the human province

Here are a few interesting links that I've come across in the last few days:

A story from ABC about Chinese Muslims wrongly imprisoned in Guantanamo and then finally released after 4.5 years. They couldn't be sent to China since the government there persecutes Uighurs, and despite being found innocent of any charges (NLEC, or No Longer Enemy Combattant, in Guantanamo Bay terminology - Mr Kafka could not have made this up if he had tried), being put away by the Americans for 4.5 years is enough to garner a bad reputation. So apparently, no country would take them, the US included, with the single and solitary exception of Albania:

We are very pleased that the Albanian government and the Albanian people opened their hearts and welcomed us. Despite the fact that all the strong, powerful, democratic countries are able and capable of accepting us, they did not do that. We are having some problems ... there are no Uighurs in Albania, and we don't speak the Albanian language. ...

Were hoping that the United States government would recognize the mistake that it has done and accept, allow us to enter the United States. U.S. government captured us, U.S. government incarcerated us, locked us up in prison, and U.S. government said that we were not a threat and should be released.

Uighur-Americans came forward, made an offer to the United States government to accept us into Uighur-American society and community. They even went into the courts and contacted the lawyers and wrote a letter to the U.S. government officials asking them to consider releasing us into the United States. Unfortunately, it did not happen, a rather disappointing decision.

Otherwise, the Post ran a really interesting first person piece about Iraq, the Republic of Fear, which makes one fearful that Baghdad is slowly but surely turning into Beirut, circa 1980:

Today, the Americans are just one more militia lost in the anarchy. They, too, are killing Iraqis. ...

Sectarian and ethnic cleansing has since continued apace, as mixed neighborhoods are "purified." In Amriya, dead bodies are being found on the main street at a rate of three or five or seven a day. People are afraid to approach the bodies, or call for an ambulance or the police, for fear that they, too, will be found dead the following day. In Abu Ghraib, Dora, Amriya and other once-diverse neighborhoods, Shiites are being forced to leave. In Maalif and Shaab, Sunnis are being targeted.

The world wonders if Iraq is on the brink of civil war, while Iraqis fear calling it one, knowing the fate such a description would portend. In truth, the civil war started long before Samarra and long before the first uprisings. It started when U.S. troops arrived in Baghdad. It began when Sunnis discovered what they had lost, and Shiites learned what they had gained. And the worst is yet to come.

This made me remember reading a piece in Harper's that said that maybe the best thing for Iraq would be for the US to withdraw and let them have their full-fledged civil war. (It was by Edward Luttwak and was adapted from a piece in Foreign Policy, which can be found here) The version in Harper's ends like this:

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

It's hard for me to know what to make of this idea. I'm not convinced that an all-out civil war would result in anything but a division of Iraq, or even worse, a regional war that would involve Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and probably Turkey as well. The latter is obviously a horrible idea, but I haven't decided how I feel about the former.

Finally, the atrocities in Haditha make me think that maybe Luttuk and Rosen are right and the US should just get out as soon as possible.

I can't get over this. I know that similar things happened in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and I know that we're talking about kids who have been put in an extremely dangerous and stressful situation, and that sometimes people just crack. But I just don't understand how someone can shoot a one-legged man in a wheelchair nine times. Or how someone can shoot a 1-year old baby. Say that again: a 1-year old baby. I just don't understand.

At some point on Nov. 19, Marines in an armored convoy arrived at Haditha's hospital. They placed the bodies of the victims in the garden of the hospital and left without explanation, said Mohammed al-Hadithi, one of the hospital officials who helped carry the bodies inside. By some accounts, some of the corpses were burnt.

The remains of the 24 lie today in a cemetery called Martyrs' Graveyard. Stray dogs scrounge in the deserted homes. "Democracy assassinated the family that was here," graffiti on one of the houses declared.

I just came across a piece by the New Republic's Lawrence Kaplan in the Los Angeles Times entitled, If Iraq was wrong, is Darfur right?

The New Republic has recently come out with an issue on Darfur (only some of which is available to non-subscribers), and they come out as a whole for American intervention in Darfur. Kaplan's piece, however, brings up the question of Iraq and asks why it is all right to intervene in Darfur but not in Iraq:

As their criticism of the particulars of the Iraq war has hardened into a broader indictment of U.S. foreign policy, the mostly progressive voices calling for action in Darfur have become caught in a bind of their own devising. Even as they demand intervention in Sudan, they excoriate Washington for employing U.S. military power without due respect to the opinion of the international community and against nations that pose no imminent threat to our own -- which is to say, precisely the terms under which U.S. power would have to be employed in the name of saving Darfur.

He then goes on to argue that neither the African Union nor the UN will intervene or is capable of intervening, leaving the US as the only capable, if not willing, power equipped to intervene.

To my mind, the main reason why I am for intervention in Darfur but was against it in Iraq can be summed up in a single word: genocide. It's happening in Darfur but wasn't happening in Iraq. Now had the Anfal campaign of the late 1980s been continuing, I would have been for intervention in Iraq. This is not to say that genocide should be the threshold for international intervention, but it would at least be a good start. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) responds similarly to Kaplan's jab against him:

Once President Bush and former Secretary of State Colin Powell used the word "genocide" to describe the carnage in Darfur, the United States and every other civilized nation had a moral imperative to act. Those who find it painful to explain the deception and misinformation preceding our invasion of Iraq should not hide behind the victims in Darfur.

As for whether or not the AU or UN could or would stop the genocide, the AU is already there but lacks a proper and muscular mandate that would allow their forces to protect civilians. As it is, they can only protect themselves. Likewise, when and if a UN force intervenes, it would be important for them to have a good mandate and be properly funded, because we know what happens to underfunded blue helmets without a real mandate. As it stands, there are 7,000 AU troops already in Darfur, which could be folded into a UN force; France has at least 1,000 troops in Chad already; and if the UK could be convinced to provide the 5,000 troops that they offered in 2004, then that would make a force of 13,000. Other nations like South Africa and Ghana could also donate more troops, and the US could help shoulder the financial and logistics costs of such an intervention.

While writing this, I've come across an interesting (and much more detailed) plan by the International Crisis Group To Save Darfur, which is similar to my idea:

Crisis Group has long contended that because AMIS has reached the outer limits of its competence, and a UN mission authorised today would not be fully ready to take over from it for some six months, a distinct and separate multinational force should be sent to Darfur to bridge that gap and help stabilise the immediate situation. We have argued, and continue to believe, that NATO would be best from a practical military point of view. Unfortunately, political opposition to this in Khartoum, within the AU and even perhaps within the Atlantic Alliance itself, means it is not achievable at this time.

What we now propose, therefore, is a compromise driven by the urgent need for a more robust force in Darfur. A militarily capable UN member state -- France seems most promising since it already has troops and aircraft in the area -- should offer to the Security Council to go now to Darfur, wearing blue helmets, as the lead nation in the first phase of the incoming UN mission. It could be joined from the outset by forces from one or two other militarily capable UN members (and would probably need to be if the desirable target of around 5,000 personnel for this force is to be achieved). This stabilisation force would be a self-contained, separately commanded UN mission with identified functional or geographic divisions of responsibility that would work beside AMIS and through a liaison unit at its headquarters until arrangements were in place for a 1 October transition to the full UN mission. That full mission would need to be recruited from the best AMIS elements as well as a wider circle of Asian and other member states -- no easy task at a time when several large UN peacekeeping missions in Africa and elsewhere have exhausted the capabilities of many contribution candidates.

The U.S. and other NATO states should respond generously and quickly to requests from it or AMIS to provide logistical help as well as regular access to satellite imagery, air mobility and close air support, especially to deter or react to egregious movements of men or heavy weapons in the border area.

They finish by coming up with a list of recommendations for each of the major parties involved (with the exception of the belligerent parties):

RECOMMENDATIONS

To the African Union:

1. Request the immediate deployment of a UN-mandated stabilisation force to help bolster the AMIS troops and focus on the Chad-Sudan border and the Tawila-Graida corridor.

2. Seek quick negotiation of a single, enhanced ceasefire document to remove the ambiguities of the existing overlapping agreements.

3. Begin immediately to map the location of forces in Darfur so as to manage and enforce the ceasefire better.

4. Begin immediately identifying, defining and profiling the government-allied militias.

5. Improve the reporting mechanisms and procedures for monitoring ceasefire violations and urgently revive and upgrade the compliance and sanctions mechanisms of the ceasefire.

6. Negotiate a series of humanitarian ground rules, in collaboration with the UN, to help hold the parties accountable for the protection of humanitarian operations in their respective areas.

To the United Nations Security Council:

7. Authorise a two-phase intervention in Darfur under Chapter Seven of the Charter, with the following elements:

(a) for the first phase, to be accomplished within a month, a lead nation would serve as the advance element of the full UN mission by sending the bulk of an initial 5,000 troops to Darfur, with three main stabilisation tasks:

i. interdiction of military activities across the Chad-Darfur border;

ii. protection of civilians in Darfur, primarily in the Tawilla-Graida corridor; and

iii. rapid-reaction support of AMIS forces until the transition to a full-fledged UN peace support operation in October 2006.

(b) for the second phase, immediate planning for a peace support operation of some 15,000 troops -- none of whom should be diverted from the mission of the existing UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) -- with a mandate emphasising civilian protection, ceasefire enforcement and monitoring of the Chad-Sudan border, to take over from AMIS as of 1 October 2006.

8. Strengthen the existing sanctions regime by implementing the recommendations in the 30 January 2006 report of the Panel of Experts.

9. Authorise the Secretariat's peacekeeping department (DPKO) to begin planning on an urgent basis and together with the AU both phases of this operation, with priority tasks to include:

(a) identifying areas for early cooperation in Darfur, such as immediate deployment of UN experts to help support the establishment of a functioning ceasefire commission secretariat and the deployment of human rights monitors and translators, including women, to help improve the reporting capacity of AMIS; and

(b) identifying the lead nation to deploy in the initial phase to support AMIS by performing the tasks set out in recommendation 7(a) above and serve as the advance element of the full UN mission.

To Donor Governments:

10. Convene an early pledging conference to ensure that AMIS is fully funded until the UN mission can take over in October 2006.

To the U.S., the EU and its member states and others with a strong interest in regional peace and stability:

11. Undertake major diplomatic efforts to:

(a) persuade Sudan to accept and the AU to confirm transition of AMIS into a strong UN peacekeeping mission as of 1 October 2006 and request in the interim dispatch of an advance force of some 5,000 blue-helmets to assist AMIS by performing essential stabilisation tasks;

(b) persuade the Security Council to authorise a mission of some 15,000, including the strongest AMIS elements and with a strong Chapter VII mandate focused on civilian protection; and

(c) identify the lead nation to contribute the bulk of the advance element to assist AMIS and perform essential stabilisation tasks immediately upon Security Council authorisation, and be prepared to help with all necessary material and logistical support.

12. Concurrently with efforts to strengthen international forces on the ground, pursue the other elements of a coordinated three-part strategy to resolve the Darfur conflict by:

(a) reinforcing AU efforts to negotiate an enhanced ceasefire and a political settlement at Abuja, including by naming special envoys; and

(b) seeking accountability and an end to impunity by enforcing the Security Council's sanction regime and supporting human rights monitoring mechanisms and the work of the ICC.

An article in the Post reports today that Iranian President Ahmadinejad sent a letter to President Bush in order to propose "new solutions for getting out of international problems and the current fragile situation in the world." It mentions the quote put forth by the Times that Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be "wiped off the map." Since this comment was reported on, it has been used as a reason why Iran should not have nuclear weapons. I've been somewhat skeptical about the translation, and as it turns out, there is some disagreement about what was actually said. This disagreement has pitted Christopher Hitchens against Juan Cole, the latter being the only one of the two who actually speaks Farsi. A good summary of the online fight can be found here.

The actual sentence in question seems to be this: "een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad." I don't speak Farsi, but several of my colleagues are Iranian, and I've sent them the text to see what they think about it. The only word I can recognize is qods which is Farsi for al Quds, which is Jerusalem in English. Cole's translation is "the Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem must [vanish from] from the page of time." As it turns out, the Israeli group Memri offers a translation that is very similar to Cole's ("eliminated from the pages of history").

As it turns out, after the comments, the Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki denied the remarks:

Mottaki also denied during a press conference in Brussels that Tehran wanted to see Israel "wiped off the map."

"Nobody can remove a country from the map. This is a misunderstanding in Europe of what our president mentioned," he said. "How is it possible to remove a country from the map? He is talking about the regime. We do not recognize legally this regime."

Another denial came on CNN's Late Edition from Iran's ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Ali Asghar Soltanieh:

SOLTANIEH: The supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran has announced, more than two years, and few cases, the Western media have reflected to public of the world, that if the divine religions -- followers of the divine religions, Jews, Christians and Muslims, in that area follow a referendum, democratic referendum, and are one (ph) with homeless Palestinians, Iranian government and Iranian people would respect their decision.

Therefore, these are fabricated news that they are threatening and using this as an excuse for the military aggression or the aggressive policy. [...]

BLITZER: I have to wrap this up, but I want to get your response to this issue of Israel because it's become such a prominent issue in this whole discussion over nuclear plans that Iran may or may not have. This is what the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said on October 26 at that World Without Zionism conference.

He said, "Israel must be wiped off the map of the world, and god willing, with the force of god behind it, we shall soon experience a world without the United States and Zionists."

You understand why people in the West, especially here in the United States, are so concerned about your program, your nuclear program, given those kinds of direct threats against Israel, which happens to be a strong ally of the United States.

SOLTANIEH: I want to very briefly remind you that the policy of Islamic Republic of Iran and according to spirit and letter of our constitution is against any sort of school of thought or regime such as apartheid, Zionism, racism, and this is a matter of principle.

Therefore, what you are talking about as apartheid was disappeared and it could not be accepted by civilized world, this Zionism and aggression of racism is also condemned. [...]

BLITZER: Does your support for the removal of Zionism mean you want to see Israel destroyed?

SOLTANIEH: I have already explained to you and reflected to you the policy echoed by our supreme leader.

It means that if in that region, the divine religion followers of the Jews, Christians and Muslims, that all three are very respectful -- and we have Jews in Iran, which are peacefully living and they are represented in our parliament, they are fully respected -- if they come with the Palestinians, homeless Palestinians, to come and through following the democratic process will decide on a government and live in peace as they were living a thousand years of coexistence of these divine religions, Iran will support because we are looking for and we support peaceful settlement of the whole issue and peaceful coexistence of these divine religions in the Middle East. Let's hope for the peace.

BLITZER: But should there be a state of Israel?

SOLTANIEH: I think I've already answered to you. If Israel is a synonym and will give the indication of Zionism mentality, no.

But if you are going to conclude that we have said the people there have to be removed or we they have to be massacred or so, this is fabricated, unfortunate selective approach to what the mentality and policy of Islamic Republic of Iran is. I have to correct, and I did so.

So it seems that the statements by Ahmadinejad, or at the very least official Iranian policy, is much more nuanced than the Western media would have us believe. Furthermore, it is important to remember that Ahmadinejad does not control Iranian foreign policy. In an interesting article in the New York Review about Iran and the bomb, Christopher de Bellaigue has this to say:

Iran's enmity toward Israel is more nuanced than Ahmadinejad's statements suggest. The President's declarations that Israel should be "wiped off the map," and that the Holocaust is a "myth," understandably aroused fears that Iran might be considering an attack on Israel. But Iran's senior civilian and military officials have insisted that Iran will strike Israel only if Israel strikes first. More significantly, the President and supreme leader have both reiterated Iran's longstanding demand for a referendum on the status of Israel that would involve all Palestinian refugees. This official position would not seem to be consistent with an ambition to destroy Israel by force, least of all by using nuclear arms, which would endanger the very Palestinians whom the Iranians claim to be protecting. Several senior Iranian officials, including Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president who heads a powerful arbitration council in Tehran, have not disguised their irritation with the President's comments. But Ahmadinejad has benefited from the furor. By raising his prestige among hard-line Islamists around the world, the President has made it harder for his domestic opponents, who include Rafsanjani, to undermine him.

I will post the English translation later this week, once my Iranian colleagues have had the chance to get back to me.

Tony Judt weighs in on the Israel lobby in today's Times. He reminds us that criticizing Israel is not synonymous with being an anti-semite and that there is a debate to be had on the topic that Americans seem afraid of.

The damage that is done by America's fear of anti-Semitism when discussing Israel is threefold. It is bad for Jews: anti-Semitism is real enough (I know something about it, growing up Jewish in 1950's Britain), but for just that reason it should not be confused with political criticisms of Israel or its American supporters. It is bad for Israel: by guaranteeing it unconditional support, Americans encourage Israel to act heedless of consequences. The Israeli journalist Tom Segev described the Mearsheimer-Walt essay as "arrogant" but also acknowledged ruefully: "They are right. Had the United States saved Israel from itself, life today would be better ...the Israel Lobby in the United States harms Israel's true interests."

BUT above all, self-censorship is bad for the United States itself. Americans are denying themselves participation in a fast-moving international conversation. Daniel Levy (a former Israeli peace negotiator) wrote in Haaretz that the Mearsheimer-Walt essay should be a wake-up call, a reminder of the damage the Israel lobby is doing to both nations. But I would go further. I think this essay, by two "realist" political scientists with no interest whatsoever in the Palestinians, is a straw in the wind.

...the terms of strategic debate are shifting. East Asia grows daily in importance. Meanwhile our clumsy failure to re-cast the Middle East ? and its enduring implications for our standing there ? has come into sharp focus. American influence in that part of the world now rests almost exclusively on our power to make war: which means in the end that it is no influence at all. Above all, perhaps, the Holocaust is passing beyond living memory. In the eyes of a watching world, the fact that an Israeli soldier's great-grandmother died in Treblinka will not excuse his own misbehavior.

Thus it will not be self-evident to future generations of Americans why the imperial might and international reputation of the United States are so closely aligned with one small, controversial Mediterranean client state. It is already not at all self-evident to Europeans, Latin Americans, Africans or Asians. Why, they ask, has America chosen to lose touch with the rest of the international community on this issue? Americans may not like the implications of this question. But it is pressing. It bears directly on our international standing and influence; and it has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. We cannot ignore it.

There has been a lot of talk about the demographics of Isreal, but most people outside of Israel are unaware of the statistics. In the London Review, Ilan Pappe talks about the various Israeli plans to deal with the 'problem'.

Israel boosted its population with two massive Jewish immigrations, each of about a million people, in 1949 and in the 1980s. This kept the Palestinian proportion of the population down and today Palestinians account for nearly 20 per cent of the population of Israel (not counting the Occupied Territories). Ehud Olmert, the leader of Kadima and acting prime minister, thinks that if Israel stays in the Occupied Territories and its inhabitants are included in the Israeli population, Palestinians will outnumber Jews within 15 years. So he advocates hitkansut ? meaning 'convergence' or, better, 'ingathering' ? a policy that would leave several populous Palestinian areas outside direct Israeli control. But even if this consolidation takes place, there will still be a very large Palestinian population inside the 88 per cent of Palestine in which Olmert hopes to build the future, stable Jewish state. How large exactly we don't know: demographers in Israel belonging to the centre or the left provide a low estimate, which makes disengagement seem a reasonable solution, while those on the right tend to exaggerate the figure. But they all seem to agree that the demographic balance will not stay the same, given the higher birth-rate of Palestinians compared to Jews. Thus Olmert may well come to the conclusion that pull-outs are not the solution.

Once the 'Arabs' in Israel and the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories came to be thought of in the West as 'Muslims' it was easy to elicit support for Israel's demographic policies, at least where it counted: on Capitol Hill. But even in Europe there was no need, after 9/11, to explain why Israel has a 'demographic problem'. On 2 February 2003 the popular daily Maariv carried a typical headline: 'A quarter of the children in Israel are Muslims.' The piece went on to describe this fact as Israel's next 'ticking bomb'. The increase in the 'Muslim' population -- 2.4 per cent a year -- was not a problem anymore, but a 'danger'.

Recently, I was at a conference about the Israelo-Palestinian conflict, and they spoke of the two-state solution (in which the Palestinians had a "viable state") as the only solution to the conflict.

I seem to be the only person that I know of, besides the late Edward Said, who is for a single-state solution. I agree with Pappe, but in the end, all he does is describe the demographic situation Israel. He does not mention (at least not explicitely) what seems to me to be the obvious result of such a "demographic problem." If 20 percent of Israeli citizens are Arabic, and this proportion increases by 2.4 percent each year, it is only a matter of time (less than 15 years) before the majority of the population is Arab, or "non-Jewish" as the official statistics would call them.

This obviously means that even if we completely disregard the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Isreal will still have to decide between being a democratic state or a Jewish state: being both is impossible in the long run. Some Isrealis have decided that the answer to this is "populaiton transfer," otherwise known as ethnic cleansing. In an interview by Haaretz (part 1 and part 2) the Israeli historian Benny Morris talks about the past and future of Israeli ethnic cleansing:

Ben-Gurion was a transferist. He understood that there could be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its midst. There would be no such state. It would not be able to exist.

...Ben-Gurion was right. If he had not done what he did, a state would not have come into being. That has to be clear. It is impossible to evade it. Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here.

...There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing. I know that this term is completely negative in the discourse of the 21st century, but when the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide - the annihilation of your people - I prefer ethnic cleansing.

...A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on.

...Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history.

...If you are asking me whether I support the transfer and expulsion of the Arabs from the West Bank, Gaza and perhaps even from Galilee and the Triangle, I say not at this moment. I am not willing to be a partner to that act. In the present circumstances it is neither moral nor realistic. The world would not allow it, the Arab world would not allow it, it would destroy the Jewish society from within. But I am ready to tell you that in other circumstances, apocalyptic ones, which are liable to be realized in five or ten years, I can see expulsions. If we find ourselves with atomic weapons around us, or if there is a general Arab attack on us and a situation of warfare on the front with Arabs in the rear shooting at convoys on their way to the front, acts of expulsion will be entirely reasonable. They may even be essential.

...The Israeli Arabs are a time bomb. Their slide into complete Palestinization has made them an emissary of the enemy that is among us. They are a potential fifth column. In both demographic and security terms they are liable to undermine the state. So that if Israel again finds itself in a situation of existential threat, as in 1948, it may be forced to act as it did then. If we are attacked by Egypt (after an Islamist revolution in Cairo) and by Syria, and chemical and biological missiles slam into our cities, and at the same time Israeli Palestinians attack us from behind, I can see an expulsion situation. It could happen. If the threat to Israel is existential, expulsion will be justified.

So this is what it boils down to: the rationalization of ethnic cleansing. Isreali Jews will not want to accept being a minority in a mainly Arab state, but I'm not sure that they have much of an option, barring the extreme measures mentioned by Morris, which it would be difficult to imagine the US intervening to stop and equally difficult to imagine the international community letting happen.

At the end of the day, I think it would be better for both Israeli Jews and Palestinians to make an overture to the creation of a democratic binational state along the lines of Belgium (called Isreal in Hebrew and Palestine in Arabic), which would grant equal rights to both Arabs and Jews, rather than being forced to do so by the international community, much like South Africa was. Because in the end, if Israel goes down the road that South Africa did, she always runs the risk of ending up like Zimbabwe, where a long-opressed majority turns the tables and forces out the minority.

Today's Times has an editorial about inaction in Darfur. It's always nice to see the "agenda setting" press take up the issue, and it's particularly pleasant to see the Times taking not only the West, but also Arab and African leaders to task for ignoring the Darfuris' plight:

Where are the Muslims who took to the streets to protest Danish cartoons? Where are the African leaders who demanded boycotts of South Africa?

...We're waiting. But time is one thing that what is left of the Darfur population doesn't really have. We're glad to see that a rally is planned in Washington on April 30. We're glad to hear that Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick invited Darfur refugees to the State Department. Now President Bush needs to do the same thing. A photo op at the White House with Darfur refugees would go a long way toward embarrassing the government of Sudan.

That should also embarrass the rest of the Security Council members, like China, Qatar, Ghana and Tanzania, that continue to give diplomatic cover to Sudan. Rwanda should have taught us all something; it's tragic that it apparently has not.

The London Review recently published an article on the Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer, a University of Chicago political scientist, and Stephen Walt, a Harvard government professor. (An unabridged version is available here.)

There has been a lot of talk about the paper, most of it pretty inane, like this piece from the Wall Street Journal, which seems to try to give the anti-semitism defense a veneer of resectability by slightly nuancing it:

The authors are at pains to note that the Israel Lobby is by no means exclusively Jewish, and that not every American Jew is a part of it. Fair enough. But has there ever been an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that does not share its basic features? Dual loyalty, disloyalty, manipulation of the media, financial manipulation of the political system, duping the goyim (gentiles) and getting them to fight their wars, sponsoring and covering up acts of gratuitous cruelty against an innocent people -- every canard ever alleged of the Jews is here made about the Israel Lobby and its cause. No wonder former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke was quick to endorse the article, calling it a "great step forward."

I do not mean to suggest that Messrs. Mearsheimer and Walt are themselves anti-Semitic. But as outgoing Harvard President Larry Summers once noted, what may not be anti-Semitic in intent may yet be anti-Semitic in effect. By giving aid and comfort to people who have no trouble substituting the word "Jews" for "Israel Lobby," the Mearsheimer-Walt article is anti-Semitic in effect.

Not all of the criticisms, however, stoop to such non-arguments. This piece by the University of Chicago's Daniel Drezner focuses on what he sees as the empirical problems of the piece:

Walt and Mearsheimer should not be criticized as anti-Semites, because that's patently false. They should be criticized for doing piss-poor, monocausal social science.

To repeat, the main empirical problems with the article are that:

A) They fail to demonstrate that Israel is a net strategic liability;
B) They ascribe U.S. foreign policy behavior almost exclusively to the activities of the "Israel Lobby"; and
C) They omit consderation of contradictory policies and countervailing foreign policy lobbies.

At the end of the day, however, the piece that I found to be the most interesting came from Ha'aretz:

It sometimes takes AIPAC omnipotence too much at face value and disregards key moments - such as the Bush senior/Baker loan guarantees episode and Clinton's showdown with Netanyahu over the Wye River Agreement. The study largely ignores AIPAC run-ins with more dovish Israeli administrations, most notably when it undermined Yitzhak Rabin, and how excessive hawkishness is often out of step with mainstream American Jewish opinion, turning many, especially young American Jews, away from taking any interest in Israel.

Yet their case is a potent one: that identification of American with Israeli interests can be principally explained via the impact of the Lobby in Washington, and in limiting the parameters of public debate, rather than by virtue of Israel being a vital strategic asset or having a uniquely compelling moral case for support (beyond, as the authors point out, the right to exist, which is anyway not in jeopardy). The study is at its most devastating when it describes how the Lobby "stifles debate by intimidation" and at its most current when it details how America's interests (and ultimately Israel's, too) are ill-served by following the Lobby's agenda.

I tend to agree that the Israel lobby is pushing a foreign policy agenda that is often detrimental to American national interest and usually gives the opposite appearance of being the fair broker that the US tries to sell itself as in the Middle East. And while idiots like David Duke might use articles like this to push their elementary racism, we know that there is a lobby and that it is effective, and that we should not let bigots like him dictate what is acceptable and what is off limits for reasonable discussion. Like Mearsheimer and Walt say in their paper:

In its basic operations, the Israel Lobby is no different from the farm lobby, steel or textile workers' unions, or other ethnic lobbies. There is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway US policy: the Lobby's activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise it are only doing what other special interest groups do, but doing it very much better. By contrast, pro-Arab interest groups, in so far as they exist at all, are weak, which makes the Israel Lobby?s task even easier.

Another fair account of the paper appears in an Op-Ed aricle by Nicholas Goldberg in the LA Times:

The idea of a powerful "Jewish lobby" that has its gnarled fingers in the machinery of the government is an old and repugnant canard. Along with the Jews who supposedly own the media and those who reputedly control the banks, the cabal of sinister, third-column Hebrews who whisper into the ears of our leaders is a classic in the traditional checklist of anti-Semitic fulminations.

So it's no surprise that in the modern era, even to broach the idea of a "Jewish lobby" is unacceptable. It's just not done in polite society -- even in situations in which there's some truth to it. Few would deny, after all, that there are people who lobby for various Jewish issues, including, of course, Israel (just as there are a lot of Jews working in Hollywood and just as Jews do own the New York Times). But even though we know these things, we generally don't talk about them.

...So what are we to make of [the article]? Is it anti-Semitism or honesty? Propaganda cloaked in academic respectability -- or a courageous willingness to identify the elephant in the room?

...It seems silly to deny that a powerful lobby on behalf of Israel exists. The real question is how pernicious it is. Does it, in fact, persuade us to act counter to our national interest -- or is it a positive thing, as publisher Mortimer Zuckerman suggests?

His answer to this question is to read the article yourself. I couldn't agree more.


