the human province

I arrived last night in Beirut, which was a good feeling after being away for so long and considering the circumstances under which I had to leave. Things seem to have picked up here, but the streets still seem much calmer than before the war. Then again, it's hard to say how much of that is due to the war and how much of that is due to the fact that it's the first Friday of Ramadan.

When I was in Cyprus, waiting for my connecting flight to Beirut, I talked with a couple from Beirut about the situation in Lebanon and Sudan. I told him how frustrated it makes me that there are no Muslims out marching agains the murder of Muslims in Darfur or the opression of Sahwari people by the Moroccan government. But cartoons in a right wing Danish newspaper set off riots and protests all over the Muslim world.

Normally, Thomas Friedman's articles annoy me, but I can't help but agree with him about the state of hypocrisy in Islam today:

This year on the first day of Ramadan, a Sunni suicide bomber in Baghdad killed 35 people who were lining up in a Shiite neighborhood to buy fuel. The same day, the severed heads of nine murdered Iraqi police officers and soldiers were found north of Baghdad.

I don?t get it. How can Muslims blow up other Muslims on their most holy day of the year -- in mosques! -- and there is barely a peep of protest in the Muslim world, let alone a million Muslim march? Yet Danish cartoons or a papal speech lead to violent protests. If Muslims butchering Muslims -- in Sudan, Iraq, Egypt, Pakistan and Jordan -- produces little communal reaction, while cartoons and papal remarks produce mass protests, what does Islam stand for today? It is not an insult to ask that question.

Muslims might say: "Well, what about Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo or Palestine? Let?s talk about all your violent behavior." To which I would say: "Let's talk about it! But you'll have to get in line behind us, because we're constantly talking about where we?ve gone wrong." We can?t have a meaningful dialogue if we, too, are not self-critical, but neither can Muslims.

I don't agree with his conclusion that the Pope shouldn't apologize -- I think he should -- but I do agree with him that there is a definite double standard for slights against Muslims. When the West hurts Muslims, the Muslim world comes together to condemn the attack, but when Muslims hurt Muslims, like in Darfur, Iraq and the Western Sahara, the silence is deafening.

Hassan Nasrallah held a public rally on 22 September, his first public appearance since the war. Hundreds of thousands of people showed up, and it was a surprise that Nasrallah was able to show up, since Israel has threatened to assasinate him. Nasrallah's speech talked about many things, including a national unity government, the welcoming of UNIFIL forces (provided that they don't spy on Hizbollah) and claims that the latest war was done at Iran and Syria's behest. He also addressed the idea of disarming Hizbollah, which he mentioned that no army, as Israelis had just learned, could disarm them by force:

The resistance is the result of several causes -- the occupation, the arrest of prisoners, the plunder of waters, the threat to Lebanon, and the attack on Lebanese sovereignty. These are the causes. Tackle the causes and the results will be tackled easily.

When we build a strong, capable, and just state that protects Lebanon and the Lebanese, it will be easy to find an honourable solution to the question of the resistance and its weapons. I would like the Lebanese to hear clearly. I and my brothers get excited sometimes and say all kinds of things. Let us speak with some responsibility. We do not say that these weapons will remain forever. And, it is not logical for these weapons to remain forever. There is bound to be an end to them. The natural key is to tackle the causes and the results will disappear.

Come and build a strong and just state, protecting the country and the citizens and their livelihoods, waters, and dignity, and you will find that the resolution of the resistance issue will not need even a negotiation table. It is a great deal easier than that.

Roger Cohen -- responding to the outrage that came with the decision by Richard Haas, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, to invite Ahmadinejad to speak -- argues, as I have for a while, that it is time to talk to Iran.

At some point these past few years, diplomacy went out of fashion. I'm not sure precisely when, but all the signs are that it's time for a rethink. The world needs a bout of bridge-building.

...Haass, the president of the council, is unrepentant. "I don't see diplomacy or talking as a favor or an endorsement or a gift," he said. "To me, it's a tool, and I'm confident that if used right, it can advance our interests."

He continued: "The United States gets itself in trouble when it limits its options and approaches diplomacy as a value judgment. It's not obvious to me, looking at the last 50 or 60 years, that we paid a price for talking to the Soviets. At the end of all the talking, we won the Cold War."

This is in strong contrast to the Israeli government's reaction, summed up in this little pearl found in Israeli ambassador to the US Daniel Ayalon's to Haass letter denouncing the event:

Some of those upset with the council's decision have compared it to hypothetically inviting Hitler to a meeting in the 1930's. In fact, meeting with Ahmadinejad is worse: Hitler did not openly call for genocide in the 1930's, and today we have the lessons of the 1930's to guide us. Foremost among those lessons is that appeasing fanatics like Hitler and granting them legitimacy leads to genocide and war.

I've said it before, but actual diplomacy and negotiation means talking to people you don't like. Only talking to those who agree with you and labelling others as evil, which is what the US does in the Middle East, is the opposite of diplomacy.

When Bush sets up a dichotomy of good and evil, or with us or against us, he's offering Ahmedinejad and Chavez a sympathetic audience on a silver platter.

This first article from the Boston Globe looks at the lessons of Suez and how the US might learn from its former stance in Egypt against Britian, France and Israel in 1956:

[British Prime Minister] Eden was reminded in friendly but forceful terms of the sheer unwisdom of "the use of force" against an Arab country-which would, "it seems to me, vastly increase the area of jeopardy." The "appeaser" in this case was General Dwight David Eisenhower, the 34th president of the United States, in the day when things were different in the White House and the Republican Party. If Eden persevered in his folly, Ike wrote to the prime minister on Sept. 3, 1956, in words just as chilling today, not only the peoples of the Middle East but "all of Asia and Africa, would be consolidated against the West to a degree which, I fear, could not be overcome in a generation."

The next is an interview in Harper's with Dr. Emile A. Nakhleh, who served in the CIA for 15 years and retired this summer as the Director of the Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program. When asked what the US should do in Iraq, he had this to say:

I have come to believe that our presence is part of the problem and that we should begin to seriously devise an exit strategy. There's a civil war in Iraq and our presence is contributing to the violence. We've become a lightning rod?we're not restricting the violence, we're contributing to it. Iraq has galvanized jihadists; our presence is what is attracting them. We need to get out of there. The idea of Iraq being a model for the region has also been tossed out the window. Now the only question is whether Iraq will become a haven for sectarianism, or follow either the Iranian model or the standard Arab authoritarian model. It's only three years old, but the once-touted model of a secular, democratic Iraq is all but forgotten. This casts a dark shadow on American efforts to spread democracy in the region.

He also has some interesting things to say about Guantanamo Bay and American's Iranian policy.

While thinking about Iran and the bomb, I've often wondered if Israel would rather be a nuclear power among others in the region or to be a non-nuclear power in a nuclear-free Middle East. Because it seems that with nuclear weapons in Iran and Israel (not to mention India and Pakistan), it would only be a matter of time until Egypt and Saudi Arabia started looking into nuclear weapons.

It turns out that I was right, or at least might be, since Gamal Mubarak, the Egyptian President's son and probably heir, has announced Egypt's interest in developing nuclear power.

"The whole world -- I don't want to say all, but many developing countries ? have proposed and started to execute the issue of alternative energy," [Gamal Mubarak] said. "It is time for Egypt to put forth, and the party will put forth, this proposal for discussion about its future energy policies, the issue of alternative energy, including nuclear energy, as one of the alternatives."

He also said in a clear reference to the White House: "We do not accept visions from abroad that try to dissolve the Arab identity and the joint Arab efforts within the framework of the so-called Greater Middle East Initiative."

..."Egypt, and especially the N.D.P., is a strategic ally of the U.S.," said Hassan Abou Taleb, an analyst with the government-financed Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. "It does not seek confrontation with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Instead, it seeks cooperation. Why should the U.S. assist India in its nuclear program and not Egypt?"

Of course, no one is talking about nuclear weapons in Egypt, just nuclear power. But then again, that's the official line in Iran as well. It seems obvious to me that Indian, Pakistani, and especially Israeli, nuclear weapons programs are only going to drive other countries like Egypt, and I predict that Saudi Arabia will follow suit, to try their hand at entering the nuclear club.

To my mind, the Middle East should be a nuke-free zone, and allowing Israel to have nuclear weapons and the Bush administration's talk of "useable nuclear weapons" that could be used against non-nuclear countries, have only ensured that more and more countries will seek nuclear arms.

According to Musharraf, in order to get Pakistan's help in the "war on terror" after September 11, 2001, Richard Armitage's argument was more Corleone-ish than Clintonian, all stick and no carrot.

In an interview to be aired on CBS television this weekend Pakistan's president, General Pervez Musharraf, said the threat was delivered by the assistant secretary of state, Richard Armitage, in conversations with Pakistan's intelligence director.

"The intelligence director told me that (Mr Armitage) said, 'Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the stone age'," Gen Musharraf was quoted as saying. The revelation that the US used extreme pressure to secure Pakistan's cooperation in the war on terror arrived at a time of renewed unease in the US about its frontline ally.

Gen Musharraf told CBS he was stunned at the bluntness of the US approach in the aftermath of the attacks. "I think it was a very rude remark," he said. But he yielded to the request.

I've wondered about the sweaty fist of American diplomacy -- which I often sum up as "do something about it, bitch!" -- and whether or not the actual language is euphemistic or whether diplomats sometimes, as my father would say, call a "spade" a "fucking shovel."

This sort of language doesn't surprise me from this administration, but I'd be curious to know if this is a change in behavior or if behind the scenes this is normal behavior for the powerful "negotiators."

The LA Times gives an Iraqi's account of what life has become in Baghdad. The piece is unsigned, because he's afraid that he'd be killed if his name were to appear:

On a recent Sunday, I was buying groceries in my beloved Amariya neighborhood in western Baghdad when I heard the sound of an AK-47 for about three seconds. It was close but not very close, so I continued shopping.

As I took a right turn on Munadhama Street, I saw a man lying on the ground in a small pool of blood. He wasn't dead.

The idea of stopping to help or to take him to a hospital crossed my mind, but I didn't dare. Cars passed without stopping. Pedestrians and shop owners kept doing what they were doing, pretending nothing had happened.

I was still looking at the wounded man and blaming myself for not stopping to help. Other shoppers peered at him from a distance, sorrowful and compassionate, but did nothing.

I went on to another grocery store, staying for about five minutes while shopping for tomatoes, onions and other vegetables. During that time, the man managed to sit up and wave to passing cars. No one stopped. Then, a white Volkswagen pulled up. A passenger stepped out with a gun, walked steadily to the wounded man and shot him three times. The car took off down a side road and vanished.

No one did anything. No one lifted a finger. The only reaction came from a woman in the grocery store. In a low voice, she said, "My God, bless his soul."

I went home and didn't dare tell my wife. I did not want to frighten her.

Via verbal privilege, the Post gives us a sad account of Mutanabi Street, where Baghdadis used to go to buy books and discuss ideas.

Under former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, Mutanabi Street was the nexus for resistance and freewheeling debates, where underground writers published illegal books that denounced Hussein.

"I wish you could see how it used to be on Fridays," Shatri spoke before he broke down in tears. "You could not even walk. The whole street was filled with books and people. Mutanabi Street is a part of how great Baghdad is."

Then, in a reverent tone, he uttered a proverb known across the Arab world: "Cairo writes. Beirut publishes. And Baghdad reads."

Since 1963, Shatri has peddled books on Mutanabi Street, like a faithful friend, through military rule and political oppression, wars and embargo. Of all the eras he has watched ebb and flow, it is today's Iraq, with its violent nature, that most mocks the proud legacy of Mutanabi Street, he said.

"It means the death of education, the death of the history of the street, the death of the culture of Baghdad," Shatri said.

Two Fridays ago, Shatri took action. He and other members of his writers union gathered in front of his shop. They sipped breakfast tea. Then, at around 9:30 a.m., they poured kerosene over a pile of books and set them aflame.

"I cried when I was burning the books," Shatri said.

"It's a message to the government," said Nakshabandi, who also took part. "It's an S.O.S. Help us. An important part of Baghdad is dying. And it is on its last breath."

"But no one got the message. There was no action."

National Public Radio's Fresh Air has a show on Christian Zionism. Terry Gross interviews Pastor John Hagee, the leader of Christians United for Israel, as well as Israeli journalist, Gershom Gorenberg and American journalist, Max Blumenthal. The interview with Hagee is particularly interesting and disturbing, but it's a shame that Gross lets him off the hook so easily. She lets statements like Muslims "have a mandate to kill all Jews and Christians" go without being challenged. Here are some verses that go directly contrary to this commonly misheld belief:

Sura 5:69 - Surely they that believe, and those of Jewry, and the Christians, and those Sabeaans, whoso believes in God and the Last Day, and works righteousness--their wage waits them with their Lord, and no fear shall be on them, neither shall they sorrow.

Sura 5:82 - ...and you will find the nearest in love to the believers (Muslims) those who say: "We are Christians." That is because amongst them are priests and monks, and they are not proud.

Sura 25:63 - The worshippers of the All-Merciful are they who tread gently upon the earth, and when the ignorant address them, they reply, "Peace!"

Sura 28:55 - And when they hear vain talk, they turn away from it and say: "To us our deeds, and to you yours; peace be to you: we do not seek out the ignorant."

My guess is that it's because she doesn't know enough about Islam to know that that his statements are demonstrably false. But there's not really much excuse for her timidity in questioning the idea that Hurricane Katrina was a punishment from God because New Orleans had too many homosexuals.

A friend sent me a link to George Packer's article in The New Yorker on Bush's recent speech on torture techniques and the Army's response:

Last week, in the guise of calling for fair trials, the President demanded that Congress give him the power to go on torturing detainees in secret prisons and use the evidence obtained against them. And last week the Army honorably closed the holes in moral conduct that the President, his counsel, the Vice-President, the Justice Department, and the Secretary of Defense pried open shortly after September 11th. It did so not only to remove the stain on its reputation and to protect its soldiers but because it cares more about the war than about the next election.

The Canadian government has released a report about the American rendition of Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured for a year until the Syrians realized that he was innocent and then let him go:

A government commission on Monday exonerated a Canadian computer engineer of any ties to terrorism and issued a scathing report that faulted Canada and the United States for his deportation four years ago to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured.

The report on the engineer, Maher Arar, said American officials had apparently acted on inaccurate information from Canadian investigators and then misled Canadian authorities about their plans for Mr. Arar before transporting him to Syria.

"I am able to say categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offense or that his activities constituted a threat to the security of Canada," Justice Dennis R. O?Connor, head of the commission, said at a news conference.

I'm not sure what's more diconceritng, the Canadian government's incompetence or the American government's dishonesty and callous cruelty. I find it interesting that the US will only talk to Damascus when they want someone tortured.

More information about the commission can be found here.

Here is an extract from the report (pdf):

On September 26, 2002, Mr. Arar, who had been in Tunisia with his family, was returning to Canada by plane via Switzerland and the United States. He boarded an American Airlines flight in Zurich and, at about two o?clock in the afternoon, arrived in New York, where he was pulled aside by American customs officials. Two hours later, he was fingerprinted and photographed, and told this was regular procedure. His possessions were searched and his passport photographed.

Mr. Arar was then placed under arrest and strip-searched, an experience he found "humiliating." He was held, first at the John F. Kennedy International Airport and later at the Metropolitan Detention Centre, for 12 days, during which time he was interrogated by American officials. Initially, he was denied access to a lawyer. His request to pray during the interrogation sessions was denied.

On October 8, 2002, Mr. Arar was awakened at three o'clock in the morning and told that he was to be removed to Syria. Mr. Arar told Professor Toope that, at that point, he had begun to cry and say that he would be tortured if sent to Syria. He said he had felt "destroyed."

Mr. Arar was taken to New Jersey, put on a corporate jet, and flown to Amman, Jordan, with brief stops in Washington, D.C., Portland, Maine, and Rome, Italy. Throughout the journey, he was chained and shackled in the back of the plane. The shackles were removed only at the end of the trip, when he was given the opportunity to have a meal with his guards. He could not eat.

It was the middle of the night when he arrived in Amman and was transported to a detention centre. He had not slept since leaving New York. He suffered blows at the hands of his Jordanian guards and was blindfolded. He was then taken into a room, where the blindfold was removed. He was asked routine questions and then blindfolded again before being led to a cell. The next morning, he was told that he was going to Syria. Later that day, he was blindfolded and put into a car or van. By the time he arrived at his destination at around five o?clock in the afternoon, Mr. Arar was exhausted, hungry, and terrified. His blindfold was removed, and he saw portraits of Presidents Assad, father and son. Mr. Arar later learned that he was in Syria, in the Far Falestin detention centre, also called the Palestine Branch, which was run by the Syrian Military Intelligence (SMI).

Later that day, Mr. Arar was interrogated for approximately four hours by a man called "George," subsequently identified as George Salloum, the head interrogator at the Palestine Branch. Two other interrogators were present, taking notes. The questions mostly concerned his family. Mr. Arar told Professor Toope that, at this point, he had decided to "say anything" necessary to avoid torture. Although no physical violence was used during this interrogation session, ominous threats were made. Whenever Mr. Arar was slow to answer, George would threaten to use "the chair," a reference Mr. Arar did not understand.

By the next day, October 9, 2002, Mr. Arar was even more exhausted, as he had not been able to sleep in the cell. He was called up for interrogation. When George arrived, he immediately started hitting Mr. Arar. The chair on which Mr. Arar had been sitting was taken away, so that he was now on the floor.

George brought a black cable, which might have been a shredded electrical cable, about two feet long, into the room with him. Mr. Arar told Professor Toope that, when he had seen the cable, he had started to cry. George told Mr. Arar to open his right hand, then raised the cable high and brought it down hard. Mr. Arar recalled the moment vividly; he told Professor Toope that he had felt like a bad Syrian school boy. He stood up and started jumping, but he was forced back down and the process was repeated with his left hand.

Mr. Arar was then made to stand near the door, and the questions began. The theme throughout was "you are a liar." He was given breaks, during which he was put into a different room, where he could hear other people screaming. Sometimes, he was blindfolded and left to stand in the hallway for an hour or more. The screaming continued. Each time Mr. Arar was brought back into the interrogation room, he was beaten about the upper body and asked more questions.

On the second day in the Palestine Branch, the interrogation lasted approximately 10 hours. Day three, October 11, 2002, was the most "intensive" for Mr. Arar. He was questioned for 16 to 18 hours, and was subjected to great physical and psychological abuse. The questions were in part about Abdullah Almalki. Mr. Arar was beaten with the black cable on numerous occasions throughout the day, and was threatened with electric shock, "the chair" and "the tire." The pattern was three or four lashes with the cable, then questions, followed by more beating. After a while, he became so weak that he was disoriented. He remembers being asked if he had trained in Afghanistan. By this time, he was so afraid and in so much pain that he replied, "If you want me to say so." He was asked which border he had crossed and whether he had seen Mr. Almalki in Afghanistan. Mr. Arar told Professor Toope that he had urinated on himself twice during this questioning, and had had to wear the same clothes for the next two and a half months. He had been "humiliated." Mr. Arar was questioned about his relationships with various people, his family, his bank accounts, and his salary. His interrogators could not understand what he did for a living. They did not believe his description of providing services in the computer sector or the amount he said he was paid in salary, which they thought impossibly high. Mr. Arar was beaten for these "lies."

After the beatings on the third day, the interrogation became less intense physically. There was much less use of the cables, and more punching and hitting. On October 16 or 17, even those beatings diminished. However, the threats intensified, and the psychological pressure remained extreme. For example, Mr. Arar was put in "the tire," though not beaten. Warnings about "the chair" were also used to scare him. At the end of each interrogation session, an interrogator would say "tomorrow will be tough" or "tomorrow will be worse for you." Mr. Arar found it almost impossible to sleep for more than two or three hours a night.

Mr. Arar's conditions of detention were atrocious. He was kept in a basement cell that was seven feet high, six feet long, and three feet wide. The cell contained only two thin blankets, a "humidity isolator," and two bottles -- one for water and one for urine. The only source of light in the cell was a small opening in the middle of the ceiling, measuring roughly one foot by two feet.

According to Mr. Arar, cats would sometimes urinate through the opening. There were also rats in the building; Mr. Arar stuffed shoes under the door to his cell to prevent them from entering. The cell was damp and very cold in the winter and stifling in the summer. Mr. Arar was known to guards only by his cell number: Two.

Over time, as the beatings diminished in intensity, the most disturbing aspect of Mr. Arar's detention came to be the daily horror of living in the tiny, dark and damp cell all alone and with no reading material (except the Koran later on). While at first the cell was a refuge from the infliction of physical pain, later it became a torture in its own right. Mr. Arar described for Professor Toope nights alone in his cell, when he had been unable to sleep on the cold concrete floor and had had to turn over every 15 minutes or so. He had thought of his family constantly, worrying about their finances and safety, and had been "bombarded by memories."

Mr. Arar remained in this cell for 10 months and 10 days, during which he saw almost no sunlight other than when he was transferred for consular visits. His first visit to the courtyard of the prison did not take place until April 2003. Mr. Arar described the cell as "a grave" and a "slow death." By June or July of 2003, he had reached his limit. Although he had tried to keep in shape by doing push-ups and pacing in his cell, he was losing all hope and stopped his modest exercise regime.

In July 2003, one of his interrogators, "Khalid," upon seeing him for the first time in months, told Mr. Arar that his wife would divorce him if she saw him as he was then: thin, listless and crying. The consular visits with Léo Martel, the Canadian consul, provided a little hope and some connection to Mr. Arar's family, but Mr. Arar also found them immensely "frustrating."

On August 20, 2003, Mr. Arar was transferred to Sednaya Prison, where conditions were "like heaven" compared with those in the Palestine Branch. On October 5, 2003, he was released from custody after signing a "confession" given to him in court by a Syrian prosecutor.

Mr. Arar was guilty of being seen with someone who was under surveillance at a café and having this same person listed as an emergency contact on his rental lease. The punishment was being whisked away to Syria where he was tortured and imprisoned for a year.

Is this the war on terror?

The commission report quotes Kofi Annan, who said, "Let us be clear: torture can never be an instrument to fight terror, for torture is an instrument of terror."

Until the US learns this lesson, things are only going to get worse.

I don't really know what to make of this piece in the Post. It's about Bush and his message to the Iranian people. Strangely enough, it seems pretty reasonable and even reasoned:

"I would say to the Iranian people: We respect your history. We respect your culture. We admire the entrepreneurial skills of your people. I would say to the Iranian people that I recognize the importance of your sovereignty -- that you're a proud nation, and you want to have a positive future for your citizens," Bush said, answering quickly and without notes.

"In terms of the nuclear issue," he continued, "I understand that you believe it is in your interest -- your sovereign interest, and your sovereign right -- to have nuclear power.

He even goes on to suggest more cultural and educational exchanges with Iran. There doesn't seem to be any belligerence here, which makes me wonder who has kidnapped Bush and replaced him with an unbelievable simulacrum?

The Progressive has an article strongly against torture in general and the the myth of the ticking bomb scenario in particular.

Here is an interesting extract about the political costs of torture and the slippery slope that the US, as well as other liberal democracies, has slid down before:

The price of torture is unacceptably high because it disgraces and then undermines the country that countenances it. For the French in Algeria, for the Americans in Vietnam, and now for the Americans in Iraq, the costs have been astronomical and have outweighed any gains gathered by torture.

Official sources are nearly unanimous that the yield from the massive Phoenix program, with more than forty prisons across South Vietnam systematically torturing thousands of suspected communists, was surprisingly low. One Pentagon contract study found that, in 1970-71, only 3 percent of the Viet Cong "killed, captured, or rallied were full or probationary Party members above the district level." Not surprisingly, such a brutal pacification effort failed either to crush the Viet Cong or win the support of Vietnamese villagers, contributing to the ultimate U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War.

Similarly, the French army won the Battle of Algiers but soon lost the war for Algeria, in part because their systematic torture delegitimated the larger war effort in the eyes of most Algerians and many French. "You might say that the Battle of Algiers was won through the use of torture," observed British journalist Sir Alistair Horne, "but that the war, the Algerian war, was lost."

Even the comparatively limited torture at Abu Ghraib has done incalculable damage to America's international prestige.

In short, the intelligence gains are soon overwhelmed by political costs as friends and enemies recoil in revulsion at such calculated savagery.

...As we slide down the slippery slope to torture in general, we should also realize that there is a chasm at the bottom called extrajudicial execution. With the agency?s multinational gulag full of dozens, even hundreds, of detainees of dwindling utility, CIA agents, active and retired, have been vocal in their complaints about the costs and inconvenience of limitless, even lifetime, incarceration for these tortured terrorists. The ideal solution to this conundrum from an agency perspective is pump and dump, as in Vietnam?pump the terrorists for information, and then dump the bodies. After all, the systematic French torture of thousands from the Casbah of Algiers in 1957 also entailed more than 3,000 "summary executions" as "an inseparable part" of this campaign, largely, as one French general put it, to ensure that "the machine of justice" not be "clogged with cases." For similar reasons, the CIA's Phoenix program produced, by the agency's own count, over 20,000 extrajudicial killings.

...The use of torture to stop ticking bombs leads ultimately to a cruel choice?either legalize this brutality, à la Dershowitz and Bush, or accept that the logical corollary to state-sanctioned torture is state-sponsored murder, à la Vietnam.

I've thought often about peace deals that include offers of amnesty for war criminals. Should justice be sacrificed for peace? The case of Pinochet comes to mind as one in which a former tyrant was given immunity when he left power (although it was stripped from him nearly 10 years later, first by British and Spanish courts -- the latter with a claim to universal jurisdiction -- and only later by Chile itself).

There has been a recent cease-fire put in place in Northern Uganda, where Joseph Kony (who is wanted by the International Criminal Court) and his Lord's Resistance Army have been using abducted children as soldiers to terrorize the people in Acholiland, killing and torturing thousands in their rebel war against the government in Kampala.

Kony has said that he will end the rebellion if, and only if, he is granted amnesty. This is in line with the traditional Acholi practice of reconciliation called mataput, in which a wrong-doer drinks a bitter root and is forgiven by those he has harmed (in many cases, fellow villagers whose ears, lips or noses have been cut off). There has been talk since 2004 of Uganda retracting its case in the International Criminal Court in return for an end to the conflict through such traditional reconciliation processes, some of which involve stepping on an egg and then being forgiven. And in the past, such practices have had an effect on weakening the cult leader's rebellion:

But it's not just geopolitics that's weakening Kony. It's also a powerful ethic of forgiveness -- one that parallels South Africa's famous reconciliation efforts after apartheid.

In the local Acholi tribe there's a traditional ceremony in which elders place an egg -- the symbol of new life -- on the ground. A repentant wrongdoer then steps on the egg. The act symbolizes the opening of a new life. The person is welcomed back into the village family. This and other ceremonies are being used to reintegrate former LRA soldiers, despite their awful acts. Pressured by local leaders, the government also offers legal amnesty to former fighters.

A major reason for the forgiveness is that so many LRA fighters were abducted as children. They were often forced to kill civilians -- or be killed themselves. "The child was innocent -- taken forcefully and forced to commit the crime," says Sheik Musa Khalil of the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative. "Forgiveness is the only way to solve this conflict."

The attitude has put local leaders at odds with the UN's International Criminal Court, which aims to prosecute Kony and others. But the news of the amnesty being broadcast via radio into the bush has spurred increasing numbers of rebels to desert Kony.

While I can see how the issue of child soldiers, particularly ones who were drugged and abducted, is morally complex and perhaps well-served by such traditional forgiveness practices (providing that there is a disarming and reintigration process included), I have to admit that I feel uneasy about letting people like Joseph Kony off the hook so easily, and groups like Amnesty International agrees.

Is peace in Northern Uganda worth letting Kony live the rest of his life a free man? Probably. Would I feel good about making the call? Definitely not.

The Columbia Journalism Review has an excellent piece by Eric Umansky that takes an in-depth look at the media's torture coverage and Congress's overall lack of interest in examining the issue:

Reporters and news organizations deserve enormous credit for exposing the abuse and torture of detainees during the U.S. war on terror, more than other institutions or individuals. Without [The New York Times'] Carlotta Gall, The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, The Washington Post's Dana Priest, and many other reporters, we might well never have learned of the abuse and torture that have occurred in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere.

