because of the inherent difficulty of tracking the flow of small arms, which are below most international reporting thresholds. The UN Panel of Experts reported spotting Chinese-made military trucks in the Port of Sudan that appeared similar to those used on Sudanese Army bases in Darfur. Non-governmental organizations have reported that small arms used by rebels, janjaweed, and government forces in Darfur are of Chinese origin. There are also reports that Khartoum supplied Chinese-made automatic grenade launchers to the United Front for Democratic Change, a Chadian rebel group that also operates out of bases in Darfur. Russia and France are also suppliers of arms and military equipment to Sudan. In the last six years, Russia reported to the United Nations deliveries of 33 attack helicopters to Khartoum, eight combat aircraft, and 30 armored combat. (Between 2001 and 2004, France exported over $1 million of mostly small arms, spare parts, and ammunition.)

Beijing defends its sales to Khartoum as legal, and says that it requires all of its buyers not to transfer arms to other parties, including guerilla groups, a claim which is difficult to confirm independently. Zhai Jun, China's Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs, said in March 2007, "With Sudan, we have cooperation in many aspects, including military cooperation. In this, we have nothing to hide."

In early April, China received Sudan's Joint Chief of Staff. The Chinese Minister of Defense told his Sudanese counterpart that China was "willing to further develop cooperation between the two militaries in every sphere."

Feinstein isn't offering up anything new or salacious in this short piece, but it's a decent outline of the economic, political and military relationship between Sudan and China.

For more on China and Sudan, see the tireless and laudable Eric Reeves.

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Zapped

My first post on the French elections has somehow disappeared. I don't know what happened to it, but it was about how I was worried about Le Pen making it to the second round and that I didn't think that Sarkozy was taking as many votes from the FN as people thought.

Since then, Le Pen only managed to get 11 percent of the vote, a welcome surprise. I don't think, however, that this is due to fewer people voting for him. I think, rather, that it's because there was an increase of almost 3.5 million people registered to vote, and voter turnout was something like 27 percent higher than it was in 2002. (I can't find the exact figure, but I remember it being around 60 percent in 2002, compared to 87 percent this time.)

So I think that people who vote Front National generally vote, whereas the young and the poor and communities "issus de l'immigration" who don't usually vote and aren't likely to vote for Le Pen probably made up a considerable proportion of newly registered voters and voters who voted this time but didn't in 2002.

Monday, April 23, 2007

China in Africa

Al Jazeera gives us a good example of how China may be doing more harm than good in Africa with its value-neutral investment in the continent:

China has agreed to give Zimbabwe $25m worth of farm equipment to help revive the country's ailing tobacco industry.

But Beijing wants something in return – large quantities of Zimbabwe's tobacco.

Jia Qinglin, a senior Chinese Communist party official, presented the equipment, including 424 tractors and 50 trucks, to Robert Mugabe, the country's president, on Saturday in a deal to replace equipment damaged when Mugabe's government seized white-owned farms to resettle landless blacks.

But China wants all the tractors to go to tobacco farmers and expects Zimbabwe to deliver 30 million kilograms by the end of the year, Haru Mutasa, Al Jazeera's correspondent, said in Harare.

While the West is trying to pressure Mugabe into lessening his brutal crackdown on the government's opposition parties, China is offering aid. And the only strings attached are financial ones: the equipment given by China has to be used for cash crops. This in a country experiencing widespread hunger and poverty.

So at the end of the day, Beijing is showing Mugabe that even if he flagrantly violates human rights and the pitiful charade that passes for democracy in Zimbabwe, the Chinese will be there to offer assistance. So long as the price is right, of course.

So are we really surprised that Beijing is financially and diplomatically underwriting Khartoum's genocide in Darfur?

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Ségo makes it to the second round, Le Pen flounders

It looks like the turnout for this election is 87 percent, which is the highest in the Fifth Republic.

According to France 2, Sarko is at 29 percent and Ségo at 25 percent and Bayrou at 19 percent. Le Pen, fortunately, only managed 11 or 12 percent, so it looks like it'll be Sarko v. Ségo in the second round.

What a relief that Le Pen didn't make it to the second round.

Now let's hope that Ségo can beat out Sarkozy...