UPDATE: The London Review speaks out against charges of anti-semitism.

Also, Noam Chomsky weighs in.

There has been a lot of talk lately about nuclear prolifilation and double standards, particularly with the nuclear fuel deal struck between the US and India, which has not signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. (The only other countries that have not signed are Israel and Pakistan.) The claim of double standards is that the US has turned a blind eye to ISrael's nuclear weapons program, yet is threatening Iran, which has signed the Treaty, with sanctions for their pursuit of nuclear technology. The treaty stipulates the following:

Each nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to transfer to any recipient whatsoever nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly; and not in any way to assist, encourage, or induce any non-nuclear-weapon State to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices, or control over such weapons or explosive devices.

While North Korea was a signatory, it pulled out of the treaty in 2003, which does not seem to be against the text of the treaty:

Each Party shall in exercising its national sovereignty have the right to withdraw from the Treaty if it decides that extraordinary events, related to the subject matter of this Treaty, have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country. It shall give notice of such withdrawal to all other Parties to the Treaty and to the United Nations Security Council three months in advance. Such notice shall include a statement of the extraordinary events it regards as having jeopardized its supreme interests.

So in response to claims of a double standard, both in comparison to Israel and India (or even Pakistan), Avner Cohen wrote a piece in Ha'aretz suggesting that Israel come clean on the bomb (print-ready version). His argument is twofold, legal and "existential." Legally, Cohen argues, Israel never signed the treaty, whereas Iran did:

The attempt to put Israel and Iran on the same level, or even to create a concrete political connection between them, is ignorant, unfair and biased. First of all, from the point of view of international law: whereas Iran is a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and is committed to comply with it, Israel, like India and Pakistan, is not a signatory to the treaty and therefore is not beholden to a formal commitment. Whereas Iran has been caught in flagrant breach of its international commitments, Israel has not broken such commitments. In other words, like the seven other nuclear states in the world, and in stark contrast to Iran, Israel has never relinquished the right to develop nuclear weaponry.

Here, he is only partially right. While nuclear powers like France, the US, Britian, Russia and China never gave up their right to have nuclear weapons, they did sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, unlike Israel, Pakistan and India. So it's not really fair to put Iran, Israel and, say, Russia in the same basket. It's hard to know what to make of countries that refuse to sign an international treaty like that one. Legally, they're not bound to any course of action, but practically speaking, are countries that renege on a treaty any safer than those that never signed in the first place? Furthermore, if we're speaking in purely legal terms, Iran is within its rights to develop nuclear power, because the treaty explicitely ensures the right to pursue "nuclear energy for peaceful purposes":

Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination and in conformity with Articles I and II of this Treaty.

But let's not be coy. We know that even if Iran were to not produce nuclear weapons immediately, just positioning itself to be able to do so in short notice would make it a dominant force in the region. But there is little that the US or Israel, Iran's rival in the region, could do about that, legally speaking, that is.

Cohen's second argument is that Israel should somehow be given carte blanche for nuclear weapons, since she has always and still faces an "existential threat."

According to foreign reports, Israel began to develop its Samson option in the 1950s, while it was establishing a state for a people still in the shadow of conflagration, in a hostile geopolitical environment that was opposed to its very existence. It found itself committed to the creation of an insurance policy within the pre-1967 borders, without external guarantees for its existence. In the political climate of that time, a decade after the Holocaust, Israel had perhaps the strongest strategic and moral justification for turning to the nuclear option, certainly no less than France or China, which also began the atomic journey at that time.

Not only is Iran not under existential threat - its nuclear aspirations are an issue that puts it on a collision course with the world. Even the leaders of North Korea are not daring to declare their aspirations to wipe countries off the map, as the president of Iran has declared with respect to Israel.

This is essentially an argument for Israeli exceptionalism, and it brings up the question of whether some countries should be allowed to have nuclear weapons but not others.

Cohen is confusing moral and strategic justifications for nuclear weapons here. Sure, Israel had strategic reasons for pursuing nuclear weapons, but so does Iran. We all know that having nuclear weapons changes the equation and makes countries like the US much more likely to choose diplomacy over military force. Nuclear weapons are a deterrent to regime change. Personally, I think that the Middle East should be a nucler weapons-free zone, but for that to happen, Israel would have to realize that it is not possible for it to remain the sole nuclear power in the region. The mere fact that Israel has nuclear weapons is enough to encourage its neighbors to catch up.

In the end, the only real justification for one country to have nuclear weapons while another is not allowed is that of power politics. Those that have weapons are in a position to deny these weapons to other countries. It would be difficult to come up with criteria to decide otherwise. Would these criteria be economic? Social? Should there be a committee that would take these things into consideration and then make a ruling? This would be very complicated, and as things stand, it would most likely be the Security Council that would make that call, and of course for those five countries, each of which is a nuclear power, there should be no nuclear proliferation. For these countries, what is good for the goose is not good for the gander.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that other countries (North Korea, Isreal, India and Pakistan) would clandestinely pursue nuclear weapons. And knowing that the nuclear powers of the world will not willingly allow any other countries to obtain nuclear weapons, the best way to ensure non-proliferation would seem to be to ensure that they have no reason to seek them. And in this case, Israel should start asking itself if it's preferable to be a nuclear power among others in the region or to be a non-nuclear power in a nuclear-free Middle East.



Note:

On why and how the world could live with a nuclear Iran, here are two interesting articles from the Times:

Suppose we just let Iran have the bomb
We can live with a nuclear Iran

Irshad Manji asks an interesting question in today's Times when explaining how she learned to love the wall that has made life for many Palestinians even harder than it already was. She wonders if an effort to prevent suicide bombings justifies further hardship for Palestinians.

She answers yes, presumably because "before the barrier, there was the bomber." Even if she would prefer to overlook the fact that before the bomber, there was the occupation, Ms. Manji should concede that there are any number of ways to ensure security for a state, but that many of them are cruel, immoral and against international law.

An important point was made by Israel's Chief Justice in his ruling on the wall, in which he quoted his judgment prohibiting the torturing of Palestinian detainees: "This is the destiny of a democracy: she does not see all means as acceptable, and the ways of her enemies are not always open before her. A democracy must sometimes fight with one arm tied behind her back."

Those who proclaim their love for the wall would do well to remember this.

Public Radio International's This American Life recently ran a very interesting episode about Guantanamo Bay and habeas corpus, called Habeas Schmaebeas (real audio). They interview two people who have been released from the camp that's not quite in Cuba and not quite in the US where over 500 people have been imprisoned without being charged with a crime. One of the people interviewed is a Pakestani man named Bader who was arrested there (and handed over to American authorities) for running a satirical Urdu language newspaper. Jack Hitt does a good job dispelling some of the misinformation about the people who are being held in Guantanamo Bay:

We're told over and over that these prisoners are so terrible that we need an off-shore facility away from US law to hold them. But then there's Bader. And every day, more storie like his are coming out, and they raise the question: Is Guantanamo a camp full of terrorists, or a camp full of mistakes?

He quotes Bush and Cheney, who had this to say about the matter:

Bush: "These are people that got scooped up off a battlefield attempting to kill U.S. troops. And I want to make sure, before they're released, that they don't come back to kill again."

Cheney: "The people that are there are people we picked up on the battlefield, primarily in Afghanistan. They're terrorists. They're bomb makers. They're facilitators of terror. They're members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban."

Then he quotes Seton Hall University Law School's Report on Guantanamo Detainees, which is based on written determinations the Government has produced for detainees that it has designated as enemy combatants, which were prepared after the Combatant Status Review Tribunals that began in 2004. The report's findings were as follows:

1. Fifty-five percent (55%) of the detainees are not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or its coalition allies.

2. Only 8% of the detainees were characterized as al Qaeda fighters. Of the remaining detainees, 40% have no definitive connection with al Qaeda at all and 18% are have no definitive affiliation with either al Qaeda or the Taliban.

3. The Government has detained numerous persons based on mere affiliations with a large number of groups that in fact, are not on the Department of Homeland Security terrorist watchlist. Moreover, the nexus between such a detainee and such organizations varies considerably. Eight percent are detained because they are deemed "fighters for;" 30% considered "members of;" a large majority ? 60% -- are detained merely because they are "associated with" a group or groups the Government asserts are terrorist organizations. For 2% of the prisoners their nexus to any terrorist group is unidentified.

4. Only 5% of the detainees were captured by United States forces. 86% of the detainees were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to United States custody. This 86% of the detainees captured by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance were handed over to the United States at a time in which the United States offered large bounties for capture of suspected enemies.

5. Finally, the population of persons deemed not to be enemy combatants ? mostly Uighers ? are in fact accused of more serious allegations than a great many persons still deemed to be enemy combatants.

Another reports done on Guantanamo, which came out at about the same time as Seton Hall's can be found here and here.

These reports confirm that the remarks that Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney have been making about how these people are the "worst of the worst" and have been "scooped up off a battle field" are patently false. The issue that is perhaps the most disconcerting is that 86 percent of Gitmo detainees were arrested by Pakistani or Northern Alliance forces at a time when the US was offering a large bounty for turning in suspected Taliban or al Qaeda members. One example of a flyer informing Afghans of the bounty read:

You can receive millions of dollars for helping the Anti-Taliban Force catch Al-Qaida and Taliban murderers. This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life. Pay for livestock and doctors and school books and housing for all your people.

This is a copy of another flyer:



It seems obvious that most of these Pakistani and Afghan (and sometimes Chinese) dirt farmers being passed off as the "worst of the worst" were just at the wrong place at the wrong time. The US government doesn't seemed too concerned about giving them a trial or habeas corpus rights, and I can say that being held incognito for years and tortured and humiliated on a daily basis is enough to turn even a poor Chinese dirt farmer into an anti-American terrorist.

Here are a few interesting links that I've come across in the last few days:

A story from ABC about Chinese Muslims wrongly imprisoned in Guantanamo and then finally released after 4.5 years. They couldn't be sent to China since the government there persecutes Uighurs, and despite being found innocent of any charges (NLEC, or No Longer Enemy Combattant, in Guantanamo Bay terminology - Mr Kafka could not have made this up if he had tried), being put away by the Americans for 4.5 years is enough to garner a bad reputation. So apparently, no country would take them, the US included, with the single and solitary exception of Albania:

We are very pleased that the Albanian government and the Albanian people opened their hearts and welcomed us. Despite the fact that all the strong, powerful, democratic countries are able and capable of accepting us, they did not do that. We are having some problems ... there are no Uighurs in Albania, and we don't speak the Albanian language. ...

Were hoping that the United States government would recognize the mistake that it has done and accept, allow us to enter the United States. U.S. government captured us, U.S. government incarcerated us, locked us up in prison, and U.S. government said that we were not a threat and should be released.

Uighur-Americans came forward, made an offer to the United States government to accept us into Uighur-American society and community. They even went into the courts and contacted the lawyers and wrote a letter to the U.S. government officials asking them to consider releasing us into the United States. Unfortunately, it did not happen, a rather disappointing decision.

Otherwise, the Post ran a really interesting first person piece about Iraq, the Republic of Fear, which makes one fearful that Baghdad is slowly but surely turning into Beirut, circa 1980:

Today, the Americans are just one more militia lost in the anarchy. They, too, are killing Iraqis. ...

Sectarian and ethnic cleansing has since continued apace, as mixed neighborhoods are "purified." In Amriya, dead bodies are being found on the main street at a rate of three or five or seven a day. People are afraid to approach the bodies, or call for an ambulance or the police, for fear that they, too, will be found dead the following day. In Abu Ghraib, Dora, Amriya and other once-diverse neighborhoods, Shiites are being forced to leave. In Maalif and Shaab, Sunnis are being targeted.

The world wonders if Iraq is on the brink of civil war, while Iraqis fear calling it one, knowing the fate such a description would portend. In truth, the civil war started long before Samarra and long before the first uprisings. It started when U.S. troops arrived in Baghdad. It began when Sunnis discovered what they had lost, and Shiites learned what they had gained. And the worst is yet to come.

This made me remember reading a piece in Harper's that said that maybe the best thing for Iraq would be for the US to withdraw and let them have their full-fledged civil war. (It was by Edward Luttwak and was adapted from a piece in Foreign Policy, which can be found here) The version in Harper's ends like this:

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

It's hard for me to know what to make of this idea. I'm not convinced that an all-out civil war would result in anything but a division of Iraq, or even worse, a regional war that would involve Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and probably Turkey as well. The latter is obviously a horrible idea, but I haven't decided how I feel about the former.

Finally, the atrocities in Haditha make me think that maybe Luttuk and Rosen are right and the US should just get out as soon as possible.

I can't get over this. I know that similar things happened in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and I know that we're talking about kids who have been put in an extremely dangerous and stressful situation, and that sometimes people just crack. But I just don't understand how someone can shoot a one-legged man in a wheelchair nine times. Or how someone can shoot a 1-year old baby. Say that again: a 1-year old baby. I just don't understand.

At some point on Nov. 19, Marines in an armored convoy arrived at Haditha's hospital. They placed the bodies of the victims in the garden of the hospital and left without explanation, said Mohammed al-Hadithi, one of the hospital officials who helped carry the bodies inside. By some accounts, some of the corpses were burnt.

The remains of the 24 lie today in a cemetery called Martyrs' Graveyard. Stray dogs scrounge in the deserted homes. "Democracy assassinated the family that was here," graffiti on one of the houses declared.

I just came across a piece by the New Republic's Lawrence Kaplan in the Los Angeles Times entitled, If Iraq was wrong, is Darfur right?

The New Republic has recently come out with an issue on Darfur (only some of which is available to non-subscribers), and they come out as a whole for American intervention in Darfur. Kaplan's piece, however, brings up the question of Iraq and asks why it is all right to intervene in Darfur but not in Iraq:

As their criticism of the particulars of the Iraq war has hardened into a broader indictment of U.S. foreign policy, the mostly progressive voices calling for action in Darfur have become caught in a bind of their own devising. Even as they demand intervention in Sudan, they excoriate Washington for employing U.S. military power without due respect to the opinion of the international community and against nations that pose no imminent threat to our own -- which is to say, precisely the terms under which U.S. power would have to be employed in the name of saving Darfur.

He then goes on to argue that neither the African Union nor the UN will intervene or is capable of intervening, leaving the US as the only capable, if not willing, power equipped to intervene.

To my mind, the main reason why I am for intervention in Darfur but was against it in Iraq can be summed up in a single word: genocide. It's happening in Darfur but wasn't happening in Iraq. Now had the Anfal campaign of the late 1980s been continuing, I would have been for intervention in Iraq. This is not to say that genocide should be the threshold for international intervention, but it would at least be a good start. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) responds similarly to Kaplan's jab against him:

Once President Bush and former Secretary of State Colin Powell used the word "genocide" to describe the carnage in Darfur, the United States and every other civilized nation had a moral imperative to act. Those who find it painful to explain the deception and misinformation preceding our invasion of Iraq should not hide behind the victims in Darfur.

As for whether or not the AU or UN could or would stop the genocide, the AU is already there but lacks a proper and muscular mandate that would allow their forces to protect civilians. As it is, they can only protect themselves. Likewise, when and if a UN force intervenes, it would be important for them to have a good mandate and be properly funded, because we know what happens to underfunded blue helmets without a real mandate. As it stands, there are 7,000 AU troops already in Darfur, which could be folded into a UN force; France has at least 1,000 troops in Chad already; and if the UK could be convinced to provide the 5,000 troops that they offered in 2004, then that would make a force of 13,000. Other nations like South Africa and Ghana could also donate more troops, and the US could help shoulder the financial and logistics costs of such an intervention.

While writing this, I've come across an interesting (and much more detailed) plan by the International Crisis Group To Save Darfur, which is similar to my idea:

Crisis Group has long contended that because AMIS has reached the outer limits of its competence, and a UN mission authorised today would not be fully ready to take over from it for some six months, a distinct and separate multinational force should be sent to Darfur to bridge that gap and help stabilise the immediate situation. We have argued, and continue to believe, that NATO would be best from a practical military point of view. Unfortunately, political opposition to this in Khartoum, within the AU and even perhaps within the Atlantic Alliance itself, means it is not achievable at this time.

What we now propose, therefore, is a compromise driven by the urgent need for a more robust force in Darfur. A militarily capable UN member state -- France seems most promising since it already has troops and aircraft in the area -- should offer to the Security Council to go now to Darfur, wearing blue helmets, as the lead nation in the first phase of the incoming UN mission. It could be joined from the outset by forces from one or two other militarily capable UN members (and would probably need to be if the desirable target of around 5,000 personnel for this force is to be achieved). This stabilisation force would be a self-contained, separately commanded UN mission with identified functional or geographic divisions of responsibility that would work beside AMIS and through a liaison unit at its headquarters until arrangements were in place for a 1 October transition to the full UN mission. That full mission would need to be recruited from the best AMIS elements as well as a wider circle of Asian and other member states -- no easy task at a time when several large UN peacekeeping missions in Africa and elsewhere have exhausted the capabilities of many contribution candidates.

The U.S. and other NATO states should respond generously and quickly to requests from it or AMIS to provide logistical help as well as regular access to satellite imagery, air mobility and close air support, especially to deter or react to egregious movements of men or heavy weapons in the border area.

They finish by coming up with a list of recommendations for each of the major parties involved (with the exception of the belligerent parties):

RECOMMENDATIONS

To the African Union:

1. Request the immediate deployment of a UN-mandated stabilisation force to help bolster the AMIS troops and focus on the Chad-Sudan border and the Tawila-Graida corridor.

2. Seek quick negotiation of a single, enhanced ceasefire document to remove the ambiguities of the existing overlapping agreements.

3. Begin immediately to map the location of forces in Darfur so as to manage and enforce the ceasefire better.

4. Begin immediately identifying, defining and profiling the government-allied militias.

5. Improve the reporting mechanisms and procedures for monitoring ceasefire violations and urgently revive and upgrade the compliance and sanctions mechanisms of the ceasefire.

6. Negotiate a series of humanitarian ground rules, in collaboration with the UN, to help hold the parties accountable for the protection of humanitarian operations in their respective areas.

To the United Nations Security Council:

7. Authorise a two-phase intervention in Darfur under Chapter Seven of the Charter, with the following elements:

(a) for the first phase, to be accomplished within a month, a lead nation would serve as the advance element of the full UN mission by sending the bulk of an initial 5,000 troops to Darfur, with three main stabilisation tasks:

i. interdiction of military activities across the Chad-Darfur border;

ii. protection of civilians in Darfur, primarily in the Tawilla-Graida corridor; and

iii. rapid-reaction support of AMIS forces until the transition to a full-fledged UN peace support operation in October 2006.

(b) for the second phase, immediate planning for a peace support operation of some 15,000 troops -- none of whom should be diverted from the mission of the existing UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) -- with a mandate emphasising civilian protection, ceasefire enforcement and monitoring of the Chad-Sudan border, to take over from AMIS as of 1 October 2006.

8. Strengthen the existing sanctions regime by implementing the recommendations in the 30 January 2006 report of the Panel of Experts.

9. Authorise the Secretariat's peacekeeping department (DPKO) to begin planning on an urgent basis and together with the AU both phases of this operation, with priority tasks to include:

(a) identifying areas for early cooperation in Darfur, such as immediate deployment of UN experts to help support the establishment of a functioning ceasefire commission secretariat and the deployment of human rights monitors and translators, including women, to help improve the reporting capacity of AMIS; and

(b) identifying the lead nation to deploy in the initial phase to support AMIS by performing the tasks set out in recommendation 7(a) above and serve as the advance element of the full UN mission.

To Donor Governments:

10. Convene an early pledging conference to ensure that AMIS is fully funded until the UN mission can take over in October 2006.

To the U.S., the EU and its member states and others with a strong interest in regional peace and stability:

11. Undertake major diplomatic efforts to:

(a) persuade Sudan to accept and the AU to confirm transition of AMIS into a strong UN peacekeeping mission as of 1 October 2006 and request in the interim dispatch of an advance force of some 5,000 blue-helmets to assist AMIS by performing essential stabilisation tasks;

(b) persuade the Security Council to authorise a mission of some 15,000, including the strongest AMIS elements and with a strong Chapter VII mandate focused on civilian protection; and

(c) identify the lead nation to contribute the bulk of the advance element to assist AMIS and perform essential stabilisation tasks immediately upon Security Council authorisation, and be prepared to help with all necessary material and logistical support.

12. Concurrently with efforts to strengthen international forces on the ground, pursue the other elements of a coordinated three-part strategy to resolve the Darfur conflict by:

(a) reinforcing AU efforts to negotiate an enhanced ceasefire and a political settlement at Abuja, including by naming special envoys; and

(b) seeking accountability and an end to impunity by enforcing the Security Council's sanction regime and supporting human rights monitoring mechanisms and the work of the ICC.

An article in the Post reports today that Iranian President Ahmadinejad sent a letter to President Bush in order to propose "new solutions for getting out of international problems and the current fragile situation in the world." It mentions the quote put forth by the Times that Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be "wiped off the map." Since this comment was reported on, it has been used as a reason why Iran should not have nuclear weapons. I've been somewhat skeptical about the translation, and as it turns out, there is some disagreement about what was actually said. This disagreement has pitted Christopher Hitchens against Juan Cole, the latter being the only one of the two who actually speaks Farsi. A good summary of the online fight can be found here.

The actual sentence in question seems to be this: "een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad." I don't speak Farsi, but several of my colleagues are Iranian, and I've sent them the text to see what they think about it. The only word I can recognize is qods which is Farsi for al Quds, which is Jerusalem in English. Cole's translation is "the Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem must [vanish from] from the page of time." As it turns out, the Israeli group Memri offers a translation that is very similar to Cole's ("eliminated from the pages of history").

As it turns out, after the comments, the Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki denied the remarks:

Mottaki also denied during a press conference in Brussels that Tehran wanted to see Israel "wiped off the map."

"Nobody can remove a country from the map. This is a misunderstanding in Europe of what our president mentioned," he said. "How is it possible to remove a country from the map? He is talking about the regime. We do not recognize legally this regime."

Another denial came on CNN's Late Edition from Iran's ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Ali Asghar Soltanieh:

SOLTANIEH: The supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran has announced, more than two years, and few cases, the Western media have reflected to public of the world, that if the divine religions -- followers of the divine religions, Jews, Christians and Muslims, in that area follow a referendum, democratic referendum, and are one (ph) with homeless Palestinians, Iranian government and Iranian people would respect their decision.

Therefore, these are fabricated news that they are threatening and using this as an excuse for the military aggression or the aggressive policy. [...]

BLITZER: I have to wrap this up, but I want to get your response to this issue of Israel because it's become such a prominent issue in this whole discussion over nuclear plans that Iran may or may not have. This is what the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said on October 26 at that World Without Zionism conference.

He said, "Israel must be wiped off the map of the world, and god willing, with the force of god behind it, we shall soon experience a world without the United States and Zionists."

You understand why people in the West, especially here in the United States, are so concerned about your program, your nuclear program, given those kinds of direct threats against Israel, which happens to be a strong ally of the United States.

SOLTANIEH: I want to very briefly remind you that the policy of Islamic Republic of Iran and according to spirit and letter of our constitution is against any sort of school of thought or regime such as apartheid, Zionism, racism, and this is a matter of principle.

Therefore, what you are talking about as apartheid was disappeared and it could not be accepted by civilized world, this Zionism and aggression of racism is also condemned. [...]

BLITZER: Does your support for the removal of Zionism mean you want to see Israel destroyed?

SOLTANIEH: I have already explained to you and reflected to you the policy echoed by our supreme leader.

It means that if in that region, the divine religion followers of the Jews, Christians and Muslims, that all three are very respectful -- and we have Jews in Iran, which are peacefully living and they are represented in our parliament, they are fully respected -- if they come with the Palestinians, homeless Palestinians, to come and through following the democratic process will decide on a government and live in peace as they were living a thousand years of coexistence of these divine religions, Iran will support because we are looking for and we support peaceful settlement of the whole issue and peaceful coexistence of these divine religions in the Middle East. Let's hope for the peace.

BLITZER: But should there be a state of Israel?

SOLTANIEH: I think I've already answered to you. If Israel is a synonym and will give the indication of Zionism mentality, no.

But if you are going to conclude that we have said the people there have to be removed or we they have to be massacred or so, this is fabricated, unfortunate selective approach to what the mentality and policy of Islamic Republic of Iran is. I have to correct, and I did so.

So it seems that the statements by Ahmadinejad, or at the very least official Iranian policy, is much more nuanced than the Western media would have us believe. Furthermore, it is important to remember that Ahmadinejad does not control Iranian foreign policy. In an interesting article in the New York Review about Iran and the bomb, Christopher de Bellaigue has this to say:

Iran's enmity toward Israel is more nuanced than Ahmadinejad's statements suggest. The President's declarations that Israel should be "wiped off the map," and that the Holocaust is a "myth," understandably aroused fears that Iran might be considering an attack on Israel. But Iran's senior civilian and military officials have insisted that Iran will strike Israel only if Israel strikes first. More significantly, the President and supreme leader have both reiterated Iran's longstanding demand for a referendum on the status of Israel that would involve all Palestinian refugees. This official position would not seem to be consistent with an ambition to destroy Israel by force, least of all by using nuclear arms, which would endanger the very Palestinians whom the Iranians claim to be protecting. Several senior Iranian officials, including Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president who heads a powerful arbitration council in Tehran, have not disguised their irritation with the President's comments. But Ahmadinejad has benefited from the furor. By raising his prestige among hard-line Islamists around the world, the President has made it harder for his domestic opponents, who include Rafsanjani, to undermine him.

I will post the English translation later this week, once my Iranian colleagues have had the chance to get back to me.

Tony Judt weighs in on the Israel lobby in today's Times. He reminds us that criticizing Israel is not synonymous with being an anti-semite and that there is a debate to be had on the topic that Americans seem afraid of.

The damage that is done by America's fear of anti-Semitism when discussing Israel is threefold. It is bad for Jews: anti-Semitism is real enough (I know something about it, growing up Jewish in 1950's Britain), but for just that reason it should not be confused with political criticisms of Israel or its American supporters. It is bad for Israel: by guaranteeing it unconditional support, Americans encourage Israel to act heedless of consequences. The Israeli journalist Tom Segev described the Mearsheimer-Walt essay as "arrogant" but also acknowledged ruefully: "They are right. Had the United States saved Israel from itself, life today would be better ...the Israel Lobby in the United States harms Israel's true interests."

BUT above all, self-censorship is bad for the United States itself. Americans are denying themselves participation in a fast-moving international conversation. Daniel Levy (a former Israeli peace negotiator) wrote in Haaretz that the Mearsheimer-Walt essay should be a wake-up call, a reminder of the damage the Israel lobby is doing to both nations. But I would go further. I think this essay, by two "realist" political scientists with no interest whatsoever in the Palestinians, is a straw in the wind.

...the terms of strategic debate are shifting. East Asia grows daily in importance. Meanwhile our clumsy failure to re-cast the Middle East ? and its enduring implications for our standing there ? has come into sharp focus. American influence in that part of the world now rests almost exclusively on our power to make war: which means in the end that it is no influence at all. Above all, perhaps, the Holocaust is passing beyond living memory. In the eyes of a watching world, the fact that an Israeli soldier's great-grandmother died in Treblinka will not excuse his own misbehavior.

Thus it will not be self-evident to future generations of Americans why the imperial might and international reputation of the United States are so closely aligned with one small, controversial Mediterranean client state. It is already not at all self-evident to Europeans, Latin Americans, Africans or Asians. Why, they ask, has America chosen to lose touch with the rest of the international community on this issue? Americans may not like the implications of this question. But it is pressing. It bears directly on our international standing and influence; and it has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. We cannot ignore it.

There has been a lot of talk about the demographics of Isreal, but most people outside of Israel are unaware of the statistics. In the London Review, Ilan Pappe talks about the various Israeli plans to deal with the 'problem'.

Israel boosted its population with two massive Jewish immigrations, each of about a million people, in 1949 and in the 1980s. This kept the Palestinian proportion of the population down and today Palestinians account for nearly 20 per cent of the population of Israel (not counting the Occupied Territories). Ehud Olmert, the leader of Kadima and acting prime minister, thinks that if Israel stays in the Occupied Territories and its inhabitants are included in the Israeli population, Palestinians will outnumber Jews within 15 years. So he advocates hitkansut ? meaning 'convergence' or, better, 'ingathering' ? a policy that would leave several populous Palestinian areas outside direct Israeli control. But even if this consolidation takes place, there will still be a very large Palestinian population inside the 88 per cent of Palestine in which Olmert hopes to build the future, stable Jewish state. How large exactly we don't know: demographers in Israel belonging to the centre or the left provide a low estimate, which makes disengagement seem a reasonable solution, while those on the right tend to exaggerate the figure. But they all seem to agree that the demographic balance will not stay the same, given the higher birth-rate of Palestinians compared to Jews. Thus Olmert may well come to the conclusion that pull-outs are not the solution.