But just as sweeping attacks against "the media" are too reductive, so too are plaudits. And when the record on torture coverage is examined in detail, an ambiguous picture emerges: in the post-9/11 days, some reporters offered detailed accusations and reports of abuse and torture, only to be met with skepticism by their own editors. Stories were buried, played down, or ignored -- a reluctance that is much diminished but still bubbles up with regard to the culpability of policymakers.

What is true and what is significant are two different matters. Everybody agrees that journalists are supposed to ascertain the truth. As for deciding what is significant, reporters and editors make that judgment, too, all the time -- what story leads on the front page, or gets played inside, what story gets followed up. And when it comes to very sensitive material, like torture, many journalists would prefer to rely on others to be the first to decide that something is significant. To do otherwise would mean sticking your neck out.

When stories about abuse did finally get attention, what was new was often less the revelations themselves than how they were presented and the prominence they were given. Simply put, a scandal wasn?t a scandal or a scoop a scoop until it was played as one. But after the September 11 attacks, most news organizations were reluctant to go there. "Being fair is one thing; being excessively worried that we might not be portraying the military in a fair light is another," says Roger Cohen [of The New York Times. "For a while there, we lost that balance."

Newsroom ambivalence is not the only impediment to covering this difficult story, of course. For one thing, with the exception of Senator John McCain's 2005 antitorture amendment -- the coverage of which turned out to have been shallow and excessively focused on personalities -- Congress has shown a studied lack of interest in torture. There have been no sustained congressional hearings, and a proposed independent investigation has long been blocked by the congressional leadership.

Complicating matters has been the Bush administration's savvy defense. It has pushed back against calls for an independent, overarching investigation of abuses. Instead, there have been a dizzying number of fractured, limited-authority reports, all of which reporters have diligently sought to cover. But many of the reports are classified and ultimately heavily redacted, and none of them have looked specifically at the connection between policymakers and abuse. Indeed, the stonewalling has been part of a larger, smarter strategy: rather than defending its policies of abuse, the administration has denied the policies exist.

The whole piece is worth a read, and if you're like me, you'll notice that some of the big stories like rendition and CIA black sites were actually broken much earlier than you remember -- sometimes years earlier.

The Post reports that the International Atomic Energy Agency found that parts of the House's report on Iran and its nuclear capabilities were "outrageous and dishonest."

This obviously brings back memories of similar debates between Republicans and IAEA on Iraq's WMD capabilities. It also brings back memories (via A Tiny Revolution) of Iraq coverage in the US prior to the war. The Post covered the House report on the front page, whereas its rebuttal was stuck on page 17. This despite the Post's admission that they dropped the ball when it came to questioning the administration's claims about Iraq:

"The paper was not front-paging stuff," said Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks. "Administration assertions were on the front page. Things that challenged the administration were on A18 on Sunday or A24 on Monday. There was an attitude among editors: Look, we're going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?"

In retrospect, said Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr., "we were so focused on trying to figure out what the administration was doing that we were not giving the same play to people who said it wouldn't be a good idea to go to war and were questioning the administration's rationale. Not enough of those stories were put on the front page. That was a mistake on my part."

Across the country, "the voices raising questions about the war were lonely ones," Downie said. "We didn't pay enough attention to the minority."

These confessions ran in the Post two years ago. It seems that no one has learned any lessons down there...

I woke up Tuesday morning to the news that the US embassy in Damascus had been attacked. It seems that the Syrian forces (and perhaps American marines) killed three of the four attackers and stopped them from exploding another car full of explosives (accounts vary, but it sounds like one car bomb was detonated).

Perhaps I've spent too much time in Lebanon, where the Syrian presence is still felt (if only from the ka'ak sellers on the street who are rumored to be Syrian mukhabarat agents), but I can't help but wondering if Damascus wasn't somehow involved in this attack or at least failed to prevent it. Syria is a police state where the mukhabarat keeps pretty close tabs on everyone, especially Sunni militants, and it seems suprising that something like this could happen without the state's knowledge, particulary as the American embassy is so close to the presidential residence.

Either the intelligence apparatus's grip on things in Damascus is slipping, or the government decided that it might be to its advantage to stop such a plot as it was unfolding instead of before it actually happened. Both hypotheses seem possible to me, and both are disconcerting in very different ways.

In Al Jazeera Magazine (which is out of Dubai and London and has no relation to Al Jazeera the television channel), there is speculation that the attacks were planned either by the US or Syria. While the article focuses on the idea that the US was behind the attack, they do mention another hypothesis from the London daily Al-Quds al-Arabi:

Meanwhile, Syrian opposition figure [Mohammad Marwan Suweidan, a former Syrian Army officer] has called Tuesday['s] attack on the U.S. embassy "a foolish act conducted by a naive regime aimed to mislead the Syrian people and send a warning to the U.S. administration," the London-based Al-Quds al-Arabi reported earlier.

It should be noted that Al Jazeera Magazine (as opposed to Al Jazeera the cable station and website) is relatively unknown to me. I'm not sure how accurate their reporting is, and I haven't been able to find the Al-Quds al-Arabi article to verify that Suweidan really made such an accusation. Furthermore, it should be disclosed that he is part of Rifaat Assad's exiled opposition. Rifaat is Bashar's uncle and was exiled after a failed coup attempt in the 1983. He was also in charge of the massacre at Hama, where he led the "Defence Brigades" in killing 10,000 to 25,000 people.

All this to say that I don't know if Rifaat or his supporters are reliable sources; however, something seems fishy about this attack.

Since I missed my train back to Paris on Tuesday night, I stayed another day in London. The trip was a good one, and in addition to seeing an old friend from Prague, I was able to see some friends who left Beirut this summer like me.

While I was there, I did some book shopping at the London Review Bookshop and at the book market under the Waterloo bridge. I bought Dubravka Ugresic's Thank You for Not Reading: Essays on Literary Trivia, Sven Lindqvist's A History of Bombing, Isaac Deutcher's 3-volume biography of Trotsky and Eliot Weinberger's Muhammad.

I'll be in London for a long weekend and won't be back until Tuesday night. I probably won't be posting while I'm gone...

I will, however, be visiting the London Review's book store.

The BBC sponsored a mock war crimes trial for Israel and Hizbollah. Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch acts as prosecutor and finds that both sides are guilty of crimes of war. His main arguments are that Hizbollah used weapons that are nearly impossible to control with much accuracy, resulting in attacks on Israeli civilians and that Israel assumed that after civilians had been warned of upcoming attacks, anyone who was still in that area was a legitimate target.

The BBC moderated a letter-writing debate in four parts (1, 2, 3, and 4) between a Lebanese man named Saleem in Beirut and an Israeli man named Gordon in a border town called Shlomi.

They both remain civil, and while they disagree on most issues, they both agree that they'd like to live in peace. Here are some extracts.

From Saleem:

Maybe you could send me some oranges from my grandfather's orchards. From the land he had to leave in 1948 - which is exactly where you live. My grandfather used to own acres and acres of land where your settlement now is. It's such a coincidence, of all the Lebanese and all the Israelis to be in a debate...

My mother's village is al-Bassa, now called Bezet. I have a picture of my grandmother on that land in 1946. It's less than 2km from Shlomi where you are. Where was your maternal grandmother in 1946?

Israel must return our land. Then I will be the first person to cross the borders and offer you a case of fresh Lebanese apples.

From Gordon:

Yes, we came through unharmed. We had rockets falling to the left of us, and rockets to the right, and our next-door neighbour was killed. But we made it.

Via the Plank, The Hill reports that Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), the vice chairman of the Armed Services panel and chairman of the Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee, is introducing a bill to cut the civilian leadership (read: Bush and Rumsfeld) out of the loop for deciding when troops should withdraw from Iraq. His resolution would make it the generals' decision, thus making the decision a military one and not a political one, he says.

The resolution would express the sense of the House that military commanders should put in place a system of criteria to assess the capability of Iraqi security forces. Once those criteria are met, the mission in Iraq would be considered complete and the president could begin withdrawing troops.

Weldon is one of the foremost Republican military experts in the House, and he is considered to have a good chance of succeeding Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) as chairman of the Armed Services Committee at the end of 2008 should Republicans keep control of the lower chamber.

This obviously brings up issues of the chain of command, since the military is always answerable to civilian leadership. If there is really this much question as to the president's judgement and that of his cabinet, it seems like the logical thing to do would be to get rid of the president, not set a precedent for changing the basic structure of the chain of command.

Using stumble upon, I came across a timeline of US intervention done by Adbusters, including "coups, humanitarian incursions, covert actions, proxy armies, freedom fighters/terrorists and multilateral offenses."

It starts in 1801 on the Barbary Coast and goes up to 2004 in Haiti, covering Honduras, Guatemala, Libya, Vietnam and Angola along the way.

It's an interesting little presentation, and I'm impressed that stumble upon found it for me.

The Times reports that Israel has decided to end the blockade on Lebanon, which is technically true since Israel did announce the lifting of the blockade. However, what the Times didn't mention is that several airlines had already decided to break the blockade:

In a sign the embargo may be eroding, British Airways/BMED said it was resuming direct flights to Beirut after the British government had given assurances that it would be safe to do so.

Lebanon's Middle East Airlines and Royal Jordanian began flying regularly into the capital last month, but have complied with Israel's insistence that all such flights go via Amman. Qatar Airways resumed direct flights to Beirut on Monday.

In addition to Qatar and British Airways, Gulf Air had also announced that they were resuming flights as of Saturday. It seems that commercial airlines that have flouted the blockade would be newsworthy, but the Times either didn't know about this or didn't think that their readers should.

Of course, the good news is that with the air blockade being lifted, this means that the sea embargo will be lifted as well. I never understood why the Israelis bothered with the air and sea embargos, unless it was just to flex Tel Aviv's muscles and illustrate that Israel can decide who comes and goes. Because the real routes that Israel needs to be worry about as far as arms resupplying goes, are the ground routes. Iranian arms shipments are overland through Syria, and the Lebanese-Syrian border is long, poorly defined and very porous. And this is the one way in and out of the country that they can't really control. Or rather their control is clumsier and involves the bombing of bridges and roads, like the road to Damascus, which was bombed and shut down, forcing people to flee the country by the northern route.

According to The Sunday Times and via Juan Cole, Israel is preparing for war with Syria and Iran. Of course, this plan has backers in the Pentagon, as well as Richard Perle:

While the American State Department favours engaging with President Bashar Assad of Syria in the hope of detaching him from the Iranian alliance, hawks believe Israel missed a golden opportunity to strike at Syria during the Hezbollah conflict.

"If they had acted against Syria during this last kerfuffle, the war might have ended more quickly and better," Perle added. "Syrian military installations are sitting ducks and the Syrian air force could have been destroyed on the ground in a couple of days." Assad set off alarm bells in Israel when he said during the war in Lebanon: "If we do not obtain the occupied Golan Heights by peaceful means, the resistance option is there." ...

Advocates of political engagement believe a war with Syria could unleash Islamic fundamentalist terror in what has hitherto been a stable dictatorship. Some voices in the Pentagon are not impressed by that argument.

"If Syria spirals into chaos, at least they?ll be taking on each other rather than heading for Jerusalem," said one insider.

This is obviously just what we need, another toppled Middle Eastern dictator in a sectarian country with a strong Islamist opposition and no one willing or capable of picking up the pieces.

The New York Review has a good analysis of recent events in the Middle East by Robert Malley, who was Special Assistant to President Clinton for Arab-Israeli Affairs and is currently Middle East and North Africa Program Director at the International Crisis Group:

For Israel, as well as Hamas and Hezbollah, the most costly blow is the one to which they will be seen as having surrendered. The conflict is no longer about achieving a specific objective -- releasing a soldier, say, or capturing defined territory. It is about something more intangible, and so more serious: establishing one's power of deterrence, defining the rules of the game, showing who is boss. Such confrontations may subside, and they may even pause. They will not end.

The whole article is worth reading. Malley has a really good grasp of the overall situation, and he's far from optimistic.

To my mind, until this conflict can be pushed back to the more manageable domain of territorial dispute, things are going to keep getting worse. The first step, as I keep insisting, is land for peace in the Golan Heights and the Shebaa Farms. Syria has precise territorial demands and no religious ideological claims, which makes Iran, and to a lesser extent Hizbollah, a strange bedfellow for the staunchly secular Ba'ath regime. And if Israel could get Syria out of the way by giving up the occupied Golan Heights, then they could break the direct line between Hizbollah and Iran. Furthermore, they could use the occasion to broker a peace with Lebanon by releasing prisoners and giving back the Shebaa farms. (A subsequent water-sharing deal could be attempted for the aquifer-rich area if Israel really thinks it's worth the effort; in any case, Israel seems to be moving more and more toward desalination schemes, so such a water-sharing agreement might not even be necessary.)

And if they were to include Hizbollah in the negotiations process, then they could not only be sure to get the Lebanese government to visa the peace plan, but they would have explicit and public agreement from Hizbollah, which would go a long way toward removing any excuse that the Party of God might have for continuing attacks against Israel.

In Sudan, Khartoum is trying to stop the African Union force currently in Darfur from being folded into a larger UN force with a stronger mandate as called for last week. Khartoum has been massing troops at El Fasher, getting ready to attack the rebels in a move that will likely involve many more dead civilians and the genocide that has become a force of habit in Khartoum's counter-insurgency strategy.

The AU force has always been under-equipped (both in terms of matériel and mandate), but its financial resources and mandate are about to run out at the end of the month. The Sudanese government has given the AU a choice: either continue as is with funding from the Arab League, which unsuprisingly supports Khartoum, or leave:

[T]he commander of the African forces in Darfur, Gen. Collins Ihekire, said in an interview last week that accepting the money would leave the African Union hopelessly compromised.

"It could become a kind of blackmail," General Ihekire said. "The viability of the force would depend on the charity of Sudan and its friends."

This is an obvious attempt to stop the force from being incorporated into a UN force, and Mustafa Osman Ismail, President Bashir, recently said, "Sudan will not accept those troops to be transformed into part of a UN force."

I'm not sure how this can be countered. Perhaps Khartoum is hoping that the EU will give more money to the AU force in order to keep it from Arab League money, thus maintaining the status quo.

In any case, the AU has decided to end its mandate on 30 September. It is unclear though if this is the final word. The AU might be deciding to call Khartoum's bluff, and the fact that the latest cease-fire was brokered and monitored by the AU might raise the issue of the cease-fire disappearing when the AU mandate expires. But then again, this might be just what Khartoum wants.

Martin Peretz at The New Republic writes about his frustration that no one is stopping the genocide in Darfur. I'm glad that he's bringing more attention to this conflict that is too often forgotten in the shuffle, but there are some ridiculous points in his little piece:

One might think that Afro-American organizations in the States and African-American politicians might raise their voices against this infamy. But no. You see, George Bush has actually done this. And he certainly can't be in the right. I wish he would go further and, as our editorial in this week's TNR hard copy edition urges, with the U.K., Canada, France, Germany, Australia and, yes, Israel, deploy the troops necessary to save the lives of those whose lives have not yet been taken or simply destroyed.

First of all, Obama Barack and other black lawmakers have been bringing attention to the issue, and seven members of the Congressional Black Caucus were arrested while protesting in front of the Sudanese embassy. So while I agree that the world as a whole has not been giving this issue the attention it deserves, Peretz's dig at black groups is unfair.

This also made me think of a recent review in The Nation about the understandable ambivalence that many black Americans have felt about Africa. So while I think we all have a moral responsibility to Darfur as humans, I'm not sure that black people have should be held any more responsible than the rest of the world just because they're black.

Second, Israeli troops? Is he crazy? The Sudanese government has already stated that any foreign troops will be seen as invaders and fought by Khartoum's forces, so it seems obvious that the more African and Arabic any intervention would be, the better chance it would have of success. American troops (and maybe even British ones) would already be a bad idea, but sending Israelis would guarantee the already likely scenario that such a conflict would be spinned as a religious war against foreign infidel usupers. Peretz should know better than to even suggest such an obviously wrongheaded idea.

My father and I are fighting again. He lives in Alabama, and I live in Paris, and this summer, in Beirut. Consequently, our fighting is done by e-mail and long-distance telephone calls. The first call in our latest fight came when I was in Beirut as the war was starting. I couldn't sleep, because even in my apartment in Hamra, the Sunni neighborhood by the American University of Beirut, the Israeli bombs, missiles and shells were shaking me awake every night. Understandably, he was worried about me, and I could tell that the fact that he could do nothing to get me out of Lebanon was getting to him.

At the end of the call, he gave me some fatherly advice: "Watch yourself, and be careful of Hezbollah." I told him that if I had anything to worry about, it was getting hit by an Israeli bomb. This introduced the conversation that both of us had been trying to avoid since the war began. He told me that Israel was just defending itself from terrorists, and I quipped that I didn't think there were too many terrorists hiding inside the milk factory that had just been bombed. In the end, and to my father's credit, he said that the question was academic in any case. But being my father's son, I couldn't leave it at that: "No, Dad, it's a very concrete question, because if I die here, chances are that it will be the Israelis that kill me."

Normally, my father and I let these disagreements get out of control. Usually, I'll respond to what I see as his uninformed and simplistic ideas, often condescendingly, and then he'll get really angry and the name-calling will commence. I think both of us would sum up the other's position in a single sentence: "his mind's made up; don't confuse him with the facts." I'm ashamed to admit that during the Christmas holidays before the war started in Iraq, our disagreement about the sagacity and rationale of the impending invasion nearly escalated into a fistfight. This is not an exaggeration. Each of us stood, angry and with heaving chest pointed outward, in the living room between the gun cabinet and the fireplace decorated with stockings and holly, waiting for the other to have the bad sense to throw the first punch.

I'm back in Paris now, and since I returned, I've received several e-mails from my father on the Middle East, all of them forwarded from elsewhere. In one, a Middle East specialist (comedian Dennis Miller) explains to us that there is no such thing as Palestinians and that we should call these people "Arabs who can't accomplish anything in life and would rather wrap themselves in the seductive melodrama of eternal struggle and death." In another message, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert tells us that he refuses to apologize about the civilian deaths in Lebanon and that if we continue to withhold our support from his noble fight, when the final solution comes, we of the "the free and enlightened world, will go down" along with the Israelis.

The worst message of the bunch, which I received from two different family members, asks whether or not one can be a good Muslim and a Good American. Of course, the answer is no, for several reasons, among which we find the following:

Theologically - no. Because his allegiance is to Allah, the moon God of Arabia.

Domestically - no. Because he is instructed to marry four women and beat and scourge his wife when she disobeys him.

Intellectually - no. Because he cannot accept the American Constitution since it is based on Biblical principles and he believes the Bible to be corrupt.

As coincidence would have it, I received this e-mail from my father a week before seeing a Gallup poll on American prejudice toward Muslims. The numbers in this poll are shocking on several accounts: 22 percent of Americans say they would not like to have a Muslim as a neighbor; 51 percent believe US Muslims are not loyal to the United States; and 34 percent think Muslims in the US are sympathetic to al-Qaeda. But what shocked me the most was that 39 percent advocate requiring American Muslims to carry special identification.

One of my weaknesses is that I cannot sit by and listen to someone say something altogether stupid without opening my mouth to rebut the most asinine of the person's remarks. This is especially true for me in e-mail exchanges. I feel compelled to respond to my father's messages citing accounts from the press and, in the case of Israel and Lebanon, a report from Human Rights Watch that squarely accuses Israel of war crimes. I'm not really sure what I hope to gain from this obvious waste of time, since my father would never admit to being wrong.

His rebuttals are almost always the same: your sources are Jew-hating liars. "Human Rights Watch are some of the biggest liars around." "Quoting organizations that hate the Jews, just like the UN ... is dishonest." Everyone has an agenda, especially The New York Times, the United Nations, Human Rights Watch and, it seems, myself as well, although to be completely honest, I can't figure out what my agenda might be.

During the war while I was in Beirut, I wrote a letter to the editor that was published in The New York Times. A friend of mine in Paris forwarded the letter to my father by e-mail, and he responded saying that he couldn't trust the Gray Lady anymore. (He can, of course, trust Fox News to call it like it is.) I'm not really sure when he ever trusted the Times, but that's not the point. The point is that one would think that he would trust me, his son.

During the war, I was in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the occupied territories and Israel. One would think that he would trust, or at least listen to, what I have to say about the affair. But he doesn't: "you can B.S. yourself if you want to, but your desire for your agenda clouds your logic."

My father and I represent two distinct parts of our not-so-united states of America. We're both from Alabama, and we can both be stubborn asses, but that's about where the similarities end -- or at least that's where I'd like to think they end. I'm not really sure what has created the gap between my father and me when it comes to politics. My first reflex is to assume that it has a lot to do with travel and education, but I know that's not true, since there are many Americans who agree with my father, many of whom are erudite and well-traveled, although they argue with perhaps a little more nuance and a little less name-calling. And if anyone has the strength of numbers on his side in America, it's my father, not me.

But finally, this consensus is what worries me the most. My father's solution to the Middle East is to "bomb the Arabs back into the stone age." And really, he's not very far from Israeli General Dan Halutz's comment that Israel would "turn back the clock in Lebanon by twenty years," which is what the IDF did. My father supports that, and he's against the "European mindset," insofar as Israel is concerned, because he thinks that given the chance, the world"s Muslims would destroy world Jewry once and for all and that the Europeans would do their best to help them on their way. Ironically enough, he's very likely part of the 39 percent of Americans who think Muslims in the US should have to carry special identification. I would ask him myself what he thinks, but we're not talking right now.

In today's Los Angeles Times, Rosa Brooks makes the obvious point that in the US, anyone who criticizes Israeli actions is pilloried as an anti-semite. The latest case being Ken Roth (whose father fled Nazi Germany), the executive director of Human Rights Watch:

But what's most troubling about the vitriol directed at Roth and his organization isn't that it's savage, unfounded and fantastical. What's most troubling is that it's typical. Typical, that is, of what anyone rash enough to criticize Israel can expect to encounter. In the United States today, it just isn't possible to have a civil debate about Israel, because any serious criticism of its policies is instantly countered with charges of anti-Semitism. Think Israel's tactics against Hezbollah were too heavy-handed, or that Israel hasn't always been wholly fair to the Palestinians, or that the United States should reconsider its unquestioning financial and military support for Israel? Shhh: Don't voice those sentiments unless you want to be called an anti-Semite -- and probably a terrorist sympathizer to boot.

How did adopting a reflexively pro-Israel stance come to be a mandatory aspect of American Jewish identity? Skepticism -- a willingness to ask tough questions, a refusal to embrace dogma -- has always been central to the Jewish intellectual tradition. Ironically, this tradition remains alive in Israel, where respected public figures routinely criticize the government in far harsher terms than those used by Human Rights Watch.

In a climate in which good-faith criticism of Israel is automatically denounced as anti-Semitic, everyone loses. Israeli policies are a major source of discord in the Islamic world, and anger at Israel usually spills over into anger at the U.S., Israel's biggest backer.

It's really a shame that this even needs to be brought up, but people in the US seem incapable of making the distinction between being Jewish and being Israeli. For some strange reason, this relationship seems to only exist for Israel. No one accuses anyone of being anti-islamic when Iran or Saudi Arabia is the object of criticism, so why should it be different for Israel?

The UN voted to send troops to Sudan, with China, Russia and Qatar abstaining. Sudan has objected, of course, (offering to send its own troops to quell the fighting in Sudan) but the State Department has been quick to point out that this force would be acting under Chapter VII of the UN Charter and doesn't require Sudan's consent.

I can imagine that no European or North American powers (with the exception of Canada, maybe) will be scrambling to take on such a mission. There is a pressing need to deploy this force (that is supposed to be 17,300-strong, including the 7,000 African Union forces already in Darfur), since the African Union forces' mandate is set to expire on 30 September.

I hope that I'm wrong and that the world will surprise me, but I imagine something along the lines of the bickering that led to no one being sent to Rwanda during the genocide in 1994. I forsee lots of offers coming from poor countries without the training or capacity to run such a mission and a deadening silence from the big military powers.

The American Prospect has an interesting article by Spencer Ackerman from The New Republic on using the promotion of human rights instead of democracy promotion as a guiding principle for American foreign policy.

What liberal democracy-promoters want to see in foreign closed societies is more precisely located in the advance of human rights: the protection of basic human dignity, freedom, and justice. Indeed, liberal democracy-promoters frequently criticize their neoconservative cousins for their lack of concern with the social protections of civil and legal rights. But it's time to uncouple human rights from democracy, and recognize that democracy has value only to the degree to which it safeguards human rights -- which is to say the degree to which democracy is liberal. Democracy in that respect is a fine and worthy thing, but the emphasis for the United States and for liberalism should be on the end, not the means.

While I'm not convinced that democracy and human rights can be totally seperated, the latter does seem to be a more attainable, and perhaps immediately, more urgent matter. But what really bothers me is how this affects pursuing American interests. He goes on later to talk (but only very briefly) about times when American interests and human rights are not compatible:

The test for America abroad should be: to what degree do American policies advance or diminish these human rights? And, in the unfortunate but inevitable cases of conflict between human rights and American interests, to what degree does subordinating either result in the best balance of each? Answering these two questions provides the best chance of keeping both America and liberalism from sliding into Manicheanism, messianism, naivete, or amorality.

This seems a little too vague for my taste. What should the US do in places like Kazhakstan, where American interests point to supporting the murderous dictator Nazarbayev, because sits atop he largest crude oil reserves in the Caspian Sea region? Other examples include the relationship that the US maintains with other dictators with easy access to cheap energy.

This is a difficult question that no one really seems to want to answer. Of course energy is a valid and necessary part of policy, but where should the US draw the line between securing oil supplies and promoting human rights? It should seem obvious that in most parts of the world, promoting human rights is going to be counterprductive to acquiring cheap energy. So then, should human rights only be limited to nations that don't have any strategic worth to the US?

I don't really know the answer to that answer, but as a humanitarian, I feel that the US is strong enough and rich enough to "take one for the team," promoting human rights even when it contradicts American interests. But maybe that's just youthful naïveté.

I arrived last night in Beirut, which was a good feeling after being away for so long and considering the circumstances under which I had to leave. Things seem to have picked up here, but the streets still seem much calmer than before the war. Then again, it's hard to say how much of that is due to the war and how much of that is due to the fact that it's the first Friday of Ramadan.

When I was in Cyprus, waiting for my connecting flight to Beirut, I talked with a couple from Beirut about the situation in Lebanon and Sudan. I told him how frustrated it makes me that there are no Muslims out marching agains the murder of Muslims in Darfur or the opression of Sahwari people by the Moroccan government. But cartoons in a right wing Danish newspaper set off riots and protests all over the Muslim world.

Normally, Thomas Friedman's articles annoy me, but I can't help but agree with him about the state of hypocrisy in Islam today:

This year on the first day of Ramadan, a Sunni suicide bomber in Baghdad killed 35 people who were lining up in a Shiite neighborhood to buy fuel. The same day, the severed heads of nine murdered Iraqi police officers and soldiers were found north of Baghdad.

I don?t get it. How can Muslims blow up other Muslims on their most holy day of the year -- in mosques! -- and there is barely a peep of protest in the Muslim world, let alone a million Muslim march? Yet Danish cartoons or a papal speech lead to violent protests. If Muslims butchering Muslims -- in Sudan, Iraq, Egypt, Pakistan and Jordan -- produces little communal reaction, while cartoons and papal remarks produce mass protests, what does Islam stand for today? It is not an insult to ask that question.

Muslims might say: "Well, what about Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo or Palestine? Let?s talk about all your violent behavior." To which I would say: "Let's talk about it! But you'll have to get in line behind us, because we're constantly talking about where we?ve gone wrong." We can?t have a meaningful dialogue if we, too, are not self-critical, but neither can Muslims.

I don't agree with his conclusion that the Pope shouldn't apologize -- I think he should -- but I do agree with him that there is a definite double standard for slights against Muslims. When the West hurts Muslims, the Muslim world comes together to condemn the attack, but when Muslims hurt Muslims, like in Darfur, Iraq and the Western Sahara, the silence is deafening.

Hassan Nasrallah held a public rally on 22 September, his first public appearance since the war. Hundreds of thousands of people showed up, and it was a surprise that Nasrallah was able to show up, since Israel has threatened to assasinate him. Nasrallah's speech talked about many things, including a national unity government, the welcoming of UNIFIL forces (provided that they don't spy on Hizbollah) and claims that the latest war was done at Iran and Syria's behest. He also addressed the idea of disarming Hizbollah, which he mentioned that no army, as Israelis had just learned, could disarm them by force:

The resistance is the result of several causes -- the occupation, the arrest of prisoners, the plunder of waters, the threat to Lebanon, and the attack on Lebanese sovereignty. These are the causes. Tackle the causes and the results will be tackled easily.