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Another brilliant idea from Kuperman

Alan Kuperman, whose work I've already taken issue with in the past has a piece in USA Today explaining his strategy for defeating al-Qaida in Iraq:

Because no option can stabilize Iraq quickly, we should refocus on our greatest achievable objective: preventing al-Qaeda from establishing a haven. This danger arises because Iraq's moderate Sunnis have allied with their extremist Sunni rivals. Why? They're trying to fend off domination and ethnic cleansing by the majority Shiites, who control Iraq's government, army and militias. Indeed, the U.S. strategy of bolstering and training Iraq's Shiite-controlled army drives Sunni moderates into extremist hands. The only way to defeat al-Qaeda in Iraq is to switch our primary allegiance to Iraq's moderate Sunnis.

The prospect of this dramatic shift in U.S. strategy raises several questions, including most fundamentally: Can we identify the moderates? Fortunately, two ready pools are available. First are the Sunni tribes the United States has attempted to recruit with little success. Until now, our offers have been too feeble, but serious military aid could do the trick.

The second source of recruits is Saddam's secular Sunni-led party, which was antithetical to al-Qaeda. Admittedly, some former Baathists are attacking U.S. forces and coordinating with Sunni extremists because they view our presence as an obstacle to their return to power, but this could change quickly if we offered to support these former enemies.

The sooner our self-styled experts on the Middle East realize that the enemy of our enemy is not necessarily our friend, the better off we'll be. While the Iraqi Sunni groups may be at odds with al-Qaida, they are also, and moreso, at odds with the American occupation. In this case, the enemy of our enemy is also our enemy.

For an informed opinion about this situation, I reccommend reading Marc Lynch's blog, where he has been discussing the schism in the Sunni insurgency for a few weeks now. He also has a piece in The American Prospect that's really worth reading:

Americans, eager for good news from Iraq and seizing upon rising public Sunni opposition to al-Qaeda, risk missing its real significance. Recent coverage of Anbar province has focused upon the growing willingness of tribal leaders to cooperate with American forces against al-Qaeda. It is true that, from Ramadi to Kirkuk, local Sunni leaders have indeed called for an "awakening," even an "intifada against al-Qaeda," in response to resentment over its behavior. That's not so new -- reports of tribes turning against al-Qaeda have been a staple of reporting from Iraq for years.

Far more importantly, last week the Islamic Army of Iraq, one of the most influential of the insurgency factions, issued a scathing public denunciation of the Islamic State of Iraq, calling on Osama bin Laden to intervene with his misguided Iraqi representatives. Al-Qaeda has taken this challenge seriously enough that its emir, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, released a lengthy and somewhat conciliatory audiotape responding to their concerns. His statement suggests that al-Qaeda is far more worried about this challenge by the insurgency than it is about the much-heralded tribal "awakening."

...While Sunni disenchantment with al-Qaeda is all to the good, it has little to do with American strategy and, crucially, even less to do with giving up on the anti-American insurgency.

French elections


Thursday, April 12, 2007

Cheney (fille) on Syria

Dick Cheney's eldest daughter, Liz, has a piece in the Post today about why the US shouldn't talk to Syria. She makes a point of listing the anti-Syrian Lebanese who have been killed in the last few years.

It is time to face facts. Talking to the Syrians emboldens and rewards them at the expense of America and our allies in the Middle East. It hasn't and won't change their behavior. They are an outlaw regime and should be isolated. Members of Congress and State Department officials should stop visiting Damascus. Arab leaders should stop receiving Bashar al-Assad. The U.N. Security Council should adopt a Chapter VII resolution mandating the establishment of an international tribunal for the Hariri murder.

The Security Council should also hold Syria accountable for its ongoing violations of existing resolutions. The U.S. government should implement all remaining elements of the Syria Accountability Act and launch an aggressive effort to empower the Syrian opposition. European governments should demonstrate that they value justice over profit and impose financial and travel sanctions on Syria's leaders.

...Conducting diplomacy with the regime in Damascus while they kill Lebanese democrats is not only irresponsible, it is shameful.

While Syria has been blamed for many of the assassinations in Lebanon, it seems unfair for a former member of the State Department to blame Syria before the investigations are finished or a tribunal has been held. Furthermore, her care for the Lebanese people seems suspect, given the current administration's stalling last summer that bought Israel more time to continue its pummeling of Lebanon. (In case anyone thought that it wasn't on purpose, Bolton has told us that not only did the US do its best to prevent an earlier cease-fire, but that he was "damned proud of what we did.")

Furthermore, it seems silly that Liz Cheney's criticism be leveled at Pelosi, whereas she remains silent about Republican Congressmen who visited Damascus the day before.

Finally, while I'm not going to go either way on Syrian involvement in the killing of Hariri, Kassir, Hawi and Tueni, I will say that it is not at all clear who killed Pierre Gemayel, so her remarks that Syria did it are disingenuous, unless of course, she's keeping some secret evidence of Damascus's involvement from the rest of us.