Once the 'Arabs' in Israel and the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories came to be thought of in the West as 'Muslims' it was easy to elicit support for Israel's demographic policies, at least where it counted: on Capitol Hill. But even in Europe there was no need, after 9/11, to explain why Israel has a 'demographic problem'. On 2 February 2003 the popular daily Maariv carried a typical headline: 'A quarter of the children in Israel are Muslims.' The piece went on to describe this fact as Israel's next 'ticking bomb'. The increase in the 'Muslim' population -- 2.4 per cent a year -- was not a problem anymore, but a 'danger'.

Recently, I was at a conference about the Israelo-Palestinian conflict, and they spoke of the two-state solution (in which the Palestinians had a "viable state") as the only solution to the conflict.

I seem to be the only person that I know of, besides the late Edward Said, who is for a single-state solution. I agree with Pappe, but in the end, all he does is describe the demographic situation Israel. He does not mention (at least not explicitely) what seems to me to be the obvious result of such a "demographic problem." If 20 percent of Israeli citizens are Arabic, and this proportion increases by 2.4 percent each year, it is only a matter of time (less than 15 years) before the majority of the population is Arab, or "non-Jewish" as the official statistics would call them.

This obviously means that even if we completely disregard the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Isreal will still have to decide between being a democratic state or a Jewish state: being both is impossible in the long run. Some Isrealis have decided that the answer to this is "populaiton transfer," otherwise known as ethnic cleansing. In an interview by Haaretz (part 1 and part 2) the Israeli historian Benny Morris talks about the past and future of Israeli ethnic cleansing:

Ben-Gurion was a transferist. He understood that there could be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its midst. There would be no such state. It would not be able to exist.

...Ben-Gurion was right. If he had not done what he did, a state would not have come into being. That has to be clear. It is impossible to evade it. Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here.

...There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing. I know that this term is completely negative in the discourse of the 21st century, but when the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide - the annihilation of your people - I prefer ethnic cleansing.

...A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on.

...Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history.

...If you are asking me whether I support the transfer and expulsion of the Arabs from the West Bank, Gaza and perhaps even from Galilee and the Triangle, I say not at this moment. I am not willing to be a partner to that act. In the present circumstances it is neither moral nor realistic. The world would not allow it, the Arab world would not allow it, it would destroy the Jewish society from within. But I am ready to tell you that in other circumstances, apocalyptic ones, which are liable to be realized in five or ten years, I can see expulsions. If we find ourselves with atomic weapons around us, or if there is a general Arab attack on us and a situation of warfare on the front with Arabs in the rear shooting at convoys on their way to the front, acts of expulsion will be entirely reasonable. They may even be essential.

...The Israeli Arabs are a time bomb. Their slide into complete Palestinization has made them an emissary of the enemy that is among us. They are a potential fifth column. In both demographic and security terms they are liable to undermine the state. So that if Israel again finds itself in a situation of existential threat, as in 1948, it may be forced to act as it did then. If we are attacked by Egypt (after an Islamist revolution in Cairo) and by Syria, and chemical and biological missiles slam into our cities, and at the same time Israeli Palestinians attack us from behind, I can see an expulsion situation. It could happen. If the threat to Israel is existential, expulsion will be justified.

So this is what it boils down to: the rationalization of ethnic cleansing. Isreali Jews will not want to accept being a minority in a mainly Arab state, but I'm not sure that they have much of an option, barring the extreme measures mentioned by Morris, which it would be difficult to imagine the US intervening to stop and equally difficult to imagine the international community letting happen.

At the end of the day, I think it would be better for both Israeli Jews and Palestinians to make an overture to the creation of a democratic binational state along the lines of Belgium (called Isreal in Hebrew and Palestine in Arabic), which would grant equal rights to both Arabs and Jews, rather than being forced to do so by the international community, much like South Africa was. Because in the end, if Israel goes down the road that South Africa did, she always runs the risk of ending up like Zimbabwe, where a long-opressed majority turns the tables and forces out the minority.

Today's Times has an editorial about inaction in Darfur. It's always nice to see the "agenda setting" press take up the issue, and it's particularly pleasant to see the Times taking not only the West, but also Arab and African leaders to task for ignoring the Darfuris' plight:

Where are the Muslims who took to the streets to protest Danish cartoons? Where are the African leaders who demanded boycotts of South Africa?

...We're waiting. But time is one thing that what is left of the Darfur population doesn't really have. We're glad to see that a rally is planned in Washington on April 30. We're glad to hear that Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick invited Darfur refugees to the State Department. Now President Bush needs to do the same thing. A photo op at the White House with Darfur refugees would go a long way toward embarrassing the government of Sudan.

That should also embarrass the rest of the Security Council members, like China, Qatar, Ghana and Tanzania, that continue to give diplomatic cover to Sudan. Rwanda should have taught us all something; it's tragic that it apparently has not.

The London Review recently published an article on the Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer, a University of Chicago political scientist, and Stephen Walt, a Harvard government professor. (An unabridged version is available here.)

There has been a lot of talk about the paper, most of it pretty inane, like this piece from the Wall Street Journal, which seems to try to give the anti-semitism defense a veneer of resectability by slightly nuancing it:

The authors are at pains to note that the Israel Lobby is by no means exclusively Jewish, and that not every American Jew is a part of it. Fair enough. But has there ever been an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that does not share its basic features? Dual loyalty, disloyalty, manipulation of the media, financial manipulation of the political system, duping the goyim (gentiles) and getting them to fight their wars, sponsoring and covering up acts of gratuitous cruelty against an innocent people -- every canard ever alleged of the Jews is here made about the Israel Lobby and its cause. No wonder former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke was quick to endorse the article, calling it a "great step forward."

I do not mean to suggest that Messrs. Mearsheimer and Walt are themselves anti-Semitic. But as outgoing Harvard President Larry Summers once noted, what may not be anti-Semitic in intent may yet be anti-Semitic in effect. By giving aid and comfort to people who have no trouble substituting the word "Jews" for "Israel Lobby," the Mearsheimer-Walt article is anti-Semitic in effect.

Not all of the criticisms, however, stoop to such non-arguments. This piece by the University of Chicago's Daniel Drezner focuses on what he sees as the empirical problems of the piece:

Walt and Mearsheimer should not be criticized as anti-Semites, because that's patently false. They should be criticized for doing piss-poor, monocausal social science.

To repeat, the main empirical problems with the article are that:

A) They fail to demonstrate that Israel is a net strategic liability;
B) They ascribe U.S. foreign policy behavior almost exclusively to the activities of the "Israel Lobby"; and
C) They omit consderation of contradictory policies and countervailing foreign policy lobbies.

At the end of the day, however, the piece that I found to be the most interesting came from Ha'aretz:

It sometimes takes AIPAC omnipotence too much at face value and disregards key moments - such as the Bush senior/Baker loan guarantees episode and Clinton's showdown with Netanyahu over the Wye River Agreement. The study largely ignores AIPAC run-ins with more dovish Israeli administrations, most notably when it undermined Yitzhak Rabin, and how excessive hawkishness is often out of step with mainstream American Jewish opinion, turning many, especially young American Jews, away from taking any interest in Israel.

Yet their case is a potent one: that identification of American with Israeli interests can be principally explained via the impact of the Lobby in Washington, and in limiting the parameters of public debate, rather than by virtue of Israel being a vital strategic asset or having a uniquely compelling moral case for support (beyond, as the authors point out, the right to exist, which is anyway not in jeopardy). The study is at its most devastating when it describes how the Lobby "stifles debate by intimidation" and at its most current when it details how America's interests (and ultimately Israel's, too) are ill-served by following the Lobby's agenda.

I tend to agree that the Israel lobby is pushing a foreign policy agenda that is often detrimental to American national interest and usually gives the opposite appearance of being the fair broker that the US tries to sell itself as in the Middle East. And while idiots like David Duke might use articles like this to push their elementary racism, we know that there is a lobby and that it is effective, and that we should not let bigots like him dictate what is acceptable and what is off limits for reasonable discussion. Like Mearsheimer and Walt say in their paper:

In its basic operations, the Israel Lobby is no different from the farm lobby, steel or textile workers' unions, or other ethnic lobbies. There is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway US policy: the Lobby's activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise it are only doing what other special interest groups do, but doing it very much better. By contrast, pro-Arab interest groups, in so far as they exist at all, are weak, which makes the Israel Lobby?s task even easier.

Another fair account of the paper appears in an Op-Ed aricle by Nicholas Goldberg in the LA Times:

The idea of a powerful "Jewish lobby" that has its gnarled fingers in the machinery of the government is an old and repugnant canard. Along with the Jews who supposedly own the media and those who reputedly control the banks, the cabal of sinister, third-column Hebrews who whisper into the ears of our leaders is a classic in the traditional checklist of anti-Semitic fulminations.

So it's no surprise that in the modern era, even to broach the idea of a "Jewish lobby" is unacceptable. It's just not done in polite society -- even in situations in which there's some truth to it. Few would deny, after all, that there are people who lobby for various Jewish issues, including, of course, Israel (just as there are a lot of Jews working in Hollywood and just as Jews do own the New York Times). But even though we know these things, we generally don't talk about them.

...So what are we to make of [the article]? Is it anti-Semitism or honesty? Propaganda cloaked in academic respectability -- or a courageous willingness to identify the elephant in the room?

...It seems silly to deny that a powerful lobby on behalf of Israel exists. The real question is how pernicious it is. Does it, in fact, persuade us to act counter to our national interest -- or is it a positive thing, as publisher Mortimer Zuckerman suggests?

His answer to this question is to read the article yourself. I couldn't agree more.


UPDATE: The London Review speaks out against charges of anti-semitism.

Also, Noam Chomsky weighs in.

There has been a lot of talk lately about nuclear prolifilation and double standards, particularly with the nuclear fuel deal struck between the US and India, which has not signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. (The only other countries that have not signed are Israel and Pakistan.) The claim of double standards is that the US has turned a blind eye to ISrael's nuclear weapons program, yet is threatening Iran, which has signed the Treaty, with sanctions for their pursuit of nuclear technology. The treaty stipulates the following:

Each nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to transfer to any recipient whatsoever nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly; and not in any way to assist, encourage, or induce any non-nuclear-weapon State to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices, or control over such weapons or explosive devices.

While North Korea was a signatory, it pulled out of the treaty in 2003, which does not seem to be against the text of the treaty:

Each Party shall in exercising its national sovereignty have the right to withdraw from the Treaty if it decides that extraordinary events, related to the subject matter of this Treaty, have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country. It shall give notice of such withdrawal to all other Parties to the Treaty and to the United Nations Security Council three months in advance. Such notice shall include a statement of the extraordinary events it regards as having jeopardized its supreme interests.

So in response to claims of a double standard, both in comparison to Israel and India (or even Pakistan), Avner Cohen wrote a piece in Ha'aretz suggesting that Israel come clean on the bomb (print-ready version). His argument is twofold, legal and "existential." Legally, Cohen argues, Israel never signed the treaty, whereas Iran did:

The attempt to put Israel and Iran on the same level, or even to create a concrete political connection between them, is ignorant, unfair and biased. First of all, from the point of view of international law: whereas Iran is a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and is committed to comply with it, Israel, like India and Pakistan, is not a signatory to the treaty and therefore is not beholden to a formal commitment. Whereas Iran has been caught in flagrant breach of its international commitments, Israel has not broken such commitments. In other words, like the seven other nuclear states in the world, and in stark contrast to Iran, Israel has never relinquished the right to develop nuclear weaponry.

Here, he is only partially right. While nuclear powers like France, the US, Britian, Russia and China never gave up their right to have nuclear weapons, they did sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, unlike Israel, Pakistan and India. So it's not really fair to put Iran, Israel and, say, Russia in the same basket. It's hard to know what to make of countries that refuse to sign an international treaty like that one. Legally, they're not bound to any course of action, but practically speaking, are countries that renege on a treaty any safer than those that never signed in the first place? Furthermore, if we're speaking in purely legal terms, Iran is within its rights to develop nuclear power, because the treaty explicitely ensures the right to pursue "nuclear energy for peaceful purposes":

Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination and in conformity with Articles I and II of this Treaty.

But let's not be coy. We know that even if Iran were to not produce nuclear weapons immediately, just positioning itself to be able to do so in short notice would make it a dominant force in the region. But there is little that the US or Israel, Iran's rival in the region, could do about that, legally speaking, that is.

Cohen's second argument is that Israel should somehow be given carte blanche for nuclear weapons, since she has always and still faces an "existential threat."

According to foreign reports, Israel began to develop its Samson option in the 1950s, while it was establishing a state for a people still in the shadow of conflagration, in a hostile geopolitical environment that was opposed to its very existence. It found itself committed to the creation of an insurance policy within the pre-1967 borders, without external guarantees for its existence. In the political climate of that time, a decade after the Holocaust, Israel had perhaps the strongest strategic and moral justification for turning to the nuclear option, certainly no less than France or China, which also began the atomic journey at that time.

Not only is Iran not under existential threat - its nuclear aspirations are an issue that puts it on a collision course with the world. Even the leaders of North Korea are not daring to declare their aspirations to wipe countries off the map, as the president of Iran has declared with respect to Israel.

This is essentially an argument for Israeli exceptionalism, and it brings up the question of whether some countries should be allowed to have nuclear weapons but not others.

Cohen is confusing moral and strategic justifications for nuclear weapons here. Sure, Israel had strategic reasons for pursuing nuclear weapons, but so does Iran. We all know that having nuclear weapons changes the equation and makes countries like the US much more likely to choose diplomacy over military force. Nuclear weapons are a deterrent to regime change. Personally, I think that the Middle East should be a nucler weapons-free zone, but for that to happen, Israel would have to realize that it is not possible for it to remain the sole nuclear power in the region. The mere fact that Israel has nuclear weapons is enough to encourage its neighbors to catch up.

In the end, the only real justification for one country to have nuclear weapons while another is not allowed is that of power politics. Those that have weapons are in a position to deny these weapons to other countries. It would be difficult to come up with criteria to decide otherwise. Would these criteria be economic? Social? Should there be a committee that would take these things into consideration and then make a ruling? This would be very complicated, and as things stand, it would most likely be the Security Council that would make that call, and of course for those five countries, each of which is a nuclear power, there should be no nuclear proliferation. For these countries, what is good for the goose is not good for the gander.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that other countries (North Korea, Isreal, India and Pakistan) would clandestinely pursue nuclear weapons. And knowing that the nuclear powers of the world will not willingly allow any other countries to obtain nuclear weapons, the best way to ensure non-proliferation would seem to be to ensure that they have no reason to seek them. And in this case, Israel should start asking itself if it's preferable to be a nuclear power among others in the region or to be a non-nuclear power in a nuclear-free Middle East.



Note:

On why and how the world could live with a nuclear Iran, here are two interesting articles from the Times:

Suppose we just let Iran have the bomb
We can live with a nuclear Iran

Irshad Manji asks an interesting question in today's Times when explaining how she learned to love the wall that has made life for many Palestinians even harder than it already was. She wonders if an effort to prevent suicide bombings justifies further hardship for Palestinians.

She answers yes, presumably because "before the barrier, there was the bomber." Even if she would prefer to overlook the fact that before the bomber, there was the occupation, Ms. Manji should concede that there are any number of ways to ensure security for a state, but that many of them are cruel, immoral and against international law.

An important point was made by Israel's Chief Justice in his ruling on the wall, in which he quoted his judgment prohibiting the torturing of Palestinian detainees: "This is the destiny of a democracy: she does not see all means as acceptable, and the ways of her enemies are not always open before her. A democracy must sometimes fight with one arm tied behind her back."

Those who proclaim their love for the wall would do well to remember this.

Public Radio International's This American Life recently ran a very interesting episode about Guantanamo Bay and habeas corpus, called Habeas Schmaebeas (real audio). They interview two people who have been released from the camp that's not quite in Cuba and not quite in the US where over 500 people have been imprisoned without being charged with a crime. One of the people interviewed is a Pakestani man named Bader who was arrested there (and handed over to American authorities) for running a satirical Urdu language newspaper. Jack Hitt does a good job dispelling some of the misinformation about the people who are being held in Guantanamo Bay:

We're told over and over that these prisoners are so terrible that we need an off-shore facility away from US law to hold them. But then there's Bader. And every day, more storie like his are coming out, and they raise the question: Is Guantanamo a camp full of terrorists, or a camp full of mistakes?

He quotes Bush and Cheney, who had this to say about the matter:

Bush: "These are people that got scooped up off a battlefield attempting to kill U.S. troops. And I want to make sure, before they're released, that they don't come back to kill again."

Cheney: "The people that are there are people we picked up on the battlefield, primarily in Afghanistan. They're terrorists. They're bomb makers. They're facilitators of terror. They're members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban."

Then he quotes Seton Hall University Law School's Report on Guantanamo Detainees, which is based on written determinations the Government has produced for detainees that it has designated as enemy combatants, which were prepared after the Combatant Status Review Tribunals that began in 2004. The report's findings were as follows:

1. Fifty-five percent (55%) of the detainees are not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or its coalition allies.

2. Only 8% of the detainees were characterized as al Qaeda fighters. Of the remaining detainees, 40% have no definitive connection with al Qaeda at all and 18% are have no definitive affiliation with either al Qaeda or the Taliban.

3. The Government has detained numerous persons based on mere affiliations with a large number of groups that in fact, are not on the Department of Homeland Security terrorist watchlist. Moreover, the nexus between such a detainee and such organizations varies considerably. Eight percent are detained because they are deemed "fighters for;" 30% considered "members of;" a large majority ? 60% -- are detained merely because they are "associated with" a group or groups the Government asserts are terrorist organizations. For 2% of the prisoners their nexus to any terrorist group is unidentified.

4. Only 5% of the detainees were captured by United States forces. 86% of the detainees were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to United States custody. This 86% of the detainees captured by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance were handed over to the United States at a time in which the United States offered large bounties for capture of suspected enemies.

5. Finally, the population of persons deemed not to be enemy combatants ? mostly Uighers ? are in fact accused of more serious allegations than a great many persons still deemed to be enemy combatants.

Another reports done on Guantanamo, which came out at about the same time as Seton Hall's can be found here and here.

These reports confirm that the remarks that Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney have been making about how these people are the "worst of the worst" and have been "scooped up off a battle field" are patently false. The issue that is perhaps the most disconcerting is that 86 percent of Gitmo detainees were arrested by Pakistani or Northern Alliance forces at a time when the US was offering a large bounty for turning in suspected Taliban or al Qaeda members. One example of a flyer informing Afghans of the bounty read:

You can receive millions of dollars for helping the Anti-Taliban Force catch Al-Qaida and Taliban murderers. This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life. Pay for livestock and doctors and school books and housing for all your people.

This is a copy of another flyer:



It seems obvious that most of these Pakistani and Afghan (and sometimes Chinese) dirt farmers being passed off as the "worst of the worst" were just at the wrong place at the wrong time. The US government doesn't seemed too concerned about giving them a trial or habeas corpus rights, and I can say that being held incognito for years and tortured and humiliated on a daily basis is enough to turn even a poor Chinese dirt farmer into an anti-American terrorist.

Here are a few interesting links that I've come across in the last few days:

A story from ABC about Chinese Muslims wrongly imprisoned in Guantanamo and then finally released after 4.5 years. They couldn't be sent to China since the government there persecutes Uighurs, and despite being found innocent of any charges (NLEC, or No Longer Enemy Combattant, in Guantanamo Bay terminology - Mr Kafka could not have made this up if he had tried), being put away by the Americans for 4.5 years is enough to garner a bad reputation. So apparently, no country would take them, the US included, with the single and solitary exception of Albania:

We are very pleased that the Albanian government and the Albanian people opened their hearts and welcomed us. Despite the fact that all the strong, powerful, democratic countries are able and capable of accepting us, they did not do that. We are having some problems ... there are no Uighurs in Albania, and we don't speak the Albanian language. ...

Were hoping that the United States government would recognize the mistake that it has done and accept, allow us to enter the United States. U.S. government captured us, U.S. government incarcerated us, locked us up in prison, and U.S. government said that we were not a threat and should be released.

Uighur-Americans came forward, made an offer to the United States government to accept us into Uighur-American society and community. They even went into the courts and contacted the lawyers and wrote a letter to the U.S. government officials asking them to consider releasing us into the United States. Unfortunately, it did not happen, a rather disappointing decision.

Otherwise, the Post ran a really interesting first person piece about Iraq, the Republic of Fear, which makes one fearful that Baghdad is slowly but surely turning into Beirut, circa 1980:

Today, the Americans are just one more militia lost in the anarchy. They, too, are killing Iraqis. ...

Sectarian and ethnic cleansing has since continued apace, as mixed neighborhoods are "purified." In Amriya, dead bodies are being found on the main street at a rate of three or five or seven a day. People are afraid to approach the bodies, or call for an ambulance or the police, for fear that they, too, will be found dead the following day. In Abu Ghraib, Dora, Amriya and other once-diverse neighborhoods, Shiites are being forced to leave. In Maalif and Shaab, Sunnis are being targeted.

The world wonders if Iraq is on the brink of civil war, while Iraqis fear calling it one, knowing the fate such a description would portend. In truth, the civil war started long before Samarra and long before the first uprisings. It started when U.S. troops arrived in Baghdad. It began when Sunnis discovered what they had lost, and Shiites learned what they had gained. And the worst is yet to come.

This made me remember reading a piece in Harper's that said that maybe the best thing for Iraq would be for the US to withdraw and let them have their full-fledged civil war. (It was by Edward Luttwak and was adapted from a piece in Foreign Policy, which can be found here) The version in Harper's ends like this:

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

It's hard for me to know what to make of this idea. I'm not convinced that an all-out civil war would result in anything but a division of Iraq, or even worse, a regional war that would involve Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and probably Turkey as well. The latter is obviously a horrible idea, but I haven't decided how I feel about the former.

Finally, the atrocities in Haditha make me think that maybe Luttuk and Rosen are right and the US should just get out as soon as possible.

I can't get over this. I know that similar things happened in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and I know that we're talking about kids who have been put in an extremely dangerous and stressful situation, and that sometimes people just crack. But I just don't understand how someone can shoot a one-legged man in a wheelchair nine times. Or how someone can shoot a 1-year old baby. Say that again: a 1-year old baby. I just don't understand.

At some point on Nov. 19, Marines in an armored convoy arrived at Haditha's hospital. They placed the bodies of the victims in the garden of the hospital and left without explanation, said Mohammed al-Hadithi, one of the hospital officials who helped carry the bodies inside. By some accounts, some of the corpses were burnt.

The remains of the 24 lie today in a cemetery called Martyrs' Graveyard. Stray dogs scrounge in the deserted homes. "Democracy assassinated the family that was here," graffiti on one of the houses declared.

I just came across a piece by the New Republic's Lawrence Kaplan in the Los Angeles Times entitled, If Iraq was wrong, is Darfur right?

The New Republic has recently come out with an issue on Darfur (only some of which is available to non-subscribers), and they come out as a whole for American intervention in Darfur. Kaplan's piece, however, brings up the question of Iraq and asks why it is all right to intervene in Darfur but not in Iraq:

As their criticism of the particulars of the Iraq war has hardened into a broader indictment of U.S. foreign policy, the mostly progressive voices calling for action in Darfur have become caught in a bind of their own devising. Even as they demand intervention in Sudan, they excoriate Washington for employing U.S. military power without due respect to the opinion of the international community and against nations that pose no imminent threat to our own -- which is to say, precisely the terms under which U.S. power would have to be employed in the name of saving Darfur.

He then goes on to argue that neither the African Union nor the UN will intervene or is capable of intervening, leaving the US as the only capable, if not willing, power equipped to intervene.

To my mind, the main reason why I am for intervention in Darfur but was against it in Iraq can be summed up in a single word: genocide. It's happening in Darfur but wasn't happening in Iraq. Now had the Anfal campaign of the late 1980s been continuing, I would have been for intervention in Iraq. This is not to say that genocide should be the threshold for international intervention, but it would at least be a good start. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) responds similarly to Kaplan's jab against him:

Once President Bush and former Secretary of State Colin Powell used the word "genocide" to describe the carnage in Darfur, the United States and every other civilized nation had a moral imperative to act. Those who find it painful to explain the deception and misinformation preceding our invasion of Iraq should not hide behind the victims in Darfur.

As for whether or not the AU or UN could or would stop the genocide, the AU is already there but lacks a proper and muscular mandate that would allow their forces to protect civilians. As it is, they can only protect themselves. Likewise, when and if a UN force intervenes, it would be important for them to have a good mandate and be properly funded, because we know what happens to underfunded blue helmets without a real mandate. As it stands, there are 7,000 AU troops already in Darfur, which could be folded into a UN force; France has at least 1,000 troops in Chad already; and if the UK could be convinced to provide the 5,000 troops that they offered in 2004, then that would make a force of 13,000. Other nations like South Africa and Ghana could also donate more troops, and the US could help shoulder the financial and logistics costs of such an intervention.

While writing this, I've come across an interesting (and much more detailed) plan by the International Crisis Group To Save Darfur, which is similar to my idea:

Crisis Group has long contended that because AMIS has reached the outer limits of its competence, and a UN mission authorised today would not be fully ready to take over from it for some six months, a distinct and separate multinational force should be sent to Darfur to bridge that gap and help stabilise the immediate situation. We have argued, and continue to believe, that NATO would be best from a practical military point of view. Unfortunately, political opposition to this in Khartoum, within the AU and even perhaps within the Atlantic Alliance itself, means it is not achievable at this time.

What we now propose, therefore, is a compromise driven by the urgent need for a more robust force in Darfur. A militarily capable UN member state -- France seems most promising since it already has troops and aircraft in the area -- should offer to the Security Council to go now to Darfur, wearing blue helmets, as the lead nation in the first phase of the incoming UN mission. It could be joined from the outset by forces from one or two other militarily capable UN members (and would probably need to be if the desirable target of around 5,000 personnel for this force is to be achieved). This stabilisation force would be a self-contained, separately commanded UN mission with identified functional or geographic divisions of responsibility that would work beside AMIS and through a liaison unit at its headquarters until arrangements were in place for a 1 October transition to the full UN mission. That full mission would need to be recruited from the best AMIS elements as well as a wider circle of Asian and other member states -- no easy task at a time when several large UN peacekeeping missions in Africa and elsewhere have exhausted the capabilities of many contribution candidates.

The U.S. and other NATO states should respond generously and quickly to requests from it or AMIS to provide logistical help as well as regular access to satellite imagery, air mobility and close air support, especially to deter or react to egregious movements of men or heavy weapons in the border area.

They finish by coming up with a list of recommendations for each of the major parties involved (with the exception of the belligerent parties):

RECOMMENDATIONS

To the African Union:

1. Request the immediate deployment of a UN-mandated stabilisation force to help bolster the AMIS troops and focus on the Chad-Sudan border and the Tawila-Graida corridor.

2. Seek quick negotiation of a single, enhanced ceasefire document to remove the ambiguities of the existing overlapping agreements.

3. Begin immediately to map the location of forces in Darfur so as to manage and enforce the ceasefire better.

4. Begin immediately identifying, defining and profiling the government-allied militias.

5. Improve the reporting mechanisms and procedures for monitoring ceasefire violations and urgently revive and upgrade the compliance and sanctions mechanisms of the ceasefire.

6. Negotiate a series of humanitarian ground rules, in collaboration with the UN, to help hold the parties accountable for the protection of humanitarian operations in their respective areas.

To the United Nations Security Council:

7. Authorise a two-phase intervention in Darfur under Chapter Seven of the Charter, with the following elements:

(a) for the first phase, to be accomplished within a month, a lead nation would serve as the advance element of the full UN mission by sending the bulk of an initial 5,000 troops to Darfur, with three main stabilisation tasks:

i. interdiction of military activities across the Chad-Darfur border;

ii. protection of civilians in Darfur, primarily in the Tawilla-Graida corridor; and

iii. rapid-reaction support of AMIS forces until the transition to a full-fledged UN peace support operation in October 2006.

(b) for the second phase, immediate planning for a peace support operation of some 15,000 troops -- none of whom should be diverted from the mission of the existing UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) -- with a mandate emphasising civilian protection, ceasefire enforcement and monitoring of the Chad-Sudan border, to take over from AMIS as of 1 October 2006.

8. Strengthen the existing sanctions regime by implementing the recommendations in the 30 January 2006 report of the Panel of Experts.