When we build a strong, capable, and just state that protects Lebanon and the Lebanese, it will be easy to find an honourable solution to the question of the resistance and its weapons. I would like the Lebanese to hear clearly. I and my brothers get excited sometimes and say all kinds of things. Let us speak with some responsibility. We do not say that these weapons will remain forever. And, it is not logical for these weapons to remain forever. There is bound to be an end to them. The natural key is to tackle the causes and the results will disappear.

Come and build a strong and just state, protecting the country and the citizens and their livelihoods, waters, and dignity, and you will find that the resolution of the resistance issue will not need even a negotiation table. It is a great deal easier than that.

Roger Cohen -- responding to the outrage that came with the decision by Richard Haas, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, to invite Ahmadinejad to speak -- argues, as I have for a while, that it is time to talk to Iran.

At some point these past few years, diplomacy went out of fashion. I'm not sure precisely when, but all the signs are that it's time for a rethink. The world needs a bout of bridge-building.

...Haass, the president of the council, is unrepentant. "I don't see diplomacy or talking as a favor or an endorsement or a gift," he said. "To me, it's a tool, and I'm confident that if used right, it can advance our interests."

He continued: "The United States gets itself in trouble when it limits its options and approaches diplomacy as a value judgment. It's not obvious to me, looking at the last 50 or 60 years, that we paid a price for talking to the Soviets. At the end of all the talking, we won the Cold War."

This is in strong contrast to the Israeli government's reaction, summed up in this little pearl found in Israeli ambassador to the US Daniel Ayalon's to Haass letter denouncing the event:

Some of those upset with the council's decision have compared it to hypothetically inviting Hitler to a meeting in the 1930's. In fact, meeting with Ahmadinejad is worse: Hitler did not openly call for genocide in the 1930's, and today we have the lessons of the 1930's to guide us. Foremost among those lessons is that appeasing fanatics like Hitler and granting them legitimacy leads to genocide and war.

I've said it before, but actual diplomacy and negotiation means talking to people you don't like. Only talking to those who agree with you and labelling others as evil, which is what the US does in the Middle East, is the opposite of diplomacy.

When Bush sets up a dichotomy of good and evil, or with us or against us, he's offering Ahmedinejad and Chavez a sympathetic audience on a silver platter.

This first article from the Boston Globe looks at the lessons of Suez and how the US might learn from its former stance in Egypt against Britian, France and Israel in 1956:

[British Prime Minister] Eden was reminded in friendly but forceful terms of the sheer unwisdom of "the use of force" against an Arab country-which would, "it seems to me, vastly increase the area of jeopardy." The "appeaser" in this case was General Dwight David Eisenhower, the 34th president of the United States, in the day when things were different in the White House and the Republican Party. If Eden persevered in his folly, Ike wrote to the prime minister on Sept. 3, 1956, in words just as chilling today, not only the peoples of the Middle East but "all of Asia and Africa, would be consolidated against the West to a degree which, I fear, could not be overcome in a generation."

The next is an interview in Harper's with Dr. Emile A. Nakhleh, who served in the CIA for 15 years and retired this summer as the Director of the Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program. When asked what the US should do in Iraq, he had this to say:

I have come to believe that our presence is part of the problem and that we should begin to seriously devise an exit strategy. There's a civil war in Iraq and our presence is contributing to the violence. We've become a lightning rod?we're not restricting the violence, we're contributing to it. Iraq has galvanized jihadists; our presence is what is attracting them. We need to get out of there. The idea of Iraq being a model for the region has also been tossed out the window. Now the only question is whether Iraq will become a haven for sectarianism, or follow either the Iranian model or the standard Arab authoritarian model. It's only three years old, but the once-touted model of a secular, democratic Iraq is all but forgotten. This casts a dark shadow on American efforts to spread democracy in the region.

He also has some interesting things to say about Guantanamo Bay and American's Iranian policy.

While thinking about Iran and the bomb, I've often wondered if Israel would rather be a nuclear power among others in the region or to be a non-nuclear power in a nuclear-free Middle East. Because it seems that with nuclear weapons in Iran and Israel (not to mention India and Pakistan), it would only be a matter of time until Egypt and Saudi Arabia started looking into nuclear weapons.

It turns out that I was right, or at least might be, since Gamal Mubarak, the Egyptian President's son and probably heir, has announced Egypt's interest in developing nuclear power.

"The whole world -- I don't want to say all, but many developing countries ? have proposed and started to execute the issue of alternative energy," [Gamal Mubarak] said. "It is time for Egypt to put forth, and the party will put forth, this proposal for discussion about its future energy policies, the issue of alternative energy, including nuclear energy, as one of the alternatives."

He also said in a clear reference to the White House: "We do not accept visions from abroad that try to dissolve the Arab identity and the joint Arab efforts within the framework of the so-called Greater Middle East Initiative."

..."Egypt, and especially the N.D.P., is a strategic ally of the U.S.," said Hassan Abou Taleb, an analyst with the government-financed Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. "It does not seek confrontation with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Instead, it seeks cooperation. Why should the U.S. assist India in its nuclear program and not Egypt?"

Of course, no one is talking about nuclear weapons in Egypt, just nuclear power. But then again, that's the official line in Iran as well. It seems obvious to me that Indian, Pakistani, and especially Israeli, nuclear weapons programs are only going to drive other countries like Egypt, and I predict that Saudi Arabia will follow suit, to try their hand at entering the nuclear club.

To my mind, the Middle East should be a nuke-free zone, and allowing Israel to have nuclear weapons and the Bush administration's talk of "useable nuclear weapons" that could be used against non-nuclear countries, have only ensured that more and more countries will seek nuclear arms.

According to Musharraf, in order to get Pakistan's help in the "war on terror" after September 11, 2001, Richard Armitage's argument was more Corleone-ish than Clintonian, all stick and no carrot.

In an interview to be aired on CBS television this weekend Pakistan's president, General Pervez Musharraf, said the threat was delivered by the assistant secretary of state, Richard Armitage, in conversations with Pakistan's intelligence director.

"The intelligence director told me that (Mr Armitage) said, 'Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the stone age'," Gen Musharraf was quoted as saying. The revelation that the US used extreme pressure to secure Pakistan's cooperation in the war on terror arrived at a time of renewed unease in the US about its frontline ally.

Gen Musharraf told CBS he was stunned at the bluntness of the US approach in the aftermath of the attacks. "I think it was a very rude remark," he said. But he yielded to the request.

I've wondered about the sweaty fist of American diplomacy -- which I often sum up as "do something about it, bitch!" -- and whether or not the actual language is euphemistic or whether diplomats sometimes, as my father would say, call a "spade" a "fucking shovel."

This sort of language doesn't surprise me from this administration, but I'd be curious to know if this is a change in behavior or if behind the scenes this is normal behavior for the powerful "negotiators."

The LA Times gives an Iraqi's account of what life has become in Baghdad. The piece is unsigned, because he's afraid that he'd be killed if his name were to appear:

On a recent Sunday, I was buying groceries in my beloved Amariya neighborhood in western Baghdad when I heard the sound of an AK-47 for about three seconds. It was close but not very close, so I continued shopping.

As I took a right turn on Munadhama Street, I saw a man lying on the ground in a small pool of blood. He wasn't dead.

The idea of stopping to help or to take him to a hospital crossed my mind, but I didn't dare. Cars passed without stopping. Pedestrians and shop owners kept doing what they were doing, pretending nothing had happened.

I was still looking at the wounded man and blaming myself for not stopping to help. Other shoppers peered at him from a distance, sorrowful and compassionate, but did nothing.

I went on to another grocery store, staying for about five minutes while shopping for tomatoes, onions and other vegetables. During that time, the man managed to sit up and wave to passing cars. No one stopped. Then, a white Volkswagen pulled up. A passenger stepped out with a gun, walked steadily to the wounded man and shot him three times. The car took off down a side road and vanished.

No one did anything. No one lifted a finger. The only reaction came from a woman in the grocery store. In a low voice, she said, "My God, bless his soul."

I went home and didn't dare tell my wife. I did not want to frighten her.

Via verbal privilege, the Post gives us a sad account of Mutanabi Street, where Baghdadis used to go to buy books and discuss ideas.

Under former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, Mutanabi Street was the nexus for resistance and freewheeling debates, where underground writers published illegal books that denounced Hussein.

"I wish you could see how it used to be on Fridays," Shatri spoke before he broke down in tears. "You could not even walk. The whole street was filled with books and people. Mutanabi Street is a part of how great Baghdad is."

Then, in a reverent tone, he uttered a proverb known across the Arab world: "Cairo writes. Beirut publishes. And Baghdad reads."

Since 1963, Shatri has peddled books on Mutanabi Street, like a faithful friend, through military rule and political oppression, wars and embargo. Of all the eras he has watched ebb and flow, it is today's Iraq, with its violent nature, that most mocks the proud legacy of Mutanabi Street, he said.

"It means the death of education, the death of the history of the street, the death of the culture of Baghdad," Shatri said.

Two Fridays ago, Shatri took action. He and other members of his writers union gathered in front of his shop. They sipped breakfast tea. Then, at around 9:30 a.m., they poured kerosene over a pile of books and set them aflame.

"I cried when I was burning the books," Shatri said.

"It's a message to the government," said Nakshabandi, who also took part. "It's an S.O.S. Help us. An important part of Baghdad is dying. And it is on its last breath."

"But no one got the message. There was no action."

National Public Radio's Fresh Air has a show on Christian Zionism. Terry Gross interviews Pastor John Hagee, the leader of Christians United for Israel, as well as Israeli journalist, Gershom Gorenberg and American journalist, Max Blumenthal. The interview with Hagee is particularly interesting and disturbing, but it's a shame that Gross lets him off the hook so easily. She lets statements like Muslims "have a mandate to kill all Jews and Christians" go without being challenged. Here are some verses that go directly contrary to this commonly misheld belief:

Sura 5:69 - Surely they that believe, and those of Jewry, and the Christians, and those Sabeaans, whoso believes in God and the Last Day, and works righteousness--their wage waits them with their Lord, and no fear shall be on them, neither shall they sorrow.

Sura 5:82 - ...and you will find the nearest in love to the believers (Muslims) those who say: "We are Christians." That is because amongst them are priests and monks, and they are not proud.

Sura 25:63 - The worshippers of the All-Merciful are they who tread gently upon the earth, and when the ignorant address them, they reply, "Peace!"

Sura 28:55 - And when they hear vain talk, they turn away from it and say: "To us our deeds, and to you yours; peace be to you: we do not seek out the ignorant."

My guess is that it's because she doesn't know enough about Islam to know that that his statements are demonstrably false. But there's not really much excuse for her timidity in questioning the idea that Hurricane Katrina was a punishment from God because New Orleans had too many homosexuals.

A friend sent me a link to George Packer's article in The New Yorker on Bush's recent speech on torture techniques and the Army's response:

Last week, in the guise of calling for fair trials, the President demanded that Congress give him the power to go on torturing detainees in secret prisons and use the evidence obtained against them. And last week the Army honorably closed the holes in moral conduct that the President, his counsel, the Vice-President, the Justice Department, and the Secretary of Defense pried open shortly after September 11th. It did so not only to remove the stain on its reputation and to protect its soldiers but because it cares more about the war than about the next election.

The Canadian government has released a report about the American rendition of Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured for a year until the Syrians realized that he was innocent and then let him go:

A government commission on Monday exonerated a Canadian computer engineer of any ties to terrorism and issued a scathing report that faulted Canada and the United States for his deportation four years ago to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured.

The report on the engineer, Maher Arar, said American officials had apparently acted on inaccurate information from Canadian investigators and then misled Canadian authorities about their plans for Mr. Arar before transporting him to Syria.

"I am able to say categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offense or that his activities constituted a threat to the security of Canada," Justice Dennis R. O?Connor, head of the commission, said at a news conference.

I'm not sure what's more diconceritng, the Canadian government's incompetence or the American government's dishonesty and callous cruelty. I find it interesting that the US will only talk to Damascus when they want someone tortured.

More information about the commission can be found here.

Here is an extract from the report (pdf):

On September 26, 2002, Mr. Arar, who had been in Tunisia with his family, was returning to Canada by plane via Switzerland and the United States. He boarded an American Airlines flight in Zurich and, at about two o?clock in the afternoon, arrived in New York, where he was pulled aside by American customs officials. Two hours later, he was fingerprinted and photographed, and told this was regular procedure. His possessions were searched and his passport photographed.

Mr. Arar was then placed under arrest and strip-searched, an experience he found "humiliating." He was held, first at the John F. Kennedy International Airport and later at the Metropolitan Detention Centre, for 12 days, during which time he was interrogated by American officials. Initially, he was denied access to a lawyer. His request to pray during the interrogation sessions was denied.

On October 8, 2002, Mr. Arar was awakened at three o'clock in the morning and told that he was to be removed to Syria. Mr. Arar told Professor Toope that, at that point, he had begun to cry and say that he would be tortured if sent to Syria. He said he had felt "destroyed."

Mr. Arar was taken to New Jersey, put on a corporate jet, and flown to Amman, Jordan, with brief stops in Washington, D.C., Portland, Maine, and Rome, Italy. Throughout the journey, he was chained and shackled in the back of the plane. The shackles were removed only at the end of the trip, when he was given the opportunity to have a meal with his guards. He could not eat.

It was the middle of the night when he arrived in Amman and was transported to a detention centre. He had not slept since leaving New York. He suffered blows at the hands of his Jordanian guards and was blindfolded. He was then taken into a room, where the blindfold was removed. He was asked routine questions and then blindfolded again before being led to a cell. The next morning, he was told that he was going to Syria. Later that day, he was blindfolded and put into a car or van. By the time he arrived at his destination at around five o?clock in the afternoon, Mr. Arar was exhausted, hungry, and terrified. His blindfold was removed, and he saw portraits of Presidents Assad, father and son. Mr. Arar later learned that he was in Syria, in the Far Falestin detention centre, also called the Palestine Branch, which was run by the Syrian Military Intelligence (SMI).

Later that day, Mr. Arar was interrogated for approximately four hours by a man called "George," subsequently identified as George Salloum, the head interrogator at the Palestine Branch. Two other interrogators were present, taking notes. The questions mostly concerned his family. Mr. Arar told Professor Toope that, at this point, he had decided to "say anything" necessary to avoid torture. Although no physical violence was used during this interrogation session, ominous threats were made. Whenever Mr. Arar was slow to answer, George would threaten to use "the chair," a reference Mr. Arar did not understand.

By the next day, October 9, 2002, Mr. Arar was even more exhausted, as he had not been able to sleep in the cell. He was called up for interrogation. When George arrived, he immediately started hitting Mr. Arar. The chair on which Mr. Arar had been sitting was taken away, so that he was now on the floor.

George brought a black cable, which might have been a shredded electrical cable, about two feet long, into the room with him. Mr. Arar told Professor Toope that, when he had seen the cable, he had started to cry. George told Mr. Arar to open his right hand, then raised the cable high and brought it down hard. Mr. Arar recalled the moment vividly; he told Professor Toope that he had felt like a bad Syrian school boy. He stood up and started jumping, but he was forced back down and the process was repeated with his left hand.

Mr. Arar was then made to stand near the door, and the questions began. The theme throughout was "you are a liar." He was given breaks, during which he was put into a different room, where he could hear other people screaming. Sometimes, he was blindfolded and left to stand in the hallway for an hour or more. The screaming continued. Each time Mr. Arar was brought back into the interrogation room, he was beaten about the upper body and asked more questions.

On the second day in the Palestine Branch, the interrogation lasted approximately 10 hours. Day three, October 11, 2002, was the most "intensive" for Mr. Arar. He was questioned for 16 to 18 hours, and was subjected to great physical and psychological abuse. The questions were in part about Abdullah Almalki. Mr. Arar was beaten with the black cable on numerous occasions throughout the day, and was threatened with electric shock, "the chair" and "the tire." The pattern was three or four lashes with the cable, then questions, followed by more beating. After a while, he became so weak that he was disoriented. He remembers being asked if he had trained in Afghanistan. By this time, he was so afraid and in so much pain that he replied, "If you want me to say so." He was asked which border he had crossed and whether he had seen Mr. Almalki in Afghanistan. Mr. Arar told Professor Toope that he had urinated on himself twice during this questioning, and had had to wear the same clothes for the next two and a half months. He had been "humiliated." Mr. Arar was questioned about his relationships with various people, his family, his bank accounts, and his salary. His interrogators could not understand what he did for a living. They did not believe his description of providing services in the computer sector or the amount he said he was paid in salary, which they thought impossibly high. Mr. Arar was beaten for these "lies."

After the beatings on the third day, the interrogation became less intense physically. There was much less use of the cables, and more punching and hitting. On October 16 or 17, even those beatings diminished. However, the threats intensified, and the psychological pressure remained extreme. For example, Mr. Arar was put in "the tire," though not beaten. Warnings about "the chair" were also used to scare him. At the end of each interrogation session, an interrogator would say "tomorrow will be tough" or "tomorrow will be worse for you." Mr. Arar found it almost impossible to sleep for more than two or three hours a night.

Mr. Arar's conditions of detention were atrocious. He was kept in a basement cell that was seven feet high, six feet long, and three feet wide. The cell contained only two thin blankets, a "humidity isolator," and two bottles -- one for water and one for urine. The only source of light in the cell was a small opening in the middle of the ceiling, measuring roughly one foot by two feet.

According to Mr. Arar, cats would sometimes urinate through the opening. There were also rats in the building; Mr. Arar stuffed shoes under the door to his cell to prevent them from entering. The cell was damp and very cold in the winter and stifling in the summer. Mr. Arar was known to guards only by his cell number: Two.

Over time, as the beatings diminished in intensity, the most disturbing aspect of Mr. Arar's detention came to be the daily horror of living in the tiny, dark and damp cell all alone and with no reading material (except the Koran later on). While at first the cell was a refuge from the infliction of physical pain, later it became a torture in its own right. Mr. Arar described for Professor Toope nights alone in his cell, when he had been unable to sleep on the cold concrete floor and had had to turn over every 15 minutes or so. He had thought of his family constantly, worrying about their finances and safety, and had been "bombarded by memories."

Mr. Arar remained in this cell for 10 months and 10 days, during which he saw almost no sunlight other than when he was transferred for consular visits. His first visit to the courtyard of the prison did not take place until April 2003. Mr. Arar described the cell as "a grave" and a "slow death." By June or July of 2003, he had reached his limit. Although he had tried to keep in shape by doing push-ups and pacing in his cell, he was losing all hope and stopped his modest exercise regime.

In July 2003, one of his interrogators, "Khalid," upon seeing him for the first time in months, told Mr. Arar that his wife would divorce him if she saw him as he was then: thin, listless and crying. The consular visits with Léo Martel, the Canadian consul, provided a little hope and some connection to Mr. Arar's family, but Mr. Arar also found them immensely "frustrating."

On August 20, 2003, Mr. Arar was transferred to Sednaya Prison, where conditions were "like heaven" compared with those in the Palestine Branch. On October 5, 2003, he was released from custody after signing a "confession" given to him in court by a Syrian prosecutor.

Mr. Arar was guilty of being seen with someone who was under surveillance at a café and having this same person listed as an emergency contact on his rental lease. The punishment was being whisked away to Syria where he was tortured and imprisoned for a year.

Is this the war on terror?

The commission report quotes Kofi Annan, who said, "Let us be clear: torture can never be an instrument to fight terror, for torture is an instrument of terror."

Until the US learns this lesson, things are only going to get worse.

I don't really know what to make of this piece in the Post. It's about Bush and his message to the Iranian people. Strangely enough, it seems pretty reasonable and even reasoned:

"I would say to the Iranian people: We respect your history. We respect your culture. We admire the entrepreneurial skills of your people. I would say to the Iranian people that I recognize the importance of your sovereignty -- that you're a proud nation, and you want to have a positive future for your citizens," Bush said, answering quickly and without notes.

"In terms of the nuclear issue," he continued, "I understand that you believe it is in your interest -- your sovereign interest, and your sovereign right -- to have nuclear power.

He even goes on to suggest more cultural and educational exchanges with Iran. There doesn't seem to be any belligerence here, which makes me wonder who has kidnapped Bush and replaced him with an unbelievable simulacrum?

The Progressive has an article strongly against torture in general and the the myth of the ticking bomb scenario in particular.

Here is an interesting extract about the political costs of torture and the slippery slope that the US, as well as other liberal democracies, has slid down before:

The price of torture is unacceptably high because it disgraces and then undermines the country that countenances it. For the French in Algeria, for the Americans in Vietnam, and now for the Americans in Iraq, the costs have been astronomical and have outweighed any gains gathered by torture.

Official sources are nearly unanimous that the yield from the massive Phoenix program, with more than forty prisons across South Vietnam systematically torturing thousands of suspected communists, was surprisingly low. One Pentagon contract study found that, in 1970-71, only 3 percent of the Viet Cong "killed, captured, or rallied were full or probationary Party members above the district level." Not surprisingly, such a brutal pacification effort failed either to crush the Viet Cong or win the support of Vietnamese villagers, contributing to the ultimate U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War.

Similarly, the French army won the Battle of Algiers but soon lost the war for Algeria, in part because their systematic torture delegitimated the larger war effort in the eyes of most Algerians and many French. "You might say that the Battle of Algiers was won through the use of torture," observed British journalist Sir Alistair Horne, "but that the war, the Algerian war, was lost."

Even the comparatively limited torture at Abu Ghraib has done incalculable damage to America's international prestige.

In short, the intelligence gains are soon overwhelmed by political costs as friends and enemies recoil in revulsion at such calculated savagery.

...As we slide down the slippery slope to torture in general, we should also realize that there is a chasm at the bottom called extrajudicial execution. With the agency?s multinational gulag full of dozens, even hundreds, of detainees of dwindling utility, CIA agents, active and retired, have been vocal in their complaints about the costs and inconvenience of limitless, even lifetime, incarceration for these tortured terrorists. The ideal solution to this conundrum from an agency perspective is pump and dump, as in Vietnam?pump the terrorists for information, and then dump the bodies. After all, the systematic French torture of thousands from the Casbah of Algiers in 1957 also entailed more than 3,000 "summary executions" as "an inseparable part" of this campaign, largely, as one French general put it, to ensure that "the machine of justice" not be "clogged with cases." For similar reasons, the CIA's Phoenix program produced, by the agency's own count, over 20,000 extrajudicial killings.

...The use of torture to stop ticking bombs leads ultimately to a cruel choice?either legalize this brutality, à la Dershowitz and Bush, or accept that the logical corollary to state-sanctioned torture is state-sponsored murder, à la Vietnam.

I've thought often about peace deals that include offers of amnesty for war criminals. Should justice be sacrificed for peace? The case of Pinochet comes to mind as one in which a former tyrant was given immunity when he left power (although it was stripped from him nearly 10 years later, first by British and Spanish courts -- the latter with a claim to universal jurisdiction -- and only later by Chile itself).

There has been a recent cease-fire put in place in Northern Uganda, where Joseph Kony (who is wanted by the International Criminal Court) and his Lord's Resistance Army have been using abducted children as soldiers to terrorize the people in Acholiland, killing and torturing thousands in their rebel war against the government in Kampala.

Kony has said that he will end the rebellion if, and only if, he is granted amnesty. This is in line with the traditional Acholi practice of reconciliation called mataput, in which a wrong-doer drinks a bitter root and is forgiven by those he has harmed (in many cases, fellow villagers whose ears, lips or noses have been cut off). There has been talk since 2004 of Uganda retracting its case in the International Criminal Court in return for an end to the conflict through such traditional reconciliation processes, some of which involve stepping on an egg and then being forgiven. And in the past, such practices have had an effect on weakening the cult leader's rebellion:

But it's not just geopolitics that's weakening Kony. It's also a powerful ethic of forgiveness -- one that parallels South Africa's famous reconciliation efforts after apartheid.

In the local Acholi tribe there's a traditional ceremony in which elders place an egg -- the symbol of new life -- on the ground. A repentant wrongdoer then steps on the egg. The act symbolizes the opening of a new life. The person is welcomed back into the village family. This and other ceremonies are being used to reintegrate former LRA soldiers, despite their awful acts. Pressured by local leaders, the government also offers legal amnesty to former fighters.

A major reason for the forgiveness is that so many LRA fighters were abducted as children. They were often forced to kill civilians -- or be killed themselves. "The child was innocent -- taken forcefully and forced to commit the crime," says Sheik Musa Khalil of the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative. "Forgiveness is the only way to solve this conflict."

The attitude has put local leaders at odds with the UN's International Criminal Court, which aims to prosecute Kony and others. But the news of the amnesty being broadcast via radio into the bush has spurred increasing numbers of rebels to desert Kony.

While I can see how the issue of child soldiers, particularly ones who were drugged and abducted, is morally complex and perhaps well-served by such traditional forgiveness practices (providing that there is a disarming and reintigration process included), I have to admit that I feel uneasy about letting people like Joseph Kony off the hook so easily, and groups like Amnesty International agrees.

Is peace in Northern Uganda worth letting Kony live the rest of his life a free man? Probably. Would I feel good about making the call? Definitely not.

The Columbia Journalism Review has an excellent piece by Eric Umansky that takes an in-depth look at the media's torture coverage and Congress's overall lack of interest in examining the issue:

Reporters and news organizations deserve enormous credit for exposing the abuse and torture of detainees during the U.S. war on terror, more than other institutions or individuals. Without [The New York Times'] Carlotta Gall, The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, The Washington Post's Dana Priest, and many other reporters, we might well never have learned of the abuse and torture that have occurred in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere.

But just as sweeping attacks against "the media" are too reductive, so too are plaudits. And when the record on torture coverage is examined in detail, an ambiguous picture emerges: in the post-9/11 days, some reporters offered detailed accusations and reports of abuse and torture, only to be met with skepticism by their own editors. Stories were buried, played down, or ignored -- a reluctance that is much diminished but still bubbles up with regard to the culpability of policymakers.

What is true and what is significant are two different matters. Everybody agrees that journalists are supposed to ascertain the truth. As for deciding what is significant, reporters and editors make that judgment, too, all the time -- what story leads on the front page, or gets played inside, what story gets followed up. And when it comes to very sensitive material, like torture, many journalists would prefer to rely on others to be the first to decide that something is significant. To do otherwise would mean sticking your neck out.

When stories about abuse did finally get attention, what was new was often less the revelations themselves than how they were presented and the prominence they were given. Simply put, a scandal wasn?t a scandal or a scoop a scoop until it was played as one. But after the September 11 attacks, most news organizations were reluctant to go there. "Being fair is one thing; being excessively worried that we might not be portraying the military in a fair light is another," says Roger Cohen [of The New York Times. "For a while there, we lost that balance."

Newsroom ambivalence is not the only impediment to covering this difficult story, of course. For one thing, with the exception of Senator John McCain's 2005 antitorture amendment -- the coverage of which turned out to have been shallow and excessively focused on personalities -- Congress has shown a studied lack of interest in torture. There have been no sustained congressional hearings, and a proposed independent investigation has long been blocked by the congressional leadership.

Complicating matters has been the Bush administration's savvy defense. It has pushed back against calls for an independent, overarching investigation of abuses. Instead, there have been a dizzying number of fractured, limited-authority reports, all of which reporters have diligently sought to cover. But many of the reports are classified and ultimately heavily redacted, and none of them have looked specifically at the connection between policymakers and abuse. Indeed, the stonewalling has been part of a larger, smarter strategy: rather than defending its policies of abuse, the administration has denied the policies exist.

The whole piece is worth a read, and if you're like me, you'll notice that some of the big stories like rendition and CIA black sites were actually broken much earlier than you remember -- sometimes years earlier.

The Post reports that the International Atomic Energy Agency found that parts of the House's report on Iran and its nuclear capabilities were "outrageous and dishonest."

This obviously brings back memories of similar debates between Republicans and IAEA on Iraq's WMD capabilities. It also brings back memories (via A Tiny Revolution) of Iraq coverage in the US prior to the war. The Post covered the House report on the front page, whereas its rebuttal was stuck on page 17. This despite the Post's admission that they dropped the ball when it came to questioning the administration's claims about Iraq:

"The paper was not front-paging stuff," said Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks. "Administration assertions were on the front page. Things that challenged the administration were on A18 on Sunday or A24 on Monday. There was an attitude among editors: Look, we're going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?"