It just so happens that shortly after Gemayel's assassination, I spoke to Antoine Richa, the late Gemayel's advisor. He told me that his party, the Kataeb, didn't know who killed Gemayel. He mentioned that most of the people assassinated lately had been anti-Syria, but if Gemayel's advisor, part of the Kataeb's rank and file isn't sure that Damascus did it, what makes Cheney so sure?

Finally, all that is beside the point. Even if Syria is responsible for all the recent political assassinations in Lebanon, that's one reason more to engage in diplomacy with Assad. Given that the prospects of regime change in Damascus are currently slim-to-none, doesn't it seem wiser to try to change Syrian behavior through diplomacy rather than ignoring the regime and thus continuing the status quo?

Robert Malley's recent piece in the LA Times makes a convincing case:

If, as Israeli and U.S. officials assert, the regime's priority is self-preservation, it is unlikely to sponsor militant groups, jeopardize its newfound status, destabilize the region or threaten nascent economic ties for the sake of ideological purity once an agreement has been reached. Israeli and U.S. demands will not be satisfied as preconditions to negotiations, but there is at the very least solid reason to believe that they would be satisfied as part of a final deal.

Even assuming that Washington and Jerusalem are right and that Syria is more interested in the process than in the outcome, what is the downside of testing the sincerity of its intentions? To the contrary, the mere sight of Israeli and Syrian officials sitting side by side would carry dividends, producing ripple effects in a region where popular opinion is moving away from acceptance of the Jewish state's right to exist, and putting Syrian allies that oppose a negotiated settlement in an awkward position. It has gone largely unnoticed, but Assad has been at pains to differentiate his position from that of his Iranian ally, emphasizing that Syria's goal is to live in peace with Israel, not to wipe it off the face of the Earth. That is a distinction worth exploiting, not ignoring.

Rigidly rebuffing Syria is a mistake fast on its way to becoming a missed opportunity. The U.S. says it wants to see real change from Damascus, and it takes pleasure in faulting visitors -- Pelosi only the latest among them -- for returning empty-handed. Syria's response is that it will continue to assist militant groups, maintain close ties to Iran and let the U.S. flounder in Iraq for as long as Washington maintains its hostile policy and blocks peace talks. It also could change all of the above should the U.S. change its stance. That's a message Pelosi can hear and one she can deliver, but not one she can do much about. Rather than engage in political theatrics, the president should listen.

I couldn't agree more. Usually, the online comment section on American newspapers is full of support for attacking Arab countries and rigid support for Israel. Strangely, the comment section for this piece is less than kind to Dick's daughter, calling into question her credentials for having filled the newly-created post of Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs. And true enough, a comparison of her bio and that of that of her boss, one might indeed be forgiven for wondering if her last name had anything to do with her appointment. But that would be nepotism, and we all know that the current administration is above that.

"Israel does not want peace"

Ha'aretz has an opinion piece by Gideon Levy in which he argues that "Israel does not want peace."

The moment of truth has arrived, and it has to be said: Israel does not want peace. The arsenal of excuses has run out, and the chorus of Israeli rejection already rings hollow. Until recently, it was still possible to accept the Israeli refrain that "there is no partner" for peace and that "the time isn't right" to deal with our enemies. Today, the new reality before our eyes leaves no room for doubt and the tired refrain that "Israel supports peace" has been left shattered.

It's hard to determine when the breaking point occurred. Was it the absolute dismissal of the Saudi initiative? The refusal to acknowledge the Syrian initiative? Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's annual Passover interviews? The revulsion at the statements made by Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, in Damascus, alleging that Israel was ready to renew peace talks with Syria?

Who would have believed it? A high-ranking U.S. official says Israel wants peace talks to resume and instantly her president "severely" denies the veracity of her words. Is Israel even hearing these voices? Are we digesting the significance of these voices for peace? Seven million apathetic Israeli citizens prove that we are not.

This is a familiar refrain in the Arab world. When asked whether he thinks Israel will sign a peace treaty with Syria or accept Riyadh's plan, the man on the street here usually says, "Of course not, Israel doesn't want peace."

It's been easy enough for the "West" to dismiss this as Arab conspiracy theory, while accepting the Israeli line that the Jewish state would love nothing more than peace with its neighbors, if only there were a real "partner for peace." With the recent Israeli rebuffing of Syrian and Saudi-led Arab League peace initiatives, it's becoming harder and harder to disagree with the idea that finally, when all's said and done, Israel isn't really interested in peaceful relations with its neighbors in the region.