9. Authorise the Secretariat's peacekeeping department (DPKO) to begin planning on an urgent basis and together with the AU both phases of this operation, with priority tasks to include:

(a) identifying areas for early cooperation in Darfur, such as immediate deployment of UN experts to help support the establishment of a functioning ceasefire commission secretariat and the deployment of human rights monitors and translators, including women, to help improve the reporting capacity of AMIS; and

(b) identifying the lead nation to deploy in the initial phase to support AMIS by performing the tasks set out in recommendation 7(a) above and serve as the advance element of the full UN mission.

To Donor Governments:

10. Convene an early pledging conference to ensure that AMIS is fully funded until the UN mission can take over in October 2006.

To the U.S., the EU and its member states and others with a strong interest in regional peace and stability:

11. Undertake major diplomatic efforts to:

(a) persuade Sudan to accept and the AU to confirm transition of AMIS into a strong UN peacekeeping mission as of 1 October 2006 and request in the interim dispatch of an advance force of some 5,000 blue-helmets to assist AMIS by performing essential stabilisation tasks;

(b) persuade the Security Council to authorise a mission of some 15,000, including the strongest AMIS elements and with a strong Chapter VII mandate focused on civilian protection; and

(c) identify the lead nation to contribute the bulk of the advance element to assist AMIS and perform essential stabilisation tasks immediately upon Security Council authorisation, and be prepared to help with all necessary material and logistical support.

12. Concurrently with efforts to strengthen international forces on the ground, pursue the other elements of a coordinated three-part strategy to resolve the Darfur conflict by:

(a) reinforcing AU efforts to negotiate an enhanced ceasefire and a political settlement at Abuja, including by naming special envoys; and

(b) seeking accountability and an end to impunity by enforcing the Security Council's sanction regime and supporting human rights monitoring mechanisms and the work of the ICC.

An article in the Post reports today that Iranian President Ahmadinejad sent a letter to President Bush in order to propose "new solutions for getting out of international problems and the current fragile situation in the world." It mentions the quote put forth by the Times that Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be "wiped off the map." Since this comment was reported on, it has been used as a reason why Iran should not have nuclear weapons. I've been somewhat skeptical about the translation, and as it turns out, there is some disagreement about what was actually said. This disagreement has pitted Christopher Hitchens against Juan Cole, the latter being the only one of the two who actually speaks Farsi. A good summary of the online fight can be found here.

The actual sentence in question seems to be this: "een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad." I don't speak Farsi, but several of my colleagues are Iranian, and I've sent them the text to see what they think about it. The only word I can recognize is qods which is Farsi for al Quds, which is Jerusalem in English. Cole's translation is "the Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem must [vanish from] from the page of time." As it turns out, the Israeli group Memri offers a translation that is very similar to Cole's ("eliminated from the pages of history").

As it turns out, after the comments, the Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki denied the remarks:

Mottaki also denied during a press conference in Brussels that Tehran wanted to see Israel "wiped off the map."

"Nobody can remove a country from the map. This is a misunderstanding in Europe of what our president mentioned," he said. "How is it possible to remove a country from the map? He is talking about the regime. We do not recognize legally this regime."

Another denial came on CNN's Late Edition from Iran's ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Ali Asghar Soltanieh:

SOLTANIEH: The supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran has announced, more than two years, and few cases, the Western media have reflected to public of the world, that if the divine religions -- followers of the divine religions, Jews, Christians and Muslims, in that area follow a referendum, democratic referendum, and are one (ph) with homeless Palestinians, Iranian government and Iranian people would respect their decision.

Therefore, these are fabricated news that they are threatening and using this as an excuse for the military aggression or the aggressive policy. [...]

BLITZER: I have to wrap this up, but I want to get your response to this issue of Israel because it's become such a prominent issue in this whole discussion over nuclear plans that Iran may or may not have. This is what the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said on October 26 at that World Without Zionism conference.

He said, "Israel must be wiped off the map of the world, and god willing, with the force of god behind it, we shall soon experience a world without the United States and Zionists."

You understand why people in the West, especially here in the United States, are so concerned about your program, your nuclear program, given those kinds of direct threats against Israel, which happens to be a strong ally of the United States.

SOLTANIEH: I want to very briefly remind you that the policy of Islamic Republic of Iran and according to spirit and letter of our constitution is against any sort of school of thought or regime such as apartheid, Zionism, racism, and this is a matter of principle.

Therefore, what you are talking about as apartheid was disappeared and it could not be accepted by civilized world, this Zionism and aggression of racism is also condemned. [...]

BLITZER: Does your support for the removal of Zionism mean you want to see Israel destroyed?

SOLTANIEH: I have already explained to you and reflected to you the policy echoed by our supreme leader.

It means that if in that region, the divine religion followers of the Jews, Christians and Muslims, that all three are very respectful -- and we have Jews in Iran, which are peacefully living and they are represented in our parliament, they are fully respected -- if they come with the Palestinians, homeless Palestinians, to come and through following the democratic process will decide on a government and live in peace as they were living a thousand years of coexistence of these divine religions, Iran will support because we are looking for and we support peaceful settlement of the whole issue and peaceful coexistence of these divine religions in the Middle East. Let's hope for the peace.

BLITZER: But should there be a state of Israel?

SOLTANIEH: I think I've already answered to you. If Israel is a synonym and will give the indication of Zionism mentality, no.

But if you are going to conclude that we have said the people there have to be removed or we they have to be massacred or so, this is fabricated, unfortunate selective approach to what the mentality and policy of Islamic Republic of Iran is. I have to correct, and I did so.

So it seems that the statements by Ahmadinejad, or at the very least official Iranian policy, is much more nuanced than the Western media would have us believe. Furthermore, it is important to remember that Ahmadinejad does not control Iranian foreign policy. In an interesting article in the New York Review about Iran and the bomb, Christopher de Bellaigue has this to say:

Iran's enmity toward Israel is more nuanced than Ahmadinejad's statements suggest. The President's declarations that Israel should be "wiped off the map," and that the Holocaust is a "myth," understandably aroused fears that Iran might be considering an attack on Israel. But Iran's senior civilian and military officials have insisted that Iran will strike Israel only if Israel strikes first. More significantly, the President and supreme leader have both reiterated Iran's longstanding demand for a referendum on the status of Israel that would involve all Palestinian refugees. This official position would not seem to be consistent with an ambition to destroy Israel by force, least of all by using nuclear arms, which would endanger the very Palestinians whom the Iranians claim to be protecting. Several senior Iranian officials, including Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president who heads a powerful arbitration council in Tehran, have not disguised their irritation with the President's comments. But Ahmadinejad has benefited from the furor. By raising his prestige among hard-line Islamists around the world, the President has made it harder for his domestic opponents, who include Rafsanjani, to undermine him.

I will post the English translation later this week, once my Iranian colleagues have had the chance to get back to me.

Tony Judt weighs in on the Israel lobby in today's Times. He reminds us that criticizing Israel is not synonymous with being an anti-semite and that there is a debate to be had on the topic that Americans seem afraid of.

The damage that is done by America's fear of anti-Semitism when discussing Israel is threefold. It is bad for Jews: anti-Semitism is real enough (I know something about it, growing up Jewish in 1950's Britain), but for just that reason it should not be confused with political criticisms of Israel or its American supporters. It is bad for Israel: by guaranteeing it unconditional support, Americans encourage Israel to act heedless of consequences. The Israeli journalist Tom Segev described the Mearsheimer-Walt essay as "arrogant" but also acknowledged ruefully: "They are right. Had the United States saved Israel from itself, life today would be better ...the Israel Lobby in the United States harms Israel's true interests."

BUT above all, self-censorship is bad for the United States itself. Americans are denying themselves participation in a fast-moving international conversation. Daniel Levy (a former Israeli peace negotiator) wrote in Haaretz that the Mearsheimer-Walt essay should be a wake-up call, a reminder of the damage the Israel lobby is doing to both nations. But I would go further. I think this essay, by two "realist" political scientists with no interest whatsoever in the Palestinians, is a straw in the wind.

...the terms of strategic debate are shifting. East Asia grows daily in importance. Meanwhile our clumsy failure to re-cast the Middle East ? and its enduring implications for our standing there ? has come into sharp focus. American influence in that part of the world now rests almost exclusively on our power to make war: which means in the end that it is no influence at all. Above all, perhaps, the Holocaust is passing beyond living memory. In the eyes of a watching world, the fact that an Israeli soldier's great-grandmother died in Treblinka will not excuse his own misbehavior.

Thus it will not be self-evident to future generations of Americans why the imperial might and international reputation of the United States are so closely aligned with one small, controversial Mediterranean client state. It is already not at all self-evident to Europeans, Latin Americans, Africans or Asians. Why, they ask, has America chosen to lose touch with the rest of the international community on this issue? Americans may not like the implications of this question. But it is pressing. It bears directly on our international standing and influence; and it has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. We cannot ignore it.

There has been a lot of talk about the demographics of Isreal, but most people outside of Israel are unaware of the statistics. In the London Review, Ilan Pappe talks about the various Israeli plans to deal with the 'problem'.

Israel boosted its population with two massive Jewish immigrations, each of about a million people, in 1949 and in the 1980s. This kept the Palestinian proportion of the population down and today Palestinians account for nearly 20 per cent of the population of Israel (not counting the Occupied Territories). Ehud Olmert, the leader of Kadima and acting prime minister, thinks that if Israel stays in the Occupied Territories and its inhabitants are included in the Israeli population, Palestinians will outnumber Jews within 15 years. So he advocates hitkansut ? meaning 'convergence' or, better, 'ingathering' ? a policy that would leave several populous Palestinian areas outside direct Israeli control. But even if this consolidation takes place, there will still be a very large Palestinian population inside the 88 per cent of Palestine in which Olmert hopes to build the future, stable Jewish state. How large exactly we don't know: demographers in Israel belonging to the centre or the left provide a low estimate, which makes disengagement seem a reasonable solution, while those on the right tend to exaggerate the figure. But they all seem to agree that the demographic balance will not stay the same, given the higher birth-rate of Palestinians compared to Jews. Thus Olmert may well come to the conclusion that pull-outs are not the solution.

Once the 'Arabs' in Israel and the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories came to be thought of in the West as 'Muslims' it was easy to elicit support for Israel's demographic policies, at least where it counted: on Capitol Hill. But even in Europe there was no need, after 9/11, to explain why Israel has a 'demographic problem'. On 2 February 2003 the popular daily Maariv carried a typical headline: 'A quarter of the children in Israel are Muslims.' The piece went on to describe this fact as Israel's next 'ticking bomb'. The increase in the 'Muslim' population -- 2.4 per cent a year -- was not a problem anymore, but a 'danger'.

Recently, I was at a conference about the Israelo-Palestinian conflict, and they spoke of the two-state solution (in which the Palestinians had a "viable state") as the only solution to the conflict.

I seem to be the only person that I know of, besides the late Edward Said, who is for a single-state solution. I agree with Pappe, but in the end, all he does is describe the demographic situation Israel. He does not mention (at least not explicitely) what seems to me to be the obvious result of such a "demographic problem." If 20 percent of Israeli citizens are Arabic, and this proportion increases by 2.4 percent each year, it is only a matter of time (less than 15 years) before the majority of the population is Arab, or "non-Jewish" as the official statistics would call them.

This obviously means that even if we completely disregard the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Isreal will still have to decide between being a democratic state or a Jewish state: being both is impossible in the long run. Some Isrealis have decided that the answer to this is "populaiton transfer," otherwise known as ethnic cleansing. In an interview by Haaretz (part 1 and part 2) the Israeli historian Benny Morris talks about the past and future of Israeli ethnic cleansing:

Ben-Gurion was a transferist. He understood that there could be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its midst. There would be no such state. It would not be able to exist.

...Ben-Gurion was right. If he had not done what he did, a state would not have come into being. That has to be clear. It is impossible to evade it. Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here.

...There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing. I know that this term is completely negative in the discourse of the 21st century, but when the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide - the annihilation of your people - I prefer ethnic cleansing.

...A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on.

...Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history.

...If you are asking me whether I support the transfer and expulsion of the Arabs from the West Bank, Gaza and perhaps even from Galilee and the Triangle, I say not at this moment. I am not willing to be a partner to that act. In the present circumstances it is neither moral nor realistic. The world would not allow it, the Arab world would not allow it, it would destroy the Jewish society from within. But I am ready to tell you that in other circumstances, apocalyptic ones, which are liable to be realized in five or ten years, I can see expulsions. If we find ourselves with atomic weapons around us, or if there is a general Arab attack on us and a situation of warfare on the front with Arabs in the rear shooting at convoys on their way to the front, acts of expulsion will be entirely reasonable. They may even be essential.

...The Israeli Arabs are a time bomb. Their slide into complete Palestinization has made them an emissary of the enemy that is among us. They are a potential fifth column. In both demographic and security terms they are liable to undermine the state. So that if Israel again finds itself in a situation of existential threat, as in 1948, it may be forced to act as it did then. If we are attacked by Egypt (after an Islamist revolution in Cairo) and by Syria, and chemical and biological missiles slam into our cities, and at the same time Israeli Palestinians attack us from behind, I can see an expulsion situation. It could happen. If the threat to Israel is existential, expulsion will be justified.

So this is what it boils down to: the rationalization of ethnic cleansing. Isreali Jews will not want to accept being a minority in a mainly Arab state, but I'm not sure that they have much of an option, barring the extreme measures mentioned by Morris, which it would be difficult to imagine the US intervening to stop and equally difficult to imagine the international community letting happen.

At the end of the day, I think it would be better for both Israeli Jews and Palestinians to make an overture to the creation of a democratic binational state along the lines of Belgium (called Isreal in Hebrew and Palestine in Arabic), which would grant equal rights to both Arabs and Jews, rather than being forced to do so by the international community, much like South Africa was. Because in the end, if Israel goes down the road that South Africa did, she always runs the risk of ending up like Zimbabwe, where a long-opressed majority turns the tables and forces out the minority.

Today's Times has an editorial about inaction in Darfur. It's always nice to see the "agenda setting" press take up the issue, and it's particularly pleasant to see the Times taking not only the West, but also Arab and African leaders to task for ignoring the Darfuris' plight:

Where are the Muslims who took to the streets to protest Danish cartoons? Where are the African leaders who demanded boycotts of South Africa?

...We're waiting. But time is one thing that what is left of the Darfur population doesn't really have. We're glad to see that a rally is planned in Washington on April 30. We're glad to hear that Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick invited Darfur refugees to the State Department. Now President Bush needs to do the same thing. A photo op at the White House with Darfur refugees would go a long way toward embarrassing the government of Sudan.

That should also embarrass the rest of the Security Council members, like China, Qatar, Ghana and Tanzania, that continue to give diplomatic cover to Sudan. Rwanda should have taught us all something; it's tragic that it apparently has not.

The London Review recently published an article on the Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer, a University of Chicago political scientist, and Stephen Walt, a Harvard government professor. (An unabridged version is available here.)

There has been a lot of talk about the paper, most of it pretty inane, like this piece from the Wall Street Journal, which seems to try to give the anti-semitism defense a veneer of resectability by slightly nuancing it:

The authors are at pains to note that the Israel Lobby is by no means exclusively Jewish, and that not every American Jew is a part of it. Fair enough. But has there ever been an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that does not share its basic features? Dual loyalty, disloyalty, manipulation of the media, financial manipulation of the political system, duping the goyim (gentiles) and getting them to fight their wars, sponsoring and covering up acts of gratuitous cruelty against an innocent people -- every canard ever alleged of the Jews is here made about the Israel Lobby and its cause. No wonder former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke was quick to endorse the article, calling it a "great step forward."

I do not mean to suggest that Messrs. Mearsheimer and Walt are themselves anti-Semitic. But as outgoing Harvard President Larry Summers once noted, what may not be anti-Semitic in intent may yet be anti-Semitic in effect. By giving aid and comfort to people who have no trouble substituting the word "Jews" for "Israel Lobby," the Mearsheimer-Walt article is anti-Semitic in effect.

Not all of the criticisms, however, stoop to such non-arguments. This piece by the University of Chicago's Daniel Drezner focuses on what he sees as the empirical problems of the piece:

Walt and Mearsheimer should not be criticized as anti-Semites, because that's patently false. They should be criticized for doing piss-poor, monocausal social science.

To repeat, the main empirical problems with the article are that:

A) They fail to demonstrate that Israel is a net strategic liability;
B) They ascribe U.S. foreign policy behavior almost exclusively to the activities of the "Israel Lobby"; and
C) They omit consderation of contradictory policies and countervailing foreign policy lobbies.

At the end of the day, however, the piece that I found to be the most interesting came from Ha'aretz:

It sometimes takes AIPAC omnipotence too much at face value and disregards key moments - such as the Bush senior/Baker loan guarantees episode and Clinton's showdown with Netanyahu over the Wye River Agreement. The study largely ignores AIPAC run-ins with more dovish Israeli administrations, most notably when it undermined Yitzhak Rabin, and how excessive hawkishness is often out of step with mainstream American Jewish opinion, turning many, especially young American Jews, away from taking any interest in Israel.

Yet their case is a potent one: that identification of American with Israeli interests can be principally explained via the impact of the Lobby in Washington, and in limiting the parameters of public debate, rather than by virtue of Israel being a vital strategic asset or having a uniquely compelling moral case for support (beyond, as the authors point out, the right to exist, which is anyway not in jeopardy). The study is at its most devastating when it describes how the Lobby "stifles debate by intimidation" and at its most current when it details how America's interests (and ultimately Israel's, too) are ill-served by following the Lobby's agenda.

I tend to agree that the Israel lobby is pushing a foreign policy agenda that is often detrimental to American national interest and usually gives the opposite appearance of being the fair broker that the US tries to sell itself as in the Middle East. And while idiots like David Duke might use articles like this to push their elementary racism, we know that there is a lobby and that it is effective, and that we should not let bigots like him dictate what is acceptable and what is off limits for reasonable discussion. Like Mearsheimer and Walt say in their paper:

In its basic operations, the Israel Lobby is no different from the farm lobby, steel or textile workers' unions, or other ethnic lobbies. There is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway US policy: the Lobby's activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise it are only doing what other special interest groups do, but doing it very much better. By contrast, pro-Arab interest groups, in so far as they exist at all, are weak, which makes the Israel Lobby?s task even easier.

Another fair account of the paper appears in an Op-Ed aricle by Nicholas Goldberg in the LA Times:

The idea of a powerful "Jewish lobby" that has its gnarled fingers in the machinery of the government is an old and repugnant canard. Along with the Jews who supposedly own the media and those who reputedly control the banks, the cabal of sinister, third-column Hebrews who whisper into the ears of our leaders is a classic in the traditional checklist of anti-Semitic fulminations.

So it's no surprise that in the modern era, even to broach the idea of a "Jewish lobby" is unacceptable. It's just not done in polite society -- even in situations in which there's some truth to it. Few would deny, after all, that there are people who lobby for various Jewish issues, including, of course, Israel (just as there are a lot of Jews working in Hollywood and just as Jews do own the New York Times). But even though we know these things, we generally don't talk about them.

...So what are we to make of [the article]? Is it anti-Semitism or honesty? Propaganda cloaked in academic respectability -- or a courageous willingness to identify the elephant in the room?

...It seems silly to deny that a powerful lobby on behalf of Israel exists. The real question is how pernicious it is. Does it, in fact, persuade us to act counter to our national interest -- or is it a positive thing, as publisher Mortimer Zuckerman suggests?

His answer to this question is to read the article yourself. I couldn't agree more.


UPDATE: The London Review speaks out against charges of anti-semitism.

Also, Noam Chomsky weighs in.

There has been a lot of talk lately about nuclear prolifilation and double standards, particularly with the nuclear fuel deal struck between the US and India, which has not signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. (The only other countries that have not signed are Israel and Pakistan.) The claim of double standards is that the US has turned a blind eye to ISrael's nuclear weapons program, yet is threatening Iran, which has signed the Treaty, with sanctions for their pursuit of nuclear technology. The treaty stipulates the following:

Each nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to transfer to any recipient whatsoever nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly; and not in any way to assist, encourage, or induce any non-nuclear-weapon State to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices, or control over such weapons or explosive devices.

While North Korea was a signatory, it pulled out of the treaty in 2003, which does not seem to be against the text of the treaty:

Each Party shall in exercising its national sovereignty have the right to withdraw from the Treaty if it decides that extraordinary events, related to the subject matter of this Treaty, have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country. It shall give notice of such withdrawal to all other Parties to the Treaty and to the United Nations Security Council three months in advance. Such notice shall include a statement of the extraordinary events it regards as having jeopardized its supreme interests.

So in response to claims of a double standard, both in comparison to Israel and India (or even Pakistan), Avner Cohen wrote a piece in Ha'aretz suggesting that Israel come clean on the bomb (print-ready version). His argument is twofold, legal and "existential." Legally, Cohen argues, Israel never signed the treaty, whereas Iran did:

The attempt to put Israel and Iran on the same level, or even to create a concrete political connection between them, is ignorant, unfair and biased. First of all, from the point of view of international law: whereas Iran is a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and is committed to comply with it, Israel, like India and Pakistan, is not a signatory to the treaty and therefore is not beholden to a formal commitment. Whereas Iran has been caught in flagrant breach of its international commitments, Israel has not broken such commitments. In other words, like the seven other nuclear states in the world, and in stark contrast to Iran, Israel has never relinquished the right to develop nuclear weaponry.

Here, he is only partially right. While nuclear powers like France, the US, Britian, Russia and China never gave up their right to have nuclear weapons, they did sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, unlike Israel, Pakistan and India. So it's not really fair to put Iran, Israel and, say, Russia in the same basket. It's hard to know what to make of countries that refuse to sign an international treaty like that one. Legally, they're not bound to any course of action, but practically speaking, are countries that renege on a treaty any safer than those that never signed in the first place? Furthermore, if we're speaking in purely legal terms, Iran is within its rights to develop nuclear power, because the treaty explicitely ensures the right to pursue "nuclear energy for peaceful purposes":

Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination and in conformity with Articles I and II of this Treaty.

But let's not be coy. We know that even if Iran were to not produce nuclear weapons immediately, just positioning itself to be able to do so in short notice would make it a dominant force in the region. But there is little that the US or Israel, Iran's rival in the region, could do about that, legally speaking, that is.

Cohen's second argument is that Israel should somehow be given carte blanche for nuclear weapons, since she has always and still faces an "existential threat."

According to foreign reports, Israel began to develop its Samson option in the 1950s, while it was establishing a state for a people still in the shadow of conflagration, in a hostile geopolitical environment that was opposed to its very existence. It found itself committed to the creation of an insurance policy within the pre-1967 borders, without external guarantees for its existence. In the political climate of that time, a decade after the Holocaust, Israel had perhaps the strongest strategic and moral justification for turning to the nuclear option, certainly no less than France or China, which also began the atomic journey at that time.

Not only is Iran not under existential threat - its nuclear aspirations are an issue that puts it on a collision course with the world. Even the leaders of North Korea are not daring to declare their aspirations to wipe countries off the map, as the president of Iran has declared with respect to Israel.

This is essentially an argument for Israeli exceptionalism, and it brings up the question of whether some countries should be allowed to have nuclear weapons but not others.

Cohen is confusing moral and strategic justifications for nuclear weapons here. Sure, Israel had strategic reasons for pursuing nuclear weapons, but so does Iran. We all know that having nuclear weapons changes the equation and makes countries like the US much more likely to choose diplomacy over military force. Nuclear weapons are a deterrent to regime change. Personally, I think that the Middle East should be a nucler weapons-free zone, but for that to happen, Israel would have to realize that it is not possible for it to remain the sole nuclear power in the region. The mere fact that Israel has nuclear weapons is enough to encourage its neighbors to catch up.

In the end, the only real justification for one country to have nuclear weapons while another is not allowed is that of power politics. Those that have weapons are in a position to deny these weapons to other countries. It would be difficult to come up with criteria to decide otherwise. Would these criteria be economic? Social? Should there be a committee that would take these things into consideration and then make a ruling? This would be very complicated, and as things stand, it would most likely be the Security Council that would make that call, and of course for those five countries, each of which is a nuclear power, there should be no nuclear proliferation. For these countries, what is good for the goose is not good for the gander.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that other countries (North Korea, Isreal, India and Pakistan) would clandestinely pursue nuclear weapons. And knowing that the nuclear powers of the world will not willingly allow any other countries to obtain nuclear weapons, the best way to ensure non-proliferation would seem to be to ensure that they have no reason to seek them. And in this case, Israel should start asking itself if it's preferable to be a nuclear power among others in the region or to be a non-nuclear power in a nuclear-free Middle East.



Note:

On why and how the world could live with a nuclear Iran, here are two interesting articles from the Times:

Suppose we just let Iran have the bomb
We can live with a nuclear Iran

Irshad Manji asks an interesting question in today's Times when explaining how she learned to love the wall that has made life for many Palestinians even harder than it already was. She wonders if an effort to prevent suicide bombings justifies further hardship for Palestinians.

She answers yes, presumably because "before the barrier, there was the bomber." Even if she would prefer to overlook the fact that before the bomber, there was the occupation, Ms. Manji should concede that there are any number of ways to ensure security for a state, but that many of them are cruel, immoral and against international law.

An important point was made by Israel's Chief Justice in his ruling on the wall, in which he quoted his judgment prohibiting the torturing of Palestinian detainees: "This is the destiny of a democracy: she does not see all means as acceptable, and the ways of her enemies are not always open before her. A democracy must sometimes fight with one arm tied behind her back."

Those who proclaim their love for the wall would do well to remember this.

Public Radio International's This American Life recently ran a very interesting episode about Guantanamo Bay and habeas corpus, called Habeas Schmaebeas (real audio). They interview two people who have been released from the camp that's not quite in Cuba and not quite in the US where over 500 people have been imprisoned without being charged with a crime. One of the people interviewed is a Pakestani man named Bader who was arrested there (and handed over to American authorities) for running a satirical Urdu language newspaper. Jack Hitt does a good job dispelling some of the misinformation about the people who are being held in Guantanamo Bay:

We're told over and over that these prisoners are so terrible that we need an off-shore facility away from US law to hold them. But then there's Bader. And every day, more storie like his are coming out, and they raise the question: Is Guantanamo a camp full of terrorists, or a camp full of mistakes?

He quotes Bush and Cheney, who had this to say about the matter:

Bush: "These are people that got scooped up off a battlefield attempting to kill U.S. troops. And I want to make sure, before they're released, that they don't come back to kill again."

Cheney: "The people that are there are people we picked up on the battlefield, primarily in Afghanistan. They're terrorists. They're bomb makers. They're facilitators of terror. They're members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban."

Then he quotes Seton Hall University Law School's Report on Guantanamo Detainees, which is based on written determinations the Government has produced for detainees that it has designated as enemy combatants, which were prepared after the Combatant Status Review Tribunals that began in 2004. The report's findings were as follows:

1. Fifty-five percent (55%) of the detainees are not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or its coalition allies.

2. Only 8% of the detainees were characterized as al Qaeda fighters. Of the remaining detainees, 40% have no definitive connection with al Qaeda at all and 18% are have no definitive affiliation with either al Qaeda or the Taliban.

3. The Government has detained numerous persons based on mere affiliations with a large number of groups that in fact, are not on the Department of Homeland Security terrorist watchlist. Moreover, the nexus between such a detainee and such organizations varies considerably. Eight percent are detained because they are deemed "fighters for;" 30% considered "members of;" a large majority ? 60% -- are detained merely because they are "associated with" a group or groups the Government asserts are terrorist organizations. For 2% of the prisoners their nexus to any terrorist group is unidentified.

4. Only 5% of the detainees were captured by United States forces. 86% of the detainees were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to United States custody. This 86% of the detainees captured by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance were handed over to the United States at a time in which the United States offered large bounties for capture of suspected enemies.

5. Finally, the population of persons deemed not to be enemy combatants ? mostly Uighers ? are in fact accused of more serious allegations than a great many persons still deemed to be enemy combatants.

Another reports done on Guantanamo, which came out at about the same time as Seton Hall's can be found here and here.

These reports confirm that the remarks that Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney have been making about how these people are the "worst of the worst" and have been "scooped up off a battle field" are patently false. The issue that is perhaps the most disconcerting is that 86 percent of Gitmo detainees were arrested by Pakistani or Northern Alliance forces at a time when the US was offering a large bounty for turning in suspected Taliban or al Qaeda members. One example of a flyer informing Afghans of the bounty read:

You can receive millions of dollars for helping the Anti-Taliban Force catch Al-Qaida and Taliban murderers. This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life. Pay for livestock and doctors and school books and housing for all your people.

This is a copy of another flyer:



It seems obvious that most of these Pakistani and Afghan (and sometimes Chinese) dirt farmers being passed off as the "worst of the worst" were just at the wrong place at the wrong time. The US government doesn't seemed too concerned about giving them a trial or habeas corpus rights, and I can say that being held incognito for years and tortured and humiliated on a daily basis is enough to turn even a poor Chinese dirt farmer into an anti-American terrorist.