In retrospect, said Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr., "we were so focused on trying to figure out what the administration was doing that we were not giving the same play to people who said it wouldn't be a good idea to go to war and were questioning the administration's rationale. Not enough of those stories were put on the front page. That was a mistake on my part."

Across the country, "the voices raising questions about the war were lonely ones," Downie said. "We didn't pay enough attention to the minority."

These confessions ran in the Post two years ago. It seems that no one has learned any lessons down there...

I woke up Tuesday morning to the news that the US embassy in Damascus had been attacked. It seems that the Syrian forces (and perhaps American marines) killed three of the four attackers and stopped them from exploding another car full of explosives (accounts vary, but it sounds like one car bomb was detonated).

Perhaps I've spent too much time in Lebanon, where the Syrian presence is still felt (if only from the ka'ak sellers on the street who are rumored to be Syrian mukhabarat agents), but I can't help but wondering if Damascus wasn't somehow involved in this attack or at least failed to prevent it. Syria is a police state where the mukhabarat keeps pretty close tabs on everyone, especially Sunni militants, and it seems suprising that something like this could happen without the state's knowledge, particulary as the American embassy is so close to the presidential residence.

Either the intelligence apparatus's grip on things in Damascus is slipping, or the government decided that it might be to its advantage to stop such a plot as it was unfolding instead of before it actually happened. Both hypotheses seem possible to me, and both are disconcerting in very different ways.

In Al Jazeera Magazine (which is out of Dubai and London and has no relation to Al Jazeera the television channel), there is speculation that the attacks were planned either by the US or Syria. While the article focuses on the idea that the US was behind the attack, they do mention another hypothesis from the London daily Al-Quds al-Arabi:

Meanwhile, Syrian opposition figure [Mohammad Marwan Suweidan, a former Syrian Army officer] has called Tuesday['s] attack on the U.S. embassy "a foolish act conducted by a naive regime aimed to mislead the Syrian people and send a warning to the U.S. administration," the London-based Al-Quds al-Arabi reported earlier.

It should be noted that Al Jazeera Magazine (as opposed to Al Jazeera the cable station and website) is relatively unknown to me. I'm not sure how accurate their reporting is, and I haven't been able to find the Al-Quds al-Arabi article to verify that Suweidan really made such an accusation. Furthermore, it should be disclosed that he is part of Rifaat Assad's exiled opposition. Rifaat is Bashar's uncle and was exiled after a failed coup attempt in the 1983. He was also in charge of the massacre at Hama, where he led the "Defence Brigades" in killing 10,000 to 25,000 people.

All this to say that I don't know if Rifaat or his supporters are reliable sources; however, something seems fishy about this attack.

Since I missed my train back to Paris on Tuesday night, I stayed another day in London. The trip was a good one, and in addition to seeing an old friend from Prague, I was able to see some friends who left Beirut this summer like me.

While I was there, I did some book shopping at the London Review Bookshop and at the book market under the Waterloo bridge. I bought Dubravka Ugresic's Thank You for Not Reading: Essays on Literary Trivia, Sven Lindqvist's A History of Bombing, Isaac Deutcher's 3-volume biography of Trotsky and Eliot Weinberger's Muhammad.

I'll be in London for a long weekend and won't be back until Tuesday night. I probably won't be posting while I'm gone...

I will, however, be visiting the London Review's book store.

The BBC sponsored a mock war crimes trial for Israel and Hizbollah. Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch acts as prosecutor and finds that both sides are guilty of crimes of war. His main arguments are that Hizbollah used weapons that are nearly impossible to control with much accuracy, resulting in attacks on Israeli civilians and that Israel assumed that after civilians had been warned of upcoming attacks, anyone who was still in that area was a legitimate target.

The BBC moderated a letter-writing debate in four parts (1, 2, 3, and 4) between a Lebanese man named Saleem in Beirut and an Israeli man named Gordon in a border town called Shlomi.

They both remain civil, and while they disagree on most issues, they both agree that they'd like to live in peace. Here are some extracts.

From Saleem:

Maybe you could send me some oranges from my grandfather's orchards. From the land he had to leave in 1948 - which is exactly where you live. My grandfather used to own acres and acres of land where your settlement now is. It's such a coincidence, of all the Lebanese and all the Israelis to be in a debate...

My mother's village is al-Bassa, now called Bezet. I have a picture of my grandmother on that land in 1946. It's less than 2km from Shlomi where you are. Where was your maternal grandmother in 1946?

Israel must return our land. Then I will be the first person to cross the borders and offer you a case of fresh Lebanese apples.

From Gordon:

Yes, we came through unharmed. We had rockets falling to the left of us, and rockets to the right, and our next-door neighbour was killed. But we made it.

Via the Plank, The Hill reports that Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), the vice chairman of the Armed Services panel and chairman of the Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee, is introducing a bill to cut the civilian leadership (read: Bush and Rumsfeld) out of the loop for deciding when troops should withdraw from Iraq. His resolution would make it the generals' decision, thus making the decision a military one and not a political one, he says.

The resolution would express the sense of the House that military commanders should put in place a system of criteria to assess the capability of Iraqi security forces. Once those criteria are met, the mission in Iraq would be considered complete and the president could begin withdrawing troops.

Weldon is one of the foremost Republican military experts in the House, and he is considered to have a good chance of succeeding Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) as chairman of the Armed Services Committee at the end of 2008 should Republicans keep control of the lower chamber.

This obviously brings up issues of the chain of command, since the military is always answerable to civilian leadership. If there is really this much question as to the president's judgement and that of his cabinet, it seems like the logical thing to do would be to get rid of the president, not set a precedent for changing the basic structure of the chain of command.

Using stumble upon, I came across a timeline of US intervention done by Adbusters, including "coups, humanitarian incursions, covert actions, proxy armies, freedom fighters/terrorists and multilateral offenses."

It starts in 1801 on the Barbary Coast and goes up to 2004 in Haiti, covering Honduras, Guatemala, Libya, Vietnam and Angola along the way.

It's an interesting little presentation, and I'm impressed that stumble upon found it for me.

The Times reports that Israel has decided to end the blockade on Lebanon, which is technically true since Israel did announce the lifting of the blockade. However, what the Times didn't mention is that several airlines had already decided to break the blockade:

In a sign the embargo may be eroding, British Airways/BMED said it was resuming direct flights to Beirut after the British government had given assurances that it would be safe to do so.

Lebanon's Middle East Airlines and Royal Jordanian began flying regularly into the capital last month, but have complied with Israel's insistence that all such flights go via Amman. Qatar Airways resumed direct flights to Beirut on Monday.

In addition to Qatar and British Airways, Gulf Air had also announced that they were resuming flights as of Saturday. It seems that commercial airlines that have flouted the blockade would be newsworthy, but the Times either didn't know about this or didn't think that their readers should.

Of course, the good news is that with the air blockade being lifted, this means that the sea embargo will be lifted as well. I never understood why the Israelis bothered with the air and sea embargos, unless it was just to flex Tel Aviv's muscles and illustrate that Israel can decide who comes and goes. Because the real routes that Israel needs to be worry about as far as arms resupplying goes, are the ground routes. Iranian arms shipments are overland through Syria, and the Lebanese-Syrian border is long, poorly defined and very porous. And this is the one way in and out of the country that they can't really control. Or rather their control is clumsier and involves the bombing of bridges and roads, like the road to Damascus, which was bombed and shut down, forcing people to flee the country by the northern route.

According to The Sunday Times and via Juan Cole, Israel is preparing for war with Syria and Iran. Of course, this plan has backers in the Pentagon, as well as Richard Perle:

While the American State Department favours engaging with President Bashar Assad of Syria in the hope of detaching him from the Iranian alliance, hawks believe Israel missed a golden opportunity to strike at Syria during the Hezbollah conflict.

"If they had acted against Syria during this last kerfuffle, the war might have ended more quickly and better," Perle added. "Syrian military installations are sitting ducks and the Syrian air force could have been destroyed on the ground in a couple of days." Assad set off alarm bells in Israel when he said during the war in Lebanon: "If we do not obtain the occupied Golan Heights by peaceful means, the resistance option is there." ...

Advocates of political engagement believe a war with Syria could unleash Islamic fundamentalist terror in what has hitherto been a stable dictatorship. Some voices in the Pentagon are not impressed by that argument.

"If Syria spirals into chaos, at least they?ll be taking on each other rather than heading for Jerusalem," said one insider.

This is obviously just what we need, another toppled Middle Eastern dictator in a sectarian country with a strong Islamist opposition and no one willing or capable of picking up the pieces.

The New York Review has a good analysis of recent events in the Middle East by Robert Malley, who was Special Assistant to President Clinton for Arab-Israeli Affairs and is currently Middle East and North Africa Program Director at the International Crisis Group:

For Israel, as well as Hamas and Hezbollah, the most costly blow is the one to which they will be seen as having surrendered. The conflict is no longer about achieving a specific objective -- releasing a soldier, say, or capturing defined territory. It is about something more intangible, and so more serious: establishing one's power of deterrence, defining the rules of the game, showing who is boss. Such confrontations may subside, and they may even pause. They will not end.

The whole article is worth reading. Malley has a really good grasp of the overall situation, and he's far from optimistic.

To my mind, until this conflict can be pushed back to the more manageable domain of territorial dispute, things are going to keep getting worse. The first step, as I keep insisting, is land for peace in the Golan Heights and the Shebaa Farms. Syria has precise territorial demands and no religious ideological claims, which makes Iran, and to a lesser extent Hizbollah, a strange bedfellow for the staunchly secular Ba'ath regime. And if Israel could get Syria out of the way by giving up the occupied Golan Heights, then they could break the direct line between Hizbollah and Iran. Furthermore, they could use the occasion to broker a peace with Lebanon by releasing prisoners and giving back the Shebaa farms. (A subsequent water-sharing deal could be attempted for the aquifer-rich area if Israel really thinks it's worth the effort; in any case, Israel seems to be moving more and more toward desalination schemes, so such a water-sharing agreement might not even be necessary.)

And if they were to include Hizbollah in the negotiations process, then they could not only be sure to get the Lebanese government to visa the peace plan, but they would have explicit and public agreement from Hizbollah, which would go a long way toward removing any excuse that the Party of God might have for continuing attacks against Israel.

In Sudan, Khartoum is trying to stop the African Union force currently in Darfur from being folded into a larger UN force with a stronger mandate as called for last week. Khartoum has been massing troops at El Fasher, getting ready to attack the rebels in a move that will likely involve many more dead civilians and the genocide that has become a force of habit in Khartoum's counter-insurgency strategy.

The AU force has always been under-equipped (both in terms of matériel and mandate), but its financial resources and mandate are about to run out at the end of the month. The Sudanese government has given the AU a choice: either continue as is with funding from the Arab League, which unsuprisingly supports Khartoum, or leave:

[T]he commander of the African forces in Darfur, Gen. Collins Ihekire, said in an interview last week that accepting the money would leave the African Union hopelessly compromised.

"It could become a kind of blackmail," General Ihekire said. "The viability of the force would depend on the charity of Sudan and its friends."

This is an obvious attempt to stop the force from being incorporated into a UN force, and Mustafa Osman Ismail, President Bashir, recently said, "Sudan will not accept those troops to be transformed into part of a UN force."

I'm not sure how this can be countered. Perhaps Khartoum is hoping that the EU will give more money to the AU force in order to keep it from Arab League money, thus maintaining the status quo.

In any case, the AU has decided to end its mandate on 30 September. It is unclear though if this is the final word. The AU might be deciding to call Khartoum's bluff, and the fact that the latest cease-fire was brokered and monitored by the AU might raise the issue of the cease-fire disappearing when the AU mandate expires. But then again, this might be just what Khartoum wants.

Martin Peretz at The New Republic writes about his frustration that no one is stopping the genocide in Darfur. I'm glad that he's bringing more attention to this conflict that is too often forgotten in the shuffle, but there are some ridiculous points in his little piece:

One might think that Afro-American organizations in the States and African-American politicians might raise their voices against this infamy. But no. You see, George Bush has actually done this. And he certainly can't be in the right. I wish he would go further and, as our editorial in this week's TNR hard copy edition urges, with the U.K., Canada, France, Germany, Australia and, yes, Israel, deploy the troops necessary to save the lives of those whose lives have not yet been taken or simply destroyed.

First of all, Obama Barack and other black lawmakers have been bringing attention to the issue, and seven members of the Congressional Black Caucus were arrested while protesting in front of the Sudanese embassy. So while I agree that the world as a whole has not been giving this issue the attention it deserves, Peretz's dig at black groups is unfair.

This also made me think of a recent review in The Nation about the understandable ambivalence that many black Americans have felt about Africa. So while I think we all have a moral responsibility to Darfur as humans, I'm not sure that black people have should be held any more responsible than the rest of the world just because they're black.

Second, Israeli troops? Is he crazy? The Sudanese government has already stated that any foreign troops will be seen as invaders and fought by Khartoum's forces, so it seems obvious that the more African and Arabic any intervention would be, the better chance it would have of success. American troops (and maybe even British ones) would already be a bad idea, but sending Israelis would guarantee the already likely scenario that such a conflict would be spinned as a religious war against foreign infidel usupers. Peretz should know better than to even suggest such an obviously wrongheaded idea.

My father and I are fighting again. He lives in Alabama, and I live in Paris, and this summer, in Beirut. Consequently, our fighting is done by e-mail and long-distance telephone calls. The first call in our latest fight came when I was in Beirut as the war was starting. I couldn't sleep, because even in my apartment in Hamra, the Sunni neighborhood by the American University of Beirut, the Israeli bombs, missiles and shells were shaking me awake every night. Understandably, he was worried about me, and I could tell that the fact that he could do nothing to get me out of Lebanon was getting to him.

At the end of the call, he gave me some fatherly advice: "Watch yourself, and be careful of Hezbollah." I told him that if I had anything to worry about, it was getting hit by an Israeli bomb. This introduced the conversation that both of us had been trying to avoid since the war began. He told me that Israel was just defending itself from terrorists, and I quipped that I didn't think there were too many terrorists hiding inside the milk factory that had just been bombed. In the end, and to my father's credit, he said that the question was academic in any case. But being my father's son, I couldn't leave it at that: "No, Dad, it's a very concrete question, because if I die here, chances are that it will be the Israelis that kill me."

Normally, my father and I let these disagreements get out of control. Usually, I'll respond to what I see as his uninformed and simplistic ideas, often condescendingly, and then he'll get really angry and the name-calling will commence. I think both of us would sum up the other's position in a single sentence: "his mind's made up; don't confuse him with the facts." I'm ashamed to admit that during the Christmas holidays before the war started in Iraq, our disagreement about the sagacity and rationale of the impending invasion nearly escalated into a fistfight. This is not an exaggeration. Each of us stood, angry and with heaving chest pointed outward, in the living room between the gun cabinet and the fireplace decorated with stockings and holly, waiting for the other to have the bad sense to throw the first punch.

I'm back in Paris now, and since I returned, I've received several e-mails from my father on the Middle East, all of them forwarded from elsewhere. In one, a Middle East specialist (comedian Dennis Miller) explains to us that there is no such thing as Palestinians and that we should call these people "Arabs who can't accomplish anything in life and would rather wrap themselves in the seductive melodrama of eternal struggle and death." In another message, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert tells us that he refuses to apologize about the civilian deaths in Lebanon and that if we continue to withhold our support from his noble fight, when the final solution comes, we of the "the free and enlightened world, will go down" along with the Israelis.

The worst message of the bunch, which I received from two different family members, asks whether or not one can be a good Muslim and a Good American. Of course, the answer is no, for several reasons, among which we find the following:

Theologically - no. Because his allegiance is to Allah, the moon God of Arabia.

Domestically - no. Because he is instructed to marry four women and beat and scourge his wife when she disobeys him.

Intellectually - no. Because he cannot accept the American Constitution since it is based on Biblical principles and he believes the Bible to be corrupt.

As coincidence would have it, I received this e-mail from my father a week before seeing a Gallup poll on American prejudice toward Muslims. The numbers in this poll are shocking on several accounts: 22 percent of Americans say they would not like to have a Muslim as a neighbor; 51 percent believe US Muslims are not loyal to the United States; and 34 percent think Muslims in the US are sympathetic to al-Qaeda. But what shocked me the most was that 39 percent advocate requiring American Muslims to carry special identification.

One of my weaknesses is that I cannot sit by and listen to someone say something altogether stupid without opening my mouth to rebut the most asinine of the person's remarks. This is especially true for me in e-mail exchanges. I feel compelled to respond to my father's messages citing accounts from the press and, in the case of Israel and Lebanon, a report from Human Rights Watch that squarely accuses Israel of war crimes. I'm not really sure what I hope to gain from this obvious waste of time, since my father would never admit to being wrong.

His rebuttals are almost always the same: your sources are Jew-hating liars. "Human Rights Watch are some of the biggest liars around." "Quoting organizations that hate the Jews, just like the UN ... is dishonest." Everyone has an agenda, especially The New York Times, the United Nations, Human Rights Watch and, it seems, myself as well, although to be completely honest, I can't figure out what my agenda might be.

During the war while I was in Beirut, I wrote a letter to the editor that was published in The New York Times. A friend of mine in Paris forwarded the letter to my father by e-mail, and he responded saying that he couldn't trust the Gray Lady anymore. (He can, of course, trust Fox News to call it like it is.) I'm not really sure when he ever trusted the Times, but that's not the point. The point is that one would think that he would trust me, his son.

During the war, I was in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the occupied territories and Israel. One would think that he would trust, or at least listen to, what I have to say about the affair. But he doesn't: "you can B.S. yourself if you want to, but your desire for your agenda clouds your logic."

My father and I represent two distinct parts of our not-so-united states of America. We're both from Alabama, and we can both be stubborn asses, but that's about where the similarities end -- or at least that's where I'd like to think they end. I'm not really sure what has created the gap between my father and me when it comes to politics. My first reflex is to assume that it has a lot to do with travel and education, but I know that's not true, since there are many Americans who agree with my father, many of whom are erudite and well-traveled, although they argue with perhaps a little more nuance and a little less name-calling. And if anyone has the strength of numbers on his side in America, it's my father, not me.

But finally, this consensus is what worries me the most. My father's solution to the Middle East is to "bomb the Arabs back into the stone age." And really, he's not very far from Israeli General Dan Halutz's comment that Israel would "turn back the clock in Lebanon by twenty years," which is what the IDF did. My father supports that, and he's against the "European mindset," insofar as Israel is concerned, because he thinks that given the chance, the world"s Muslims would destroy world Jewry once and for all and that the Europeans would do their best to help them on their way. Ironically enough, he's very likely part of the 39 percent of Americans who think Muslims in the US should have to carry special identification. I would ask him myself what he thinks, but we're not talking right now.

In today's Los Angeles Times, Rosa Brooks makes the obvious point that in the US, anyone who criticizes Israeli actions is pilloried as an anti-semite. The latest case being Ken Roth (whose father fled Nazi Germany), the executive director of Human Rights Watch:

But what's most troubling about the vitriol directed at Roth and his organization isn't that it's savage, unfounded and fantastical. What's most troubling is that it's typical. Typical, that is, of what anyone rash enough to criticize Israel can expect to encounter. In the United States today, it just isn't possible to have a civil debate about Israel, because any serious criticism of its policies is instantly countered with charges of anti-Semitism. Think Israel's tactics against Hezbollah were too heavy-handed, or that Israel hasn't always been wholly fair to the Palestinians, or that the United States should reconsider its unquestioning financial and military support for Israel? Shhh: Don't voice those sentiments unless you want to be called an anti-Semite -- and probably a terrorist sympathizer to boot.

How did adopting a reflexively pro-Israel stance come to be a mandatory aspect of American Jewish identity? Skepticism -- a willingness to ask tough questions, a refusal to embrace dogma -- has always been central to the Jewish intellectual tradition. Ironically, this tradition remains alive in Israel, where respected public figures routinely criticize the government in far harsher terms than those used by Human Rights Watch.

In a climate in which good-faith criticism of Israel is automatically denounced as anti-Semitic, everyone loses. Israeli policies are a major source of discord in the Islamic world, and anger at Israel usually spills over into anger at the U.S., Israel's biggest backer.

It's really a shame that this even needs to be brought up, but people in the US seem incapable of making the distinction between being Jewish and being Israeli. For some strange reason, this relationship seems to only exist for Israel. No one accuses anyone of being anti-islamic when Iran or Saudi Arabia is the object of criticism, so why should it be different for Israel?

The UN voted to send troops to Sudan, with China, Russia and Qatar abstaining. Sudan has objected, of course, (offering to send its own troops to quell the fighting in Sudan) but the State Department has been quick to point out that this force would be acting under Chapter VII of the UN Charter and doesn't require Sudan's consent.

I can imagine that no European or North American powers (with the exception of Canada, maybe) will be scrambling to take on such a mission. There is a pressing need to deploy this force (that is supposed to be 17,300-strong, including the 7,000 African Union forces already in Darfur), since the African Union forces' mandate is set to expire on 30 September.

I hope that I'm wrong and that the world will surprise me, but I imagine something along the lines of the bickering that led to no one being sent to Rwanda during the genocide in 1994. I forsee lots of offers coming from poor countries without the training or capacity to run such a mission and a deadening silence from the big military powers.

The American Prospect has an interesting article by Spencer Ackerman from The New Republic on using the promotion of human rights instead of democracy promotion as a guiding principle for American foreign policy.

What liberal democracy-promoters want to see in foreign closed societies is more precisely located in the advance of human rights: the protection of basic human dignity, freedom, and justice. Indeed, liberal democracy-promoters frequently criticize their neoconservative cousins for their lack of concern with the social protections of civil and legal rights. But it's time to uncouple human rights from democracy, and recognize that democracy has value only to the degree to which it safeguards human rights -- which is to say the degree to which democracy is liberal. Democracy in that respect is a fine and worthy thing, but the emphasis for the United States and for liberalism should be on the end, not the means.

While I'm not convinced that democracy and human rights can be totally seperated, the latter does seem to be a more attainable, and perhaps immediately, more urgent matter. But what really bothers me is how this affects pursuing American interests. He goes on later to talk (but only very briefly) about times when American interests and human rights are not compatible:

The test for America abroad should be: to what degree do American policies advance or diminish these human rights? And, in the unfortunate but inevitable cases of conflict between human rights and American interests, to what degree does subordinating either result in the best balance of each? Answering these two questions provides the best chance of keeping both America and liberalism from sliding into Manicheanism, messianism, naivete, or amorality.

This seems a little too vague for my taste. What should the US do in places like Kazhakstan, where American interests point to supporting the murderous dictator Nazarbayev, because sits atop he largest crude oil reserves in the Caspian Sea region? Other examples include the relationship that the US maintains with other dictators with easy access to cheap energy.

This is a difficult question that no one really seems to want to answer. Of course energy is a valid and necessary part of policy, but where should the US draw the line between securing oil supplies and promoting human rights? It should seem obvious that in most parts of the world, promoting human rights is going to be counterprductive to acquiring cheap energy. So then, should human rights only be limited to nations that don't have any strategic worth to the US?

I don't really know the answer to that answer, but as a humanitarian, I feel that the US is strong enough and rich enough to "take one for the team," promoting human rights even when it contradicts American interests. But maybe that's just youthful naïveté.

I arrived last night in Beirut, which was a good feeling after being away for so long and considering the circumstances under which I had to leave. Things seem to have picked up here, but the streets still seem much calmer than before the war. Then again, it's hard to say how much of that is due to the war and how much of that is due to the fact that it's the first Friday of Ramadan.

When I was in Cyprus, waiting for my connecting flight to Beirut, I talked with a couple from Beirut about the situation in Lebanon and Sudan. I told him how frustrated it makes me that there are no Muslims out marching agains the murder of Muslims in Darfur or the opression of Sahwari people by the Moroccan government. But cartoons in a right wing Danish newspaper set off riots and protests all over the Muslim world.

Normally, Thomas Friedman's articles annoy me, but I can't help but agree with him about the state of hypocrisy in Islam today:

This year on the first day of Ramadan, a Sunni suicide bomber in Baghdad killed 35 people who were lining up in a Shiite neighborhood to buy fuel. The same day, the severed heads of nine murdered Iraqi police officers and soldiers were found north of Baghdad.

I don?t get it. How can Muslims blow up other Muslims on their most holy day of the year -- in mosques! -- and there is barely a peep of protest in the Muslim world, let alone a million Muslim march? Yet Danish cartoons or a papal speech lead to violent protests. If Muslims butchering Muslims -- in Sudan, Iraq, Egypt, Pakistan and Jordan -- produces little communal reaction, while cartoons and papal remarks produce mass protests, what does Islam stand for today? It is not an insult to ask that question.

Muslims might say: "Well, what about Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo or Palestine? Let?s talk about all your violent behavior." To which I would say: "Let's talk about it! But you'll have to get in line behind us, because we're constantly talking about where we?ve gone wrong." We can?t have a meaningful dialogue if we, too, are not self-critical, but neither can Muslims.

I don't agree with his conclusion that the Pope shouldn't apologize -- I think he should -- but I do agree with him that there is a definite double standard for slights against Muslims. When the West hurts Muslims, the Muslim world comes together to condemn the attack, but when Muslims hurt Muslims, like in Darfur, Iraq and the Western Sahara, the silence is deafening.

Hassan Nasrallah held a public rally on 22 September, his first public appearance since the war. Hundreds of thousands of people showed up, and it was a surprise that Nasrallah was able to show up, since Israel has threatened to assasinate him. Nasrallah's speech talked about many things, including a national unity government, the welcoming of UNIFIL forces (provided that they don't spy on Hizbollah) and claims that the latest war was done at Iran and Syria's behest. He also addressed the idea of disarming Hizbollah, which he mentioned that no army, as Israelis had just learned, could disarm them by force:

The resistance is the result of several causes -- the occupation, the arrest of prisoners, the plunder of waters, the threat to Lebanon, and the attack on Lebanese sovereignty. These are the causes. Tackle the causes and the results will be tackled easily.

When we build a strong, capable, and just state that protects Lebanon and the Lebanese, it will be easy to find an honourable solution to the question of the resistance and its weapons. I would like the Lebanese to hear clearly. I and my brothers get excited sometimes and say all kinds of things. Let us speak with some responsibility. We do not say that these weapons will remain forever. And, it is not logical for these weapons to remain forever. There is bound to be an end to them. The natural key is to tackle the causes and the results will disappear.

Come and build a strong and just state, protecting the country and the citizens and their livelihoods, waters, and dignity, and you will find that the resolution of the resistance issue will not need even a negotiation table. It is a great deal easier than that.

Roger Cohen -- responding to the outrage that came with the decision by Richard Haas, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, to invite Ahmadinejad to speak -- argues, as I have for a while, that it is time to talk to Iran.

At some point these past few years, diplomacy went out of fashion. I'm not sure precisely when, but all the signs are that it's time for a rethink. The world needs a bout of bridge-building.

...Haass, the president of the council, is unrepentant. "I don't see diplomacy or talking as a favor or an endorsement or a gift," he said. "To me, it's a tool, and I'm confident that if used right, it can advance our interests."

He continued: "The United States gets itself in trouble when it limits its options and approaches diplomacy as a value judgment. It's not obvious to me, looking at the last 50 or 60 years, that we paid a price for talking to the Soviets. At the end of all the talking, we won the Cold War."

This is in strong contrast to the Israeli government's reaction, summed up in this little pearl found in Israeli ambassador to the US Daniel Ayalon's to Haass letter denouncing the event:

Some of those upset with the council's decision have compared it to hypothetically inviting Hitler to a meeting in the 1930's. In fact, meeting with Ahmadinejad is worse: Hitler did not openly call for genocide in the 1930's, and today we have the lessons of the 1930's to guide us. Foremost among those lessons is that appeasing fanatics like Hitler and granting them legitimacy leads to genocide and war.

I've said it before, but actual diplomacy and negotiation means talking to people you don't like. Only talking to those who agree with you and labelling others as evil, which is what the US does in the Middle East, is the opposite of diplomacy.

When Bush sets up a dichotomy of good and evil, or with us or against us, he's offering Ahmedinejad and Chavez a sympathetic audience on a silver platter.

This first article from the Boston Globe looks at the lessons of Suez and how the US might learn from its former stance in Egypt against Britian, France and Israel in 1956:

[British Prime Minister] Eden was reminded in friendly but forceful terms of the sheer unwisdom of "the use of force" against an Arab country-which would, "it seems to me, vastly increase the area of jeopardy." The "appeaser" in this case was General Dwight David Eisenhower, the 34th president of the United States, in the day when things were different in the White House and the Republican Party. If Eden persevered in his folly, Ike wrote to the prime minister on Sept. 3, 1956, in words just as chilling today, not only the peoples of the Middle East but "all of Asia and Africa, would be consolidated against the West to a degree which, I fear, could not be overcome in a generation."