Who says Wolfowitz doesn't love Arabs?

According to the Post, Wolfowitz ordered a big pay raise for his Libyan girlfriend:

Wolfowitz's tenure, contentious from the start because of his earlier role as an architect of U.S. policy in Iraq, has been marred in recent months by a series of controversies. World Bank staffers disclosed that a woman with whom Wolfowitz is romantically involved received big pay raises from the bank. Sensitive board minutes regarding China have been leaked to the press, and blistering criticism has been leveled at Wolfowitz on an internal electronic bulletin board.

...Wolfowitz sought to defray questions about the pay raises in a briefing with reporters yesterday and to focus attention on his priorities, which he has defined as dealing seriously with environmental problems, rooting out governmental corruption and fighting poverty, particularly in Africa.

Wolfowitz noted that a committee has been appointed to review the situation involving Shaha Riza, to whom he has been romantically linked. "I'm comfortable with that, and that's all I have to say on that," Wolfowitz said. "I don't think its fair to the rest of the agenda to take up this valuable time with that."

Riza was transferred to the State Department shortly after Wolfowitz took over the World Bank in 2005, in accordance with conflict-of-interest rules. She is still paid by the bank and she has received raises that increased her pay to $193,590 from $132,660 after she was moved to the State Department in 2005, according to the bank's employee association. A Wolfowitz spokesman, who has previously said that Wolfowitz played no role in the raises, would not comment yesterday. Riza has made no public comment.

Mapping the violence in Baghdad

Continuing with online maps, the BBC has an interactive map of Baghdad that lets you chart bombings and see how the sectarian makeup of the city has changed in the last year or so.

Baghdad pre-2006






Baghdad today

US claims Iran is aiding Sunni insurgency

The Times reports that the US is now explicitly claiming that Iran is supporting Sunni groups in Iraq:

Arms that American military officials say appear to have been manufactured in Iran as recently as last year have turned up in the past week in a Sunni-majority area, the chief spokesman for the American military command in Iraq said Wednesday in a news conference.

The spokesman, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, said that detainees in American custody had indicated that Iranian intelligence operatives had given support to Sunni insurgents and that surrogates for the Iranian intelligence service were training Shiite extremists in Iran. He gave no further description of the detainees and did not say why they would have that information.

"We have in fact found some cases recently where Iranian intelligence sources have provided to Sunni insurgent groups some support," said General Caldwell, who sat near a table crowded with weapons that he said the military contended were largely of Iranian manufacture.

The weapons were found in a mostly Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad, he said, a rare instance of the American military suggesting any link between Iran and the Sunni insurgency. It has recently suggested a link with Shiite militants in Iraq.

...Critics have cast doubt on the American military statements about those bombs, saying the evidence linking them to Iran was circumstantial and inferential.

...It is unclear from the military's comments on Wednesday whether it is possible to draw conclusions about how the weapons that the military contends are of Iranian origin might have made their way into a predominantly Sunni area or why Shiite Iran would arm Sunni militants.

There are several possibilities, military officials who were not authorized to speak publicly for attribution said privately. One is that they came through Syria, long a transit route for Iranian-made weapons being funneled to the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah. Another possibility is that arms dealers are selling to every side in the conflict.

The weapons on the table next to General Caldwell were found two days ago, the general said, after a resident of the predominantly Sunni Arab neighborhood called Jihad, in western Baghdad, informed the local Joint Security Station run by Iraqi and American soldiers that there were illegal arms in the area.

The soldiers found a black Mercedes sedan and on its back seat, in plain view, a rocket of a type commonly made in China but repainted and labeled and sold by Iran, said Maj. Marty Weber, a master ordnance technician who joined General Caldwell at the briefing. In the trunk were mortar rounds marked "made in 2006."

In a nearby house and buried in the yard, the soldiers found more mortar rounds, 1,000 to 2,000 rounds of bullets, five hand grenades and a couple of Bulgarian-made rocket-propelled grenades, Major Weber said.

Interestingly enough, the US is not claiming that Bulgaria and China are supporting the insurgents. Likewise, many of the weapons used by groups like Islamic Jihad and Hamas in Palestine are made in the US and sold to Israel. Does anyone accuse the American or Israeli governments of supporting Islamic Jihad? Of course not.

If the US is going to claim that Tehran (and not Iranian or Iraqi arms dealers) is arming the Sunni insurgency, then it's going to have to do better than this.