Here are a few interesting links that I've come across in the last few days:

A story from ABC about Chinese Muslims wrongly imprisoned in Guantanamo and then finally released after 4.5 years. They couldn't be sent to China since the government there persecutes Uighurs, and despite being found innocent of any charges (NLEC, or No Longer Enemy Combattant, in Guantanamo Bay terminology - Mr Kafka could not have made this up if he had tried), being put away by the Americans for 4.5 years is enough to garner a bad reputation. So apparently, no country would take them, the US included, with the single and solitary exception of Albania:

We are very pleased that the Albanian government and the Albanian people opened their hearts and welcomed us. Despite the fact that all the strong, powerful, democratic countries are able and capable of accepting us, they did not do that. We are having some problems ... there are no Uighurs in Albania, and we don't speak the Albanian language. ...

Were hoping that the United States government would recognize the mistake that it has done and accept, allow us to enter the United States. U.S. government captured us, U.S. government incarcerated us, locked us up in prison, and U.S. government said that we were not a threat and should be released.

Uighur-Americans came forward, made an offer to the United States government to accept us into Uighur-American society and community. They even went into the courts and contacted the lawyers and wrote a letter to the U.S. government officials asking them to consider releasing us into the United States. Unfortunately, it did not happen, a rather disappointing decision.

Otherwise, the Post ran a really interesting first person piece about Iraq, the Republic of Fear, which makes one fearful that Baghdad is slowly but surely turning into Beirut, circa 1980:

Today, the Americans are just one more militia lost in the anarchy. They, too, are killing Iraqis. ...

Sectarian and ethnic cleansing has since continued apace, as mixed neighborhoods are "purified." In Amriya, dead bodies are being found on the main street at a rate of three or five or seven a day. People are afraid to approach the bodies, or call for an ambulance or the police, for fear that they, too, will be found dead the following day. In Abu Ghraib, Dora, Amriya and other once-diverse neighborhoods, Shiites are being forced to leave. In Maalif and Shaab, Sunnis are being targeted.

The world wonders if Iraq is on the brink of civil war, while Iraqis fear calling it one, knowing the fate such a description would portend. In truth, the civil war started long before Samarra and long before the first uprisings. It started when U.S. troops arrived in Baghdad. It began when Sunnis discovered what they had lost, and Shiites learned what they had gained. And the worst is yet to come.

This made me remember reading a piece in Harper's that said that maybe the best thing for Iraq would be for the US to withdraw and let them have their full-fledged civil war. (It was by Edward Luttwak and was adapted from a piece in Foreign Policy, which can be found here) The version in Harper's ends like this:

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

It's hard for me to know what to make of this idea. I'm not convinced that an all-out civil war would result in anything but a division of Iraq, or even worse, a regional war that would involve Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and probably Turkey as well. The latter is obviously a horrible idea, but I haven't decided how I feel about the former.

Finally, the atrocities in Haditha make me think that maybe Luttuk and Rosen are right and the US should just get out as soon as possible.

I can't get over this. I know that similar things happened in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and I know that we're talking about kids who have been put in an extremely dangerous and stressful situation, and that sometimes people just crack. But I just don't understand how someone can shoot a one-legged man in a wheelchair nine times. Or how someone can shoot a 1-year old baby. Say that again: a 1-year old baby. I just don't understand.

At some point on Nov. 19, Marines in an armored convoy arrived at Haditha's hospital. They placed the bodies of the victims in the garden of the hospital and left without explanation, said Mohammed al-Hadithi, one of the hospital officials who helped carry the bodies inside. By some accounts, some of the corpses were burnt.

The remains of the 24 lie today in a cemetery called Martyrs' Graveyard. Stray dogs scrounge in the deserted homes. "Democracy assassinated the family that was here," graffiti on one of the houses declared.

I just came across a piece by the New Republic's Lawrence Kaplan in the Los Angeles Times entitled, If Iraq was wrong, is Darfur right?

The New Republic has recently come out with an issue on Darfur (only some of which is available to non-subscribers), and they come out as a whole for American intervention in Darfur. Kaplan's piece, however, brings up the question of Iraq and asks why it is all right to intervene in Darfur but not in Iraq:

As their criticism of the particulars of the Iraq war has hardened into a broader indictment of U.S. foreign policy, the mostly progressive voices calling for action in Darfur have become caught in a bind of their own devising. Even as they demand intervention in Sudan, they excoriate Washington for employing U.S. military power without due respect to the opinion of the international community and against nations that pose no imminent threat to our own -- which is to say, precisely the terms under which U.S. power would have to be employed in the name of saving Darfur.

He then goes on to argue that neither the African Union nor the UN will intervene or is capable of intervening, leaving the US as the only capable, if not willing, power equipped to intervene.

To my mind, the main reason why I am for intervention in Darfur but was against it in Iraq can be summed up in a single word: genocide. It's happening in Darfur but wasn't happening in Iraq. Now had the Anfal campaign of the late 1980s been continuing, I would have been for intervention in Iraq. This is not to say that genocide should be the threshold for international intervention, but it would at least be a good start. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) responds similarly to Kaplan's jab against him:

Once President Bush and former Secretary of State Colin Powell used the word "genocide" to describe the carnage in Darfur, the United States and every other civilized nation had a moral imperative to act. Those who find it painful to explain the deception and misinformation preceding our invasion of Iraq should not hide behind the victims in Darfur.

As for whether or not the AU or UN could or would stop the genocide, the AU is already there but lacks a proper and muscular mandate that would allow their forces to protect civilians. As it is, they can only protect themselves. Likewise, when and if a UN force intervenes, it would be important for them to have a good mandate and be properly funded, because we know what happens to underfunded blue helmets without a real mandate. As it stands, there are 7,000 AU troops already in Darfur, which could be folded into a UN force; France has at least 1,000 troops in Chad already; and if the UK could be convinced to provide the 5,000 troops that they offered in 2004, then that would make a force of 13,000. Other nations like South Africa and Ghana could also donate more troops, and the US could help shoulder the financial and logistics costs of such an intervention.

While writing this, I've come across an interesting (and much more detailed) plan by the International Crisis Group To Save Darfur, which is similar to my idea:

Crisis Group has long contended that because AMIS has reached the outer limits of its competence, and a UN mission authorised today would not be fully ready to take over from it for some six months, a distinct and separate multinational force should be sent to Darfur to bridge that gap and help stabilise the immediate situation. We have argued, and continue to believe, that NATO would be best from a practical military point of view. Unfortunately, political opposition to this in Khartoum, within the AU and even perhaps within the Atlantic Alliance itself, means it is not achievable at this time.

What we now propose, therefore, is a compromise driven by the urgent need for a more robust force in Darfur. A militarily capable UN member state -- France seems most promising since it already has troops and aircraft in the area -- should offer to the Security Council to go now to Darfur, wearing blue helmets, as the lead nation in the first phase of the incoming UN mission. It could be joined from the outset by forces from one or two other militarily capable UN members (and would probably need to be if the desirable target of around 5,000 personnel for this force is to be achieved). This stabilisation force would be a self-contained, separately commanded UN mission with identified functional or geographic divisions of responsibility that would work beside AMIS and through a liaison unit at its headquarters until arrangements were in place for a 1 October transition to the full UN mission. That full mission would need to be recruited from the best AMIS elements as well as a wider circle of Asian and other member states -- no easy task at a time when several large UN peacekeeping missions in Africa and elsewhere have exhausted the capabilities of many contribution candidates.

The U.S. and other NATO states should respond generously and quickly to requests from it or AMIS to provide logistical help as well as regular access to satellite imagery, air mobility and close air support, especially to deter or react to egregious movements of men or heavy weapons in the border area.

They finish by coming up with a list of recommendations for each of the major parties involved (with the exception of the belligerent parties):

RECOMMENDATIONS

To the African Union:

1. Request the immediate deployment of a UN-mandated stabilisation force to help bolster the AMIS troops and focus on the Chad-Sudan border and the Tawila-Graida corridor.

2. Seek quick negotiation of a single, enhanced ceasefire document to remove the ambiguities of the existing overlapping agreements.

3. Begin immediately to map the location of forces in Darfur so as to manage and enforce the ceasefire better.

4. Begin immediately identifying, defining and profiling the government-allied militias.

5. Improve the reporting mechanisms and procedures for monitoring ceasefire violations and urgently revive and upgrade the compliance and sanctions mechanisms of the ceasefire.

6. Negotiate a series of humanitarian ground rules, in collaboration with the UN, to help hold the parties accountable for the protection of humanitarian operations in their respective areas.

To the United Nations Security Council:

7. Authorise a two-phase intervention in Darfur under Chapter Seven of the Charter, with the following elements:

(a) for the first phase, to be accomplished within a month, a lead nation would serve as the advance element of the full UN mission by sending the bulk of an initial 5,000 troops to Darfur, with three main stabilisation tasks:

i. interdiction of military activities across the Chad-Darfur border;

ii. protection of civilians in Darfur, primarily in the Tawilla-Graida corridor; and

iii. rapid-reaction support of AMIS forces until the transition to a full-fledged UN peace support operation in October 2006.

(b) for the second phase, immediate planning for a peace support operation of some 15,000 troops -- none of whom should be diverted from the mission of the existing UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) -- with a mandate emphasising civilian protection, ceasefire enforcement and monitoring of the Chad-Sudan border, to take over from AMIS as of 1 October 2006.

8. Strengthen the existing sanctions regime by implementing the recommendations in the 30 January 2006 report of the Panel of Experts.

9. Authorise the Secretariat's peacekeeping department (DPKO) to begin planning on an urgent basis and together with the AU both phases of this operation, with priority tasks to include:

(a) identifying areas for early cooperation in Darfur, such as immediate deployment of UN experts to help support the establishment of a functioning ceasefire commission secretariat and the deployment of human rights monitors and translators, including women, to help improve the reporting capacity of AMIS; and

(b) identifying the lead nation to deploy in the initial phase to support AMIS by performing the tasks set out in recommendation 7(a) above and serve as the advance element of the full UN mission.

To Donor Governments:

10. Convene an early pledging conference to ensure that AMIS is fully funded until the UN mission can take over in October 2006.

To the U.S., the EU and its member states and others with a strong interest in regional peace and stability:

11. Undertake major diplomatic efforts to:

(a) persuade Sudan to accept and the AU to confirm transition of AMIS into a strong UN peacekeeping mission as of 1 October 2006 and request in the interim dispatch of an advance force of some 5,000 blue-helmets to assist AMIS by performing essential stabilisation tasks;

(b) persuade the Security Council to authorise a mission of some 15,000, including the strongest AMIS elements and with a strong Chapter VII mandate focused on civilian protection; and

(c) identify the lead nation to contribute the bulk of the advance element to assist AMIS and perform essential stabilisation tasks immediately upon Security Council authorisation, and be prepared to help with all necessary material and logistical support.

12. Concurrently with efforts to strengthen international forces on the ground, pursue the other elements of a coordinated three-part strategy to resolve the Darfur conflict by:

(a) reinforcing AU efforts to negotiate an enhanced ceasefire and a political settlement at Abuja, including by naming special envoys; and

(b) seeking accountability and an end to impunity by enforcing the Security Council's sanction regime and supporting human rights monitoring mechanisms and the work of the ICC.

An article in the Post reports today that Iranian President Ahmadinejad sent a letter to President Bush in order to propose "new solutions for getting out of international problems and the current fragile situation in the world." It mentions the quote put forth by the Times that Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be "wiped off the map." Since this comment was reported on, it has been used as a reason why Iran should not have nuclear weapons. I've been somewhat skeptical about the translation, and as it turns out, there is some disagreement about what was actually said. This disagreement has pitted Christopher Hitchens against Juan Cole, the latter being the only one of the two who actually speaks Farsi. A good summary of the online fight can be found here.

The actual sentence in question seems to be this: "een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad." I don't speak Farsi, but several of my colleagues are Iranian, and I've sent them the text to see what they think about it. The only word I can recognize is qods which is Farsi for al Quds, which is Jerusalem in English. Cole's translation is "the Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem must [vanish from] from the page of time." As it turns out, the Israeli group Memri offers a translation that is very similar to Cole's ("eliminated from the pages of history").

As it turns out, after the comments, the Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki denied the remarks:

Mottaki also denied during a press conference in Brussels that Tehran wanted to see Israel "wiped off the map."

"Nobody can remove a country from the map. This is a misunderstanding in Europe of what our president mentioned," he said. "How is it possible to remove a country from the map? He is talking about the regime. We do not recognize legally this regime."

Another denial came on CNN's Late Edition from Iran's ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Ali Asghar Soltanieh:

SOLTANIEH: The supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran has announced, more than two years, and few cases, the Western media have reflected to public of the world, that if the divine religions -- followers of the divine religions, Jews, Christians and Muslims, in that area follow a referendum, democratic referendum, and are one (ph) with homeless Palestinians, Iranian government and Iranian people would respect their decision.

Therefore, these are fabricated news that they are threatening and using this as an excuse for the military aggression or the aggressive policy. [...]

BLITZER: I have to wrap this up, but I want to get your response to this issue of Israel because it's become such a prominent issue in this whole discussion over nuclear plans that Iran may or may not have. This is what the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said on October 26 at that World Without Zionism conference.

He said, "Israel must be wiped off the map of the world, and god willing, with the force of god behind it, we shall soon experience a world without the United States and Zionists."

You understand why people in the West, especially here in the United States, are so concerned about your program, your nuclear program, given those kinds of direct threats against Israel, which happens to be a strong ally of the United States.

SOLTANIEH: I want to very briefly remind you that the policy of Islamic Republic of Iran and according to spirit and letter of our constitution is against any sort of school of thought or regime such as apartheid, Zionism, racism, and this is a matter of principle.

Therefore, what you are talking about as apartheid was disappeared and it could not be accepted by civilized world, this Zionism and aggression of racism is also condemned. [...]

BLITZER: Does your support for the removal of Zionism mean you want to see Israel destroyed?

SOLTANIEH: I have already explained to you and reflected to you the policy echoed by our supreme leader.

It means that if in that region, the divine religion followers of the Jews, Christians and Muslims, that all three are very respectful -- and we have Jews in Iran, which are peacefully living and they are represented in our parliament, they are fully respected -- if they come with the Palestinians, homeless Palestinians, to come and through following the democratic process will decide on a government and live in peace as they were living a thousand years of coexistence of these divine religions, Iran will support because we are looking for and we support peaceful settlement of the whole issue and peaceful coexistence of these divine religions in the Middle East. Let's hope for the peace.

BLITZER: But should there be a state of Israel?

SOLTANIEH: I think I've already answered to you. If Israel is a synonym and will give the indication of Zionism mentality, no.

But if you are going to conclude that we have said the people there have to be removed or we they have to be massacred or so, this is fabricated, unfortunate selective approach to what the mentality and policy of Islamic Republic of Iran is. I have to correct, and I did so.

So it seems that the statements by Ahmadinejad, or at the very least official Iranian policy, is much more nuanced than the Western media would have us believe. Furthermore, it is important to remember that Ahmadinejad does not control Iranian foreign policy. In an interesting article in the New York Review about Iran and the bomb, Christopher de Bellaigue has this to say:

Iran's enmity toward Israel is more nuanced than Ahmadinejad's statements suggest. The President's declarations that Israel should be "wiped off the map," and that the Holocaust is a "myth," understandably aroused fears that Iran might be considering an attack on Israel. But Iran's senior civilian and military officials have insisted that Iran will strike Israel only if Israel strikes first. More significantly, the President and supreme leader have both reiterated Iran's longstanding demand for a referendum on the status of Israel that would involve all Palestinian refugees. This official position would not seem to be consistent with an ambition to destroy Israel by force, least of all by using nuclear arms, which would endanger the very Palestinians whom the Iranians claim to be protecting. Several senior Iranian officials, including Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president who heads a powerful arbitration council in Tehran, have not disguised their irritation with the President's comments. But Ahmadinejad has benefited from the furor. By raising his prestige among hard-line Islamists around the world, the President has made it harder for his domestic opponents, who include Rafsanjani, to undermine him.

I will post the English translation later this week, once my Iranian colleagues have had the chance to get back to me.

Tony Judt weighs in on the Israel lobby in today's Times. He reminds us that criticizing Israel is not synonymous with being an anti-semite and that there is a debate to be had on the topic that Americans seem afraid of.

The damage that is done by America's fear of anti-Semitism when discussing Israel is threefold. It is bad for Jews: anti-Semitism is real enough (I know something about it, growing up Jewish in 1950's Britain), but for just that reason it should not be confused with political criticisms of Israel or its American supporters. It is bad for Israel: by guaranteeing it unconditional support, Americans encourage Israel to act heedless of consequences. The Israeli journalist Tom Segev described the Mearsheimer-Walt essay as "arrogant" but also acknowledged ruefully: "They are right. Had the United States saved Israel from itself, life today would be better ...the Israel Lobby in the United States harms Israel's true interests."

BUT above all, self-censorship is bad for the United States itself. Americans are denying themselves participation in a fast-moving international conversation. Daniel Levy (a former Israeli peace negotiator) wrote in Haaretz that the Mearsheimer-Walt essay should be a wake-up call, a reminder of the damage the Israel lobby is doing to both nations. But I would go further. I think this essay, by two "realist" political scientists with no interest whatsoever in the Palestinians, is a straw in the wind.

...the terms of strategic debate are shifting. East Asia grows daily in importance. Meanwhile our clumsy failure to re-cast the Middle East ? and its enduring implications for our standing there ? has come into sharp focus. American influence in that part of the world now rests almost exclusively on our power to make war: which means in the end that it is no influence at all. Above all, perhaps, the Holocaust is passing beyond living memory. In the eyes of a watching world, the fact that an Israeli soldier's great-grandmother died in Treblinka will not excuse his own misbehavior.

Thus it will not be self-evident to future generations of Americans why the imperial might and international reputation of the United States are so closely aligned with one small, controversial Mediterranean client state. It is already not at all self-evident to Europeans, Latin Americans, Africans or Asians. Why, they ask, has America chosen to lose touch with the rest of the international community on this issue? Americans may not like the implications of this question. But it is pressing. It bears directly on our international standing and influence; and it has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. We cannot ignore it.

There has been a lot of talk about the demographics of Isreal, but most people outside of Israel are unaware of the statistics. In the London Review, Ilan Pappe talks about the various Israeli plans to deal with the 'problem'.

Israel boosted its population with two massive Jewish immigrations, each of about a million people, in 1949 and in the 1980s. This kept the Palestinian proportion of the population down and today Palestinians account for nearly 20 per cent of the population of Israel (not counting the Occupied Territories). Ehud Olmert, the leader of Kadima and acting prime minister, thinks that if Israel stays in the Occupied Territories and its inhabitants are included in the Israeli population, Palestinians will outnumber Jews within 15 years. So he advocates hitkansut ? meaning 'convergence' or, better, 'ingathering' ? a policy that would leave several populous Palestinian areas outside direct Israeli control. But even if this consolidation takes place, there will still be a very large Palestinian population inside the 88 per cent of Palestine in which Olmert hopes to build the future, stable Jewish state. How large exactly we don't know: demographers in Israel belonging to the centre or the left provide a low estimate, which makes disengagement seem a reasonable solution, while those on the right tend to exaggerate the figure. But they all seem to agree that the demographic balance will not stay the same, given the higher birth-rate of Palestinians compared to Jews. Thus Olmert may well come to the conclusion that pull-outs are not the solution.

Once the 'Arabs' in Israel and the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories came to be thought of in the West as 'Muslims' it was easy to elicit support for Israel's demographic policies, at least where it counted: on Capitol Hill. But even in Europe there was no need, after 9/11, to explain why Israel has a 'demographic problem'. On 2 February 2003 the popular daily Maariv carried a typical headline: 'A quarter of the children in Israel are Muslims.' The piece went on to describe this fact as Israel's next 'ticking bomb'. The increase in the 'Muslim' population -- 2.4 per cent a year -- was not a problem anymore, but a 'danger'.

Recently, I was at a conference about the Israelo-Palestinian conflict, and they spoke of the two-state solution (in which the Palestinians had a "viable state") as the only solution to the conflict.

I seem to be the only person that I know of, besides the late Edward Said, who is for a single-state solution. I agree with Pappe, but in the end, all he does is describe the demographic situation Israel. He does not mention (at least not explicitely) what seems to me to be the obvious result of such a "demographic problem." If 20 percent of Israeli citizens are Arabic, and this proportion increases by 2.4 percent each year, it is only a matter of time (less than 15 years) before the majority of the population is Arab, or "non-Jewish" as the official statistics would call them.

This obviously means that even if we completely disregard the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Isreal will still have to decide between being a democratic state or a Jewish state: being both is impossible in the long run. Some Isrealis have decided that the answer to this is "populaiton transfer," otherwise known as ethnic cleansing. In an interview by Haaretz (part 1 and part 2) the Israeli historian Benny Morris talks about the past and future of Israeli ethnic cleansing:

Ben-Gurion was a transferist. He understood that there could be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its midst. There would be no such state. It would not be able to exist.

...Ben-Gurion was right. If he had not done what he did, a state would not have come into being. That has to be clear. It is impossible to evade it. Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here.

...There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing. I know that this term is completely negative in the discourse of the 21st century, but when the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide - the annihilation of your people - I prefer ethnic cleansing.

...A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on.

...Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history.

...If you are asking me whether I support the transfer and expulsion of the Arabs from the West Bank, Gaza and perhaps even from Galilee and the Triangle, I say not at this moment. I am not willing to be a partner to that act. In the present circumstances it is neither moral nor realistic. The world would not allow it, the Arab world would not allow it, it would destroy the Jewish society from within. But I am ready to tell you that in other circumstances, apocalyptic ones, which are liable to be realized in five or ten years, I can see expulsions. If we find ourselves with atomic weapons around us, or if there is a general Arab attack on us and a situation of warfare on the front with Arabs in the rear shooting at convoys on their way to the front, acts of expulsion will be entirely reasonable. They may even be essential.

...The Israeli Arabs are a time bomb. Their slide into complete Palestinization has made them an emissary of the enemy that is among us. They are a potential fifth column. In both demographic and security terms they are liable to undermine the state. So that if Israel again finds itself in a situation of existential threat, as in 1948, it may be forced to act as it did then. If we are attacked by Egypt (after an Islamist revolution in Cairo) and by Syria, and chemical and biological missiles slam into our cities, and at the same time Israeli Palestinians attack us from behind, I can see an expulsion situation. It could happen. If the threat to Israel is existential, expulsion will be justified.

So this is what it boils down to: the rationalization of ethnic cleansing. Isreali Jews will not want to accept being a minority in a mainly Arab state, but I'm not sure that they have much of an option, barring the extreme measures mentioned by Morris, which it would be difficult to imagine the US intervening to stop and equally difficult to imagine the international community letting happen.

At the end of the day, I think it would be better for both Israeli Jews and Palestinians to make an overture to the creation of a democratic binational state along the lines of Belgium (called Isreal in Hebrew and Palestine in Arabic), which would grant equal rights to both Arabs and Jews, rather than being forced to do so by the international community, much like South Africa was. Because in the end, if Israel goes down the road that South Africa did, she always runs the risk of ending up like Zimbabwe, where a long-opressed majority turns the tables and forces out the minority.

Today's Times has an editorial about inaction in Darfur. It's always nice to see the "agenda setting" press take up the issue, and it's particularly pleasant to see the Times taking not only the West, but also Arab and African leaders to task for ignoring the Darfuris' plight:

Where are the Muslims who took to the streets to protest Danish cartoons? Where are the African leaders who demanded boycotts of South Africa?

...We're waiting. But time is one thing that what is left of the Darfur population doesn't really have. We're glad to see that a rally is planned in Washington on April 30. We're glad to hear that Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick invited Darfur refugees to the State Department. Now President Bush needs to do the same thing. A photo op at the White House with Darfur refugees would go a long way toward embarrassing the government of Sudan.

That should also embarrass the rest of the Security Council members, like China, Qatar, Ghana and Tanzania, that continue to give diplomatic cover to Sudan. Rwanda should have taught us all something; it's tragic that it apparently has not.

The London Review recently published an article on the Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer, a University of Chicago political scientist, and Stephen Walt, a Harvard government professor. (An unabridged version is available here.)

There has been a lot of talk about the paper, most of it pretty inane, like this piece from the Wall Street Journal, which seems to try to give the anti-semitism defense a veneer of resectability by slightly nuancing it:

The authors are at pains to note that the Israel Lobby is by no means exclusively Jewish, and that not every American Jew is a part of it. Fair enough. But has there ever been an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that does not share its basic features? Dual loyalty, disloyalty, manipulation of the media, financial manipulation of the political system, duping the goyim (gentiles) and getting them to fight their wars, sponsoring and covering up acts of gratuitous cruelty against an innocent people -- every canard ever alleged of the Jews is here made about the Israel Lobby and its cause. No wonder former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke was quick to endorse the article, calling it a "great step forward."

I do not mean to suggest that Messrs. Mearsheimer and Walt are themselves anti-Semitic. But as outgoing Harvard President Larry Summers once noted, what may not be anti-Semitic in intent may yet be anti-Semitic in effect. By giving aid and comfort to people who have no trouble substituting the word "Jews" for "Israel Lobby," the Mearsheimer-Walt article is anti-Semitic in effect.

Not all of the criticisms, however, stoop to such non-arguments. This piece by the University of Chicago's Daniel Drezner focuses on what he sees as the empirical problems of the piece:

Walt and Mearsheimer should not be criticized as anti-Semites, because that's patently false. They should be criticized for doing piss-poor, monocausal social science.

To repeat, the main empirical problems with the article are that:

A) They fail to demonstrate that Israel is a net strategic liability;
B) They ascribe U.S. foreign policy behavior almost exclusively to the activities of the "Israel Lobby"; and
C) They omit consderation of contradictory policies and countervailing foreign policy lobbies.

At the end of the day, however, the piece that I found to be the most interesting came from Ha'aretz:

It sometimes takes AIPAC omnipotence too much at face value and disregards key moments - such as the Bush senior/Baker loan guarantees episode and Clinton's showdown with Netanyahu over the Wye River Agreement. The study largely ignores AIPAC run-ins with more dovish Israeli administrations, most notably when it undermined Yitzhak Rabin, and how excessive hawkishness is often out of step with mainstream American Jewish opinion, turning many, especially young American Jews, away from taking any interest in Israel.

Yet their case is a potent one: that identification of American with Israeli interests can be principally explained via the impact of the Lobby in Washington, and in limiting the parameters of public debate, rather than by virtue of Israel being a vital strategic asset or having a uniquely compelling moral case for support (beyond, as the authors point out, the right to exist, which is anyway not in jeopardy). The study is at its most devastating when it describes how the Lobby "stifles debate by intimidation" and at its most current when it details how America's interests (and ultimately Israel's, too) are ill-served by following the Lobby's agenda.

I tend to agree that the Israel lobby is pushing a foreign policy agenda that is often detrimental to American national interest and usually gives the opposite appearance of being the fair broker that the US tries to sell itself as in the Middle East. And while idiots like David Duke might use articles like this to push their elementary racism, we know that there is a lobby and that it is effective, and that we should not let bigots like him dictate what is acceptable and what is off limits for reasonable discussion. Like Mearsheimer and Walt say in their paper:

In its basic operations, the Israel Lobby is no different from the farm lobby, steel or textile workers' unions, or other ethnic lobbies. There is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway US policy: the Lobby's activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise it are only doing what other special interest groups do, but doing it very much better. By contrast, pro-Arab interest groups, in so far as they exist at all, are weak, which makes the Israel Lobby?s task even easier.

Another fair account of the paper appears in an Op-Ed aricle by Nicholas Goldberg in the LA Times:

The idea of a powerful "Jewish lobby" that has its gnarled fingers in the machinery of the government is an old and repugnant canard. Along with the Jews who supposedly own the media and those who reputedly control the banks, the cabal of sinister, third-column Hebrews who whisper into the ears of our leaders is a classic in the traditional checklist of anti-Semitic fulminations.

So it's no surprise that in the modern era, even to broach the idea of a "Jewish lobby" is unacceptable. It's just not done in polite society -- even in situations in which there's some truth to it. Few would deny, after all, that there are people who lobby for various Jewish issues, including, of course, Israel (just as there are a lot of Jews working in Hollywood and just as Jews do own the New York Times). But even though we know these things, we generally don't talk about them.

...So what are we to make of [the article]? Is it anti-Semitism or honesty? Propaganda cloaked in academic respectability -- or a courageous willingness to identify the elephant in the room?

...It seems silly to deny that a powerful lobby on behalf of Israel exists. The real question is how pernicious it is. Does it, in fact, persuade us to act counter to our national interest -- or is it a positive thing, as publisher Mortimer Zuckerman suggests?

His answer to this question is to read the article yourself. I couldn't agree more.