The next is an interview in Harper's with Dr. Emile A. Nakhleh, who served in the CIA for 15 years and retired this summer as the Director of the Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program. When asked what the US should do in Iraq, he had this to say:

I have come to believe that our presence is part of the problem and that we should begin to seriously devise an exit strategy. There's a civil war in Iraq and our presence is contributing to the violence. We've become a lightning rod?we're not restricting the violence, we're contributing to it. Iraq has galvanized jihadists; our presence is what is attracting them. We need to get out of there. The idea of Iraq being a model for the region has also been tossed out the window. Now the only question is whether Iraq will become a haven for sectarianism, or follow either the Iranian model or the standard Arab authoritarian model. It's only three years old, but the once-touted model of a secular, democratic Iraq is all but forgotten. This casts a dark shadow on American efforts to spread democracy in the region.

He also has some interesting things to say about Guantanamo Bay and American's Iranian policy.

While thinking about Iran and the bomb, I've often wondered if Israel would rather be a nuclear power among others in the region or to be a non-nuclear power in a nuclear-free Middle East. Because it seems that with nuclear weapons in Iran and Israel (not to mention India and Pakistan), it would only be a matter of time until Egypt and Saudi Arabia started looking into nuclear weapons.

It turns out that I was right, or at least might be, since Gamal Mubarak, the Egyptian President's son and probably heir, has announced Egypt's interest in developing nuclear power.

"The whole world -- I don't want to say all, but many developing countries ? have proposed and started to execute the issue of alternative energy," [Gamal Mubarak] said. "It is time for Egypt to put forth, and the party will put forth, this proposal for discussion about its future energy policies, the issue of alternative energy, including nuclear energy, as one of the alternatives."

He also said in a clear reference to the White House: "We do not accept visions from abroad that try to dissolve the Arab identity and the joint Arab efforts within the framework of the so-called Greater Middle East Initiative."

..."Egypt, and especially the N.D.P., is a strategic ally of the U.S.," said Hassan Abou Taleb, an analyst with the government-financed Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. "It does not seek confrontation with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Instead, it seeks cooperation. Why should the U.S. assist India in its nuclear program and not Egypt?"

Of course, no one is talking about nuclear weapons in Egypt, just nuclear power. But then again, that's the official line in Iran as well. It seems obvious to me that Indian, Pakistani, and especially Israeli, nuclear weapons programs are only going to drive other countries like Egypt, and I predict that Saudi Arabia will follow suit, to try their hand at entering the nuclear club.

To my mind, the Middle East should be a nuke-free zone, and allowing Israel to have nuclear weapons and the Bush administration's talk of "useable nuclear weapons" that could be used against non-nuclear countries, have only ensured that more and more countries will seek nuclear arms.

According to Musharraf, in order to get Pakistan's help in the "war on terror" after September 11, 2001, Richard Armitage's argument was more Corleone-ish than Clintonian, all stick and no carrot.

In an interview to be aired on CBS television this weekend Pakistan's president, General Pervez Musharraf, said the threat was delivered by the assistant secretary of state, Richard Armitage, in conversations with Pakistan's intelligence director.

"The intelligence director told me that (Mr Armitage) said, 'Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the stone age'," Gen Musharraf was quoted as saying. The revelation that the US used extreme pressure to secure Pakistan's cooperation in the war on terror arrived at a time of renewed unease in the US about its frontline ally.

Gen Musharraf told CBS he was stunned at the bluntness of the US approach in the aftermath of the attacks. "I think it was a very rude remark," he said. But he yielded to the request.

I've wondered about the sweaty fist of American diplomacy -- which I often sum up as "do something about it, bitch!" -- and whether or not the actual language is euphemistic or whether diplomats sometimes, as my father would say, call a "spade" a "fucking shovel."

This sort of language doesn't surprise me from this administration, but I'd be curious to know if this is a change in behavior or if behind the scenes this is normal behavior for the powerful "negotiators."

The LA Times gives an Iraqi's account of what life has become in Baghdad. The piece is unsigned, because he's afraid that he'd be killed if his name were to appear:

On a recent Sunday, I was buying groceries in my beloved Amariya neighborhood in western Baghdad when I heard the sound of an AK-47 for about three seconds. It was close but not very close, so I continued shopping.

As I took a right turn on Munadhama Street, I saw a man lying on the ground in a small pool of blood. He wasn't dead.

The idea of stopping to help or to take him to a hospital crossed my mind, but I didn't dare. Cars passed without stopping. Pedestrians and shop owners kept doing what they were doing, pretending nothing had happened.

I was still looking at the wounded man and blaming myself for not stopping to help. Other shoppers peered at him from a distance, sorrowful and compassionate, but did nothing.

I went on to another grocery store, staying for about five minutes while shopping for tomatoes, onions and other vegetables. During that time, the man managed to sit up and wave to passing cars. No one stopped. Then, a white Volkswagen pulled up. A passenger stepped out with a gun, walked steadily to the wounded man and shot him three times. The car took off down a side road and vanished.

No one did anything. No one lifted a finger. The only reaction came from a woman in the grocery store. In a low voice, she said, "My God, bless his soul."

I went home and didn't dare tell my wife. I did not want to frighten her.

Via verbal privilege, the Post gives us a sad account of Mutanabi Street, where Baghdadis used to go to buy books and discuss ideas.

Under former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, Mutanabi Street was the nexus for resistance and freewheeling debates, where underground writers published illegal books that denounced Hussein.

"I wish you could see how it used to be on Fridays," Shatri spoke before he broke down in tears. "You could not even walk. The whole street was filled with books and people. Mutanabi Street is a part of how great Baghdad is."

Then, in a reverent tone, he uttered a proverb known across the Arab world: "Cairo writes. Beirut publishes. And Baghdad reads."

Since 1963, Shatri has peddled books on Mutanabi Street, like a faithful friend, through military rule and political oppression, wars and embargo. Of all the eras he has watched ebb and flow, it is today's Iraq, with its violent nature, that most mocks the proud legacy of Mutanabi Street, he said.

"It means the death of education, the death of the history of the street, the death of the culture of Baghdad," Shatri said.

Two Fridays ago, Shatri took action. He and other members of his writers union gathered in front of his shop. They sipped breakfast tea. Then, at around 9:30 a.m., they poured kerosene over a pile of books and set them aflame.

"I cried when I was burning the books," Shatri said.

"It's a message to the government," said Nakshabandi, who also took part. "It's an S.O.S. Help us. An important part of Baghdad is dying. And it is on its last breath."

"But no one got the message. There was no action."

National Public Radio's Fresh Air has a show on Christian Zionism. Terry Gross interviews Pastor John Hagee, the leader of Christians United for Israel, as well as Israeli journalist, Gershom Gorenberg and American journalist, Max Blumenthal. The interview with Hagee is particularly interesting and disturbing, but it's a shame that Gross lets him off the hook so easily. She lets statements like Muslims "have a mandate to kill all Jews and Christians" go without being challenged. Here are some verses that go directly contrary to this commonly misheld belief:

Sura 5:69 - Surely they that believe, and those of Jewry, and the Christians, and those Sabeaans, whoso believes in God and the Last Day, and works righteousness--their wage waits them with their Lord, and no fear shall be on them, neither shall they sorrow.

Sura 5:82 - ...and you will find the nearest in love to the believers (Muslims) those who say: "We are Christians." That is because amongst them are priests and monks, and they are not proud.

Sura 25:63 - The worshippers of the All-Merciful are they who tread gently upon the earth, and when the ignorant address them, they reply, "Peace!"

Sura 28:55 - And when they hear vain talk, they turn away from it and say: "To us our deeds, and to you yours; peace be to you: we do not seek out the ignorant."

My guess is that it's because she doesn't know enough about Islam to know that that his statements are demonstrably false. But there's not really much excuse for her timidity in questioning the idea that Hurricane Katrina was a punishment from God because New Orleans had too many homosexuals.

A friend sent me a link to George Packer's article in The New Yorker on Bush's recent speech on torture techniques and the Army's response:

Last week, in the guise of calling for fair trials, the President demanded that Congress give him the power to go on torturing detainees in secret prisons and use the evidence obtained against them. And last week the Army honorably closed the holes in moral conduct that the President, his counsel, the Vice-President, the Justice Department, and the Secretary of Defense pried open shortly after September 11th. It did so not only to remove the stain on its reputation and to protect its soldiers but because it cares more about the war than about the next election.

The Canadian government has released a report about the American rendition of Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured for a year until the Syrians realized that he was innocent and then let him go:

A government commission on Monday exonerated a Canadian computer engineer of any ties to terrorism and issued a scathing report that faulted Canada and the United States for his deportation four years ago to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured.

The report on the engineer, Maher Arar, said American officials had apparently acted on inaccurate information from Canadian investigators and then misled Canadian authorities about their plans for Mr. Arar before transporting him to Syria.

"I am able to say categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offense or that his activities constituted a threat to the security of Canada," Justice Dennis R. O?Connor, head of the commission, said at a news conference.

I'm not sure what's more diconceritng, the Canadian government's incompetence or the American government's dishonesty and callous cruelty. I find it interesting that the US will only talk to Damascus when they want someone tortured.

More information about the commission can be found here.

Here is an extract from the report (pdf):

On September 26, 2002, Mr. Arar, who had been in Tunisia with his family, was returning to Canada by plane via Switzerland and the United States. He boarded an American Airlines flight in Zurich and, at about two o?clock in the afternoon, arrived in New York, where he was pulled aside by American customs officials. Two hours later, he was fingerprinted and photographed, and told this was regular procedure. His possessions were searched and his passport photographed.

Mr. Arar was then placed under arrest and strip-searched, an experience he found "humiliating." He was held, first at the John F. Kennedy International Airport and later at the Metropolitan Detention Centre, for 12 days, during which time he was interrogated by American officials. Initially, he was denied access to a lawyer. His request to pray during the interrogation sessions was denied.

On October 8, 2002, Mr. Arar was awakened at three o'clock in the morning and told that he was to be removed to Syria. Mr. Arar told Professor Toope that, at that point, he had begun to cry and say that he would be tortured if sent to Syria. He said he had felt "destroyed."

Mr. Arar was taken to New Jersey, put on a corporate jet, and flown to Amman, Jordan, with brief stops in Washington, D.C., Portland, Maine, and Rome, Italy. Throughout the journey, he was chained and shackled in the back of the plane. The shackles were removed only at the end of the trip, when he was given the opportunity to have a meal with his guards. He could not eat.

It was the middle of the night when he arrived in Amman and was transported to a detention centre. He had not slept since leaving New York. He suffered blows at the hands of his Jordanian guards and was blindfolded. He was then taken into a room, where the blindfold was removed. He was asked routine questions and then blindfolded again before being led to a cell. The next morning, he was told that he was going to Syria. Later that day, he was blindfolded and put into a car or van. By the time he arrived at his destination at around five o?clock in the afternoon, Mr. Arar was exhausted, hungry, and terrified. His blindfold was removed, and he saw portraits of Presidents Assad, father and son. Mr. Arar later learned that he was in Syria, in the Far Falestin detention centre, also called the Palestine Branch, which was run by the Syrian Military Intelligence (SMI).

Later that day, Mr. Arar was interrogated for approximately four hours by a man called "George," subsequently identified as George Salloum, the head interrogator at the Palestine Branch. Two other interrogators were present, taking notes. The questions mostly concerned his family. Mr. Arar told Professor Toope that, at this point, he had decided to "say anything" necessary to avoid torture. Although no physical violence was used during this interrogation session, ominous threats were made. Whenever Mr. Arar was slow to answer, George would threaten to use "the chair," a reference Mr. Arar did not understand.

By the next day, October 9, 2002, Mr. Arar was even more exhausted, as he had not been able to sleep in the cell. He was called up for interrogation. When George arrived, he immediately started hitting Mr. Arar. The chair on which Mr. Arar had been sitting was taken away, so that he was now on the floor.

George brought a black cable, which might have been a shredded electrical cable, about two feet long, into the room with him. Mr. Arar told Professor Toope that, when he had seen the cable, he had started to cry. George told Mr. Arar to open his right hand, then raised the cable high and brought it down hard. Mr. Arar recalled the moment vividly; he told Professor Toope that he had felt like a bad Syrian school boy. He stood up and started jumping, but he was forced back down and the process was repeated with his left hand.

Mr. Arar was then made to stand near the door, and the questions began. The theme throughout was "you are a liar." He was given breaks, during which he was put into a different room, where he could hear other people screaming. Sometimes, he was blindfolded and left to stand in the hallway for an hour or more. The screaming continued. Each time Mr. Arar was brought back into the interrogation room, he was beaten about the upper body and asked more questions.

On the second day in the Palestine Branch, the interrogation lasted approximately 10 hours. Day three, October 11, 2002, was the most "intensive" for Mr. Arar. He was questioned for 16 to 18 hours, and was subjected to great physical and psychological abuse. The questions were in part about Abdullah Almalki. Mr. Arar was beaten with the black cable on numerous occasions throughout the day, and was threatened with electric shock, "the chair" and "the tire." The pattern was three or four lashes with the cable, then questions, followed by more beating. After a while, he became so weak that he was disoriented. He remembers being asked if he had trained in Afghanistan. By this time, he was so afraid and in so much pain that he replied, "If you want me to say so." He was asked which border he had crossed and whether he had seen Mr. Almalki in Afghanistan. Mr. Arar told Professor Toope that he had urinated on himself twice during this questioning, and had had to wear the same clothes for the next two and a half months. He had been "humiliated." Mr. Arar was questioned about his relationships with various people, his family, his bank accounts, and his salary. His interrogators could not understand what he did for a living. They did not believe his description of providing services in the computer sector or the amount he said he was paid in salary, which they thought impossibly high. Mr. Arar was beaten for these "lies."

After the beatings on the third day, the interrogation became less intense physically. There was much less use of the cables, and more punching and hitting. On October 16 or 17, even those beatings diminished. However, the threats intensified, and the psychological pressure remained extreme. For example, Mr. Arar was put in "the tire," though not beaten. Warnings about "the chair" were also used to scare him. At the end of each interrogation session, an interrogator would say "tomorrow will be tough" or "tomorrow will be worse for you." Mr. Arar found it almost impossible to sleep for more than two or three hours a night.

Mr. Arar's conditions of detention were atrocious. He was kept in a basement cell that was seven feet high, six feet long, and three feet wide. The cell contained only two thin blankets, a "humidity isolator," and two bottles -- one for water and one for urine. The only source of light in the cell was a small opening in the middle of the ceiling, measuring roughly one foot by two feet.

According to Mr. Arar, cats would sometimes urinate through the opening. There were also rats in the building; Mr. Arar stuffed shoes under the door to his cell to prevent them from entering. The cell was damp and very cold in the winter and stifling in the summer. Mr. Arar was known to guards only by his cell number: Two.

Over time, as the beatings diminished in intensity, the most disturbing aspect of Mr. Arar's detention came to be the daily horror of living in the tiny, dark and damp cell all alone and with no reading material (except the Koran later on). While at first the cell was a refuge from the infliction of physical pain, later it became a torture in its own right. Mr. Arar described for Professor Toope nights alone in his cell, when he had been unable to sleep on the cold concrete floor and had had to turn over every 15 minutes or so. He had thought of his family constantly, worrying about their finances and safety, and had been "bombarded by memories."

Mr. Arar remained in this cell for 10 months and 10 days, during which he saw almost no sunlight other than when he was transferred for consular visits. His first visit to the courtyard of the prison did not take place until April 2003. Mr. Arar described the cell as "a grave" and a "slow death." By June or July of 2003, he had reached his limit. Although he had tried to keep in shape by doing push-ups and pacing in his cell, he was losing all hope and stopped his modest exercise regime.

In July 2003, one of his interrogators, "Khalid," upon seeing him for the first time in months, told Mr. Arar that his wife would divorce him if she saw him as he was then: thin, listless and crying. The consular visits with Léo Martel, the Canadian consul, provided a little hope and some connection to Mr. Arar's family, but Mr. Arar also found them immensely "frustrating."

On August 20, 2003, Mr. Arar was transferred to Sednaya Prison, where conditions were "like heaven" compared with those in the Palestine Branch. On October 5, 2003, he was released from custody after signing a "confession" given to him in court by a Syrian prosecutor.

Mr. Arar was guilty of being seen with someone who was under surveillance at a café and having this same person listed as an emergency contact on his rental lease. The punishment was being whisked away to Syria where he was tortured and imprisoned for a year.

Is this the war on terror?

The commission report quotes Kofi Annan, who said, "Let us be clear: torture can never be an instrument to fight terror, for torture is an instrument of terror."

Until the US learns this lesson, things are only going to get worse.

I don't really know what to make of this piece in the Post. It's about Bush and his message to the Iranian people. Strangely enough, it seems pretty reasonable and even reasoned:

"I would say to the Iranian people: We respect your history. We respect your culture. We admire the entrepreneurial skills of your people. I would say to the Iranian people that I recognize the importance of your sovereignty -- that you're a proud nation, and you want to have a positive future for your citizens," Bush said, answering quickly and without notes.

"In terms of the nuclear issue," he continued, "I understand that you believe it is in your interest -- your sovereign interest, and your sovereign right -- to have nuclear power.

He even goes on to suggest more cultural and educational exchanges with Iran. There doesn't seem to be any belligerence here, which makes me wonder who has kidnapped Bush and replaced him with an unbelievable simulacrum?

The Progressive has an article strongly against torture in general and the the myth of the ticking bomb scenario in particular.

Here is an interesting extract about the political costs of torture and the slippery slope that the US, as well as other liberal democracies, has slid down before:

The price of torture is unacceptably high because it disgraces and then undermines the country that countenances it. For the French in Algeria, for the Americans in Vietnam, and now for the Americans in Iraq, the costs have been astronomical and have outweighed any gains gathered by torture.

Official sources are nearly unanimous that the yield from the massive Phoenix program, with more than forty prisons across South Vietnam systematically torturing thousands of suspected communists, was surprisingly low. One Pentagon contract study found that, in 1970-71, only 3 percent of the Viet Cong "killed, captured, or rallied were full or probationary Party members above the district level." Not surprisingly, such a brutal pacification effort failed either to crush the Viet Cong or win the support of Vietnamese villagers, contributing to the ultimate U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War.

Similarly, the French army won the Battle of Algiers but soon lost the war for Algeria, in part because their systematic torture delegitimated the larger war effort in the eyes of most Algerians and many French. "You might say that the Battle of Algiers was won through the use of torture," observed British journalist Sir Alistair Horne, "but that the war, the Algerian war, was lost."

Even the comparatively limited torture at Abu Ghraib has done incalculable damage to America's international prestige.

In short, the intelligence gains are soon overwhelmed by political costs as friends and enemies recoil in revulsion at such calculated savagery.

...As we slide down the slippery slope to torture in general, we should also realize that there is a chasm at the bottom called extrajudicial execution. With the agency?s multinational gulag full of dozens, even hundreds, of detainees of dwindling utility, CIA agents, active and retired, have been vocal in their complaints about the costs and inconvenience of limitless, even lifetime, incarceration for these tortured terrorists. The ideal solution to this conundrum from an agency perspective is pump and dump, as in Vietnam?pump the terrorists for information, and then dump the bodies. After all, the systematic French torture of thousands from the Casbah of Algiers in 1957 also entailed more than 3,000 "summary executions" as "an inseparable part" of this campaign, largely, as one French general put it, to ensure that "the machine of justice" not be "clogged with cases." For similar reasons, the CIA's Phoenix program produced, by the agency's own count, over 20,000 extrajudicial killings.

...The use of torture to stop ticking bombs leads ultimately to a cruel choice?either legalize this brutality, à la Dershowitz and Bush, or accept that the logical corollary to state-sanctioned torture is state-sponsored murder, à la Vietnam.

I've thought often about peace deals that include offers of amnesty for war criminals. Should justice be sacrificed for peace? The case of Pinochet comes to mind as one in which a former tyrant was given immunity when he left power (although it was stripped from him nearly 10 years later, first by British and Spanish courts -- the latter with a claim to universal jurisdiction -- and only later by Chile itself).

There has been a recent cease-fire put in place in Northern Uganda, where Joseph Kony (who is wanted by the International Criminal Court) and his Lord's Resistance Army have been using abducted children as soldiers to terrorize the people in Acholiland, killing and torturing thousands in their rebel war against the government in Kampala.

Kony has said that he will end the rebellion if, and only if, he is granted amnesty. This is in line with the traditional Acholi practice of reconciliation called mataput, in which a wrong-doer drinks a bitter root and is forgiven by those he has harmed (in many cases, fellow villagers whose ears, lips or noses have been cut off). There has been talk since 2004 of Uganda retracting its case in the International Criminal Court in return for an end to the conflict through such traditional reconciliation processes, some of which involve stepping on an egg and then being forgiven. And in the past, such practices have had an effect on weakening the cult leader's rebellion:

But it's not just geopolitics that's weakening Kony. It's also a powerful ethic of forgiveness -- one that parallels South Africa's famous reconciliation efforts after apartheid.

In the local Acholi tribe there's a traditional ceremony in which elders place an egg -- the symbol of new life -- on the ground. A repentant wrongdoer then steps on the egg. The act symbolizes the opening of a new life. The person is welcomed back into the village family. This and other ceremonies are being used to reintegrate former LRA soldiers, despite their awful acts. Pressured by local leaders, the government also offers legal amnesty to former fighters.

A major reason for the forgiveness is that so many LRA fighters were abducted as children. They were often forced to kill civilians -- or be killed themselves. "The child was innocent -- taken forcefully and forced to commit the crime," says Sheik Musa Khalil of the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative. "Forgiveness is the only way to solve this conflict."

The attitude has put local leaders at odds with the UN's International Criminal Court, which aims to prosecute Kony and others. But the news of the amnesty being broadcast via radio into the bush has spurred increasing numbers of rebels to desert Kony.

While I can see how the issue of child soldiers, particularly ones who were drugged and abducted, is morally complex and perhaps well-served by such traditional forgiveness practices (providing that there is a disarming and reintigration process included), I have to admit that I feel uneasy about letting people like Joseph Kony off the hook so easily, and groups like Amnesty International agrees.

Is peace in Northern Uganda worth letting Kony live the rest of his life a free man? Probably. Would I feel good about making the call? Definitely not.

The Columbia Journalism Review has an excellent piece by Eric Umansky that takes an in-depth look at the media's torture coverage and Congress's overall lack of interest in examining the issue:

Reporters and news organizations deserve enormous credit for exposing the abuse and torture of detainees during the U.S. war on terror, more than other institutions or individuals. Without [The New York Times'] Carlotta Gall, The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, The Washington Post's Dana Priest, and many other reporters, we might well never have learned of the abuse and torture that have occurred in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere.

But just as sweeping attacks against "the media" are too reductive, so too are plaudits. And when the record on torture coverage is examined in detail, an ambiguous picture emerges: in the post-9/11 days, some reporters offered detailed accusations and reports of abuse and torture, only to be met with skepticism by their own editors. Stories were buried, played down, or ignored -- a reluctance that is much diminished but still bubbles up with regard to the culpability of policymakers.

What is true and what is significant are two different matters. Everybody agrees that journalists are supposed to ascertain the truth. As for deciding what is significant, reporters and editors make that judgment, too, all the time -- what story leads on the front page, or gets played inside, what story gets followed up. And when it comes to very sensitive material, like torture, many journalists would prefer to rely on others to be the first to decide that something is significant. To do otherwise would mean sticking your neck out.

When stories about abuse did finally get attention, what was new was often less the revelations themselves than how they were presented and the prominence they were given. Simply put, a scandal wasn?t a scandal or a scoop a scoop until it was played as one. But after the September 11 attacks, most news organizations were reluctant to go there. "Being fair is one thing; being excessively worried that we might not be portraying the military in a fair light is another," says Roger Cohen [of The New York Times. "For a while there, we lost that balance."

Newsroom ambivalence is not the only impediment to covering this difficult story, of course. For one thing, with the exception of Senator John McCain's 2005 antitorture amendment -- the coverage of which turned out to have been shallow and excessively focused on personalities -- Congress has shown a studied lack of interest in torture. There have been no sustained congressional hearings, and a proposed independent investigation has long been blocked by the congressional leadership.

Complicating matters has been the Bush administration's savvy defense. It has pushed back against calls for an independent, overarching investigation of abuses. Instead, there have been a dizzying number of fractured, limited-authority reports, all of which reporters have diligently sought to cover. But many of the reports are classified and ultimately heavily redacted, and none of them have looked specifically at the connection between policymakers and abuse. Indeed, the stonewalling has been part of a larger, smarter strategy: rather than defending its policies of abuse, the administration has denied the policies exist.

The whole piece is worth a read, and if you're like me, you'll notice that some of the big stories like rendition and CIA black sites were actually broken much earlier than you remember -- sometimes years earlier.

The Post reports that the International Atomic Energy Agency found that parts of the House's report on Iran and its nuclear capabilities were "outrageous and dishonest."

This obviously brings back memories of similar debates between Republicans and IAEA on Iraq's WMD capabilities. It also brings back memories (via A Tiny Revolution) of Iraq coverage in the US prior to the war. The Post covered the House report on the front page, whereas its rebuttal was stuck on page 17. This despite the Post's admission that they dropped the ball when it came to questioning the administration's claims about Iraq:

"The paper was not front-paging stuff," said Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks. "Administration assertions were on the front page. Things that challenged the administration were on A18 on Sunday or A24 on Monday. There was an attitude among editors: Look, we're going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?"

In retrospect, said Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr., "we were so focused on trying to figure out what the administration was doing that we were not giving the same play to people who said it wouldn't be a good idea to go to war and were questioning the administration's rationale. Not enough of those stories were put on the front page. That was a mistake on my part."

Across the country, "the voices raising questions about the war were lonely ones," Downie said. "We didn't pay enough attention to the minority."

These confessions ran in the Post two years ago. It seems that no one has learned any lessons down there...

I woke up Tuesday morning to the news that the US embassy in Damascus had been attacked. It seems that the Syrian forces (and perhaps American marines) killed three of the four attackers and stopped them from exploding another car full of explosives (accounts vary, but it sounds like one car bomb was detonated).

Perhaps I've spent too much time in Lebanon, where the Syrian presence is still felt (if only from the ka'ak sellers on the street who are rumored to be Syrian mukhabarat agents), but I can't help but wondering if Damascus wasn't somehow involved in this attack or at least failed to prevent it. Syria is a police state where the mukhabarat keeps pretty close tabs on everyone, especially Sunni militants, and it seems suprising that something like this could happen without the state's knowledge, particulary as the American embassy is so close to the presidential residence.

Either the intelligence apparatus's grip on things in Damascus is slipping, or the government decided that it might be to its advantage to stop such a plot as it was unfolding instead of before it actually happened. Both hypotheses seem possible to me, and both are disconcerting in very different ways.

In Al Jazeera Magazine (which is out of Dubai and London and has no relation to Al Jazeera the television channel), there is speculation that the attacks were planned either by the US or Syria. While the article focuses on the idea that the US was behind the attack, they do mention another hypothesis from the London daily Al-Quds al-Arabi:

Meanwhile, Syrian opposition figure [Mohammad Marwan Suweidan, a former Syrian Army officer] has called Tuesday['s] attack on the U.S. embassy "a foolish act conducted by a naive regime aimed to mislead the Syrian people and send a warning to the U.S. administration," the London-based Al-Quds al-Arabi reported earlier.

It should be noted that Al Jazeera Magazine (as opposed to Al Jazeera the cable station and website) is relatively unknown to me. I'm not sure how accurate their reporting is, and I haven't been able to find the Al-Quds al-Arabi article to verify that Suweidan really made such an accusation. Furthermore, it should be disclosed that he is part of Rifaat Assad's exiled opposition. Rifaat is Bashar's uncle and was exiled after a failed coup attempt in the 1983. He was also in charge of the massacre at Hama, where he led the "Defence Brigades" in killing 10,000 to 25,000 people.

All this to say that I don't know if Rifaat or his supporters are reliable sources; however, something seems fishy about this attack.

Since I missed my train back to Paris on Tuesday night, I stayed another day in London. The trip was a good one, and in addition to seeing an old friend from Prague, I was able to see some friends who left Beirut this summer like me.