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Mapping genocide

Via The Guardian, Google and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have come together to form the online mapping project, Crisis in Darfur:

Crisis in Darfur enables more than 200 million Google Earth users worldwide to visualize and better understand the genocide currently unfolding in Darfur, Sudan. The Museum has assembled content—photographs, data, and eyewitness testimony—from a number of sources that are brought together for the first time in Google Earth.

Crisis in Darfur is the first project of the Museum’s Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative that will over time include information on potential genocides allowing citizens, governments, and institutions to access information on atrocities in their nascent stages and respond.

Something rotten

Here's another genocide-related event in the international community, which gives me the impression that something's rotten in, well, the Hague:

Serbia, the heir to Yugoslavia, obtained the tribunal's permission to keep parts of the archives out of the public eye. Citing national security, its lawyers blacked out many sensitive -- those who have seen them say incriminating -- pages. Judges and lawyers at the war crimes tribunal could see the censored material, but it was barred from the tribunal’s public records.

Now, lawyers and others who were involved in Serbia's bid for secrecy say that, at the time, Belgrade made its true objective clear: to keep the full military archives from the International Court of Justice, where Bosnia was suing Serbia for genocide. And they say Belgrade’s goal was achieved in February, when the international court, which is also in The Hague, declared Serbia not guilty of genocide, and absolved it from paying potentially enormous damages.

Lawyers interviewed in The Hague and Belgrade said that the outcome might well have been different had the International Court of Justice pressed for access to the full archives, and legal scholars and human rights groups said it was deeply troubling that the judges did not subpoena the documents directly from Serbia. At one point, the court rebuffed a Bosnian request that it demand the full documents, saying that ample evidence was available in tribunal records.

"It's a question that nags loudly," Diane Orentlicher, a law professor at American University in Washington, said recently in The Hague. "Why didn’t the court request the full documents? The fact that they were blacked out clearly implies these passages would have made a difference."

The ruling -- which was binding and final -- was in many ways meticulous, and acknowledged that the 15 judges had not seen the censored archives. But it did not say why the court did not order Serbia to provide the full documents.

The first-hand experience I've had at the UN and what I know of the tribunals in the Hague and Arusha have convinced me that it would be naïve to think that there are no deals being made in the smoke-filled hotel rooms.

This probably has something to do with Serbia's wishes to join the EU and the fact that a guilty verdict would probably ruin the country financially. But still, this seems unacceptable to me.

Shame, shame

I've seen first hand how politics (office and international) can override common sense or even doing the right thing in a large bureaucracy. I shouldn't be surprised by stories like this anymore, and I guess I'm not.

But still. Shame on Ankara, and shame on the UN for kowtowing:

The United Nations dismantled an exhibit on the Rwandan genocide and postponed its scheduled opening by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Monday after the Turkish mission objected to references to the Armenian genocide in Turkey at the time of World War I.

The panels of graphics, photos and statements had been installed in the visitors lobby on Thursday by the British-based Aegis Trust. The trust campaigns for the prevention of genocide and runs a center in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, memorializing the 500,000 victims of the massacres there 13 years ago.

Hours after the show was assembled, however, a Turkish diplomat spotted offending words in a section entitled "What is genocide?" and raised objections.

The passage said that "following World War I, during which one million Armenians were murdered in Turkey," Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer credited with coining the word genocide, "urged the League of Nations to recognize crimes of barbarity as international crimes."

James Smith, the chief executive of Aegis, said he was told by the United Nations on Saturday night that the sentence would have to be eliminated or the exhibition would be struck.

...Mr. Smith said he was "very disappointed because this was supposed to talk about the lessons drawn from Rwanda and point up that what is happening in Darfur is the cost of inaction."

Sunday, April 08, 2007

Chutzpah

I was hanging laundry to dry yesterday while the TV was on in the background. It just so happened that CNN was on, and there was a discussion of the treatment of the captured British servicemen and woman and whether or not it amounted to torture.

Just now I tried to find an online version of the story and a google search for "cnn british captives torture iran" came back with this question: "Did you mean: cnn british captives torture iraq"?

That pretty much sums up my thoughts on the question. Terry Jones agrees.

Saturday, April 07, 2007

Jerusalem Post creepiness

Maybe I'm just being paranoid here, but I find it kind of disconcerting and creepy that the Jerusalem Post's website has a whole section entitled "Iranian Threat." It's right up there with Real Estate, Headlines, Travel & Leisure, International, Arts and Culture and Sports.

Go see for yourself.