UPDATE: The London Review speaks out against charges of anti-semitism.

Also, Noam Chomsky weighs in.

There has been a lot of talk lately about nuclear prolifilation and double standards, particularly with the nuclear fuel deal struck between the US and India, which has not signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. (The only other countries that have not signed are Israel and Pakistan.) The claim of double standards is that the US has turned a blind eye to ISrael's nuclear weapons program, yet is threatening Iran, which has signed the Treaty, with sanctions for their pursuit of nuclear technology. The treaty stipulates the following:

Each nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to transfer to any recipient whatsoever nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly; and not in any way to assist, encourage, or induce any non-nuclear-weapon State to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices, or control over such weapons or explosive devices.

While North Korea was a signatory, it pulled out of the treaty in 2003, which does not seem to be against the text of the treaty:

Each Party shall in exercising its national sovereignty have the right to withdraw from the Treaty if it decides that extraordinary events, related to the subject matter of this Treaty, have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country. It shall give notice of such withdrawal to all other Parties to the Treaty and to the United Nations Security Council three months in advance. Such notice shall include a statement of the extraordinary events it regards as having jeopardized its supreme interests.

So in response to claims of a double standard, both in comparison to Israel and India (or even Pakistan), Avner Cohen wrote a piece in Ha'aretz suggesting that Israel come clean on the bomb (print-ready version). His argument is twofold, legal and "existential." Legally, Cohen argues, Israel never signed the treaty, whereas Iran did:

The attempt to put Israel and Iran on the same level, or even to create a concrete political connection between them, is ignorant, unfair and biased. First of all, from the point of view of international law: whereas Iran is a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and is committed to comply with it, Israel, like India and Pakistan, is not a signatory to the treaty and therefore is not beholden to a formal commitment. Whereas Iran has been caught in flagrant breach of its international commitments, Israel has not broken such commitments. In other words, like the seven other nuclear states in the world, and in stark contrast to Iran, Israel has never relinquished the right to develop nuclear weaponry.

Here, he is only partially right. While nuclear powers like France, the US, Britian, Russia and China never gave up their right to have nuclear weapons, they did sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, unlike Israel, Pakistan and India. So it's not really fair to put Iran, Israel and, say, Russia in the same basket. It's hard to know what to make of countries that refuse to sign an international treaty like that one. Legally, they're not bound to any course of action, but practically speaking, are countries that renege on a treaty any safer than those that never signed in the first place? Furthermore, if we're speaking in purely legal terms, Iran is within its rights to develop nuclear power, because the treaty explicitely ensures the right to pursue "nuclear energy for peaceful purposes":

Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination and in conformity with Articles I and II of this Treaty.

But let's not be coy. We know that even if Iran were to not produce nuclear weapons immediately, just positioning itself to be able to do so in short notice would make it a dominant force in the region. But there is little that the US or Israel, Iran's rival in the region, could do about that, legally speaking, that is.

Cohen's second argument is that Israel should somehow be given carte blanche for nuclear weapons, since she has always and still faces an "existential threat."

According to foreign reports, Israel began to develop its Samson option in the 1950s, while it was establishing a state for a people still in the shadow of conflagration, in a hostile geopolitical environment that was opposed to its very existence. It found itself committed to the creation of an insurance policy within the pre-1967 borders, without external guarantees for its existence. In the political climate of that time, a decade after the Holocaust, Israel had perhaps the strongest strategic and moral justification for turning to the nuclear option, certainly no less than France or China, which also began the atomic journey at that time.

Not only is Iran not under existential threat - its nuclear aspirations are an issue that puts it on a collision course with the world. Even the leaders of North Korea are not daring to declare their aspirations to wipe countries off the map, as the president of Iran has declared with respect to Israel.

This is essentially an argument for Israeli exceptionalism, and it brings up the question of whether some countries should be allowed to have nuclear weapons but not others.

Cohen is confusing moral and strategic justifications for nuclear weapons here. Sure, Israel had strategic reasons for pursuing nuclear weapons, but so does Iran. We all know that having nuclear weapons changes the equation and makes countries like the US much more likely to choose diplomacy over military force. Nuclear weapons are a deterrent to regime change. Personally, I think that the Middle East should be a nucler weapons-free zone, but for that to happen, Israel would have to realize that it is not possible for it to remain the sole nuclear power in the region. The mere fact that Israel has nuclear weapons is enough to encourage its neighbors to catch up.

In the end, the only real justification for one country to have nuclear weapons while another is not allowed is that of power politics. Those that have weapons are in a position to deny these weapons to other countries. It would be difficult to come up with criteria to decide otherwise. Would these criteria be economic? Social? Should there be a committee that would take these things into consideration and then make a ruling? This would be very complicated, and as things stand, it would most likely be the Security Council that would make that call, and of course for those five countries, each of which is a nuclear power, there should be no nuclear proliferation. For these countries, what is good for the goose is not good for the gander.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that other countries (North Korea, Isreal, India and Pakistan) would clandestinely pursue nuclear weapons. And knowing that the nuclear powers of the world will not willingly allow any other countries to obtain nuclear weapons, the best way to ensure non-proliferation would seem to be to ensure that they have no reason to seek them. And in this case, Israel should start asking itself if it's preferable to be a nuclear power among others in the region or to be a non-nuclear power in a nuclear-free Middle East.



Note:

On why and how the world could live with a nuclear Iran, here are two interesting articles from the Times:

Suppose we just let Iran have the bomb
We can live with a nuclear Iran

Irshad Manji asks an interesting question in today's Times when explaining how she learned to love the wall that has made life for many Palestinians even harder than it already was. She wonders if an effort to prevent suicide bombings justifies further hardship for Palestinians.

She answers yes, presumably because "before the barrier, there was the bomber." Even if she would prefer to overlook the fact that before the bomber, there was the occupation, Ms. Manji should concede that there are any number of ways to ensure security for a state, but that many of them are cruel, immoral and against international law.

An important point was made by Israel's Chief Justice in his ruling on the wall, in which he quoted his judgment prohibiting the torturing of Palestinian detainees: "This is the destiny of a democracy: she does not see all means as acceptable, and the ways of her enemies are not always open before her. A democracy must sometimes fight with one arm tied behind her back."

Those who proclaim their love for the wall would do well to remember this.

Public Radio International's This American Life recently ran a very interesting episode about Guantanamo Bay and habeas corpus, called Habeas Schmaebeas (real audio). They interview two people who have been released from the camp that's not quite in Cuba and not quite in the US where over 500 people have been imprisoned without being charged with a crime. One of the people interviewed is a Pakestani man named Bader who was arrested there (and handed over to American authorities) for running a satirical Urdu language newspaper. Jack Hitt does a good job dispelling some of the misinformation about the people who are being held in Guantanamo Bay:

We're told over and over that these prisoners are so terrible that we need an off-shore facility away from US law to hold them. But then there's Bader. And every day, more storie like his are coming out, and they raise the question: Is Guantanamo a camp full of terrorists, or a camp full of mistakes?

He quotes Bush and Cheney, who had this to say about the matter:

Bush: "These are people that got scooped up off a battlefield attempting to kill U.S. troops. And I want to make sure, before they're released, that they don't come back to kill again."

Cheney: "The people that are there are people we picked up on the battlefield, primarily in Afghanistan. They're terrorists. They're bomb makers. They're facilitators of terror. They're members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban."

Then he quotes Seton Hall University Law School's Report on Guantanamo Detainees, which is based on written determinations the Government has produced for detainees that it has designated as enemy combatants, which were prepared after the Combatant Status Review Tribunals that began in 2004. The report's findings were as follows:

1. Fifty-five percent (55%) of the detainees are not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or its coalition allies.

2. Only 8% of the detainees were characterized as al Qaeda fighters. Of the remaining detainees, 40% have no definitive connection with al Qaeda at all and 18% are have no definitive affiliation with either al Qaeda or the Taliban.

3. The Government has detained numerous persons based on mere affiliations with a large number of groups that in fact, are not on the Department of Homeland Security terrorist watchlist. Moreover, the nexus between such a detainee and such organizations varies considerably. Eight percent are detained because they are deemed "fighters for;" 30% considered "members of;" a large majority ? 60% -- are detained merely because they are "associated with" a group or groups the Government asserts are terrorist organizations. For 2% of the prisoners their nexus to any terrorist group is unidentified.

4. Only 5% of the detainees were captured by United States forces. 86% of the detainees were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to United States custody. This 86% of the detainees captured by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance were handed over to the United States at a time in which the United States offered large bounties for capture of suspected enemies.

5. Finally, the population of persons deemed not to be enemy combatants ? mostly Uighers ? are in fact accused of more serious allegations than a great many persons still deemed to be enemy combatants.

Another reports done on Guantanamo, which came out at about the same time as Seton Hall's can be found here and here.

These reports confirm that the remarks that Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney have been making about how these people are the "worst of the worst" and have been "scooped up off a battle field" are patently false. The issue that is perhaps the most disconcerting is that 86 percent of Gitmo detainees were arrested by Pakistani or Northern Alliance forces at a time when the US was offering a large bounty for turning in suspected Taliban or al Qaeda members. One example of a flyer informing Afghans of the bounty read:

You can receive millions of dollars for helping the Anti-Taliban Force catch Al-Qaida and Taliban murderers. This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life. Pay for livestock and doctors and school books and housing for all your people.

This is a copy of another flyer:



It seems obvious that most of these Pakistani and Afghan (and sometimes Chinese) dirt farmers being passed off as the "worst of the worst" were just at the wrong place at the wrong time. The US government doesn't seemed too concerned about giving them a trial or habeas corpus rights, and I can say that being held incognito for years and tortured and humiliated on a daily basis is enough to turn even a poor Chinese dirt farmer into an anti-American terrorist.

Here are a few interesting links that I've come across in the last few days:

A story from ABC about Chinese Muslims wrongly imprisoned in Guantanamo and then finally released after 4.5 years. They couldn't be sent to China since the government there persecutes Uighurs, and despite being found innocent of any charges (NLEC, or No Longer Enemy Combattant, in Guantanamo Bay terminology - Mr Kafka could not have made this up if he had tried), being put away by the Americans for 4.5 years is enough to garner a bad reputation. So apparently, no country would take them, the US included, with the single and solitary exception of Albania:

We are very pleased that the Albanian government and the Albanian people opened their hearts and welcomed us. Despite the fact that all the strong, powerful, democratic countries are able and capable of accepting us, they did not do that. We are having some problems ... there are no Uighurs in Albania, and we don't speak the Albanian language. ...

Were hoping that the United States government would recognize the mistake that it has done and accept, allow us to enter the United States. U.S. government captured us, U.S. government incarcerated us, locked us up in prison, and U.S. government said that we were not a threat and should be released.

Uighur-Americans came forward, made an offer to the United States government to accept us into Uighur-American society and community. They even went into the courts and contacted the lawyers and wrote a letter to the U.S. government officials asking them to consider releasing us into the United States. Unfortunately, it did not happen, a rather disappointing decision.

Otherwise, the Post ran a really interesting first person piece about Iraq, the Republic of Fear, which makes one fearful that Baghdad is slowly but surely turning into Beirut, circa 1980:

Today, the Americans are just one more militia lost in the anarchy. They, too, are killing Iraqis. ...

Sectarian and ethnic cleansing has since continued apace, as mixed neighborhoods are "purified." In Amriya, dead bodies are being found on the main street at a rate of three or five or seven a day. People are afraid to approach the bodies, or call for an ambulance or the police, for fear that they, too, will be found dead the following day. In Abu Ghraib, Dora, Amriya and other once-diverse neighborhoods, Shiites are being forced to leave. In Maalif and Shaab, Sunnis are being targeted.

The world wonders if Iraq is on the brink of civil war, while Iraqis fear calling it one, knowing the fate such a description would portend. In truth, the civil war started long before Samarra and long before the first uprisings. It started when U.S. troops arrived in Baghdad. It began when Sunnis discovered what they had lost, and Shiites learned what they had gained. And the worst is yet to come.

This made me remember reading a piece in Harper's that said that maybe the best thing for Iraq would be for the US to withdraw and let them have their full-fledged civil war. (It was by Edward Luttwak and was adapted from a piece in Foreign Policy, which can be found here) The version in Harper's ends like this:

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

It's hard for me to know what to make of this idea. I'm not convinced that an all-out civil war would result in anything but a division of Iraq, or even worse, a regional war that would involve Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and probably Turkey as well. The latter is obviously a horrible idea, but I haven't decided how I feel about the former.

Finally, the atrocities in Haditha make me think that maybe Luttuk and Rosen are right and the US should just get out as soon as possible.

I can't get over this. I know that similar things happened in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and I know that we're talking about kids who have been put in an extremely dangerous and stressful situation, and that sometimes people just crack. But I just don't understand how someone can shoot a one-legged man in a wheelchair nine times. Or how someone can shoot a 1-year old baby. Say that again: a 1-year old baby. I just don't understand.

At some point on Nov. 19, Marines in an armored convoy arrived at Haditha's hospital. They placed the bodies of the victims in the garden of the hospital and left without explanation, said Mohammed al-Hadithi, one of the hospital officials who helped carry the bodies inside. By some accounts, some of the corpses were burnt.

The remains of the 24 lie today in a cemetery called Martyrs' Graveyard. Stray dogs scrounge in the deserted homes. "Democracy assassinated the family that was here," graffiti on one of the houses declared.

I just came across a piece by the New Republic's Lawrence Kaplan in the Los Angeles Times entitled, If Iraq was wrong, is Darfur right?

The New Republic has recently come out with an issue on Darfur (only some of which is available to non-subscribers), and they come out as a whole for American intervention in Darfur. Kaplan's piece, however, brings up the question of Iraq and asks why it is all right to intervene in Darfur but not in Iraq:

As their criticism of the particulars of the Iraq war has hardened into a broader indictment of U.S. foreign policy, the mostly progressive voices calling for action in Darfur have become caught in a bind of their own devising. Even as they demand intervention in Sudan, they excoriate Washington for employing U.S. military power without due respect to the opinion of the international community and against nations that pose no imminent threat to our own -- which is to say, precisely the terms under which U.S. power would have to be employed in the name of saving Darfur.

He then goes on to argue that neither the African Union nor the UN will intervene or is capable of intervening, leaving the US as the only capable, if not willing, power equipped to intervene.

To my mind, the main reason why I am for intervention in Darfur but was against it in Iraq can be summed up in a single word: genocide. It's happening in Darfur but wasn't happening in Iraq. Now had the Anfal campaign of the late 1980s been continuing, I would have been for intervention in Iraq. This is not to say that genocide should be the threshold for international intervention, but it would at least be a good start. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) responds similarly to Kaplan's jab against him:

Once President Bush and former Secretary of State Colin Powell used the word "genocide" to describe the carnage in Darfur, the United States and every other civilized nation had a moral imperative to act. Those who find it painful to explain the deception and misinformation preceding our invasion of Iraq should not hide behind the victims in Darfur.

As for whether or not the AU or UN could or would stop the genocide, the AU is already there but lacks a proper and muscular mandate that would allow their forces to protect civilians. As it is, they can only protect themselves. Likewise, when and if a UN force intervenes, it would be important for them to have a good mandate and be properly funded, because we know what happens to underfunded blue helmets without a real mandate. As it stands, there are 7,000 AU troops already in Darfur, which could be folded into a UN force; France has at least 1,000 troops in Chad already; and if the UK could be convinced to provide the 5,000 troops that they offered in 2004, then that would make a force of 13,000. Other nations like South Africa and Ghana could also donate more troops, and the US could help shoulder the financial and logistics costs of such an intervention.

While writing this, I've come across an interesting (and much more detailed) plan by the International Crisis Group To Save Darfur, which is similar to my idea:

Crisis Group has long contended that because AMIS has reached the outer limits of its competence, and a UN mission authorised today would not be fully ready to take over from it for some six months, a distinct and separate multinational force should be sent to Darfur to bridge that gap and help stabilise the immediate situation. We have argued, and continue to believe, that NATO would be best from a practical military point of view. Unfortunately, political opposition to this in Khartoum, within the AU and even perhaps within the Atlantic Alliance itself, means it is not achievable at this time.

What we now propose, therefore, is a compromise driven by the urgent need for a more robust force in Darfur. A militarily capable UN member state -- France seems most promising since it already has troops and aircraft in the area -- should offer to the Security Council to go now to Darfur, wearing blue helmets, as the lead nation in the first phase of the incoming UN mission. It could be joined from the outset by forces from one or two other militarily capable UN members (and would probably need to be if the desirable target of around 5,000 personnel for this force is to be achieved). This stabilisation force would be a self-contained, separately commanded UN mission with identified functional or geographic divisions of responsibility that would work beside AMIS and through a liaison unit at its headquarters until arrangements were in place for a 1 October transition to the full UN mission. That full mission would need to be recruited from the best AMIS elements as well as a wider circle of Asian and other member states -- no easy task at a time when several large UN peacekeeping missions in Africa and elsewhere have exhausted the capabilities of many contribution candidates.

The U.S. and other NATO states should respond generously and quickly to requests from it or AMIS to provide logistical help as well as regular access to satellite imagery, air mobility and close air support, especially to deter or react to egregious movements of men or heavy weapons in the border area.

They finish by coming up with a list of recommendations for each of the major parties involved (with the exception of the belligerent parties):

RECOMMENDATIONS

To the African Union:

1. Request the immediate deployment of a UN-mandated stabilisation force to help bolster the AMIS troops and focus on the Chad-Sudan border and the Tawila-Graida corridor.

2. Seek quick negotiation of a single, enhanced ceasefire document to remove the ambiguities of the existing overlapping agreements.

3. Begin immediately to map the location of forces in Darfur so as to manage and enforce the ceasefire better.

4. Begin immediately identifying, defining and profiling the government-allied militias.

5. Improve the reporting mechanisms and procedures for monitoring ceasefire violations and urgently revive and upgrade the compliance and sanctions mechanisms of the ceasefire.

6. Negotiate a series of humanitarian ground rules, in collaboration with the UN, to help hold the parties accountable for the protection of humanitarian operations in their respective areas.

To the United Nations Security Council:

7. Authorise a two-phase intervention in Darfur under Chapter Seven of the Charter, with the following elements:

(a) for the first phase, to be accomplished within a month, a lead nation would serve as the advance element of the full UN mission by sending the bulk of an initial 5,000 troops to Darfur, with three main stabilisation tasks:

i. interdiction of military activities across the Chad-Darfur border;

ii. protection of civilians in Darfur, primarily in the Tawilla-Graida corridor; and

iii. rapid-reaction support of AMIS forces until the transition to a full-fledged UN peace support operation in October 2006.

(b) for the second phase, immediate planning for a peace support operation of some 15,000 troops -- none of whom should be diverted from the mission of the existing UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) -- with a mandate emphasising civilian protection, ceasefire enforcement and monitoring of the Chad-Sudan border, to take over from AMIS as of 1 October 2006.

8. Strengthen the existing sanctions regime by implementing the recommendations in the 30 January 2006 report of the Panel of Experts.

9. Authorise the Secretariat's peacekeeping department (DPKO) to begin planning on an urgent basis and together with the AU both phases of this operation, with priority tasks to include:

(a) identifying areas for early cooperation in Darfur, such as immediate deployment of UN experts to help support the establishment of a functioning ceasefire commission secretariat and the deployment of human rights monitors and translators, including women, to help improve the reporting capacity of AMIS; and

(b) identifying the lead nation to deploy in the initial phase to support AMIS by performing the tasks set out in recommendation 7(a) above and serve as the advance element of the full UN mission.

To Donor Governments:

10. Convene an early pledging conference to ensure that AMIS is fully funded until the UN mission can take over in October 2006.

To the U.S., the EU and its member states and others with a strong interest in regional peace and stability:

11. Undertake major diplomatic efforts to:

(a) persuade Sudan to accept and the AU to confirm transition of AMIS into a strong UN peacekeeping mission as of 1 October 2006 and request in the interim dispatch of an advance force of some 5,000 blue-helmets to assist AMIS by performing essential stabilisation tasks;

(b) persuade the Security Council to authorise a mission of some 15,000, including the strongest AMIS elements and with a strong Chapter VII mandate focused on civilian protection; and

(c) identify the lead nation to contribute the bulk of the advance element to assist AMIS and perform essential stabilisation tasks immediately upon Security Council authorisation, and be prepared to help with all necessary material and logistical support.

12. Concurrently with efforts to strengthen international forces on the ground, pursue the other elements of a coordinated three-part strategy to resolve the Darfur conflict by:

(a) reinforcing AU efforts to negotiate an enhanced ceasefire and a political settlement at Abuja, including by naming special envoys; and

(b) seeking accountability and an end to impunity by enforcing the Security Council's sanction regime and supporting human rights monitoring mechanisms and the work of the ICC.

An article in the Post reports today that Iranian President Ahmadinejad sent a letter to President Bush in order to propose "new solutions for getting out of international problems and the current fragile situation in the world." It mentions the quote put forth by the Times that Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be "wiped off the map." Since this comment was reported on, it has been used as a reason why Iran should not have nuclear weapons. I've been somewhat skeptical about the translation, and as it turns out, there is some disagreement about what was actually said. This disagreement has pitted Christopher Hitchens against Juan Cole, the latter being the only one of the two who actually speaks Farsi. A good summary of the online fight can be found here.

The actual sentence in question seems to be this: "een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad." I don't speak Farsi, but several of my colleagues are Iranian, and I've sent them the text to see what they think about it. The only word I can recognize is qods which is Farsi for al Quds, which is Jerusalem in English. Cole's translation is "the Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem must [vanish from] from the page of time." As it turns out, the Israeli group Memri offers a translation that is very similar to Cole's ("eliminated from the pages of history").

As it turns out, after the comments, the Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki denied the remarks:

Mottaki also denied during a press conference in Brussels that Tehran wanted to see Israel "wiped off the map."

"Nobody can remove a country from the map. This is a misunderstanding in Europe of what our president mentioned," he said. "How is it possible to remove a country from the map? He is talking about the regime. We do not recognize legally this regime."

Another denial came on CNN's Late Edition from Iran's ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Ali Asghar Soltanieh:

SOLTANIEH: The supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran has announced, more than two years, and few cases, the Western media have reflected to public of the world, that if the divine religions -- followers of the divine religions, Jews, Christians and Muslims, in that area follow a referendum, democratic referendum, and are one (ph) with homeless Palestinians, Iranian government and Iranian people would respect their decision.

Therefore, these are fabricated news that they are threatening and using this as an excuse for the military aggression or the aggressive policy. [...]

BLITZER: I have to wrap this up, but I want to get your response to this issue of Israel because it's become such a prominent issue in this whole discussion over nuclear plans that Iran may or may not have. This is what the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said on October 26 at that World Without Zionism conference.

He said, "Israel must be wiped off the map of the world, and god willing, with the force of god behind it, we shall soon experience a world without the United States and Zionists."

You understand why people in the West, especially here in the United States, are so concerned about your program, your nuclear program, given those kinds of direct threats against Israel, which happens to be a strong ally of the United States.

SOLTANIEH: I want to very briefly remind you that the policy of Islamic Republic of Iran and according to spirit and letter of our constitution is against any sort of school of thought or regime such as apartheid, Zionism, racism, and this is a matter of principle.

Therefore, what you are talking about as apartheid was disappeared and it could not be accepted by civilized world, this Zionism and aggression of racism is also condemned. [...]

BLITZER: Does your support for the removal of Zionism mean you want to see Israel destroyed?

SOLTANIEH: I have already explained to you and reflected to you the policy echoed by our supreme leader.

It means that if in that region, the divine religion followers of the Jews, Christians and Muslims, that all three are very respectful -- and we have Jews in Iran, which are peacefully living and they are represented in our parliament, they are fully respected -- if they come with the Palestinians, homeless Palestinians, to come and through following the democratic process will decide on a government and live in peace as they were living a thousand years of coexistence of these divine religions, Iran will support because we are looking for and we support peaceful settlement of the whole issue and peaceful coexistence of these divine religions in the Middle East. Let's hope for the peace.

BLITZER: But should there be a state of Israel?

SOLTANIEH: I think I've already answered to you. If Israel is a synonym and will give the indication of Zionism mentality, no.

But if you are going to conclude that we have said the people there have to be removed or we they have to be massacred or so, this is fabricated, unfortunate selective approach to what the mentality and policy of Islamic Republic of Iran is. I have to correct, and I did so.

So it seems that the statements by Ahmadinejad, or at the very least official Iranian policy, is much more nuanced than the Western media would have us believe. Furthermore, it is important to remember that Ahmadinejad does not control Iranian foreign policy. In an interesting article in the New York Review about Iran and the bomb, Christopher de Bellaigue has this to say:

Iran's enmity toward Israel is more nuanced than Ahmadinejad's statements suggest. The President's declarations that Israel should be "wiped off the map," and that the Holocaust is a "myth," understandably aroused fears that Iran might be considering an attack on Israel. But Iran's senior civilian and military officials have insisted that Iran will strike Israel only if Israel strikes first. More significantly, the President and supreme leader have both reiterated Iran's longstanding demand for a referendum on the status of Israel that would involve all Palestinian refugees. This official position would not seem to be consistent with an ambition to destroy Israel by force, least of all by using nuclear arms, which would endanger the very Palestinians whom the Iranians claim to be protecting. Several senior Iranian officials, including Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president who heads a powerful arbitration council in Tehran, have not disguised their irritation with the President's comments. But Ahmadinejad has benefited from the furor. By raising his prestige among hard-line Islamists around the world, the President has made it harder for his domestic opponents, who include Rafsanjani, to undermine him.

I will post the English translation later this week, once my Iranian colleagues have had the chance to get back to me.

Tony Judt weighs in on the Israel lobby in today's Times. He reminds us that criticizing Israel is not synonymous with being an anti-semite and that there is a debate to be had on the topic that Americans seem afraid of.

The damage that is done by America's fear of anti-Semitism when discussing Israel is threefold. It is bad for Jews: anti-Semitism is real enough (I know something about it, growing up Jewish in 1950's Britain), but for just that reason it should not be confused with political criticisms of Israel or its American supporters. It is bad for Israel: by guaranteeing it unconditional support, Americans encourage Israel to act heedless of consequences. The Israeli journalist Tom Segev described the Mearsheimer-Walt essay as "arrogant" but also acknowledged ruefully: "They are right. Had the United States saved Israel from itself, life today would be better ...the Israel Lobby in the United States harms Israel's true interests."

BUT above all, self-censorship is bad for the United States itself. Americans are denying themselves participation in a fast-moving international conversation. Daniel Levy (a former Israeli peace negotiator) wrote in Haaretz that the Mearsheimer-Walt essay should be a wake-up call, a reminder of the damage the Israel lobby is doing to both nations. But I would go further. I think this essay, by two "realist" political scientists with no interest whatsoever in the Palestinians, is a straw in the wind.

...the terms of strategic debate are shifting. East Asia grows daily in importance. Meanwhile our clumsy failure to re-cast the Middle East ? and its enduring implications for our standing there ? has come into sharp focus. American influence in that part of the world now rests almost exclusively on our power to make war: which means in the end that it is no influence at all. Above all, perhaps, the Holocaust is passing beyond living memory. In the eyes of a watching world, the fact that an Israeli soldier's great-grandmother died in Treblinka will not excuse his own misbehavior.

Thus it will not be self-evident to future generations of Americans why the imperial might and international reputation of the United States are so closely aligned with one small, controversial Mediterranean client state. It is already not at all self-evident to Europeans, Latin Americans, Africans or Asians. Why, they ask, has America chosen to lose touch with the rest of the international community on this issue? Americans may not like the implications of this question. But it is pressing. It bears directly on our international standing and influence; and it has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. We cannot ignore it.

There has been a lot of talk about the demographics of Isreal, but most people outside of Israel are unaware of the statistics. In the London Review, Ilan Pappe talks about the various Israeli plans to deal with the 'problem'.

Israel boosted its population with two massive Jewish immigrations, each of about a million people, in 1949 and in the 1980s. This kept the Palestinian proportion of the population down and today Palestinians account for nearly 20 per cent of the population of Israel (not counting the Occupied Territories). Ehud Olmert, the leader of Kadima and acting prime minister, thinks that if Israel stays in the Occupied Territories and its inhabitants are included in the Israeli population, Palestinians will outnumber Jews within 15 years. So he advocates hitkansut ? meaning 'convergence' or, better, 'ingathering' ? a policy that would leave several populous Palestinian areas outside direct Israeli control. But even if this consolidation takes place, there will still be a very large Palestinian population inside the 88 per cent of Palestine in which Olmert hopes to build the future, stable Jewish state. How large exactly we don't know: demographers in Israel belonging to the centre or the left provide a low estimate, which makes disengagement seem a reasonable solution, while those on the right tend to exaggerate the figure. But they all seem to agree that the demographic balance will not stay the same, given the higher birth-rate of Palestinians compared to Jews. Thus Olmert may well come to the conclusion that pull-outs are not the solution.