While I was there, I did some book shopping at the London Review Bookshop and at the book market under the Waterloo bridge. I bought Dubravka Ugresic's Thank You for Not Reading: Essays on Literary Trivia, Sven Lindqvist's A History of Bombing, Isaac Deutcher's 3-volume biography of Trotsky and Eliot Weinberger's Muhammad.

I'll be in London for a long weekend and won't be back until Tuesday night. I probably won't be posting while I'm gone...

I will, however, be visiting the London Review's book store.

The BBC sponsored a mock war crimes trial for Israel and Hizbollah. Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch acts as prosecutor and finds that both sides are guilty of crimes of war. His main arguments are that Hizbollah used weapons that are nearly impossible to control with much accuracy, resulting in attacks on Israeli civilians and that Israel assumed that after civilians had been warned of upcoming attacks, anyone who was still in that area was a legitimate target.

The BBC moderated a letter-writing debate in four parts (1, 2, 3, and 4) between a Lebanese man named Saleem in Beirut and an Israeli man named Gordon in a border town called Shlomi.

They both remain civil, and while they disagree on most issues, they both agree that they'd like to live in peace. Here are some extracts.

From Saleem:

Maybe you could send me some oranges from my grandfather's orchards. From the land he had to leave in 1948 - which is exactly where you live. My grandfather used to own acres and acres of land where your settlement now is. It's such a coincidence, of all the Lebanese and all the Israelis to be in a debate...

My mother's village is al-Bassa, now called Bezet. I have a picture of my grandmother on that land in 1946. It's less than 2km from Shlomi where you are. Where was your maternal grandmother in 1946?

Israel must return our land. Then I will be the first person to cross the borders and offer you a case of fresh Lebanese apples.

From Gordon:

Yes, we came through unharmed. We had rockets falling to the left of us, and rockets to the right, and our next-door neighbour was killed. But we made it.

Via the Plank, The Hill reports that Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), the vice chairman of the Armed Services panel and chairman of the Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee, is introducing a bill to cut the civilian leadership (read: Bush and Rumsfeld) out of the loop for deciding when troops should withdraw from Iraq. His resolution would make it the generals' decision, thus making the decision a military one and not a political one, he says.

The resolution would express the sense of the House that military commanders should put in place a system of criteria to assess the capability of Iraqi security forces. Once those criteria are met, the mission in Iraq would be considered complete and the president could begin withdrawing troops.

Weldon is one of the foremost Republican military experts in the House, and he is considered to have a good chance of succeeding Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) as chairman of the Armed Services Committee at the end of 2008 should Republicans keep control of the lower chamber.

This obviously brings up issues of the chain of command, since the military is always answerable to civilian leadership. If there is really this much question as to the president's judgement and that of his cabinet, it seems like the logical thing to do would be to get rid of the president, not set a precedent for changing the basic structure of the chain of command.

Using stumble upon, I came across a timeline of US intervention done by Adbusters, including "coups, humanitarian incursions, covert actions, proxy armies, freedom fighters/terrorists and multilateral offenses."

It starts in 1801 on the Barbary Coast and goes up to 2004 in Haiti, covering Honduras, Guatemala, Libya, Vietnam and Angola along the way.

It's an interesting little presentation, and I'm impressed that stumble upon found it for me.

The Times reports that Israel has decided to end the blockade on Lebanon, which is technically true since Israel did announce the lifting of the blockade. However, what the Times didn't mention is that several airlines had already decided to break the blockade:

In a sign the embargo may be eroding, British Airways/BMED said it was resuming direct flights to Beirut after the British government had given assurances that it would be safe to do so.

Lebanon's Middle East Airlines and Royal Jordanian began flying regularly into the capital last month, but have complied with Israel's insistence that all such flights go via Amman. Qatar Airways resumed direct flights to Beirut on Monday.

In addition to Qatar and British Airways, Gulf Air had also announced that they were resuming flights as of Saturday. It seems that commercial airlines that have flouted the blockade would be newsworthy, but the Times either didn't know about this or didn't think that their readers should.

Of course, the good news is that with the air blockade being lifted, this means that the sea embargo will be lifted as well. I never understood why the Israelis bothered with the air and sea embargos, unless it was just to flex Tel Aviv's muscles and illustrate that Israel can decide who comes and goes. Because the real routes that Israel needs to be worry about as far as arms resupplying goes, are the ground routes. Iranian arms shipments are overland through Syria, and the Lebanese-Syrian border is long, poorly defined and very porous. And this is the one way in and out of the country that they can't really control. Or rather their control is clumsier and involves the bombing of bridges and roads, like the road to Damascus, which was bombed and shut down, forcing people to flee the country by the northern route.

According to The Sunday Times and via Juan Cole, Israel is preparing for war with Syria and Iran. Of course, this plan has backers in the Pentagon, as well as Richard Perle:

While the American State Department favours engaging with President Bashar Assad of Syria in the hope of detaching him from the Iranian alliance, hawks believe Israel missed a golden opportunity to strike at Syria during the Hezbollah conflict.

"If they had acted against Syria during this last kerfuffle, the war might have ended more quickly and better," Perle added. "Syrian military installations are sitting ducks and the Syrian air force could have been destroyed on the ground in a couple of days." Assad set off alarm bells in Israel when he said during the war in Lebanon: "If we do not obtain the occupied Golan Heights by peaceful means, the resistance option is there." ...

Advocates of political engagement believe a war with Syria could unleash Islamic fundamentalist terror in what has hitherto been a stable dictatorship. Some voices in the Pentagon are not impressed by that argument.

"If Syria spirals into chaos, at least they?ll be taking on each other rather than heading for Jerusalem," said one insider.

This is obviously just what we need, another toppled Middle Eastern dictator in a sectarian country with a strong Islamist opposition and no one willing or capable of picking up the pieces.

The New York Review has a good analysis of recent events in the Middle East by Robert Malley, who was Special Assistant to President Clinton for Arab-Israeli Affairs and is currently Middle East and North Africa Program Director at the International Crisis Group:

For Israel, as well as Hamas and Hezbollah, the most costly blow is the one to which they will be seen as having surrendered. The conflict is no longer about achieving a specific objective -- releasing a soldier, say, or capturing defined territory. It is about something more intangible, and so more serious: establishing one's power of deterrence, defining the rules of the game, showing who is boss. Such confrontations may subside, and they may even pause. They will not end.

The whole article is worth reading. Malley has a really good grasp of the overall situation, and he's far from optimistic.

To my mind, until this conflict can be pushed back to the more manageable domain of territorial dispute, things are going to keep getting worse. The first step, as I keep insisting, is land for peace in the Golan Heights and the Shebaa Farms. Syria has precise territorial demands and no religious ideological claims, which makes Iran, and to a lesser extent Hizbollah, a strange bedfellow for the staunchly secular Ba'ath regime. And if Israel could get Syria out of the way by giving up the occupied Golan Heights, then they could break the direct line between Hizbollah and Iran. Furthermore, they could use the occasion to broker a peace with Lebanon by releasing prisoners and giving back the Shebaa farms. (A subsequent water-sharing deal could be attempted for the aquifer-rich area if Israel really thinks it's worth the effort; in any case, Israel seems to be moving more and more toward desalination schemes, so such a water-sharing agreement might not even be necessary.)

And if they were to include Hizbollah in the negotiations process, then they could not only be sure to get the Lebanese government to visa the peace plan, but they would have explicit and public agreement from Hizbollah, which would go a long way toward removing any excuse that the Party of God might have for continuing attacks against Israel.

In Sudan, Khartoum is trying to stop the African Union force currently in Darfur from being folded into a larger UN force with a stronger mandate as called for last week. Khartoum has been massing troops at El Fasher, getting ready to attack the rebels in a move that will likely involve many more dead civilians and the genocide that has become a force of habit in Khartoum's counter-insurgency strategy.

The AU force has always been under-equipped (both in terms of matériel and mandate), but its financial resources and mandate are about to run out at the end of the month. The Sudanese government has given the AU a choice: either continue as is with funding from the Arab League, which unsuprisingly supports Khartoum, or leave:

[T]he commander of the African forces in Darfur, Gen. Collins Ihekire, said in an interview last week that accepting the money would leave the African Union hopelessly compromised.

"It could become a kind of blackmail," General Ihekire said. "The viability of the force would depend on the charity of Sudan and its friends."

This is an obvious attempt to stop the force from being incorporated into a UN force, and Mustafa Osman Ismail, President Bashir, recently said, "Sudan will not accept those troops to be transformed into part of a UN force."

I'm not sure how this can be countered. Perhaps Khartoum is hoping that the EU will give more money to the AU force in order to keep it from Arab League money, thus maintaining the status quo.

In any case, the AU has decided to end its mandate on 30 September. It is unclear though if this is the final word. The AU might be deciding to call Khartoum's bluff, and the fact that the latest cease-fire was brokered and monitored by the AU might raise the issue of the cease-fire disappearing when the AU mandate expires. But then again, this might be just what Khartoum wants.

Martin Peretz at The New Republic writes about his frustration that no one is stopping the genocide in Darfur. I'm glad that he's bringing more attention to this conflict that is too often forgotten in the shuffle, but there are some ridiculous points in his little piece:

One might think that Afro-American organizations in the States and African-American politicians might raise their voices against this infamy. But no. You see, George Bush has actually done this. And he certainly can't be in the right. I wish he would go further and, as our editorial in this week's TNR hard copy edition urges, with the U.K., Canada, France, Germany, Australia and, yes, Israel, deploy the troops necessary to save the lives of those whose lives have not yet been taken or simply destroyed.

First of all, Obama Barack and other black lawmakers have been bringing attention to the issue, and seven members of the Congressional Black Caucus were arrested while protesting in front of the Sudanese embassy. So while I agree that the world as a whole has not been giving this issue the attention it deserves, Peretz's dig at black groups is unfair.

This also made me think of a recent review in The Nation about the understandable ambivalence that many black Americans have felt about Africa. So while I think we all have a moral responsibility to Darfur as humans, I'm not sure that black people have should be held any more responsible than the rest of the world just because they're black.

Second, Israeli troops? Is he crazy? The Sudanese government has already stated that any foreign troops will be seen as invaders and fought by Khartoum's forces, so it seems obvious that the more African and Arabic any intervention would be, the better chance it would have of success. American troops (and maybe even British ones) would already be a bad idea, but sending Israelis would guarantee the already likely scenario that such a conflict would be spinned as a religious war against foreign infidel usupers. Peretz should know better than to even suggest such an obviously wrongheaded idea.

My father and I are fighting again. He lives in Alabama, and I live in Paris, and this summer, in Beirut. Consequently, our fighting is done by e-mail and long-distance telephone calls. The first call in our latest fight came when I was in Beirut as the war was starting. I couldn't sleep, because even in my apartment in Hamra, the Sunni neighborhood by the American University of Beirut, the Israeli bombs, missiles and shells were shaking me awake every night. Understandably, he was worried about me, and I could tell that the fact that he could do nothing to get me out of Lebanon was getting to him.

At the end of the call, he gave me some fatherly advice: "Watch yourself, and be careful of Hezbollah." I told him that if I had anything to worry about, it was getting hit by an Israeli bomb. This introduced the conversation that both of us had been trying to avoid since the war began. He told me that Israel was just defending itself from terrorists, and I quipped that I didn't think there were too many terrorists hiding inside the milk factory that had just been bombed. In the end, and to my father's credit, he said that the question was academic in any case. But being my father's son, I couldn't leave it at that: "No, Dad, it's a very concrete question, because if I die here, chances are that it will be the Israelis that kill me."

Normally, my father and I let these disagreements get out of control. Usually, I'll respond to what I see as his uninformed and simplistic ideas, often condescendingly, and then he'll get really angry and the name-calling will commence. I think both of us would sum up the other's position in a single sentence: "his mind's made up; don't confuse him with the facts." I'm ashamed to admit that during the Christmas holidays before the war started in Iraq, our disagreement about the sagacity and rationale of the impending invasion nearly escalated into a fistfight. This is not an exaggeration. Each of us stood, angry and with heaving chest pointed outward, in the living room between the gun cabinet and the fireplace decorated with stockings and holly, waiting for the other to have the bad sense to throw the first punch.

I'm back in Paris now, and since I returned, I've received several e-mails from my father on the Middle East, all of them forwarded from elsewhere. In one, a Middle East specialist (comedian Dennis Miller) explains to us that there is no such thing as Palestinians and that we should call these people "Arabs who can't accomplish anything in life and would rather wrap themselves in the seductive melodrama of eternal struggle and death." In another message, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert tells us that he refuses to apologize about the civilian deaths in Lebanon and that if we continue to withhold our support from his noble fight, when the final solution comes, we of the "the free and enlightened world, will go down" along with the Israelis.

The worst message of the bunch, which I received from two different family members, asks whether or not one can be a good Muslim and a Good American. Of course, the answer is no, for several reasons, among which we find the following:

Theologically - no. Because his allegiance is to Allah, the moon God of Arabia.

Domestically - no. Because he is instructed to marry four women and beat and scourge his wife when she disobeys him.

Intellectually - no. Because he cannot accept the American Constitution since it is based on Biblical principles and he believes the Bible to be corrupt.

As coincidence would have it, I received this e-mail from my father a week before seeing a Gallup poll on American prejudice toward Muslims. The numbers in this poll are shocking on several accounts: 22 percent of Americans say they would not like to have a Muslim as a neighbor; 51 percent believe US Muslims are not loyal to the United States; and 34 percent think Muslims in the US are sympathetic to al-Qaeda. But what shocked me the most was that 39 percent advocate requiring American Muslims to carry special identification.

One of my weaknesses is that I cannot sit by and listen to someone say something altogether stupid without opening my mouth to rebut the most asinine of the person's remarks. This is especially true for me in e-mail exchanges. I feel compelled to respond to my father's messages citing accounts from the press and, in the case of Israel and Lebanon, a report from Human Rights Watch that squarely accuses Israel of war crimes. I'm not really sure what I hope to gain from this obvious waste of time, since my father would never admit to being wrong.

His rebuttals are almost always the same: your sources are Jew-hating liars. "Human Rights Watch are some of the biggest liars around." "Quoting organizations that hate the Jews, just like the UN ... is dishonest." Everyone has an agenda, especially The New York Times, the United Nations, Human Rights Watch and, it seems, myself as well, although to be completely honest, I can't figure out what my agenda might be.

During the war while I was in Beirut, I wrote a letter to the editor that was published in The New York Times. A friend of mine in Paris forwarded the letter to my father by e-mail, and he responded saying that he couldn't trust the Gray Lady anymore. (He can, of course, trust Fox News to call it like it is.) I'm not really sure when he ever trusted the Times, but that's not the point. The point is that one would think that he would trust me, his son.

During the war, I was in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the occupied territories and Israel. One would think that he would trust, or at least listen to, what I have to say about the affair. But he doesn't: "you can B.S. yourself if you want to, but your desire for your agenda clouds your logic."

My father and I represent two distinct parts of our not-so-united states of America. We're both from Alabama, and we can both be stubborn asses, but that's about where the similarities end -- or at least that's where I'd like to think they end. I'm not really sure what has created the gap between my father and me when it comes to politics. My first reflex is to assume that it has a lot to do with travel and education, but I know that's not true, since there are many Americans who agree with my father, many of whom are erudite and well-traveled, although they argue with perhaps a little more nuance and a little less name-calling. And if anyone has the strength of numbers on his side in America, it's my father, not me.

But finally, this consensus is what worries me the most. My father's solution to the Middle East is to "bomb the Arabs back into the stone age." And really, he's not very far from Israeli General Dan Halutz's comment that Israel would "turn back the clock in Lebanon by twenty years," which is what the IDF did. My father supports that, and he's against the "European mindset," insofar as Israel is concerned, because he thinks that given the chance, the world"s Muslims would destroy world Jewry once and for all and that the Europeans would do their best to help them on their way. Ironically enough, he's very likely part of the 39 percent of Americans who think Muslims in the US should have to carry special identification. I would ask him myself what he thinks, but we're not talking right now.

In today's Los Angeles Times, Rosa Brooks makes the obvious point that in the US, anyone who criticizes Israeli actions is pilloried as an anti-semite. The latest case being Ken Roth (whose father fled Nazi Germany), the executive director of Human Rights Watch:

But what's most troubling about the vitriol directed at Roth and his organization isn't that it's savage, unfounded and fantastical. What's most troubling is that it's typical. Typical, that is, of what anyone rash enough to criticize Israel can expect to encounter. In the United States today, it just isn't possible to have a civil debate about Israel, because any serious criticism of its policies is instantly countered with charges of anti-Semitism. Think Israel's tactics against Hezbollah were too heavy-handed, or that Israel hasn't always been wholly fair to the Palestinians, or that the United States should reconsider its unquestioning financial and military support for Israel? Shhh: Don't voice those sentiments unless you want to be called an anti-Semite -- and probably a terrorist sympathizer to boot.

How did adopting a reflexively pro-Israel stance come to be a mandatory aspect of American Jewish identity? Skepticism -- a willingness to ask tough questions, a refusal to embrace dogma -- has always been central to the Jewish intellectual tradition. Ironically, this tradition remains alive in Israel, where respected public figures routinely criticize the government in far harsher terms than those used by Human Rights Watch.

In a climate in which good-faith criticism of Israel is automatically denounced as anti-Semitic, everyone loses. Israeli policies are a major source of discord in the Islamic world, and anger at Israel usually spills over into anger at the U.S., Israel's biggest backer.

It's really a shame that this even needs to be brought up, but people in the US seem incapable of making the distinction between being Jewish and being Israeli. For some strange reason, this relationship seems to only exist for Israel. No one accuses anyone of being anti-islamic when Iran or Saudi Arabia is the object of criticism, so why should it be different for Israel?

The UN voted to send troops to Sudan, with China, Russia and Qatar abstaining. Sudan has objected, of course, (offering to send its own troops to quell the fighting in Sudan) but the State Department has been quick to point out that this force would be acting under Chapter VII of the UN Charter and doesn't require Sudan's consent.

I can imagine that no European or North American powers (with the exception of Canada, maybe) will be scrambling to take on such a mission. There is a pressing need to deploy this force (that is supposed to be 17,300-strong, including the 7,000 African Union forces already in Darfur), since the African Union forces' mandate is set to expire on 30 September.

I hope that I'm wrong and that the world will surprise me, but I imagine something along the lines of the bickering that led to no one being sent to Rwanda during the genocide in 1994. I forsee lots of offers coming from poor countries without the training or capacity to run such a mission and a deadening silence from the big military powers.

The American Prospect has an interesting article by Spencer Ackerman from The New Republic on using the promotion of human rights instead of democracy promotion as a guiding principle for American foreign policy.

What liberal democracy-promoters want to see in foreign closed societies is more precisely located in the advance of human rights: the protection of basic human dignity, freedom, and justice. Indeed, liberal democracy-promoters frequently criticize their neoconservative cousins for their lack of concern with the social protections of civil and legal rights. But it's time to uncouple human rights from democracy, and recognize that democracy has value only to the degree to which it safeguards human rights -- which is to say the degree to which democracy is liberal. Democracy in that respect is a fine and worthy thing, but the emphasis for the United States and for liberalism should be on the end, not the means.

While I'm not convinced that democracy and human rights can be totally seperated, the latter does seem to be a more attainable, and perhaps immediately, more urgent matter. But what really bothers me is how this affects pursuing American interests. He goes on later to talk (but only very briefly) about times when American interests and human rights are not compatible:

The test for America abroad should be: to what degree do American policies advance or diminish these human rights? And, in the unfortunate but inevitable cases of conflict between human rights and American interests, to what degree does subordinating either result in the best balance of each? Answering these two questions provides the best chance of keeping both America and liberalism from sliding into Manicheanism, messianism, naivete, or amorality.

This seems a little too vague for my taste. What should the US do in places like Kazhakstan, where American interests point to supporting the murderous dictator Nazarbayev, because sits atop he largest crude oil reserves in the Caspian Sea region? Other examples include the relationship that the US maintains with other dictators with easy access to cheap energy.

This is a difficult question that no one really seems to want to answer. Of course energy is a valid and necessary part of policy, but where should the US draw the line between securing oil supplies and promoting human rights? It should seem obvious that in most parts of the world, promoting human rights is going to be counterprductive to acquiring cheap energy. So then, should human rights only be limited to nations that don't have any strategic worth to the US?

I don't really know the answer to that answer, but as a humanitarian, I feel that the US is strong enough and rich enough to "take one for the team," promoting human rights even when it contradicts American interests. But maybe that's just youthful naïveté.

I arrived last night in Beirut, which was a good feeling after being away for so long and considering the circumstances under which I had to leave. Things seem to have picked up here, but the streets still seem much calmer than before the war. Then again, it's hard to say how much of that is due to the war and how much of that is due to the fact that it's the first Friday of Ramadan.

When I was in Cyprus, waiting for my connecting flight to Beirut, I talked with a couple from Beirut about the situation in Lebanon and Sudan. I told him how frustrated it makes me that there are no Muslims out marching agains the murder of Muslims in Darfur or the opression of Sahwari people by the Moroccan government. But cartoons in a right wing Danish newspaper set off riots and protests all over the Muslim world.

Normally, Thomas Friedman's articles annoy me, but I can't help but agree with him about the state of hypocrisy in Islam today:

This year on the first day of Ramadan, a Sunni suicide bomber in Baghdad killed 35 people who were lining up in a Shiite neighborhood to buy fuel. The same day, the severed heads of nine murdered Iraqi police officers and soldiers were found north of Baghdad.

I don?t get it. How can Muslims blow up other Muslims on their most holy day of the year -- in mosques! -- and there is barely a peep of protest in the Muslim world, let alone a million Muslim march? Yet Danish cartoons or a papal speech lead to violent protests. If Muslims butchering Muslims -- in Sudan, Iraq, Egypt, Pakistan and Jordan -- produces little communal reaction, while cartoons and papal remarks produce mass protests, what does Islam stand for today? It is not an insult to ask that question.

Muslims might say: "Well, what about Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo or Palestine? Let?s talk about all your violent behavior." To which I would say: "Let's talk about it! But you'll have to get in line behind us, because we're constantly talking about where we?ve gone wrong." We can?t have a meaningful dialogue if we, too, are not self-critical, but neither can Muslims.

I don't agree with his conclusion that the Pope shouldn't apologize -- I think he should -- but I do agree with him that there is a definite double standard for slights against Muslims. When the West hurts Muslims, the Muslim world comes together to condemn the attack, but when Muslims hurt Muslims, like in Darfur, Iraq and the Western Sahara, the silence is deafening.

Hassan Nasrallah held a public rally on 22 September, his first public appearance since the war. Hundreds of thousands of people showed up, and it was a surprise that Nasrallah was able to show up, since Israel has threatened to assasinate him. Nasrallah's speech talked about many things, including a national unity government, the welcoming of UNIFIL forces (provided that they don't spy on Hizbollah) and claims that the latest war was done at Iran and Syria's behest. He also addressed the idea of disarming Hizbollah, which he mentioned that no army, as Israelis had just learned, could disarm them by force:

The resistance is the result of several causes -- the occupation, the arrest of prisoners, the plunder of waters, the threat to Lebanon, and the attack on Lebanese sovereignty. These are the causes. Tackle the causes and the results will be tackled easily.

When we build a strong, capable, and just state that protects Lebanon and the Lebanese, it will be easy to find an honourable solution to the question of the resistance and its weapons. I would like the Lebanese to hear clearly. I and my brothers get excited sometimes and say all kinds of things. Let us speak with some responsibility. We do not say that these weapons will remain forever. And, it is not logical for these weapons to remain forever. There is bound to be an end to them. The natural key is to tackle the causes and the results will disappear.

Come and build a strong and just state, protecting the country and the citizens and their livelihoods, waters, and dignity, and you will find that the resolution of the resistance issue will not need even a negotiation table. It is a great deal easier than that.

Roger Cohen -- responding to the outrage that came with the decision by Richard Haas, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, to invite Ahmadinejad to speak -- argues, as I have for a while, that it is time to talk to Iran.

At some point these past few years, diplomacy went out of fashion. I'm not sure precisely when, but all the signs are that it's time for a rethink. The world needs a bout of bridge-building.

...Haass, the president of the council, is unrepentant. "I don't see diplomacy or talking as a favor or an endorsement or a gift," he said. "To me, it's a tool, and I'm confident that if used right, it can advance our interests."

He continued: "The United States gets itself in trouble when it limits its options and approaches diplomacy as a value judgment. It's not obvious to me, looking at the last 50 or 60 years, that we paid a price for talking to the Soviets. At the end of all the talking, we won the Cold War."

This is in strong contrast to the Israeli government's reaction, summed up in this little pearl found in Israeli ambassador to the US Daniel Ayalon's to Haass letter denouncing the event:

Some of those upset with the council's decision have compared it to hypothetically inviting Hitler to a meeting in the 1930's. In fact, meeting with Ahmadinejad is worse: Hitler did not openly call for genocide in the 1930's, and today we have the lessons of the 1930's to guide us. Foremost among those lessons is that appeasing fanatics like Hitler and granting them legitimacy leads to genocide and war.

I've said it before, but actual diplomacy and negotiation means talking to people you don't like. Only talking to those who agree with you and labelling others as evil, which is what the US does in the Middle East, is the opposite of diplomacy.

When Bush sets up a dichotomy of good and evil, or with us or against us, he's offering Ahmedinejad and Chavez a sympathetic audience on a silver platter.

This first article from the Boston Globe looks at the lessons of Suez and how the US might learn from its former stance in Egypt against Britian, France and Israel in 1956:

[British Prime Minister] Eden was reminded in friendly but forceful terms of the sheer unwisdom of "the use of force" against an Arab country-which would, "it seems to me, vastly increase the area of jeopardy." The "appeaser" in this case was General Dwight David Eisenhower, the 34th president of the United States, in the day when things were different in the White House and the Republican Party. If Eden persevered in his folly, Ike wrote to the prime minister on Sept. 3, 1956, in words just as chilling today, not only the peoples of the Middle East but "all of Asia and Africa, would be consolidated against the West to a degree which, I fear, could not be overcome in a generation."

The next is an interview in Harper's with Dr. Emile A. Nakhleh, who served in the CIA for 15 years and retired this summer as the Director of the Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program. When asked what the US should do in Iraq, he had this to say:

I have come to believe that our presence is part of the problem and that we should begin to seriously devise an exit strategy. There's a civil war in Iraq and our presence is contributing to the violence. We've become a lightning rod?we're not restricting the violence, we're contributing to it. Iraq has galvanized jihadists; our presence is what is attracting them. We need to get out of there. The idea of Iraq being a model for the region has also been tossed out the window. Now the only question is whether Iraq will become a haven for sectarianism, or follow either the Iranian model or the standard Arab authoritarian model. It's only three years old, but the once-touted model of a secular, democratic Iraq is all but forgotten. This casts a dark shadow on American efforts to spread democracy in the region.

He also has some interesting things to say about Guantanamo Bay and American's Iranian policy.

While thinking about Iran and the bomb, I've often wondered if Israel would rather be a nuclear power among others in the region or to be a non-nuclear power in a nuclear-free Middle East. Because it seems that with nuclear weapons in Iran and Israel (not to mention India and Pakistan), it would only be a matter of time until Egypt and Saudi Arabia started looking into nuclear weapons.

It turns out that I was right, or at least might be, since Gamal Mubarak, the Egyptian President's son and probably heir, has announced Egypt's interest in developing nuclear power.

"The whole world -- I don't want to say all, but many developing countries ? have proposed and started to execute the issue of alternative energy," [Gamal Mubarak] said. "It is time for Egypt to put forth, and the party will put forth, this proposal for discussion about its future energy policies, the issue of alternative energy, including nuclear energy, as one of the alternatives."

He also said in a clear reference to the White House: "We do not accept visions from abroad that try to dissolve the Arab identity and the joint Arab efforts within the framework of the so-called Greater Middle East Initiative."

..."Egypt, and especially the N.D.P., is a strategic ally of the U.S.," said Hassan Abou Taleb, an analyst with the government-financed Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. "It does not seek confrontation with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Instead, it seeks cooperation. Why should the U.S. assist India in its nuclear program and not Egypt?"

Of course, no one is talking about nuclear weapons in Egypt, just nuclear power. But then again, that's the official line in Iran as well. It seems obvious to me that Indian, Pakistani, and especially Israeli, nuclear weapons programs are only going to drive other countries like Egypt, and I predict that Saudi Arabia will follow suit, to try their hand at entering the nuclear club.