Totten's trip to "Upper Galilee"

It's difficult to know where to start when picking apart Michael Totten's most recent article on Hezbollah. A good place to start, however, is this sentence: "We ventured deeper into the south, into the steep rolling hills that make up the region known as Upper Galilee." Known by whom as Upper Galilee, one might ask. The south of Lebanon is called "Upper Galilee" mostly by those who also talk of Eretz Ysrael. It reminds me of how Iraq's former prime minister Abdel Karim Qasim used to use the Turkish title qaimaqam to designate the ruling Sheikh of Kuwait as "district governor" of "that part of the Iraqi province of Basra known as Kuwait." In any case, this naming gives us an idea of where Totten is coming from.

Even if he's physically lived in Beirut, ideologically, Totten is without a doubt coming from the United States, via Israel. He and an American who writes for a magazine in Israel were shown around the south by a certain Said and Henry from an anti-Hezbollah organization made up mostly of Lebanese expatriates, whom Totten calls "professional enemies of Hizbullah." One of them tells Totten, "Since 1975 we have been fighting for the free world. ... We are on the front lines."

During his trip, he doesn't talk to any UNIFIL soldiers, presumably because he didn't bother to get UN permission to do so, and the only Lebanese civilians whom he talks to are a couple of people from the Christian village of Ein Ebel who provide Totten with the quotes he needs to "verify" the talking points that he'd already decided on -- Hezbollah uses civilians as "human shields":

He then said that 18 days after the start of the war a large group of civilians decided it was time to leave Ein Ebel and flee to the north. They were no longer willing to stay while Israel fired back at Hizbullah's rocket launchers. It was too dangerous, and Hizbullah insisted on staying and endangering those who lived there.

So they fled the area in a convoy of civilian vehicles. It was safer, they figured, to travel in a group than alone.

On their way out of the village, Hizbullah fighters stood on the side of the road and opened fire with machine guns on the fleeing civilians.

I was shocked, and I asked Alan to confirm this. Was it really true? Hizbullah opened fire on Lebanese civilians with machine guns? Alan confirmed this was true.

"Why?" I had an idea, but I wanted a local person to say it.

Because, Alan said, Hizbullah wanted to use the civilians of Ein Ebel as "human shields." I did not use the phrase "human shields." These were Alan's own words.

So according to Totten, Hezbollah opened fire on Lebanese civilians, because they were Christians, and Hezbollah wanted to use them as human shields. You see, he already knew what he wanted to write in the Jerusalem Post, but he "wanted a local person to say it."

If this were true, then Totten would have uncovered a huge story. Imagine the headlines in L'Orient le Jour! Imagine Michael Young's fiery indignation of Hezbollah's attack on helpless civilians fleeing the war last summer.

Color me skeptical. For some reason, I can't imagine that the same party that gave up defeated SLA militia members (who had been fighting with Israel during the latter's occupation of the south) to the government in Beirut for trial instead of dealing with them themselves would open fire on a convoy of Lebanese civilians. And I believe even less that no one would have heard about it until the intrepid American gumshoe Michael Totten uncovered the scoop during his travels in "Upper Galilee." Give me a break.

Earlier in his trip, he decided against talking to people in Shi'a areas. His escort did not "recommend" it, so Totten doesn't force the issue. After all, what good would talking to the Shi'a in the south be (or Hezbollah, or Amal or the UN for that matter), when you can be given the grand tour by "professional enemies of Hizbullah"?

Totten is the embodiment of a partisan hack who travels for rhetorical flair. His pieces usually have all the nuance of an IDF press release, and it's no wonder that the Jerusalem Post publishes his obtuse pap. To borrow a phrase from a friend of mine, Michael Totten doesn't know Shi'ite from shinola.


UPDATE: According to Totten's buddy Noah over at Azure: Ideas for the Jewish Nation, the two Lebanese guides who took them on a tour of the south were "Lebanese Christians, veterans of the Lebanese Forces army (sic)."

For those who aren't familiar with Lebanese politics, the Lebanese Forces are a Christian umbrella militia force cum political party that included the Phalange militia, which has its roots in a visit Pierre Gemayal took to Nazi Germany for the Olympic games in Berlin. The Lebanese Forces are now run by Samir Geagea, who was released from prison after serving 10 years for war crimes including political assassinations. According to Pollak, Totten's buddies from the Lebanese Forces had this to say (with a laugh) about Shi'a martyrdom: "The best way is to change them into real victims. This way they won’t be liars."