Once the 'Arabs' in Israel and the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories came to be thought of in the West as 'Muslims' it was easy to elicit support for Israel's demographic policies, at least where it counted: on Capitol Hill. But even in Europe there was no need, after 9/11, to explain why Israel has a 'demographic problem'. On 2 February 2003 the popular daily Maariv carried a typical headline: 'A quarter of the children in Israel are Muslims.' The piece went on to describe this fact as Israel's next 'ticking bomb'. The increase in the 'Muslim' population -- 2.4 per cent a year -- was not a problem anymore, but a 'danger'.

Recently, I was at a conference about the Israelo-Palestinian conflict, and they spoke of the two-state solution (in which the Palestinians had a "viable state") as the only solution to the conflict.

I seem to be the only person that I know of, besides the late Edward Said, who is for a single-state solution. I agree with Pappe, but in the end, all he does is describe the demographic situation Israel. He does not mention (at least not explicitely) what seems to me to be the obvious result of such a "demographic problem." If 20 percent of Israeli citizens are Arabic, and this proportion increases by 2.4 percent each year, it is only a matter of time (less than 15 years) before the majority of the population is Arab, or "non-Jewish" as the official statistics would call them.

This obviously means that even if we completely disregard the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Isreal will still have to decide between being a democratic state or a Jewish state: being both is impossible in the long run. Some Isrealis have decided that the answer to this is "populaiton transfer," otherwise known as ethnic cleansing. In an interview by Haaretz (part 1 and part 2) the Israeli historian Benny Morris talks about the past and future of Israeli ethnic cleansing:

Ben-Gurion was a transferist. He understood that there could be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its midst. There would be no such state. It would not be able to exist.

...Ben-Gurion was right. If he had not done what he did, a state would not have come into being. That has to be clear. It is impossible to evade it. Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here.

...There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing. I know that this term is completely negative in the discourse of the 21st century, but when the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide - the annihilation of your people - I prefer ethnic cleansing.

...A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on.

...Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history.

...If you are asking me whether I support the transfer and expulsion of the Arabs from the West Bank, Gaza and perhaps even from Galilee and the Triangle, I say not at this moment. I am not willing to be a partner to that act. In the present circumstances it is neither moral nor realistic. The world would not allow it, the Arab world would not allow it, it would destroy the Jewish society from within. But I am ready to tell you that in other circumstances, apocalyptic ones, which are liable to be realized in five or ten years, I can see expulsions. If we find ourselves with atomic weapons around us, or if there is a general Arab attack on us and a situation of warfare on the front with Arabs in the rear shooting at convoys on their way to the front, acts of expulsion will be entirely reasonable. They may even be essential.

...The Israeli Arabs are a time bomb. Their slide into complete Palestinization has made them an emissary of the enemy that is among us. They are a potential fifth column. In both demographic and security terms they are liable to undermine the state. So that if Israel again finds itself in a situation of existential threat, as in 1948, it may be forced to act as it did then. If we are attacked by Egypt (after an Islamist revolution in Cairo) and by Syria, and chemical and biological missiles slam into our cities, and at the same time Israeli Palestinians attack us from behind, I can see an expulsion situation. It could happen. If the threat to Israel is existential, expulsion will be justified.

So this is what it boils down to: the rationalization of ethnic cleansing. Isreali Jews will not want to accept being a minority in a mainly Arab state, but I'm not sure that they have much of an option, barring the extreme measures mentioned by Morris, which it would be difficult to imagine the US intervening to stop and equally difficult to imagine the international community letting happen.

At the end of the day, I think it would be better for both Israeli Jews and Palestinians to make an overture to the creation of a democratic binational state along the lines of Belgium (called Isreal in Hebrew and Palestine in Arabic), which would grant equal rights to both Arabs and Jews, rather than being forced to do so by the international community, much like South Africa was. Because in the end, if Israel goes down the road that South Africa did, she always runs the risk of ending up like Zimbabwe, where a long-opressed majority turns the tables and forces out the minority.

Today's Times has an editorial about inaction in Darfur. It's always nice to see the "agenda setting" press take up the issue, and it's particularly pleasant to see the Times taking not only the West, but also Arab and African leaders to task for ignoring the Darfuris' plight:

Where are the Muslims who took to the streets to protest Danish cartoons? Where are the African leaders who demanded boycotts of South Africa?

...We're waiting. But time is one thing that what is left of the Darfur population doesn't really have. We're glad to see that a rally is planned in Washington on April 30. We're glad to hear that Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick invited Darfur refugees to the State Department. Now President Bush needs to do the same thing. A photo op at the White House with Darfur refugees would go a long way toward embarrassing the government of Sudan.

That should also embarrass the rest of the Security Council members, like China, Qatar, Ghana and Tanzania, that continue to give diplomatic cover to Sudan. Rwanda should have taught us all something; it's tragic that it apparently has not.

The London Review recently published an article on the Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer, a University of Chicago political scientist, and Stephen Walt, a Harvard government professor. (An unabridged version is available here.)

There has been a lot of talk about the paper, most of it pretty inane, like this piece from the Wall Street Journal, which seems to try to give the anti-semitism defense a veneer of resectability by slightly nuancing it:

The authors are at pains to note that the Israel Lobby is by no means exclusively Jewish, and that not every American Jew is a part of it. Fair enough. But has there ever been an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that does not share its basic features? Dual loyalty, disloyalty, manipulation of the media, financial manipulation of the political system, duping the goyim (gentiles) and getting them to fight their wars, sponsoring and covering up acts of gratuitous cruelty against an innocent people -- every canard ever alleged of the Jews is here made about the Israel Lobby and its cause. No wonder former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke was quick to endorse the article, calling it a "great step forward."

I do not mean to suggest that Messrs. Mearsheimer and Walt are themselves anti-Semitic. But as outgoing Harvard President Larry Summers once noted, what may not be anti-Semitic in intent may yet be anti-Semitic in effect. By giving aid and comfort to people who have no trouble substituting the word "Jews" for "Israel Lobby," the Mearsheimer-Walt article is anti-Semitic in effect.

Not all of the criticisms, however, stoop to such non-arguments. This piece by the University of Chicago's Daniel Drezner focuses on what he sees as the empirical problems of the piece:

Walt and Mearsheimer should not be criticized as anti-Semites, because that's patently false. They should be criticized for doing piss-poor, monocausal social science.

To repeat, the main empirical problems with the article are that:

A) They fail to demonstrate that Israel is a net strategic liability;
B) They ascribe U.S. foreign policy behavior almost exclusively to the activities of the "Israel Lobby"; and
C) They omit consderation of contradictory policies and countervailing foreign policy lobbies.

At the end of the day, however, the piece that I found to be the most interesting came from Ha'aretz:

It sometimes takes AIPAC omnipotence too much at face value and disregards key moments - such as the Bush senior/Baker loan guarantees episode and Clinton's showdown with Netanyahu over the Wye River Agreement. The study largely ignores AIPAC run-ins with more dovish Israeli administrations, most notably when it undermined Yitzhak Rabin, and how excessive hawkishness is often out of step with mainstream American Jewish opinion, turning many, especially young American Jews, away from taking any interest in Israel.

Yet their case is a potent one: that identification of American with Israeli interests can be principally explained via the impact of the Lobby in Washington, and in limiting the parameters of public debate, rather than by virtue of Israel being a vital strategic asset or having a uniquely compelling moral case for support (beyond, as the authors point out, the right to exist, which is anyway not in jeopardy). The study is at its most devastating when it describes how the Lobby "stifles debate by intimidation" and at its most current when it details how America's interests (and ultimately Israel's, too) are ill-served by following the Lobby's agenda.

I tend to agree that the Israel lobby is pushing a foreign policy agenda that is often detrimental to American national interest and usually gives the opposite appearance of being the fair broker that the US tries to sell itself as in the Middle East. And while idiots like David Duke might use articles like this to push their elementary racism, we know that there is a lobby and that it is effective, and that we should not let bigots like him dictate what is acceptable and what is off limits for reasonable discussion. Like Mearsheimer and Walt say in their paper:

In its basic operations, the Israel Lobby is no different from the farm lobby, steel or textile workers' unions, or other ethnic lobbies. There is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway US policy: the Lobby's activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise it are only doing what other special interest groups do, but doing it very much better. By contrast, pro-Arab interest groups, in so far as they exist at all, are weak, which makes the Israel Lobby?s task even easier.

Another fair account of the paper appears in an Op-Ed aricle by Nicholas Goldberg in the LA Times:

The idea of a powerful "Jewish lobby" that has its gnarled fingers in the machinery of the government is an old and repugnant canard. Along with the Jews who supposedly own the media and those who reputedly control the banks, the cabal of sinister, third-column Hebrews who whisper into the ears of our leaders is a classic in the traditional checklist of anti-Semitic fulminations.

So it's no surprise that in the modern era, even to broach the idea of a "Jewish lobby" is unacceptable. It's just not done in polite society -- even in situations in which there's some truth to it. Few would deny, after all, that there are people who lobby for various Jewish issues, including, of course, Israel (just as there are a lot of Jews working in Hollywood and just as Jews do own the New York Times). But even though we know these things, we generally don't talk about them.

...So what are we to make of [the article]? Is it anti-Semitism or honesty? Propaganda cloaked in academic respectability -- or a courageous willingness to identify the elephant in the room?

...It seems silly to deny that a powerful lobby on behalf of Israel exists. The real question is how pernicious it is. Does it, in fact, persuade us to act counter to our national interest -- or is it a positive thing, as publisher Mortimer Zuckerman suggests?

His answer to this question is to read the article yourself. I couldn't agree more.


UPDATE: The London Review speaks out against charges of anti-semitism.

Also, Noam Chomsky weighs in.

There has been a lot of talk lately about nuclear prolifilation and double standards, particularly with the nuclear fuel deal struck between the US and India, which has not signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. (The only other countries that have not signed are Israel and Pakistan.) The claim of double standards is that the US has turned a blind eye to ISrael's nuclear weapons program, yet is threatening Iran, which has signed the Treaty, with sanctions for their pursuit of nuclear technology. The treaty stipulates the following:

Each nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to transfer to any recipient whatsoever nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly; and not in any way to assist, encourage, or induce any non-nuclear-weapon State to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices, or control over such weapons or explosive devices.

While North Korea was a signatory, it pulled out of the treaty in 2003, which does not seem to be against the text of the treaty:

Each Party shall in exercising its national sovereignty have the right to withdraw from the Treaty if it decides that extraordinary events, related to the subject matter of this Treaty, have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country. It shall give notice of such withdrawal to all other Parties to the Treaty and to the United Nations Security Council three months in advance. Such notice shall include a statement of the extraordinary events it regards as having jeopardized its supreme interests.

So in response to claims of a double standard, both in comparison to Israel and India (or even Pakistan), Avner Cohen wrote a piece in Ha'aretz suggesting that Israel come clean on the bomb (print-ready version). His argument is twofold, legal and "existential." Legally, Cohen argues, Israel never signed the treaty, whereas Iran did:

The attempt to put Israel and Iran on the same level, or even to create a concrete political connection between them, is ignorant, unfair and biased. First of all, from the point of view of international law: whereas Iran is a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and is committed to comply with it, Israel, like India and Pakistan, is not a signatory to the treaty and therefore is not beholden to a formal commitment. Whereas Iran has been caught in flagrant breach of its international commitments, Israel has not broken such commitments. In other words, like the seven other nuclear states in the world, and in stark contrast to Iran, Israel has never relinquished the right to develop nuclear weaponry.

Here, he is only partially right. While nuclear powers like France, the US, Britian, Russia and China never gave up their right to have nuclear weapons, they did sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, unlike Israel, Pakistan and India. So it's not really fair to put Iran, Israel and, say, Russia in the same basket. It's hard to know what to make of countries that refuse to sign an international treaty like that one. Legally, they're not bound to any course of action, but practically speaking, are countries that renege on a treaty any safer than those that never signed in the first place? Furthermore, if we're speaking in purely legal terms, Iran is within its rights to develop nuclear power, because the treaty explicitely ensures the right to pursue "nuclear energy for peaceful purposes":

Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination and in conformity with Articles I and II of this Treaty.

But let's not be coy. We know that even if Iran were to not produce nuclear weapons immediately, just positioning itself to be able to do so in short notice would make it a dominant force in the region. But there is little that the US or Israel, Iran's rival in the region, could do about that, legally speaking, that is.

Cohen's second argument is that Israel should somehow be given carte blanche for nuclear weapons, since she has always and still faces an "existential threat."

According to foreign reports, Israel began to develop its Samson option in the 1950s, while it was establishing a state for a people still in the shadow of conflagration, in a hostile geopolitical environment that was opposed to its very existence. It found itself committed to the creation of an insurance policy within the pre-1967 borders, without external guarantees for its existence. In the political climate of that time, a decade after the Holocaust, Israel had perhaps the strongest strategic and moral justification for turning to the nuclear option, certainly no less than France or China, which also began the atomic journey at that time.

Not only is Iran not under existential threat - its nuclear aspirations are an issue that puts it on a collision course with the world. Even the leaders of North Korea are not daring to declare their aspirations to wipe countries off the map, as the president of Iran has declared with respect to Israel.

This is essentially an argument for Israeli exceptionalism, and it brings up the question of whether some countries should be allowed to have nuclear weapons but not others.

Cohen is confusing moral and strategic justifications for nuclear weapons here. Sure, Israel had strategic reasons for pursuing nuclear weapons, but so does Iran. We all know that having nuclear weapons changes the equation and makes countries like the US much more likely to choose diplomacy over military force. Nuclear weapons are a deterrent to regime change. Personally, I think that the Middle East should be a nucler weapons-free zone, but for that to happen, Israel would have to realize that it is not possible for it to remain the sole nuclear power in the region. The mere fact that Israel has nuclear weapons is enough to encourage its neighbors to catch up.

In the end, the only real justification for one country to have nuclear weapons while another is not allowed is that of power politics. Those that have weapons are in a position to deny these weapons to other countries. It would be difficult to come up with criteria to decide otherwise. Would these criteria be economic? Social? Should there be a committee that would take these things into consideration and then make a ruling? This would be very complicated, and as things stand, it would most likely be the Security Council that would make that call, and of course for those five countries, each of which is a nuclear power, there should be no nuclear proliferation. For these countries, what is good for the goose is not good for the gander.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that other countries (North Korea, Isreal, India and Pakistan) would clandestinely pursue nuclear weapons. And knowing that the nuclear powers of the world will not willingly allow any other countries to obtain nuclear weapons, the best way to ensure non-proliferation would seem to be to ensure that they have no reason to seek them. And in this case, Israel should start asking itself if it's preferable to be a nuclear power among others in the region or to be a non-nuclear power in a nuclear-free Middle East.



Note:

On why and how the world could live with a nuclear Iran, here are two interesting articles from the Times:

Suppose we just let Iran have the bomb
We can live with a nuclear Iran

Irshad Manji asks an interesting question in today's Times when explaining how she learned to love the wall that has made life for many Palestinians even harder than it already was. She wonders if an effort to prevent suicide bombings justifies further hardship for Palestinians.

She answers yes, presumably because "before the barrier, there was the bomber." Even if she would prefer to overlook the fact that before the bomber, there was the occupation, Ms. Manji should concede that there are any number of ways to ensure security for a state, but that many of them are cruel, immoral and against international law.

An important point was made by Israel's Chief Justice in his ruling on the wall, in which he quoted his judgment prohibiting the torturing of Palestinian detainees: "This is the destiny of a democracy: she does not see all means as acceptable, and the ways of her enemies are not always open before her. A democracy must sometimes fight with one arm tied behind her back."

Those who proclaim their love for the wall would do well to remember this.

Public Radio International's This American Life recently ran a very interesting episode about Guantanamo Bay and habeas corpus, called Habeas Schmaebeas (real audio). They interview two people who have been released from the camp that's not quite in Cuba and not quite in the US where over 500 people have been imprisoned without being charged with a crime. One of the people interviewed is a Pakestani man named Bader who was arrested there (and handed over to American authorities) for running a satirical Urdu language newspaper. Jack Hitt does a good job dispelling some of the misinformation about the people who are being held in Guantanamo Bay:

We're told over and over that these prisoners are so terrible that we need an off-shore facility away from US law to hold them. But then there's Bader. And every day, more storie like his are coming out, and they raise the question: Is Guantanamo a camp full of terrorists, or a camp full of mistakes?

He quotes Bush and Cheney, who had this to say about the matter:

Bush: "These are people that got scooped up off a battlefield attempting to kill U.S. troops. And I want to make sure, before they're released, that they don't come back to kill again."

Cheney: "The people that are there are people we picked up on the battlefield, primarily in Afghanistan. They're terrorists. They're bomb makers. They're facilitators of terror. They're members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban."

Then he quotes Seton Hall University Law School's Report on Guantanamo Detainees, which is based on written determinations the Government has produced for detainees that it has designated as enemy combatants, which were prepared after the Combatant Status Review Tribunals that began in 2004. The report's findings were as follows:

1. Fifty-five percent (55%) of the detainees are not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or its coalition allies.

2. Only 8% of the detainees were characterized as al Qaeda fighters. Of the remaining detainees, 40% have no definitive connection with al Qaeda at all and 18% are have no definitive affiliation with either al Qaeda or the Taliban.

3. The Government has detained numerous persons based on mere affiliations with a large number of groups that in fact, are not on the Department of Homeland Security terrorist watchlist. Moreover, the nexus between such a detainee and such organizations varies considerably. Eight percent are detained because they are deemed "fighters for;" 30% considered "members of;" a large majority ? 60% -- are detained merely because they are "associated with" a group or groups the Government asserts are terrorist organizations. For 2% of the prisoners their nexus to any terrorist group is unidentified.

4. Only 5% of the detainees were captured by United States forces. 86% of the detainees were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to United States custody. This 86% of the detainees captured by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance were handed over to the United States at a time in which the United States offered large bounties for capture of suspected enemies.

5. Finally, the population of persons deemed not to be enemy combatants ? mostly Uighers ? are in fact accused of more serious allegations than a great many persons still deemed to be enemy combatants.

Another reports done on Guantanamo, which came out at about the same time as Seton Hall's can be found here and here.

These reports confirm that the remarks that Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney have been making about how these people are the "worst of the worst" and have been "scooped up off a battle field" are patently false. The issue that is perhaps the most disconcerting is that 86 percent of Gitmo detainees were arrested by Pakistani or Northern Alliance forces at a time when the US was offering a large bounty for turning in suspected Taliban or al Qaeda members. One example of a flyer informing Afghans of the bounty read:

You can receive millions of dollars for helping the Anti-Taliban Force catch Al-Qaida and Taliban murderers. This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life. Pay for livestock and doctors and school books and housing for all your people.

This is a copy of another flyer:



It seems obvious that most of these Pakistani and Afghan (and sometimes Chinese) dirt farmers being passed off as the "worst of the worst" were just at the wrong place at the wrong time. The US government doesn't seemed too concerned about giving them a trial or habeas corpus rights, and I can say that being held incognito for years and tortured and humiliated on a daily basis is enough to turn even a poor Chinese dirt farmer into an anti-American terrorist.

Here are a few interesting links that I've come across in the last few days:

A story from ABC about Chinese Muslims wrongly imprisoned in Guantanamo and then finally released after 4.5 years. They couldn't be sent to China since the government there persecutes Uighurs, and despite being found innocent of any charges (NLEC, or No Longer Enemy Combattant, in Guantanamo Bay terminology - Mr Kafka could not have made this up if he had tried), being put away by the Americans for 4.5 years is enough to garner a bad reputation. So apparently, no country would take them, the US included, with the single and solitary exception of Albania:

We are very pleased that the Albanian government and the Albanian people opened their hearts and welcomed us. Despite the fact that all the strong, powerful, democratic countries are able and capable of accepting us, they did not do that. We are having some problems ... there are no Uighurs in Albania, and we don't speak the Albanian language. ...

Were hoping that the United States government would recognize the mistake that it has done and accept, allow us to enter the United States. U.S. government captured us, U.S. government incarcerated us, locked us up in prison, and U.S. government said that we were not a threat and should be released.

Uighur-Americans came forward, made an offer to the United States government to accept us into Uighur-American society and community. They even went into the courts and contacted the lawyers and wrote a letter to the U.S. government officials asking them to consider releasing us into the United States. Unfortunately, it did not happen, a rather disappointing decision.

Otherwise, the Post ran a really interesting first person piece about Iraq, the Republic of Fear, which makes one fearful that Baghdad is slowly but surely turning into Beirut, circa 1980:

Today, the Americans are just one more militia lost in the anarchy. They, too, are killing Iraqis. ...

Sectarian and ethnic cleansing has since continued apace, as mixed neighborhoods are "purified." In Amriya, dead bodies are being found on the main street at a rate of three or five or seven a day. People are afraid to approach the bodies, or call for an ambulance or the police, for fear that they, too, will be found dead the following day. In Abu Ghraib, Dora, Amriya and other once-diverse neighborhoods, Shiites are being forced to leave. In Maalif and Shaab, Sunnis are being targeted.

The world wonders if Iraq is on the brink of civil war, while Iraqis fear calling it one, knowing the fate such a description would portend. In truth, the civil war started long before Samarra and long before the first uprisings. It started when U.S. troops arrived in Baghdad. It began when Sunnis discovered what they had lost, and Shiites learned what they had gained. And the worst is yet to come.

This made me remember reading a piece in Harper's that said that maybe the best thing for Iraq would be for the US to withdraw and let them have their full-fledged civil war. (It was by Edward Luttwak and was adapted from a piece in Foreign Policy, which can be found here) The version in Harper's ends like this:

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

It's hard for me to know what to make of this idea. I'm not convinced that an all-out civil war would result in anything but a division of Iraq, or even worse, a regional war that would involve Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and probably Turkey as well. The latter is obviously a horrible idea, but I haven't decided how I feel about the former.

Finally, the atrocities in Haditha make me think that maybe Luttuk and Rosen are right and the US should just get out as soon as possible.

I can't get over this. I know that similar things happened in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and I know that we're talking about kids who have been put in an extremely dangerous and stressful situation, and that sometimes people just crack. But I just don't understand how someone can shoot a one-legged man in a wheelchair nine times. Or how someone can shoot a 1-year old baby. Say that again: a 1-year old baby. I just don't understand.

At some point on Nov. 19, Marines in an armored convoy arrived at Haditha's hospital. They placed the bodies of the victims in the garden of the hospital and left without explanation, said Mohammed al-Hadithi, one of the hospital officials who helped carry the bodies inside. By some accounts, some of the corpses were burnt.

The remains of the 24 lie today in a cemetery called Martyrs' Graveyard. Stray dogs scrounge in the deserted homes. "Democracy assassinated the family that was here," graffiti on one of the houses declared.

I just came across a piece by the New Republic's Lawrence Kaplan in the Los Angeles Times entitled, If Iraq was wrong, is Darfur right?

The New Republic has recently come out with an issue on Darfur (only some of which is available to non-subscribers), and they come out as a whole for American intervention in Darfur. Kaplan's piece, however, brings up the question of Iraq and asks why it is all right to intervene in Darfur but not in Iraq:

As their criticism of the particulars of the Iraq war has hardened into a broader indictment of U.S. foreign policy, the mostly progressive voices calling for action in Darfur have become caught in a bind of their own devising. Even as they demand intervention in Sudan, they excoriate Washington for employing U.S. military power without due respect to the opinion of the international community and against nations that pose no imminent threat to our own -- which is to say, precisely the terms under which U.S. power would have to be employed in the name of saving Darfur.

He then goes on to argue that neither the African Union nor the UN will intervene or is capable of intervening, leaving the US as the only capable, if not willing, power equipped to intervene.

To my mind, the main reason why I am for intervention in Darfur but was against it in Iraq can be summed up in a single word: genocide. It's happening in Darfur but wasn't happening in Iraq. Now had the Anfal campaign of the late 1980s been continuing, I would have been for intervention in Iraq. This is not to say that genocide should be the threshold for international intervention, but it would at least be a good start. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) responds similarly to Kaplan's jab against him:

Once President Bush and former Secretary of State Colin Powell used the word "genocide" to describe the carnage in Darfur, the United States and every other civilized nation had a moral imperative to act. Those who find it painful to explain the deception and misinformation preceding our invasion of Iraq should not hide behind the victims in Darfur.

As for whether or not the AU or UN could or would stop the genocide, the AU is already there but lacks a proper and muscular mandate that would allow their forces to protect civilians. As it is, they can only protect themselves. Likewise, when and if a UN force intervenes, it would be important for them to have a good mandate and be properly funded, because we know what happens to underfunded blue helmets without a real mandate. As it stands, there are 7,000 AU troops already in Darfur, which could be folded into a UN force; France has at least 1,000 troops in Chad already; and if the UK could be convinced to provide the 5,000 troops that they offered in 2004, then that would make a force of 13,000. Other nations like South Africa and Ghana could also donate more troops, and the US could help shoulder the financial and logistics costs of such an intervention.

While writing this, I've come across an interesting (and much more detailed) plan by the International Crisis Group To Save Darfur, which is similar to my idea:

Crisis Group has long contended that because AMIS has reached the outer limits of its competence, and a UN mission authorised today would not be fully ready to take over from it for some six months, a distinct and separate multinational force should be sent to Darfur to bridge that gap and help stabilise the immediate situation. We have argued, and continue to believe, that NATO would be best from a practical military point of view. Unfortunately, political opposition to this in Khartoum, within the AU and even perhaps within the Atlantic Alliance itself, means it is not achievable at this time.

What we now propose, therefore, is a compromise driven by the urgent need for a more robust force in Darfur. A militarily capable UN member state -- France seems most promising since it already has troops and aircraft in the area -- should offer to the Security Council to go now to Darfur, wearing blue helmets, as the lead nation in the first phase of the incoming UN mission. It could be joined from the outset by forces from one or two other militarily capable UN members (and would probably need to be if the desirable target of around 5,000 personnel for this force is to be achieved). This stabilisation force would be a self-contained, separately commanded UN mission with identified functional or geographic divisions of responsibility that would work beside AMIS and through a liaison unit at its headquarters until arrangements were in place for a 1 October transition to the full UN mission. That full mission would need to be recruited from the best AMIS elements as well as a wider circle of Asian and other member states -- no easy task at a time when several large UN peacekeeping missions in Africa and elsewhere have exhausted the capabilities of many contribution candidates.

The U.S. and other NATO states should respond generously and quickly to requests from it or AMIS to provide logistical help as well as regular access to satellite imagery, air mobility and close air support, especially to deter or react to egregious movements of men or heavy weapons in the border area.

They finish by coming up with a list of recommendations for each of the major parties involved (with the exception of the belligerent parties):

RECOMMENDATIONS

To the African Union:

1. Request the immediate deployment of a UN-mandated stabilisation force to help bolster the AMIS troops and focus on the Chad-Sudan border and the Tawila-Graida corridor.

2. Seek quick negotiation of a single, enhanced ceasefire document to remove the ambiguities of the existing overlapping agreements.

3. Begin immediately to map the location of forces in Darfur so as to manage and enforce the ceasefire better.

4. Begin immediately identifying, defining and profiling the government-allied militias.

5. Improve the reporting mechanisms and procedures for monitoring ceasefire violations and urgently revive and upgrade the compliance and sanctions mechanisms of the ceasefire.

6. Negotiate a series of humanitarian ground rules, in collaboration with the UN, to help hold the parties accountable for the protection of humanitarian operations in their respective areas.

To the United Nations Security Council:

7. Authorise a two-phase intervention in Darfur under Chapter Seven of the Charter, with the following elements:

(a) for the first phase, to be accomplished within a month, a lead nation would serve as the advance element of the full UN mission by sending the bulk of an initial 5,000 troops to Darfur, with three main stabilisation tasks:

i. interdiction of military activities across the Chad-Darfur border;

ii. protection of civilians in Darfur, primarily in the Tawilla-Graida corridor; and

iii. rapid-reaction support of AMIS forces until the transition to a full-fledged UN peace support operation in October 2006.

(b) for the second phase, immediate planning for a peace support operation of some 15,000 troops -- none of whom should be diverted from the mission of the existing UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) -- with a mandate emphasising civilian protection, ceasefire enforcement and monitoring of the Chad-Sudan border, to take over from AMIS as of 1 October 2006.

8. Strengthen the existing sanctions regime by implementing the recommendations in the 30 January 2006 report of the Panel of Experts.