To my mind, the Middle East should be a nuke-free zone, and allowing Israel to have nuclear weapons and the Bush administration's talk of "useable nuclear weapons" that could be used against non-nuclear countries, have only ensured that more and more countries will seek nuclear arms.

According to Musharraf, in order to get Pakistan's help in the "war on terror" after September 11, 2001, Richard Armitage's argument was more Corleone-ish than Clintonian, all stick and no carrot.

In an interview to be aired on CBS television this weekend Pakistan's president, General Pervez Musharraf, said the threat was delivered by the assistant secretary of state, Richard Armitage, in conversations with Pakistan's intelligence director.

"The intelligence director told me that (Mr Armitage) said, 'Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the stone age'," Gen Musharraf was quoted as saying. The revelation that the US used extreme pressure to secure Pakistan's cooperation in the war on terror arrived at a time of renewed unease in the US about its frontline ally.

Gen Musharraf told CBS he was stunned at the bluntness of the US approach in the aftermath of the attacks. "I think it was a very rude remark," he said. But he yielded to the request.

I've wondered about the sweaty fist of American diplomacy -- which I often sum up as "do something about it, bitch!" -- and whether or not the actual language is euphemistic or whether diplomats sometimes, as my father would say, call a "spade" a "fucking shovel."

This sort of language doesn't surprise me from this administration, but I'd be curious to know if this is a change in behavior or if behind the scenes this is normal behavior for the powerful "negotiators."

The LA Times gives an Iraqi's account of what life has become in Baghdad. The piece is unsigned, because he's afraid that he'd be killed if his name were to appear:

On a recent Sunday, I was buying groceries in my beloved Amariya neighborhood in western Baghdad when I heard the sound of an AK-47 for about three seconds. It was close but not very close, so I continued shopping.

As I took a right turn on Munadhama Street, I saw a man lying on the ground in a small pool of blood. He wasn't dead.

The idea of stopping to help or to take him to a hospital crossed my mind, but I didn't dare. Cars passed without stopping. Pedestrians and shop owners kept doing what they were doing, pretending nothing had happened.

I was still looking at the wounded man and blaming myself for not stopping to help. Other shoppers peered at him from a distance, sorrowful and compassionate, but did nothing.

I went on to another grocery store, staying for about five minutes while shopping for tomatoes, onions and other vegetables. During that time, the man managed to sit up and wave to passing cars. No one stopped. Then, a white Volkswagen pulled up. A passenger stepped out with a gun, walked steadily to the wounded man and shot him three times. The car took off down a side road and vanished.

No one did anything. No one lifted a finger. The only reaction came from a woman in the grocery store. In a low voice, she said, "My God, bless his soul."

I went home and didn't dare tell my wife. I did not want to frighten her.

Via verbal privilege, the Post gives us a sad account of Mutanabi Street, where Baghdadis used to go to buy books and discuss ideas.

Under former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, Mutanabi Street was the nexus for resistance and freewheeling debates, where underground writers published illegal books that denounced Hussein.

"I wish you could see how it used to be on Fridays," Shatri spoke before he broke down in tears. "You could not even walk. The whole street was filled with books and people. Mutanabi Street is a part of how great Baghdad is."

Then, in a reverent tone, he uttered a proverb known across the Arab world: "Cairo writes. Beirut publishes. And Baghdad reads."

Since 1963, Shatri has peddled books on Mutanabi Street, like a faithful friend, through military rule and political oppression, wars and embargo. Of all the eras he has watched ebb and flow, it is today's Iraq, with its violent nature, that most mocks the proud legacy of Mutanabi Street, he said.

"It means the death of education, the death of the history of the street, the death of the culture of Baghdad," Shatri said.

Two Fridays ago, Shatri took action. He and other members of his writers union gathered in front of his shop. They sipped breakfast tea. Then, at around 9:30 a.m., they poured kerosene over a pile of books and set them aflame.

"I cried when I was burning the books," Shatri said.

"It's a message to the government," said Nakshabandi, who also took part. "It's an S.O.S. Help us. An important part of Baghdad is dying. And it is on its last breath."

"But no one got the message. There was no action."

National Public Radio's Fresh Air has a show on Christian Zionism. Terry Gross interviews Pastor John Hagee, the leader of Christians United for Israel, as well as Israeli journalist, Gershom Gorenberg and American journalist, Max Blumenthal. The interview with Hagee is particularly interesting and disturbing, but it's a shame that Gross lets him off the hook so easily. She lets statements like Muslims "have a mandate to kill all Jews and Christians" go without being challenged. Here are some verses that go directly contrary to this commonly misheld belief:

Sura 5:69 - Surely they that believe, and those of Jewry, and the Christians, and those Sabeaans, whoso believes in God and the Last Day, and works righteousness--their wage waits them with their Lord, and no fear shall be on them, neither shall they sorrow.

Sura 5:82 - ...and you will find the nearest in love to the believers (Muslims) those who say: "We are Christians." That is because amongst them are priests and monks, and they are not proud.

Sura 25:63 - The worshippers of the All-Merciful are they who tread gently upon the earth, and when the ignorant address them, they reply, "Peace!"

Sura 28:55 - And when they hear vain talk, they turn away from it and say: "To us our deeds, and to you yours; peace be to you: we do not seek out the ignorant."

My guess is that it's because she doesn't know enough about Islam to know that that his statements are demonstrably false. But there's not really much excuse for her timidity in questioning the idea that Hurricane Katrina was a punishment from God because New Orleans had too many homosexuals.

A friend sent me a link to George Packer's article in The New Yorker on Bush's recent speech on torture techniques and the Army's response:

Last week, in the guise of calling for fair trials, the President demanded that Congress give him the power to go on torturing detainees in secret prisons and use the evidence obtained against them. And last week the Army honorably closed the holes in moral conduct that the President, his counsel, the Vice-President, the Justice Department, and the Secretary of Defense pried open shortly after September 11th. It did so not only to remove the stain on its reputation and to protect its soldiers but because it cares more about the war than about the next election.

The Canadian government has released a report about the American rendition of Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured for a year until the Syrians realized that he was innocent and then let him go:

A government commission on Monday exonerated a Canadian computer engineer of any ties to terrorism and issued a scathing report that faulted Canada and the United States for his deportation four years ago to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured.

The report on the engineer, Maher Arar, said American officials had apparently acted on inaccurate information from Canadian investigators and then misled Canadian authorities about their plans for Mr. Arar before transporting him to Syria.

"I am able to say categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offense or that his activities constituted a threat to the security of Canada," Justice Dennis R. O?Connor, head of the commission, said at a news conference.

I'm not sure what's more diconceritng, the Canadian government's incompetence or the American government's dishonesty and callous cruelty. I find it interesting that the US will only talk to Damascus when they want someone tortured.

More information about the commission can be found here.

Here is an extract from the report (pdf):

On September 26, 2002, Mr. Arar, who had been in Tunisia with his family, was returning to Canada by plane via Switzerland and the United States. He boarded an American Airlines flight in Zurich and, at about two o?clock in the afternoon, arrived in New York, where he was pulled aside by American customs officials. Two hours later, he was fingerprinted and photographed, and told this was regular procedure. His possessions were searched and his passport photographed.

Mr. Arar was then placed under arrest and strip-searched, an experience he found "humiliating." He was held, first at the John F. Kennedy International Airport and later at the Metropolitan Detention Centre, for 12 days, during which time he was interrogated by American officials. Initially, he was denied access to a lawyer. His request to pray during the interrogation sessions was denied.

On October 8, 2002, Mr. Arar was awakened at three o'clock in the morning and told that he was to be removed to Syria. Mr. Arar told Professor Toope that, at that point, he had begun to cry and say that he would be tortured if sent to Syria. He said he had felt "destroyed."

Mr. Arar was taken to New Jersey, put on a corporate jet, and flown to Amman, Jordan, with brief stops in Washington, D.C., Portland, Maine, and Rome, Italy. Throughout the journey, he was chained and shackled in the back of the plane. The shackles were removed only at the end of the trip, when he was given the opportunity to have a meal with his guards. He could not eat.

It was the middle of the night when he arrived in Amman and was transported to a detention centre. He had not slept since leaving New York. He suffered blows at the hands of his Jordanian guards and was blindfolded. He was then taken into a room, where the blindfold was removed. He was asked routine questions and then blindfolded again before being led to a cell. The next morning, he was told that he was going to Syria. Later that day, he was blindfolded and put into a car or van. By the time he arrived at his destination at around five o?clock in the afternoon, Mr. Arar was exhausted, hungry, and terrified. His blindfold was removed, and he saw portraits of Presidents Assad, father and son. Mr. Arar later learned that he was in Syria, in the Far Falestin detention centre, also called the Palestine Branch, which was run by the Syrian Military Intelligence (SMI).

Later that day, Mr. Arar was interrogated for approximately four hours by a man called "George," subsequently identified as George Salloum, the head interrogator at the Palestine Branch. Two other interrogators were present, taking notes. The questions mostly concerned his family. Mr. Arar told Professor Toope that, at this point, he had decided to "say anything" necessary to avoid torture. Although no physical violence was used during this interrogation session, ominous threats were made. Whenever Mr. Arar was slow to answer, George would threaten to use "the chair," a reference Mr. Arar did not understand.

By the next day, October 9, 2002, Mr. Arar was even more exhausted, as he had not been able to sleep in the cell. He was called up for interrogation. When George arrived, he immediately started hitting Mr. Arar. The chair on which Mr. Arar had been sitting was taken away, so that he was now on the floor.

George brought a black cable, which might have been a shredded electrical cable, about two feet long, into the room with him. Mr. Arar told Professor Toope that, when he had seen the cable, he had started to cry. George told Mr. Arar to open his right hand, then raised the cable high and brought it down hard. Mr. Arar recalled the moment vividly; he told Professor Toope that he had felt like a bad Syrian school boy. He stood up and started jumping, but he was forced back down and the process was repeated with his left hand.

Mr. Arar was then made to stand near the door, and the questions began. The theme throughout was "you are a liar." He was given breaks, during which he was put into a different room, where he could hear other people screaming. Sometimes, he was blindfolded and left to stand in the hallway for an hour or more. The screaming continued. Each time Mr. Arar was brought back into the interrogation room, he was beaten about the upper body and asked more questions.

On the second day in the Palestine Branch, the interrogation lasted approximately 10 hours. Day three, October 11, 2002, was the most "intensive" for Mr. Arar. He was questioned for 16 to 18 hours, and was subjected to great physical and psychological abuse. The questions were in part about Abdullah Almalki. Mr. Arar was beaten with the black cable on numerous occasions throughout the day, and was threatened with electric shock, "the chair" and "the tire." The pattern was three or four lashes with the cable, then questions, followed by more beating. After a while, he became so weak that he was disoriented. He remembers being asked if he had trained in Afghanistan. By this time, he was so afraid and in so much pain that he replied, "If you want me to say so." He was asked which border he had crossed and whether he had seen Mr. Almalki in Afghanistan. Mr. Arar told Professor Toope that he had urinated on himself twice during this questioning, and had had to wear the same clothes for the next two and a half months. He had been "humiliated." Mr. Arar was questioned about his relationships with various people, his family, his bank accounts, and his salary. His interrogators could not understand what he did for a living. They did not believe his description of providing services in the computer sector or the amount he said he was paid in salary, which they thought impossibly high. Mr. Arar was beaten for these "lies."

After the beatings on the third day, the interrogation became less intense physically. There was much less use of the cables, and more punching and hitting. On October 16 or 17, even those beatings diminished. However, the threats intensified, and the psychological pressure remained extreme. For example, Mr. Arar was put in "the tire," though not beaten. Warnings about "the chair" were also used to scare him. At the end of each interrogation session, an interrogator would say "tomorrow will be tough" or "tomorrow will be worse for you." Mr. Arar found it almost impossible to sleep for more than two or three hours a night.

Mr. Arar's conditions of detention were atrocious. He was kept in a basement cell that was seven feet high, six feet long, and three feet wide. The cell contained only two thin blankets, a "humidity isolator," and two bottles -- one for water and one for urine. The only source of light in the cell was a small opening in the middle of the ceiling, measuring roughly one foot by two feet.

According to Mr. Arar, cats would sometimes urinate through the opening. There were also rats in the building; Mr. Arar stuffed shoes under the door to his cell to prevent them from entering. The cell was damp and very cold in the winter and stifling in the summer. Mr. Arar was known to guards only by his cell number: Two.

Over time, as the beatings diminished in intensity, the most disturbing aspect of Mr. Arar's detention came to be the daily horror of living in the tiny, dark and damp cell all alone and with no reading material (except the Koran later on). While at first the cell was a refuge from the infliction of physical pain, later it became a torture in its own right. Mr. Arar described for Professor Toope nights alone in his cell, when he had been unable to sleep on the cold concrete floor and had had to turn over every 15 minutes or so. He had thought of his family constantly, worrying about their finances and safety, and had been "bombarded by memories."

Mr. Arar remained in this cell for 10 months and 10 days, during which he saw almost no sunlight other than when he was transferred for consular visits. His first visit to the courtyard of the prison did not take place until April 2003. Mr. Arar described the cell as "a grave" and a "slow death." By June or July of 2003, he had reached his limit. Although he had tried to keep in shape by doing push-ups and pacing in his cell, he was losing all hope and stopped his modest exercise regime.

In July 2003, one of his interrogators, "Khalid," upon seeing him for the first time in months, told Mr. Arar that his wife would divorce him if she saw him as he was then: thin, listless and crying. The consular visits with Léo Martel, the Canadian consul, provided a little hope and some connection to Mr. Arar's family, but Mr. Arar also found them immensely "frustrating."

On August 20, 2003, Mr. Arar was transferred to Sednaya Prison, where conditions were "like heaven" compared with those in the Palestine Branch. On October 5, 2003, he was released from custody after signing a "confession" given to him in court by a Syrian prosecutor.

Mr. Arar was guilty of being seen with someone who was under surveillance at a café and having this same person listed as an emergency contact on his rental lease. The punishment was being whisked away to Syria where he was tortured and imprisoned for a year.

Is this the war on terror?

The commission report quotes Kofi Annan, who said, "Let us be clear: torture can never be an instrument to fight terror, for torture is an instrument of terror."

Until the US learns this lesson, things are only going to get worse.

I don't really know what to make of this piece in the Post. It's about Bush and his message to the Iranian people. Strangely enough, it seems pretty reasonable and even reasoned:

"I would say to the Iranian people: We respect your history. We respect your culture. We admire the entrepreneurial skills of your people. I would say to the Iranian people that I recognize the importance of your sovereignty -- that you're a proud nation, and you want to have a positive future for your citizens," Bush said, answering quickly and without notes.

"In terms of the nuclear issue," he continued, "I understand that you believe it is in your interest -- your sovereign interest, and your sovereign right -- to have nuclear power.

He even goes on to suggest more cultural and educational exchanges with Iran. There doesn't seem to be any belligerence here, which makes me wonder who has kidnapped Bush and replaced him with an unbelievable simulacrum?

The Progressive has an article strongly against torture in general and the the myth of the ticking bomb scenario in particular.

Here is an interesting extract about the political costs of torture and the slippery slope that the US, as well as other liberal democracies, has slid down before:

The price of torture is unacceptably high because it disgraces and then undermines the country that countenances it. For the French in Algeria, for the Americans in Vietnam, and now for the Americans in Iraq, the costs have been astronomical and have outweighed any gains gathered by torture.

Official sources are nearly unanimous that the yield from the massive Phoenix program, with more than forty prisons across South Vietnam systematically torturing thousands of suspected communists, was surprisingly low. One Pentagon contract study found that, in 1970-71, only 3 percent of the Viet Cong "killed, captured, or rallied were full or probationary Party members above the district level." Not surprisingly, such a brutal pacification effort failed either to crush the Viet Cong or win the support of Vietnamese villagers, contributing to the ultimate U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War.

Similarly, the French army won the Battle of Algiers but soon lost the war for Algeria, in part because their systematic torture delegitimated the larger war effort in the eyes of most Algerians and many French. "You might say that the Battle of Algiers was won through the use of torture," observed British journalist Sir Alistair Horne, "but that the war, the Algerian war, was lost."

Even the comparatively limited torture at Abu Ghraib has done incalculable damage to America's international prestige.

In short, the intelligence gains are soon overwhelmed by political costs as friends and enemies recoil in revulsion at such calculated savagery.

...As we slide down the slippery slope to torture in general, we should also realize that there is a chasm at the bottom called extrajudicial execution. With the agency?s multinational gulag full of dozens, even hundreds, of detainees of dwindling utility, CIA agents, active and retired, have been vocal in their complaints about the costs and inconvenience of limitless, even lifetime, incarceration for these tortured terrorists. The ideal solution to this conundrum from an agency perspective is pump and dump, as in Vietnam?pump the terrorists for information, and then dump the bodies. After all, the systematic French torture of thousands from the Casbah of Algiers in 1957 also entailed more than 3,000 "summary executions" as "an inseparable part" of this campaign, largely, as one French general put it, to ensure that "the machine of justice" not be "clogged with cases." For similar reasons, the CIA's Phoenix program produced, by the agency's own count, over 20,000 extrajudicial killings.

...The use of torture to stop ticking bombs leads ultimately to a cruel choice?either legalize this brutality, à la Dershowitz and Bush, or accept that the logical corollary to state-sanctioned torture is state-sponsored murder, à la Vietnam.

I've thought often about peace deals that include offers of amnesty for war criminals. Should justice be sacrificed for peace? The case of Pinochet comes to mind as one in which a former tyrant was given immunity when he left power (although it was stripped from him nearly 10 years later, first by British and Spanish courts -- the latter with a claim to universal jurisdiction -- and only later by Chile itself).

There has been a recent cease-fire put in place in Northern Uganda, where Joseph Kony (who is wanted by the International Criminal Court) and his Lord's Resistance Army have been using abducted children as soldiers to terrorize the people in Acholiland, killing and torturing thousands in their rebel war against the government in Kampala.

Kony has said that he will end the rebellion if, and only if, he is granted amnesty. This is in line with the traditional Acholi practice of reconciliation called mataput, in which a wrong-doer drinks a bitter root and is forgiven by those he has harmed (in many cases, fellow villagers whose ears, lips or noses have been cut off). There has been talk since 2004 of Uganda retracting its case in the International Criminal Court in return for an end to the conflict through such traditional reconciliation processes, some of which involve stepping on an egg and then being forgiven. And in the past, such practices have had an effect on weakening the cult leader's rebellion:

But it's not just geopolitics that's weakening Kony. It's also a powerful ethic of forgiveness -- one that parallels South Africa's famous reconciliation efforts after apartheid.

In the local Acholi tribe there's a traditional ceremony in which elders place an egg -- the symbol of new life -- on the ground. A repentant wrongdoer then steps on the egg. The act symbolizes the opening of a new life. The person is welcomed back into the village family. This and other ceremonies are being used to reintegrate former LRA soldiers, despite their awful acts. Pressured by local leaders, the government also offers legal amnesty to former fighters.

A major reason for the forgiveness is that so many LRA fighters were abducted as children. They were often forced to kill civilians -- or be killed themselves. "The child was innocent -- taken forcefully and forced to commit the crime," says Sheik Musa Khalil of the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative. "Forgiveness is the only way to solve this conflict."

The attitude has put local leaders at odds with the UN's International Criminal Court, which aims to prosecute Kony and others. But the news of the amnesty being broadcast via radio into the bush has spurred increasing numbers of rebels to desert Kony.

While I can see how the issue of child soldiers, particularly ones who were drugged and abducted, is morally complex and perhaps well-served by such traditional forgiveness practices (providing that there is a disarming and reintigration process included), I have to admit that I feel uneasy about letting people like Joseph Kony off the hook so easily, and groups like Amnesty International agrees.

Is peace in Northern Uganda worth letting Kony live the rest of his life a free man? Probably. Would I feel good about making the call? Definitely not.

The Columbia Journalism Review has an excellent piece by Eric Umansky that takes an in-depth look at the media's torture coverage and Congress's overall lack of interest in examining the issue:

Reporters and news organizations deserve enormous credit for exposing the abuse and torture of detainees during the U.S. war on terror, more than other institutions or individuals. Without [The New York Times'] Carlotta Gall, The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, The Washington Post's Dana Priest, and many other reporters, we might well never have learned of the abuse and torture that have occurred in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere.

But just as sweeping attacks against "the media" are too reductive, so too are plaudits. And when the record on torture coverage is examined in detail, an ambiguous picture emerges: in the post-9/11 days, some reporters offered detailed accusations and reports of abuse and torture, only to be met with skepticism by their own editors. Stories were buried, played down, or ignored -- a reluctance that is much diminished but still bubbles up with regard to the culpability of policymakers.

What is true and what is significant are two different matters. Everybody agrees that journalists are supposed to ascertain the truth. As for deciding what is significant, reporters and editors make that judgment, too, all the time -- what story leads on the front page, or gets played inside, what story gets followed up. And when it comes to very sensitive material, like torture, many journalists would prefer to rely on others to be the first to decide that something is significant. To do otherwise would mean sticking your neck out.

When stories about abuse did finally get attention, what was new was often less the revelations themselves than how they were presented and the prominence they were given. Simply put, a scandal wasn?t a scandal or a scoop a scoop until it was played as one. But after the September 11 attacks, most news organizations were reluctant to go there. "Being fair is one thing; being excessively worried that we might not be portraying the military in a fair light is another," says Roger Cohen [of The New York Times. "For a while there, we lost that balance."

Newsroom ambivalence is not the only impediment to covering this difficult story, of course. For one thing, with the exception of Senator John McCain's 2005 antitorture amendment -- the coverage of which turned out to have been shallow and excessively focused on personalities -- Congress has shown a studied lack of interest in torture. There have been no sustained congressional hearings, and a proposed independent investigation has long been blocked by the congressional leadership.

Complicating matters has been the Bush administration's savvy defense. It has pushed back against calls for an independent, overarching investigation of abuses. Instead, there have been a dizzying number of fractured, limited-authority reports, all of which reporters have diligently sought to cover. But many of the reports are classified and ultimately heavily redacted, and none of them have looked specifically at the connection between policymakers and abuse. Indeed, the stonewalling has been part of a larger, smarter strategy: rather than defending its policies of abuse, the administration has denied the policies exist.

The whole piece is worth a read, and if you're like me, you'll notice that some of the big stories like rendition and CIA black sites were actually broken much earlier than you remember -- sometimes years earlier.

The Post reports that the International Atomic Energy Agency found that parts of the House's report on Iran and its nuclear capabilities were "outrageous and dishonest."

This obviously brings back memories of similar debates between Republicans and IAEA on Iraq's WMD capabilities. It also brings back memories (via A Tiny Revolution) of Iraq coverage in the US prior to the war. The Post covered the House report on the front page, whereas its rebuttal was stuck on page 17. This despite the Post's admission that they dropped the ball when it came to questioning the administration's claims about Iraq:

"The paper was not front-paging stuff," said Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks. "Administration assertions were on the front page. Things that challenged the administration were on A18 on Sunday or A24 on Monday. There was an attitude among editors: Look, we're going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?"

In retrospect, said Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr., "we were so focused on trying to figure out what the administration was doing that we were not giving the same play to people who said it wouldn't be a good idea to go to war and were questioning the administration's rationale. Not enough of those stories were put on the front page. That was a mistake on my part."

Across the country, "the voices raising questions about the war were lonely ones," Downie said. "We didn't pay enough attention to the minority."

These confessions ran in the Post two years ago. It seems that no one has learned any lessons down there...

I woke up Tuesday morning to the news that the US embassy in Damascus had been attacked. It seems that the Syrian forces (and perhaps American marines) killed three of the four attackers and stopped them from exploding another car full of explosives (accounts vary, but it sounds like one car bomb was detonated).

Perhaps I've spent too much time in Lebanon, where the Syrian presence is still felt (if only from the ka'ak sellers on the street who are rumored to be Syrian mukhabarat agents), but I can't help but wondering if Damascus wasn't somehow involved in this attack or at least failed to prevent it. Syria is a police state where the mukhabarat keeps pretty close tabs on everyone, especially Sunni militants, and it seems suprising that something like this could happen without the state's knowledge, particulary as the American embassy is so close to the presidential residence.

Either the intelligence apparatus's grip on things in Damascus is slipping, or the government decided that it might be to its advantage to stop such a plot as it was unfolding instead of before it actually happened. Both hypotheses seem possible to me, and both are disconcerting in very different ways.

In Al Jazeera Magazine (which is out of Dubai and London and has no relation to Al Jazeera the television channel), there is speculation that the attacks were planned either by the US or Syria. While the article focuses on the idea that the US was behind the attack, they do mention another hypothesis from the London daily Al-Quds al-Arabi:

Meanwhile, Syrian opposition figure [Mohammad Marwan Suweidan, a former Syrian Army officer] has called Tuesday['s] attack on the U.S. embassy "a foolish act conducted by a naive regime aimed to mislead the Syrian people and send a warning to the U.S. administration," the London-based Al-Quds al-Arabi reported earlier.

It should be noted that Al Jazeera Magazine (as opposed to Al Jazeera the cable station and website) is relatively unknown to me. I'm not sure how accurate their reporting is, and I haven't been able to find the Al-Quds al-Arabi article to verify that Suweidan really made such an accusation. Furthermore, it should be disclosed that he is part of Rifaat Assad's exiled opposition. Rifaat is Bashar's uncle and was exiled after a failed coup attempt in the 1983. He was also in charge of the massacre at Hama, where he led the "Defence Brigades" in killing 10,000 to 25,000 people.

All this to say that I don't know if Rifaat or his supporters are reliable sources; however, something seems fishy about this attack.

Since I missed my train back to Paris on Tuesday night, I stayed another day in London. The trip was a good one, and in addition to seeing an old friend from Prague, I was able to see some friends who left Beirut this summer like me.

While I was there, I did some book shopping at the London Review Bookshop and at the book market under the Waterloo bridge. I bought Dubravka Ugresic's Thank You for Not Reading: Essays on Literary Trivia, Sven Lindqvist's A History of Bombing, Isaac Deutcher's 3-volume biography of Trotsky and Eliot Weinberger's Muhammad.

I'll be in London for a long weekend and won't be back until Tuesday night. I probably won't be posting while I'm gone...

I will, however, be visiting the London Review's book store.

The BBC sponsored a mock war crimes trial for Israel and Hizbollah. Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch acts as prosecutor and finds that both sides are guilty of crimes of war. His main arguments are that Hizbollah used weapons that are nearly impossible to control with much accuracy, resulting in attacks on Israeli civilians and that Israel assumed that after civilians had been warned of upcoming attacks, anyone who was still in that area was a legitimate target.

The BBC moderated a letter-writing debate in four parts (1, 2, 3, and 4) between a Lebanese man named Saleem in Beirut and an Israeli man named Gordon in a border town called Shlomi.

They both remain civil, and while they disagree on most issues, they both agree that they'd like to live in peace. Here are some extracts.

From Saleem:

Maybe you could send me some oranges from my grandfather's orchards. From the land he had to leave in 1948 - which is exactly where you live. My grandfather used to own acres and acres of land where your settlement now is. It's such a coincidence, of all the Lebanese and all the Israelis to be in a debate...

My mother's village is al-Bassa, now called Bezet. I have a picture of my grandmother on that land in 1946. It's less than 2km from Shlomi where you are. Where was your maternal grandmother in 1946?

Israel must return our land. Then I will be the first person to cross the borders and offer you a case of fresh Lebanese apples.

From Gordon:

Yes, we came through unharmed. We had rockets falling to the left of us, and rockets to the right, and our next-door neighbour was killed. But we made it.

Via the Plank, The Hill reports that Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), the vice chairman of the Armed Services panel and chairman of the Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee, is introducing a bill to cut the civilian leadership (read: Bush and Rumsfeld) out of the loop for deciding when troops should withdraw from Iraq. His resolution would make it the generals' decision, thus making the decision a military one and not a political one, he says.

The resolution would express the sense of the House that military commanders should put in place a system of criteria to assess the capability of Iraqi security forces. Once those criteria are met, the mission in Iraq would be considered complete and the president could begin withdrawing troops.

Weldon is one of the foremost Republican military experts in the House, and he is considered to have a good chance of succeeding Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) as chairman of the Armed Services Committee at the end of 2008 should Republicans keep control of the lower chamber.