So Totten went on his trip with two (ex?) militia members and an American who enjoys feting the Lebanon that he would like to see come out on top:

...the Lebanon of the Christians, the moderate Sunnis, and the Druze, the Lebanon that earned Beirut the moniker of the Paris of the Middle East. This Lebanon looks West for inspiration and support, not East, and sustains a loathing for Hezbollah (and the Palestinians) that rivals Israel's.

So hats off to Micheal Totten, the self-styled "independent journalist" who gives us the real scoop in the Middle East -- as opposed to the obviously biased reporting done by the mainstream media. If you enjoy his evenhanded traipsing around in "Upper Galilee" with Christian militiamen, you should probably go to his site and donate some money via Paypal so he can keep fighting the good fight.

Thursday, April 05, 2007

Prisoner swap?

Over the last few days, I've been wondering about a possible prisoner swap between the Iranians and the Americans, but this hasn't come up that much in the press, and all governments involved (Iranian, British and American) have insisted that there would be no "quid pro quo." This entry from Harper's, however, seems to suggest otherwise:

Yesterday I spoke with a British diplomat who has some peripheral involvement in the current Persian Gulf crisis and asked a fairly obvious question: What were the prospects for a resolution of the current dilemma through a prisoner exchange -- namely the 15 British sailors and marines seized by Tehran for the six Iranians held by U.S. forces in Iraq? The question drew a broad smile and this comment: "If everything develops as I hope it will, then about a week from today people may very well be speculating that this is what has happened. They might very well think that. Of course, government representatives would be at pains to convince them that there is no relationship between the releases, because it is the position of each of the governments involved that there can be no quid pro quo when it comes to hostages." That's about as close as a wiley diplomat would come to saying “yes.” Shortly after that discussion, I noticed that one of the captured Iranians was released in Baghdad, and the AP reported that an Iranian diplomat was permitted to see the five Iranians held in Arbil. Both sides were careful to say that none of this had anything whatsoever to do with the case of the detained British service personnel.

The British soldiers have been released now. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the Iranians being held by American forces released in the next week or two.

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Untapped: Africa's oil

Slate has an interesting beginning to a 4-part piece on Africa's oil, excerpted from John Ghazvinian's new book, Untapped: The Scramble for Africa's Oil. Today's segment explains why you're hard pressed to buy a banana in Gabon:

I soon learned that it is extremely difficult to buy a banana in Gabon. During a week and a half in the country, I feasted on the most delicately prepared beef bourguignon and rack of lamb, always served with haricots verts or gratinée potatoes. But never did I manage to find a bunch of bananas for sale.

This is not to say there are no bananas in Gabon. Quite the contrary—there are literally millions. About half the country's tiny population lives in Libreville, while most of the rest reside in three or four towns that dot the jungle interior. Where the population centers stop, there is nothing but miles and miles of misty virgin rain-forest, inhabited by gorillas and lizards and thick with banana trees. All one has to do is walk to the edge of town, into where the bush begins, and there is no shortage of banana trees to choose from. The country is bursting with sweet, soft bananas.

So what happens to them? The ones that are not picked by chimpanzees and baboons turn yellow, then brown, then black, and then fall to the ground and fertilize the jungle floor. Before oil was discovered in Gabon, the country was self-sufficient in bananas. By 1981 it had become almost totally dependent on bananas imported from neighboring Cameroon. One could not ask for a more vivid image to associate with the Dutch disease than that of a vast jungle nation where there is no one available to pick bananas off the trees.

And it's not just the bananas. In the early 1980s, when Gabon was at the height of its oil production, and globally it seemed that cheap oil was a thing of the past, the country imported a staggering 96 percent of its food. Even eggs were flown in, as no one in this cash-flooded nation could be bothered to raise chickens. Today Gabon is dependent on imports for 60 percent of its food needs -- still an uncomfortably high figure in a country where the oil is beginning to run out.

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

McCain's peaceful stroll in Baghdad

Lately, I have had two pet peeves. The first is the group of so-called experts on certain regions of the world (these days, it's usually the Middle East) who have never been to that region nor even have a basic grasp of the language(s) spoken there. The airwaves and blogosphere are full of so-called experts on Islam and Arab society, many of whom couldn't order a coffee in Cairo or say a prayer in a mosque in Detroit. We would laugh if an "expert" on American affairs who'd never been to the states (or maybe had spent 3 days in New York) and didn't speak any English were being broadcast by Al Jazeera. Why do we accept the same from armchair Islamic "experts" on our own airwaves?