9. Authorise the Secretariat's peacekeeping department (DPKO) to begin planning on an urgent basis and together with the AU both phases of this operation, with priority tasks to include:

(a) identifying areas for early cooperation in Darfur, such as immediate deployment of UN experts to help support the establishment of a functioning ceasefire commission secretariat and the deployment of human rights monitors and translators, including women, to help improve the reporting capacity of AMIS; and

(b) identifying the lead nation to deploy in the initial phase to support AMIS by performing the tasks set out in recommendation 7(a) above and serve as the advance element of the full UN mission.

To Donor Governments:

10. Convene an early pledging conference to ensure that AMIS is fully funded until the UN mission can take over in October 2006.

To the U.S., the EU and its member states and others with a strong interest in regional peace and stability:

11. Undertake major diplomatic efforts to:

(a) persuade Sudan to accept and the AU to confirm transition of AMIS into a strong UN peacekeeping mission as of 1 October 2006 and request in the interim dispatch of an advance force of some 5,000 blue-helmets to assist AMIS by performing essential stabilisation tasks;

(b) persuade the Security Council to authorise a mission of some 15,000, including the strongest AMIS elements and with a strong Chapter VII mandate focused on civilian protection; and

(c) identify the lead nation to contribute the bulk of the advance element to assist AMIS and perform essential stabilisation tasks immediately upon Security Council authorisation, and be prepared to help with all necessary material and logistical support.

12. Concurrently with efforts to strengthen international forces on the ground, pursue the other elements of a coordinated three-part strategy to resolve the Darfur conflict by:

(a) reinforcing AU efforts to negotiate an enhanced ceasefire and a political settlement at Abuja, including by naming special envoys; and

(b) seeking accountability and an end to impunity by enforcing the Security Council's sanction regime and supporting human rights monitoring mechanisms and the work of the ICC.

An article in the Post reports today that Iranian President Ahmadinejad sent a letter to President Bush in order to propose "new solutions for getting out of international problems and the current fragile situation in the world." It mentions the quote put forth by the Times that Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be "wiped off the map." Since this comment was reported on, it has been used as a reason why Iran should not have nuclear weapons. I've been somewhat skeptical about the translation, and as it turns out, there is some disagreement about what was actually said. This disagreement has pitted Christopher Hitchens against Juan Cole, the latter being the only one of the two who actually speaks Farsi. A good summary of the online fight can be found here.

The actual sentence in question seems to be this: "een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad." I don't speak Farsi, but several of my colleagues are Iranian, and I've sent them the text to see what they think about it. The only word I can recognize is qods which is Farsi for al Quds, which is Jerusalem in English. Cole's translation is "the Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem must [vanish from] from the page of time." As it turns out, the Israeli group Memri offers a translation that is very similar to Cole's ("eliminated from the pages of history").

As it turns out, after the comments, the Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki denied the remarks:

Mottaki also denied during a press conference in Brussels that Tehran wanted to see Israel "wiped off the map."

"Nobody can remove a country from the map. This is a misunderstanding in Europe of what our president mentioned," he said. "How is it possible to remove a country from the map? He is talking about the regime. We do not recognize legally this regime."

Another denial came on CNN's Late Edition from Iran's ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Ali Asghar Soltanieh:

SOLTANIEH: The supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran has announced, more than two years, and few cases, the Western media have reflected to public of the world, that if the divine religions -- followers of the divine religions, Jews, Christians and Muslims, in that area follow a referendum, democratic referendum, and are one (ph) with homeless Palestinians, Iranian government and Iranian people would respect their decision.

Therefore, these are fabricated news that they are threatening and using this as an excuse for the military aggression or the aggressive policy. [...]

BLITZER: I have to wrap this up, but I want to get your response to this issue of Israel because it's become such a prominent issue in this whole discussion over nuclear plans that Iran may or may not have. This is what the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said on October 26 at that World Without Zionism conference.

He said, "Israel must be wiped off the map of the world, and god willing, with the force of god behind it, we shall soon experience a world without the United States and Zionists."

You understand why people in the West, especially here in the United States, are so concerned about your program, your nuclear program, given those kinds of direct threats against Israel, which happens to be a strong ally of the United States.

SOLTANIEH: I want to very briefly remind you that the policy of Islamic Republic of Iran and according to spirit and letter of our constitution is against any sort of school of thought or regime such as apartheid, Zionism, racism, and this is a matter of principle.

Therefore, what you are talking about as apartheid was disappeared and it could not be accepted by civilized world, this Zionism and aggression of racism is also condemned. [...]

BLITZER: Does your support for the removal of Zionism mean you want to see Israel destroyed?

SOLTANIEH: I have already explained to you and reflected to you the policy echoed by our supreme leader.

It means that if in that region, the divine religion followers of the Jews, Christians and Muslims, that all three are very respectful -- and we have Jews in Iran, which are peacefully living and they are represented in our parliament, they are fully respected -- if they come with the Palestinians, homeless Palestinians, to come and through following the democratic process will decide on a government and live in peace as they were living a thousand years of coexistence of these divine religions, Iran will support because we are looking for and we support peaceful settlement of the whole issue and peaceful coexistence of these divine religions in the Middle East. Let's hope for the peace.

BLITZER: But should there be a state of Israel?

SOLTANIEH: I think I've already answered to you. If Israel is a synonym and will give the indication of Zionism mentality, no.

But if you are going to conclude that we have said the people there have to be removed or we they have to be massacred or so, this is fabricated, unfortunate selective approach to what the mentality and policy of Islamic Republic of Iran is. I have to correct, and I did so.

So it seems that the statements by Ahmadinejad, or at the very least official Iranian policy, is much more nuanced than the Western media would have us believe. Furthermore, it is important to remember that Ahmadinejad does not control Iranian foreign policy. In an interesting article in the New York Review about Iran and the bomb, Christopher de Bellaigue has this to say:

Iran's enmity toward Israel is more nuanced than Ahmadinejad's statements suggest. The President's declarations that Israel should be "wiped off the map," and that the Holocaust is a "myth," understandably aroused fears that Iran might be considering an attack on Israel. But Iran's senior civilian and military officials have insisted that Iran will strike Israel only if Israel strikes first. More significantly, the President and supreme leader have both reiterated Iran's longstanding demand for a referendum on the status of Israel that would involve all Palestinian refugees. This official position would not seem to be consistent with an ambition to destroy Israel by force, least of all by using nuclear arms, which would endanger the very Palestinians whom the Iranians claim to be protecting. Several senior Iranian officials, including Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president who heads a powerful arbitration council in Tehran, have not disguised their irritation with the President's comments. But Ahmadinejad has benefited from the furor. By raising his prestige among hard-line Islamists around the world, the President has made it harder for his domestic opponents, who include Rafsanjani, to undermine him.

I will post the English translation later this week, once my Iranian colleagues have had the chance to get back to me.

Tony Judt weighs in on the Israel lobby in today's Times. He reminds us that criticizing Israel is not synonymous with being an anti-semite and that there is a debate to be had on the topic that Americans seem afraid of.

The damage that is done by America's fear of anti-Semitism when discussing Israel is threefold. It is bad for Jews: anti-Semitism is real enough (I know something about it, growing up Jewish in 1950's Britain), but for just that reason it should not be confused with political criticisms of Israel or its American supporters. It is bad for Israel: by guaranteeing it unconditional support, Americans encourage Israel to act heedless of consequences. The Israeli journalist Tom Segev described the Mearsheimer-Walt essay as "arrogant" but also acknowledged ruefully: "They are right. Had the United States saved Israel from itself, life today would be better ...the Israel Lobby in the United States harms Israel's true interests."

BUT above all, self-censorship is bad for the United States itself. Americans are denying themselves participation in a fast-moving international conversation. Daniel Levy (a former Israeli peace negotiator) wrote in Haaretz that the Mearsheimer-Walt essay should be a wake-up call, a reminder of the damage the Israel lobby is doing to both nations. But I would go further. I think this essay, by two "realist" political scientists with no interest whatsoever in the Palestinians, is a straw in the wind.

...the terms of strategic debate are shifting. East Asia grows daily in importance. Meanwhile our clumsy failure to re-cast the Middle East ? and its enduring implications for our standing there ? has come into sharp focus. American influence in that part of the world now rests almost exclusively on our power to make war: which means in the end that it is no influence at all. Above all, perhaps, the Holocaust is passing beyond living memory. In the eyes of a watching world, the fact that an Israeli soldier's great-grandmother died in Treblinka will not excuse his own misbehavior.

Thus it will not be self-evident to future generations of Americans why the imperial might and international reputation of the United States are so closely aligned with one small, controversial Mediterranean client state. It is already not at all self-evident to Europeans, Latin Americans, Africans or Asians. Why, they ask, has America chosen to lose touch with the rest of the international community on this issue? Americans may not like the implications of this question. But it is pressing. It bears directly on our international standing and influence; and it has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. We cannot ignore it.

There has been a lot of talk about the demographics of Isreal, but most people outside of Israel are unaware of the statistics. In the London Review, Ilan Pappe talks about the various Israeli plans to deal with the 'problem'.

Israel boosted its population with two massive Jewish immigrations, each of about a million people, in 1949 and in the 1980s. This kept the Palestinian proportion of the population down and today Palestinians account for nearly 20 per cent of the population of Israel (not counting the Occupied Territories). Ehud Olmert, the leader of Kadima and acting prime minister, thinks that if Israel stays in the Occupied Territories and its inhabitants are included in the Israeli population, Palestinians will outnumber Jews within 15 years. So he advocates hitkansut ? meaning 'convergence' or, better, 'ingathering' ? a policy that would leave several populous Palestinian areas outside direct Israeli control. But even if this consolidation takes place, there will still be a very large Palestinian population inside the 88 per cent of Palestine in which Olmert hopes to build the future, stable Jewish state. How large exactly we don't know: demographers in Israel belonging to the centre or the left provide a low estimate, which makes disengagement seem a reasonable solution, while those on the right tend to exaggerate the figure. But they all seem to agree that the demographic balance will not stay the same, given the higher birth-rate of Palestinians compared to Jews. Thus Olmert may well come to the conclusion that pull-outs are not the solution.

Once the 'Arabs' in Israel and the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories came to be thought of in the West as 'Muslims' it was easy to elicit support for Israel's demographic policies, at least where it counted: on Capitol Hill. But even in Europe there was no need, after 9/11, to explain why Israel has a 'demographic problem'. On 2 February 2003 the popular daily Maariv carried a typical headline: 'A quarter of the children in Israel are Muslims.' The piece went on to describe this fact as Israel's next 'ticking bomb'. The increase in the 'Muslim' population -- 2.4 per cent a year -- was not a problem anymore, but a 'danger'.

Recently, I was at a conference about the Israelo-Palestinian conflict, and they spoke of the two-state solution (in which the Palestinians had a "viable state") as the only solution to the conflict.

I seem to be the only person that I know of, besides the late Edward Said, who is for a single-state solution. I agree with Pappe, but in the end, all he does is describe the demographic situation Israel. He does not mention (at least not explicitely) what seems to me to be the obvious result of such a "demographic problem." If 20 percent of Israeli citizens are Arabic, and this proportion increases by 2.4 percent each year, it is only a matter of time (less than 15 years) before the majority of the population is Arab, or "non-Jewish" as the official statistics would call them.

This obviously means that even if we completely disregard the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Isreal will still have to decide between being a democratic state or a Jewish state: being both is impossible in the long run. Some Isrealis have decided that the answer to this is "populaiton transfer," otherwise known as ethnic cleansing. In an interview by Haaretz (part 1 and part 2) the Israeli historian Benny Morris talks about the past and future of Israeli ethnic cleansing:

Ben-Gurion was a transferist. He understood that there could be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its midst. There would be no such state. It would not be able to exist.

...Ben-Gurion was right. If he had not done what he did, a state would not have come into being. That has to be clear. It is impossible to evade it. Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here.

...There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing. I know that this term is completely negative in the discourse of the 21st century, but when the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide - the annihilation of your people - I prefer ethnic cleansing.

...A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on.

...Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history.

...If you are asking me whether I support the transfer and expulsion of the Arabs from the West Bank, Gaza and perhaps even from Galilee and the Triangle, I say not at this moment. I am not willing to be a partner to that act. In the present circumstances it is neither moral nor realistic. The world would not allow it, the Arab world would not allow it, it would destroy the Jewish society from within. But I am ready to tell you that in other circumstances, apocalyptic ones, which are liable to be realized in five or ten years, I can see expulsions. If we find ourselves with atomic weapons around us, or if there is a general Arab attack on us and a situation of warfare on the front with Arabs in the rear shooting at convoys on their way to the front, acts of expulsion will be entirely reasonable. They may even be essential.

...The Israeli Arabs are a time bomb. Their slide into complete Palestinization has made them an emissary of the enemy that is among us. They are a potential fifth column. In both demographic and security terms they are liable to undermine the state. So that if Israel again finds itself in a situation of existential threat, as in 1948, it may be forced to act as it did then. If we are attacked by Egypt (after an Islamist revolution in Cairo) and by Syria, and chemical and biological missiles slam into our cities, and at the same time Israeli Palestinians attack us from behind, I can see an expulsion situation. It could happen. If the threat to Israel is existential, expulsion will be justified.

So this is what it boils down to: the rationalization of ethnic cleansing. Isreali Jews will not want to accept being a minority in a mainly Arab state, but I'm not sure that they have much of an option, barring the extreme measures mentioned by Morris, which it would be difficult to imagine the US intervening to stop and equally difficult to imagine the international community letting happen.

At the end of the day, I think it would be better for both Israeli Jews and Palestinians to make an overture to the creation of a democratic binational state along the lines of Belgium (called Isreal in Hebrew and Palestine in Arabic), which would grant equal rights to both Arabs and Jews, rather than being forced to do so by the international community, much like South Africa was. Because in the end, if Israel goes down the road that South Africa did, she always runs the risk of ending up like Zimbabwe, where a long-opressed majority turns the tables and forces out the minority.

Today's Times has an editorial about inaction in Darfur. It's always nice to see the "agenda setting" press take up the issue, and it's particularly pleasant to see the Times taking not only the West, but also Arab and African leaders to task for ignoring the Darfuris' plight:

Where are the Muslims who took to the streets to protest Danish cartoons? Where are the African leaders who demanded boycotts of South Africa?

...We're waiting. But time is one thing that what is left of the Darfur population doesn't really have. We're glad to see that a rally is planned in Washington on April 30. We're glad to hear that Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick invited Darfur refugees to the State Department. Now President Bush needs to do the same thing. A photo op at the White House with Darfur refugees would go a long way toward embarrassing the government of Sudan.

That should also embarrass the rest of the Security Council members, like China, Qatar, Ghana and Tanzania, that continue to give diplomatic cover to Sudan. Rwanda should have taught us all something; it's tragic that it apparently has not.

The London Review recently published an article on the Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer, a University of Chicago political scientist, and Stephen Walt, a Harvard government professor. (An unabridged version is available here.)

There has been a lot of talk about the paper, most of it pretty inane, like this piece from the Wall Street Journal, which seems to try to give the anti-semitism defense a veneer of resectability by slightly nuancing it:

The authors are at pains to note that the Israel Lobby is by no means exclusively Jewish, and that not every American Jew is a part of it. Fair enough. But has there ever been an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that does not share its basic features? Dual loyalty, disloyalty, manipulation of the media, financial manipulation of the political system, duping the goyim (gentiles) and getting them to fight their wars, sponsoring and covering up acts of gratuitous cruelty against an innocent people -- every canard ever alleged of the Jews is here made about the Israel Lobby and its cause. No wonder former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke was quick to endorse the article, calling it a "great step forward."

I do not mean to suggest that Messrs. Mearsheimer and Walt are themselves anti-Semitic. But as outgoing Harvard President Larry Summers once noted, what may not be anti-Semitic in intent may yet be anti-Semitic in effect. By giving aid and comfort to people who have no trouble substituting the word "Jews" for "Israel Lobby," the Mearsheimer-Walt article is anti-Semitic in effect.

Not all of the criticisms, however, stoop to such non-arguments. This piece by the University of Chicago's Daniel Drezner focuses on what he sees as the empirical problems of the piece:

Walt and Mearsheimer should not be criticized as anti-Semites, because that's patently false. They should be criticized for doing piss-poor, monocausal social science.

To repeat, the main empirical problems with the article are that:

A) They fail to demonstrate that Israel is a net strategic liability;
B) They ascribe U.S. foreign policy behavior almost exclusively to the activities of the "Israel Lobby"; and
C) They omit consderation of contradictory policies and countervailing foreign policy lobbies.

At the end of the day, however, the piece that I found to be the most interesting came from Ha'aretz:

It sometimes takes AIPAC omnipotence too much at face value and disregards key moments - such as the Bush senior/Baker loan guarantees episode and Clinton's showdown with Netanyahu over the Wye River Agreement. The study largely ignores AIPAC run-ins with more dovish Israeli administrations, most notably when it undermined Yitzhak Rabin, and how excessive hawkishness is often out of step with mainstream American Jewish opinion, turning many, especially young American Jews, away from taking any interest in Israel.

Yet their case is a potent one: that identification of American with Israeli interests can be principally explained via the impact of the Lobby in Washington, and in limiting the parameters of public debate, rather than by virtue of Israel being a vital strategic asset or having a uniquely compelling moral case for support (beyond, as the authors point out, the right to exist, which is anyway not in jeopardy). The study is at its most devastating when it describes how the Lobby "stifles debate by intimidation" and at its most current when it details how America's interests (and ultimately Israel's, too) are ill-served by following the Lobby's agenda.

I tend to agree that the Israel lobby is pushing a foreign policy agenda that is often detrimental to American national interest and usually gives the opposite appearance of being the fair broker that the US tries to sell itself as in the Middle East. And while idiots like David Duke might use articles like this to push their elementary racism, we know that there is a lobby and that it is effective, and that we should not let bigots like him dictate what is acceptable and what is off limits for reasonable discussion. Like Mearsheimer and Walt say in their paper:

In its basic operations, the Israel Lobby is no different from the farm lobby, steel or textile workers' unions, or other ethnic lobbies. There is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway US policy: the Lobby's activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise it are only doing what other special interest groups do, but doing it very much better. By contrast, pro-Arab interest groups, in so far as they exist at all, are weak, which makes the Israel Lobby?s task even easier.

Another fair account of the paper appears in an Op-Ed aricle by Nicholas Goldberg in the LA Times:

The idea of a powerful "Jewish lobby" that has its gnarled fingers in the machinery of the government is an old and repugnant canard. Along with the Jews who supposedly own the media and those who reputedly control the banks, the cabal of sinister, third-column Hebrews who whisper into the ears of our leaders is a classic in the traditional checklist of anti-Semitic fulminations.

So it's no surprise that in the modern era, even to broach the idea of a "Jewish lobby" is unacceptable. It's just not done in polite society -- even in situations in which there's some truth to it. Few would deny, after all, that there are people who lobby for various Jewish issues, including, of course, Israel (just as there are a lot of Jews working in Hollywood and just as Jews do own the New York Times). But even though we know these things, we generally don't talk about them.

...So what are we to make of [the article]? Is it anti-Semitism or honesty? Propaganda cloaked in academic respectability -- or a courageous willingness to identify the elephant in the room?

...It seems silly to deny that a powerful lobby on behalf of Israel exists. The real question is how pernicious it is. Does it, in fact, persuade us to act counter to our national interest -- or is it a positive thing, as publisher Mortimer Zuckerman suggests?

His answer to this question is to read the article yourself. I couldn't agree more.


UPDATE: The London Review speaks out against charges of anti-semitism.

Also, Noam Chomsky weighs in.

There has been a lot of talk lately about nuclear prolifilation and double standards, particularly with the nuclear fuel deal struck between the US and India, which has not signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. (The only other countries that have not signed are Israel and Pakistan.) The claim of double standards is that the US has turned a blind eye to ISrael's nuclear weapons program, yet is threatening Iran, which has signed the Treaty, with sanctions for their pursuit of nuclear technology. The treaty stipulates the following:

Each nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to transfer to any recipient whatsoever nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly; and not in any way to assist, encourage, or induce any non-nuclear-weapon State to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices, or control over such weapons or explosive devices.

While North Korea was a signatory, it pulled out of the treaty in 2003, which does not seem to be against the text of the treaty:

Each Party shall in exercising its national sovereignty have the right to withdraw from the Treaty if it decides that extraordinary events, related to the subject matter of this Treaty, have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country. It shall give notice of such withdrawal to all other Parties to the Treaty and to the United Nations Security Council three months in advance. Such notice shall include a statement of the extraordinary events it regards as having jeopardized its supreme interests.

So in response to claims of a double standard, both in comparison to Israel and India (or even Pakistan), Avner Cohen wrote a piece in Ha'aretz suggesting that Israel come clean on the bomb (print-ready version). His argument is twofold, legal and "existential." Legally, Cohen argues, Israel never signed the treaty, whereas Iran did:

The attempt to put Israel and Iran on the same level, or even to create a concrete political connection between them, is ignorant, unfair and biased. First of all, from the point of view of international law: whereas Iran is a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and is committed to comply with it, Israel, like India and Pakistan, is not a signatory to the treaty and therefore is not beholden to a formal commitment. Whereas Iran has been caught in flagrant breach of its international commitments, Israel has not broken such commitments. In other words, like the seven other nuclear states in the world, and in stark contrast to Iran, Israel has never relinquished the right to develop nuclear weaponry.

Here, he is only partially right. While nuclear powers like France, the US, Britian, Russia and China never gave up their right to have nuclear weapons, they did sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, unlike Israel, Pakistan and India. So it's not really fair to put Iran, Israel and, say, Russia in the same basket. It's hard to know what to make of countries that refuse to sign an international treaty like that one. Legally, they're not bound to any course of action, but practically speaking, are countries that renege on a treaty any safer than those that never signed in the first place? Furthermore, if we're speaking in purely legal terms, Iran is within its rights to develop nuclear power, because the treaty explicitely ensures the right to pursue "nuclear energy for peaceful purposes":

Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination and in conformity with Articles I and II of this Treaty.

But let's not be coy. We know that even if Iran were to not produce nuclear weapons immediately, just positioning itself to be able to do so in short notice would make it a dominant force in the region. But there is little that the US or Israel, Iran's rival in the region, could do about that, legally speaking, that is.

Cohen's second argument is that Israel should somehow be given carte blanche for nuclear weapons, since she has always and still faces an "existential threat."

According to foreign reports, Israel began to develop its Samson option in the 1950s, while it was establishing a state for a people still in the shadow of conflagration, in a hostile geopolitical environment that was opposed to its very existence. It found itself committed to the creation of an insurance policy within the pre-1967 borders, without external guarantees for its existence. In the political climate of that time, a decade after the Holocaust, Israel had perhaps the strongest strategic and moral justification for turning to the nuclear option, certainly no less than France or China, which also began the atomic journey at that time.

Not only is Iran not under existential threat - its nuclear aspirations are an issue that puts it on a collision course with the world. Even the leaders of North Korea are not daring to declare their aspirations to wipe countries off the map, as the president of Iran has declared with respect to Israel.

This is essentially an argument for Israeli exceptionalism, and it brings up the question of whether some countries should be allowed to have nuclear weapons but not others.

Cohen is confusing moral and strategic justifications for nuclear weapons here. Sure, Israel had strategic reasons for pursuing nuclear weapons, but so does Iran. We all know that having nuclear weapons changes the equation and makes countries like the US much more likely to choose diplomacy over military force. Nuclear weapons are a deterrent to regime change. Personally, I think that the Middle East should be a nucler weapons-free zone, but for that to happen, Israel would have to realize that it is not possible for it to remain the sole nuclear power in the region. The mere fact that Israel has nuclear weapons is enough to encourage its neighbors to catch up.

In the end, the only real justification for one country to have nuclear weapons while another is not allowed is that of power politics. Those that have weapons are in a position to deny these weapons to other countries. It would be difficult to come up with criteria to decide otherwise. Would these criteria be economic? Social? Should there be a committee that would take these things into consideration and then make a ruling? This would be very complicated, and as things stand, it would most likely be the Security Council that would make that call, and of course for those five countries, each of which is a nuclear power, there should be no nuclear proliferation. For these countries, what is good for the goose is not good for the gander.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that other countries (North Korea, Isreal, India and Pakistan) would clandestinely pursue nuclear weapons. And knowing that the nuclear powers of the world will not willingly allow any other countries to obtain nuclear weapons, the best way to ensure non-proliferation would seem to be to ensure that they have no reason to seek them. And in this case, Israel should start asking itself if it's preferable to be a nuclear power among others in the region or to be a non-nuclear power in a nuclear-free Middle East.



Note:

On why and how the world could live with a nuclear Iran, here are two interesting articles from the Times:

Suppose we just let Iran have the bomb
We can live with a nuclear Iran

Irshad Manji asks an interesting question in today's Times when explaining how she learned to love the wall that has made life for many Palestinians even harder than it already was. She wonders if an effort to prevent suicide bombings justifies further hardship for Palestinians.

She answers yes, presumably because "before the barrier, there was the bomber." Even if she would prefer to overlook the fact that before the bomber, there was the occupation, Ms. Manji should concede that there are any number of ways to ensure security for a state, but that many of them are cruel, immoral and against international law.

An important point was made by Israel's Chief Justice in his ruling on the wall, in which he quoted his judgment prohibiting the torturing of Palestinian detainees: "This is the destiny of a democracy: she does not see all means as acceptable, and the ways of her enemies are not always open before her. A democracy must sometimes fight with one arm tied behind her back."

Those who proclaim their love for the wall would do well to remember this.

Public Radio International's This American Life recently ran a very interesting episode about Guantanamo Bay and habeas corpus, called Habeas Schmaebeas (real audio). They interview two people who have been released from the camp that's not quite in Cuba and not quite in the US where over 500 people have been imprisoned without being charged with a crime. One of the people interviewed is a Pakestani man named Bader who was arrested there (and handed over to American authorities) for running a satirical Urdu language newspaper. Jack Hitt does a good job dispelling some of the misinformation about the people who are being held in Guantanamo Bay:

We're told over and over that these prisoners are so terrible that we need an off-shore facility away from US law to hold them. But then there's Bader. And every day, more storie like his are coming out, and they raise the question: Is Guantanamo a camp full of terrorists, or a camp full of mistakes?

He quotes Bush and Cheney, who had this to say about the matter:

Bush: "These are people that got scooped up off a battlefield attempting to kill U.S. troops. And I want to make sure, before they're released, that they don't come back to kill again."

Cheney: "The people that are there are people we picked up on the battlefield, primarily in Afghanistan. They're terrorists. They're bomb makers. They're facilitators of terror. They're members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban."

Then he quotes Seton Hall University Law School's Report on Guantanamo Detainees, which is based on written determinations the Government has produced for detainees that it has designated as enemy combatants, which were prepared after the Combatant Status Review Tribunals that began in 2004. The report's findings were as follows:

1. Fifty-five percent (55%) of the detainees are not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or its coalition allies.

2. Only 8% of the detainees were characterized as al Qaeda fighters. Of the remaining detainees, 40% have no definitive connection with al Qaeda at all and 18% are have no definitive affiliation with either al Qaeda or the Taliban.

3. The Government has detained numerous persons based on mere affiliations with a large number of groups that in fact, are not on the Department of Homeland Security terrorist watchlist. Moreover, the nexus between such a detainee and such organizations varies considerably. Eight percent are detained because they are deemed "fighters for;" 30% considered "members of;" a large majority ? 60% -- are detained merely because they are "associated with" a group or groups the Government asserts are terrorist organizations. For 2% of the prisoners their nexus to any terrorist group is unidentified.

4. Only 5% of the detainees were captured by United States forces. 86% of the detainees were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to United States custody. This 86% of the detainees captured by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance were handed over to the United States at a time in which the United States offered large bounties for capture of suspected enemies.

5. Finally, the population of persons deemed not to be enemy combatants ? mostly Uighers ? are in fact accused of more serious allegations than a great many persons still deemed to be enemy combatants.

Another reports done on Guantanamo, which came out at about the same time as Seton Hall's can be found here and here.

These reports confirm that the remarks that Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney have been making about how these people are the "worst of the worst" and have been "scooped up off a battle field" are patently false. The issue that is perhaps the most disconcerting is that 86 percent of Gitmo detainees were arrested by Pakistani or Northern Alliance forces at a time when the US was offering a large bounty for turning in suspected Taliban or al Qaeda members. One example of a flyer informing Afghans of the bounty read:

You can receive millions of dollars for helping the Anti-Taliban Force catch Al-Qaida and Taliban murderers. This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life. Pay for livestock and doctors and school books and housing for all your people.

This is a copy of another flyer:



It seems obvious that most of these Pakistani and Afghan (and sometimes Chinese) dirt farmers being passed off as the "worst of the worst" were just at the wrong place at the wrong time. The US government doesn't seemed too concerned about giving them a trial or habeas corpus rights, and I can say that being held incognito for years and tortured and humiliated on a daily basis is enough to turn even a poor Chinese dirt farmer into an anti-American terrorist.