The second is people who make a show of going somewhere, but have no intention of actually letting the trip or the people they've met on that trip influence their opinion on the place. More succinctly, I hate people who travel for rhetorical flair instead of actual experience. Most American congressmen are such people. And John McCain has become one of the most egregious offenders. He took a trip to a Baghdadi souk three minutes outside of the green zone while he was covered by snipers and "100 American soldiers, with three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships overhead." All this so that he could wax optimistic on the new safety plan, with Mike Pence (R-IL), who likened the market to a "a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime":

"They asked about our conditions, and we told them the situation was bad," said Aboud Sharif Kadhoury, 63, who peddles prayer rugs at a sidewalk stand. He said he sold a small prayer rug worth less than $1 to a member of the Congressional delegation. (The official paid $20 and told Mr. Kadhoury to keep the change, the vendor said.)

Mr. Kadhoury said he lost more than $2,000 worth of merchandise in the triple bombing in February. "I was hit in the head and back with shrapnel," he recalled.

Ali Youssef, 39, who sells glassware from a sidewalk stand down the block from Mr. Kadhoury, recalled: "Everybody complained to them. We told them we were harmed."

He and other merchants used to keep their shops open until dusk, but with the dropoff in customers as a result of the attacks, and a nightly curfew, most shop owners close their businesses in the early afternoon.

"This area here is very dangerous," continued Mr. Youssef, who lost his shop in the February attack. "They cannot secure it."

But those conversations were not reflected in the congressmen's comments at the news conference on Sunday.

Instead, the politicians spoke of strolling through the marketplace, haggling with merchants and drinking tea. "The most deeply moving thing for me was to mix and mingle unfettered," Mr. Pence said.

Mr. McCain was asked about a comment he made on a radio program in which he said that he could walk freely through certain areas of Baghdad.

"I just came from one," he replied sharply. "Things are better and there are encouraging signs."

He added, "Never have I been able to go out into the city as I was today."

Told about Mr. McCain's assessment of the market, Abu Samer, a kitchenware and clothing wholesaler, scoffed: "He is just using this visit for publicity. He is just using it for himself. They’ll just take a photo of him at our market and they will just show it in the United States. He will win in America and we will have nothing."

So let's get this straight: the market is essentially "paralyzed" so a group of American lawmakers can come in, pay twenty times the actual price of a prayer mat, get photographed "on the ground," not listen to the problems that actual Iraqis have, and then send back a rose-tinted view of a Baghdad where Americans and Iraqis can haggle over the price of merchandise, while peacefully sipping tea together. This really turns my stomach.

But in case you're not willing to take the Iraqis' word on the bad situation there, please feel free to ask the corpses of workers from that same market:

The latest massacre of Iraqi children came as 21 Shia market workers were ambushed, bound and shot dead north of the capital.

The victims came from the Baghdad market visited the previous day by John McCain, the US presidential candidate, who said that an American security plan in the capital was starting to show signs of progress.

Like an Indiana market in summertime indeed.

But it's not just Pence and MacCain. Apparently two-thirds of House Republicans have indulged in at least one political junket to Iraq:

According to the Pentagon, as of mid-March, 365 members of Congress had visited the country since May 2003, when Mr. Bush declared the end of major combat operations. But it is unclear just how illuminating the trips have been.

The duration and scope of Congressional visits are tightly controlled. Lawmakers from opposing parties often travel together, but draw opposite conclusions from the same trip on the war’s progress. And while lawmakers say they are deeply moved by their experiences, they almost always return with their previous convictions firmly reinforced.

...Members rarely spend more than a night in Iraq, often flying back to Kuwait or Jordan at the end of the day. The trips are heavy on meetings with American military and embassy officials, with almost no opportunities for unscripted encounters with regular Iraqis.

Of course those currently expounding how safe Iraq is wouldn't actually want to test their theory by sleeping there -- not even in the Green Zone.

This sort of behavior annoys me even more than those who lecture us on the cultures of a country without ever having been there. They go to a place in bad faith, pretending to listen to the concerns of the "natives," while in reality they're only reinforcing their preconceived notions. I used to wonder why such people even bothered to travel in the first place, but I've come to realize that I was being naïve, because such a trip is obviously for rhetorical flair, not for actually informing one's opinion.

So McCain tries to score some political points for the surge, and 21 Iraqi Shia get killed. Maybe the timing of their murder was a coincidence, not aimed at following up the American visit to the souk. Probably not. But in either case, their deaths show just how hollow McCain's and Pence's rhetoric in Iraq rings.