This obviously brings up issues of the chain of command, since the military is always answerable to civilian leadership. If there is really this much question as to the president's judgement and that of his cabinet, it seems like the logical thing to do would be to get rid of the president, not set a precedent for changing the basic structure of the chain of command.

Using stumble upon, I came across a timeline of US intervention done by Adbusters, including "coups, humanitarian incursions, covert actions, proxy armies, freedom fighters/terrorists and multilateral offenses."

It starts in 1801 on the Barbary Coast and goes up to 2004 in Haiti, covering Honduras, Guatemala, Libya, Vietnam and Angola along the way.

It's an interesting little presentation, and I'm impressed that stumble upon found it for me.

The Times reports that Israel has decided to end the blockade on Lebanon, which is technically true since Israel did announce the lifting of the blockade. However, what the Times didn't mention is that several airlines had already decided to break the blockade:

In a sign the embargo may be eroding, British Airways/BMED said it was resuming direct flights to Beirut after the British government had given assurances that it would be safe to do so.

Lebanon's Middle East Airlines and Royal Jordanian began flying regularly into the capital last month, but have complied with Israel's insistence that all such flights go via Amman. Qatar Airways resumed direct flights to Beirut on Monday.

In addition to Qatar and British Airways, Gulf Air had also announced that they were resuming flights as of Saturday. It seems that commercial airlines that have flouted the blockade would be newsworthy, but the Times either didn't know about this or didn't think that their readers should.

Of course, the good news is that with the air blockade being lifted, this means that the sea embargo will be lifted as well. I never understood why the Israelis bothered with the air and sea embargos, unless it was just to flex Tel Aviv's muscles and illustrate that Israel can decide who comes and goes. Because the real routes that Israel needs to be worry about as far as arms resupplying goes, are the ground routes. Iranian arms shipments are overland through Syria, and the Lebanese-Syrian border is long, poorly defined and very porous. And this is the one way in and out of the country that they can't really control. Or rather their control is clumsier and involves the bombing of bridges and roads, like the road to Damascus, which was bombed and shut down, forcing people to flee the country by the northern route.

According to The Sunday Times and via Juan Cole, Israel is preparing for war with Syria and Iran. Of course, this plan has backers in the Pentagon, as well as Richard Perle:

While the American State Department favours engaging with President Bashar Assad of Syria in the hope of detaching him from the Iranian alliance, hawks believe Israel missed a golden opportunity to strike at Syria during the Hezbollah conflict.

"If they had acted against Syria during this last kerfuffle, the war might have ended more quickly and better," Perle added. "Syrian military installations are sitting ducks and the Syrian air force could have been destroyed on the ground in a couple of days." Assad set off alarm bells in Israel when he said during the war in Lebanon: "If we do not obtain the occupied Golan Heights by peaceful means, the resistance option is there." ...

Advocates of political engagement believe a war with Syria could unleash Islamic fundamentalist terror in what has hitherto been a stable dictatorship. Some voices in the Pentagon are not impressed by that argument.

"If Syria spirals into chaos, at least they?ll be taking on each other rather than heading for Jerusalem," said one insider.

This is obviously just what we need, another toppled Middle Eastern dictator in a sectarian country with a strong Islamist opposition and no one willing or capable of picking up the pieces.

The New York Review has a good analysis of recent events in the Middle East by Robert Malley, who was Special Assistant to President Clinton for Arab-Israeli Affairs and is currently Middle East and North Africa Program Director at the International Crisis Group:

For Israel, as well as Hamas and Hezbollah, the most costly blow is the one to which they will be seen as having surrendered. The conflict is no longer about achieving a specific objective -- releasing a soldier, say, or capturing defined territory. It is about something more intangible, and so more serious: establishing one's power of deterrence, defining the rules of the game, showing who is boss. Such confrontations may subside, and they may even pause. They will not end.

The whole article is worth reading. Malley has a really good grasp of the overall situation, and he's far from optimistic.

To my mind, until this conflict can be pushed back to the more manageable domain of territorial dispute, things are going to keep getting worse. The first step, as I keep insisting, is land for peace in the Golan Heights and the Shebaa Farms. Syria has precise territorial demands and no religious ideological claims, which makes Iran, and to a lesser extent Hizbollah, a strange bedfellow for the staunchly secular Ba'ath regime. And if Israel could get Syria out of the way by giving up the occupied Golan Heights, then they could break the direct line between Hizbollah and Iran. Furthermore, they could use the occasion to broker a peace with Lebanon by releasing prisoners and giving back the Shebaa farms. (A subsequent water-sharing deal could be attempted for the aquifer-rich area if Israel really thinks it's worth the effort; in any case, Israel seems to be moving more and more toward desalination schemes, so such a water-sharing agreement might not even be necessary.)

And if they were to include Hizbollah in the negotiations process, then they could not only be sure to get the Lebanese government to visa the peace plan, but they would have explicit and public agreement from Hizbollah, which would go a long way toward removing any excuse that the Party of God might have for continuing attacks against Israel.

In Sudan, Khartoum is trying to stop the African Union force currently in Darfur from being folded into a larger UN force with a stronger mandate as called for last week. Khartoum has been massing troops at El Fasher, getting ready to attack the rebels in a move that will likely involve many more dead civilians and the genocide that has become a force of habit in Khartoum's counter-insurgency strategy.

The AU force has always been under-equipped (both in terms of matériel and mandate), but its financial resources and mandate are about to run out at the end of the month. The Sudanese government has given the AU a choice: either continue as is with funding from the Arab League, which unsuprisingly supports Khartoum, or leave:

[T]he commander of the African forces in Darfur, Gen. Collins Ihekire, said in an interview last week that accepting the money would leave the African Union hopelessly compromised.

"It could become a kind of blackmail," General Ihekire said. "The viability of the force would depend on the charity of Sudan and its friends."

This is an obvious attempt to stop the force from being incorporated into a UN force, and Mustafa Osman Ismail, President Bashir, recently said, "Sudan will not accept those troops to be transformed into part of a UN force."

I'm not sure how this can be countered. Perhaps Khartoum is hoping that the EU will give more money to the AU force in order to keep it from Arab League money, thus maintaining the status quo.

In any case, the AU has decided to end its mandate on 30 September. It is unclear though if this is the final word. The AU might be deciding to call Khartoum's bluff, and the fact that the latest cease-fire was brokered and monitored by the AU might raise the issue of the cease-fire disappearing when the AU mandate expires. But then again, this might be just what Khartoum wants.

Martin Peretz at The New Republic writes about his frustration that no one is stopping the genocide in Darfur. I'm glad that he's bringing more attention to this conflict that is too often forgotten in the shuffle, but there are some ridiculous points in his little piece:

One might think that Afro-American organizations in the States and African-American politicians might raise their voices against this infamy. But no. You see, George Bush has actually done this. And he certainly can't be in the right. I wish he would go further and, as our editorial in this week's TNR hard copy edition urges, with the U.K., Canada, France, Germany, Australia and, yes, Israel, deploy the troops necessary to save the lives of those whose lives have not yet been taken or simply destroyed.

First of all, Obama Barack and other black lawmakers have been bringing attention to the issue, and seven members of the Congressional Black Caucus were arrested while protesting in front of the Sudanese embassy. So while I agree that the world as a whole has not been giving this issue the attention it deserves, Peretz's dig at black groups is unfair.

This also made me think of a recent review in The Nation about the understandable ambivalence that many black Americans have felt about Africa. So while I think we all have a moral responsibility to Darfur as humans, I'm not sure that black people have should be held any more responsible than the rest of the world just because they're black.

Second, Israeli troops? Is he crazy? The Sudanese government has already stated that any foreign troops will be seen as invaders and fought by Khartoum's forces, so it seems obvious that the more African and Arabic any intervention would be, the better chance it would have of success. American troops (and maybe even British ones) would already be a bad idea, but sending Israelis would guarantee the already likely scenario that such a conflict would be spinned as a religious war against foreign infidel usupers. Peretz should know better than to even suggest such an obviously wrongheaded idea.

My father and I are fighting again. He lives in Alabama, and I live in Paris, and this summer, in Beirut. Consequently, our fighting is done by e-mail and long-distance telephone calls. The first call in our latest fight came when I was in Beirut as the war was starting. I couldn't sleep, because even in my apartment in Hamra, the Sunni neighborhood by the American University of Beirut, the Israeli bombs, missiles and shells were shaking me awake every night. Understandably, he was worried about me, and I could tell that the fact that he could do nothing to get me out of Lebanon was getting to him.

At the end of the call, he gave me some fatherly advice: "Watch yourself, and be careful of Hezbollah." I told him that if I had anything to worry about, it was getting hit by an Israeli bomb. This introduced the conversation that both of us had been trying to avoid since the war began. He told me that Israel was just defending itself from terrorists, and I quipped that I didn't think there were too many terrorists hiding inside the milk factory that had just been bombed. In the end, and to my father's credit, he said that the question was academic in any case. But being my father's son, I couldn't leave it at that: "No, Dad, it's a very concrete question, because if I die here, chances are that it will be the Israelis that kill me."

Normally, my father and I let these disagreements get out of control. Usually, I'll respond to what I see as his uninformed and simplistic ideas, often condescendingly, and then he'll get really angry and the name-calling will commence. I think both of us would sum up the other's position in a single sentence: "his mind's made up; don't confuse him with the facts." I'm ashamed to admit that during the Christmas holidays before the war started in Iraq, our disagreement about the sagacity and rationale of the impending invasion nearly escalated into a fistfight. This is not an exaggeration. Each of us stood, angry and with heaving chest pointed outward, in the living room between the gun cabinet and the fireplace decorated with stockings and holly, waiting for the other to have the bad sense to throw the first punch.

I'm back in Paris now, and since I returned, I've received several e-mails from my father on the Middle East, all of them forwarded from elsewhere. In one, a Middle East specialist (comedian Dennis Miller) explains to us that there is no such thing as Palestinians and that we should call these people "Arabs who can't accomplish anything in life and would rather wrap themselves in the seductive melodrama of eternal struggle and death." In another message, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert tells us that he refuses to apologize about the civilian deaths in Lebanon and that if we continue to withhold our support from his noble fight, when the final solution comes, we of the "the free and enlightened world, will go down" along with the Israelis.

The worst message of the bunch, which I received from two different family members, asks whether or not one can be a good Muslim and a Good American. Of course, the answer is no, for several reasons, among which we find the following:

Theologically - no. Because his allegiance is to Allah, the moon God of Arabia.

Domestically - no. Because he is instructed to marry four women and beat and scourge his wife when she disobeys him.

Intellectually - no. Because he cannot accept the American Constitution since it is based on Biblical principles and he believes the Bible to be corrupt.

As coincidence would have it, I received this e-mail from my father a week before seeing a Gallup poll on American prejudice toward Muslims. The numbers in this poll are shocking on several accounts: 22 percent of Americans say they would not like to have a Muslim as a neighbor; 51 percent believe US Muslims are not loyal to the United States; and 34 percent think Muslims in the US are sympathetic to al-Qaeda. But what shocked me the most was that 39 percent advocate requiring American Muslims to carry special identification.

One of my weaknesses is that I cannot sit by and listen to someone say something altogether stupid without opening my mouth to rebut the most asinine of the person's remarks. This is especially true for me in e-mail exchanges. I feel compelled to respond to my father's messages citing accounts from the press and, in the case of Israel and Lebanon, a report from Human Rights Watch that squarely accuses Israel of war crimes. I'm not really sure what I hope to gain from this obvious waste of time, since my father would never admit to being wrong.

His rebuttals are almost always the same: your sources are Jew-hating liars. "Human Rights Watch are some of the biggest liars around." "Quoting organizations that hate the Jews, just like the UN ... is dishonest." Everyone has an agenda, especially The New York Times, the United Nations, Human Rights Watch and, it seems, myself as well, although to be completely honest, I can't figure out what my agenda might be.

During the war while I was in Beirut, I wrote a letter to the editor that was published in The New York Times. A friend of mine in Paris forwarded the letter to my father by e-mail, and he responded saying that he couldn't trust the Gray Lady anymore. (He can, of course, trust Fox News to call it like it is.) I'm not really sure when he ever trusted the Times, but that's not the point. The point is that one would think that he would trust me, his son.

During the war, I was in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the occupied territories and Israel. One would think that he would trust, or at least listen to, what I have to say about the affair. But he doesn't: "you can B.S. yourself if you want to, but your desire for your agenda clouds your logic."

My father and I represent two distinct parts of our not-so-united states of America. We're both from Alabama, and we can both be stubborn asses, but that's about where the similarities end -- or at least that's where I'd like to think they end. I'm not really sure what has created the gap between my father and me when it comes to politics. My first reflex is to assume that it has a lot to do with travel and education, but I know that's not true, since there are many Americans who agree with my father, many of whom are erudite and well-traveled, although they argue with perhaps a little more nuance and a little less name-calling. And if anyone has the strength of numbers on his side in America, it's my father, not me.

But finally, this consensus is what worries me the most. My father's solution to the Middle East is to "bomb the Arabs back into the stone age." And really, he's not very far from Israeli General Dan Halutz's comment that Israel would "turn back the clock in Lebanon by twenty years," which is what the IDF did. My father supports that, and he's against the "European mindset," insofar as Israel is concerned, because he thinks that given the chance, the world"s Muslims would destroy world Jewry once and for all and that the Europeans would do their best to help them on their way. Ironically enough, he's very likely part of the 39 percent of Americans who think Muslims in the US should have to carry special identification. I would ask him myself what he thinks, but we're not talking right now.

In today's Los Angeles Times, Rosa Brooks makes the obvious point that in the US, anyone who criticizes Israeli actions is pilloried as an anti-semite. The latest case being Ken Roth (whose father fled Nazi Germany), the executive director of Human Rights Watch:

But what's most troubling about the vitriol directed at Roth and his organization isn't that it's savage, unfounded and fantastical. What's most troubling is that it's typical. Typical, that is, of what anyone rash enough to criticize Israel can expect to encounter. In the United States today, it just isn't possible to have a civil debate about Israel, because any serious criticism of its policies is instantly countered with charges of anti-Semitism. Think Israel's tactics against Hezbollah were too heavy-handed, or that Israel hasn't always been wholly fair to the Palestinians, or that the United States should reconsider its unquestioning financial and military support for Israel? Shhh: Don't voice those sentiments unless you want to be called an anti-Semite -- and probably a terrorist sympathizer to boot.

How did adopting a reflexively pro-Israel stance come to be a mandatory aspect of American Jewish identity? Skepticism -- a willingness to ask tough questions, a refusal to embrace dogma -- has always been central to the Jewish intellectual tradition. Ironically, this tradition remains alive in Israel, where respected public figures routinely criticize the government in far harsher terms than those used by Human Rights Watch.

In a climate in which good-faith criticism of Israel is automatically denounced as anti-Semitic, everyone loses. Israeli policies are a major source of discord in the Islamic world, and anger at Israel usually spills over into anger at the U.S., Israel's biggest backer.

It's really a shame that this even needs to be brought up, but people in the US seem incapable of making the distinction between being Jewish and being Israeli. For some strange reason, this relationship seems to only exist for Israel. No one accuses anyone of being anti-islamic when Iran or Saudi Arabia is the object of criticism, so why should it be different for Israel?

The UN voted to send troops to Sudan, with China, Russia and Qatar abstaining. Sudan has objected, of course, (offering to send its own troops to quell the fighting in Sudan) but the State Department has been quick to point out that this force would be acting under Chapter VII of the UN Charter and doesn't require Sudan's consent.

I can imagine that no European or North American powers (with the exception of Canada, maybe) will be scrambling to take on such a mission. There is a pressing need to deploy this force (that is supposed to be 17,300-strong, including the 7,000 African Union forces already in Darfur), since the African Union forces' mandate is set to expire on 30 September.

I hope that I'm wrong and that the world will surprise me, but I imagine something along the lines of the bickering that led to no one being sent to Rwanda during the genocide in 1994. I forsee lots of offers coming from poor countries without the training or capacity to run such a mission and a deadening silence from the big military powers.

The American Prospect has an interesting article by Spencer Ackerman from The New Republic on using the promotion of human rights instead of democracy promotion as a guiding principle for American foreign policy.

What liberal democracy-promoters want to see in foreign closed societies is more precisely located in the advance of human rights: the protection of basic human dignity, freedom, and justice. Indeed, liberal democracy-promoters frequently criticize their neoconservative cousins for their lack of concern with the social protections of civil and legal rights. But it's time to uncouple human rights from democracy, and recognize that democracy has value only to the degree to which it safeguards human rights -- which is to say the degree to which democracy is liberal. Democracy in that respect is a fine and worthy thing, but the emphasis for the United States and for liberalism should be on the end, not the means.

While I'm not convinced that democracy and human rights can be totally seperated, the latter does seem to be a more attainable, and perhaps immediately, more urgent matter. But what really bothers me is how this affects pursuing American interests. He goes on later to talk (but only very briefly) about times when American interests and human rights are not compatible:

The test for America abroad should be: to what degree do American policies advance or diminish these human rights? And, in the unfortunate but inevitable cases of conflict between human rights and American interests, to what degree does subordinating either result in the best balance of each? Answering these two questions provides the best chance of keeping both America and liberalism from sliding into Manicheanism, messianism, naivete, or amorality.

This seems a little too vague for my taste. What should the US do in places like Kazhakstan, where American interests point to supporting the murderous dictator Nazarbayev, because sits atop he largest crude oil reserves in the Caspian Sea region? Other examples include the relationship that the US maintains with other dictators with easy access to cheap energy.

This is a difficult question that no one really seems to want to answer. Of course energy is a valid and necessary part of policy, but where should the US draw the line between securing oil supplies and promoting human rights? It should seem obvious that in most parts of the world, promoting human rights is going to be counterprductive to acquiring cheap energy. So then, should human rights only be limited to nations that don't have any strategic worth to the US?

I don't really know the answer to that answer, but as a humanitarian, I feel that the US is strong enough and rich enough to "take one for the team," promoting human rights even when it contradicts American interests. But maybe that's just youthful naïveté.

I arrived last night in Beirut, which was a good feeling after being away for so long and considering the circumstances under which I had to leave. Things seem to have picked up here, but the streets still seem much calmer than before the war. Then again, it's hard to say how much of that is due to the war and how much of that is due to the fact that it's the first Friday of Ramadan.

When I was in Cyprus, waiting for my connecting flight to Beirut, I talked with a couple from Beirut about the situation in Lebanon and Sudan. I told him how frustrated it makes me that there are no Muslims out marching agains the murder of Muslims in Darfur or the opression of Sahwari people by the Moroccan government. But cartoons in a right wing Danish newspaper set off riots and protests all over the Muslim world.

Normally, Thomas Friedman's articles annoy me, but I can't help but agree with him about the state of hypocrisy in Islam today:

This year on the first day of Ramadan, a Sunni suicide bomber in Baghdad killed 35 people who were lining up in a Shiite neighborhood to buy fuel. The same day, the severed heads of nine murdered Iraqi police officers and soldiers were found north of Baghdad.

I don?t get it. How can Muslims blow up other Muslims on their most holy day of the year -- in mosques! -- and there is barely a peep of protest in the Muslim world, let alone a million Muslim march? Yet Danish cartoons or a papal speech lead to violent protests. If Muslims butchering Muslims -- in Sudan, Iraq, Egypt, Pakistan and Jordan -- produces little communal reaction, while cartoons and papal remarks produce mass protests, what does Islam stand for today? It is not an insult to ask that question.

Muslims might say: "Well, what about Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo or Palestine? Let?s talk about all your violent behavior." To which I would say: "Let's talk about it! But you'll have to get in line behind us, because we're constantly talking about where we?ve gone wrong." We can?t have a meaningful dialogue if we, too, are not self-critical, but neither can Muslims.

I don't agree with his conclusion that the Pope shouldn't apologize -- I think he should -- but I do agree with him that there is a definite double standard for slights against Muslims. When the West hurts Muslims, the Muslim world comes together to condemn the attack, but when Muslims hurt Muslims, like in Darfur, Iraq and the Western Sahara, the silence is deafening.

Hassan Nasrallah held a public rally on 22 September, his first public appearance since the war. Hundreds of thousands of people showed up, and it was a surprise that Nasrallah was able to show up, since Israel has threatened to assasinate him. Nasrallah's speech talked about many things, including a national unity government, the welcoming of UNIFIL forces (provided that they don't spy on Hizbollah) and claims that the latest war was done at Iran and Syria's behest. He also addressed the idea of disarming Hizbollah, which he mentioned that no army, as Israelis had just learned, could disarm them by force:

The resistance is the result of several causes -- the occupation, the arrest of prisoners, the plunder of waters, the threat to Lebanon, and the attack on Lebanese sovereignty. These are the causes. Tackle the causes and the results will be tackled easily.

When we build a strong, capable, and just state that protects Lebanon and the Lebanese, it will be easy to find an honourable solution to the question of the resistance and its weapons. I would like the Lebanese to hear clearly. I and my brothers get excited sometimes and say all kinds of things. Let us speak with some responsibility. We do not say that these weapons will remain forever. And, it is not logical for these weapons to remain forever. There is bound to be an end to them. The natural key is to tackle the causes and the results will disappear.

Come and build a strong and just state, protecting the country and the citizens and their livelihoods, waters, and dignity, and you will find that the resolution of the resistance issue will not need even a negotiation table. It is a great deal easier than that.

Roger Cohen -- responding to the outrage that came with the decision by Richard Haas, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, to invite Ahmadinejad to speak -- argues, as I have for a while, that it is time to talk to Iran.

At some point these past few years, diplomacy went out of fashion. I'm not sure precisely when, but all the signs are that it's time for a rethink. The world needs a bout of bridge-building.

...Haass, the president of the council, is unrepentant. "I don't see diplomacy or talking as a favor or an endorsement or a gift," he said. "To me, it's a tool, and I'm confident that if used right, it can advance our interests."

He continued: "The United States gets itself in trouble when it limits its options and approaches diplomacy as a value judgment. It's not obvious to me, looking at the last 50 or 60 years, that we paid a price for talking to the Soviets. At the end of all the talking, we won the Cold War."

This is in strong contrast to the Israeli government's reaction, summed up in this little pearl found in Israeli ambassador to the US Daniel Ayalon's to Haass letter denouncing the event:

Some of those upset with the council's decision have compared it to hypothetically inviting Hitler to a meeting in the 1930's. In fact, meeting with Ahmadinejad is worse: Hitler did not openly call for genocide in the 1930's, and today we have the lessons of the 1930's to guide us. Foremost among those lessons is that appeasing fanatics like Hitler and granting them legitimacy leads to genocide and war.

I've said it before, but actual diplomacy and negotiation means talking to people you don't like. Only talking to those who agree with you and labelling others as evil, which is what the US does in the Middle East, is the opposite of diplomacy.

When Bush sets up a dichotomy of good and evil, or with us or against us, he's offering Ahmedinejad and Chavez a sympathetic audience on a silver platter.

This first article from the Boston Globe looks at the lessons of Suez and how the US might learn from its former stance in Egypt against Britian, France and Israel in 1956:

[British Prime Minister] Eden was reminded in friendly but forceful terms of the sheer unwisdom of "the use of force" against an Arab country-which would, "it seems to me, vastly increase the area of jeopardy." The "appeaser" in this case was General Dwight David Eisenhower, the 34th president of the United States, in the day when things were different in the White House and the Republican Party. If Eden persevered in his folly, Ike wrote to the prime minister on Sept. 3, 1956, in words just as chilling today, not only the peoples of the Middle East but "all of Asia and Africa, would be consolidated against the West to a degree which, I fear, could not be overcome in a generation."

The next is an interview in Harper's with Dr. Emile A. Nakhleh, who served in the CIA for 15 years and retired this summer as the Director of the Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program. When asked what the US should do in Iraq, he had this to say:

I have come to believe that our presence is part of the problem and that we should begin to seriously devise an exit strategy. There's a civil war in Iraq and our presence is contributing to the violence. We've become a lightning rod?we're not restricting the violence, we're contributing to it. Iraq has galvanized jihadists; our presence is what is attracting them. We need to get out of there. The idea of Iraq being a model for the region has also been tossed out the window. Now the only question is whether Iraq will become a haven for sectarianism, or follow either the Iranian model or the standard Arab authoritarian model. It's only three years old, but the once-touted model of a secular, democratic Iraq is all but forgotten. This casts a dark shadow on American efforts to spread democracy in the region.

He also has some interesting things to say about Guantanamo Bay and American's Iranian policy.

While thinking about Iran and the bomb, I've often wondered if Israel would rather be a nuclear power among others in the region or to be a non-nuclear power in a nuclear-free Middle East. Because it seems that with nuclear weapons in Iran and Israel (not to mention India and Pakistan), it would only be a matter of time until Egypt and Saudi Arabia started looking into nuclear weapons.

It turns out that I was right, or at least might be, since Gamal Mubarak, the Egyptian President's son and probably heir, has announced Egypt's interest in developing nuclear power.

"The whole world -- I don't want to say all, but many developing countries ? have proposed and started to execute the issue of alternative energy," [Gamal Mubarak] said. "It is time for Egypt to put forth, and the party will put forth, this proposal for discussion about its future energy policies, the issue of alternative energy, including nuclear energy, as one of the alternatives."

He also said in a clear reference to the White House: "We do not accept visions from abroad that try to dissolve the Arab identity and the joint Arab efforts within the framework of the so-called Greater Middle East Initiative."

..."Egypt, and especially the N.D.P., is a strategic ally of the U.S.," said Hassan Abou Taleb, an analyst with the government-financed Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. "It does not seek confrontation with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Instead, it seeks cooperation. Why should the U.S. assist India in its nuclear program and not Egypt?"

Of course, no one is talking about nuclear weapons in Egypt, just nuclear power. But then again, that's the official line in Iran as well. It seems obvious to me that Indian, Pakistani, and especially Israeli, nuclear weapons programs are only going to drive other countries like Egypt, and I predict that Saudi Arabia will follow suit, to try their hand at entering the nuclear club.

To my mind, the Middle East should be a nuke-free zone, and allowing Israel to have nuclear weapons and the Bush administration's talk of "useable nuclear weapons" that could be used against non-nuclear countries, have only ensured that more and more countries will seek nuclear arms.

According to Musharraf, in order to get Pakistan's help in the "war on terror" after September 11, 2001, Richard Armitage's argument was more Corleone-ish than Clintonian, all stick and no carrot.

In an interview to be aired on CBS television this weekend Pakistan's president, General Pervez Musharraf, said the threat was delivered by the assistant secretary of state, Richard Armitage, in conversations with Pakistan's intelligence director.

"The intelligence director told me that (Mr Armitage) said, 'Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the stone age'," Gen Musharraf was quoted as saying. The revelation that the US used extreme pressure to secure Pakistan's cooperation in the war on terror arrived at a time of renewed unease in the US about its frontline ally.

Gen Musharraf told CBS he was stunned at the bluntness of the US approach in the aftermath of the attacks. "I think it was a very rude remark," he said. But he yielded to the request.

I've wondered about the sweaty fist of American diplomacy -- which I often sum up as "do something about it, bitch!" -- and whether or not the actual language is euphemistic or whether diplomats sometimes, as my father would say, call a "spade" a "fucking shovel."

This sort of language doesn't surprise me from this administration, but I'd be curious to know if this is a change in behavior or if behind the scenes this is normal behavior for the powerful "negotiators."

The LA Times gives an Iraqi's account of what life has become in Baghdad. The piece is unsigned, because he's afraid that he'd be killed if his name were to appear:

On a recent Sunday, I was buying groceries in my beloved Amariya neighborhood in western Baghdad when I heard the sound of an AK-47 for about three seconds. It was close but not very close, so I continued shopping.

As I took a right turn on Munadhama Street, I saw a man lying on the ground in a small pool of blood. He wasn't dead.

The idea of stopping to help or to take him to a hospital crossed my mind, but I didn't dare. Cars passed without stopping. Pedestrians and shop owners kept doing what they were doing, pretending nothing had happened.

I was still looking at the wounded man and blaming myself for not stopping to help. Other shoppers peered at him from a distance, sorrowful and compassionate, but did nothing.

I went on to another grocery store, staying for about five minutes while shopping for tomatoes, onions and other vegetables. During that time, the man managed to sit up and wave to passing cars. No one stopped. Then, a white Volkswagen pulled up. A passenger stepped out with a gun, walked steadily to the wounded man and shot him three times. The car took off down a side road and vanished.

No one did anything. No one lifted a finger. The only reaction came from a woman in the grocery store. In a low voice, she said, "My God, bless his soul."

I went home and didn't dare tell my wife. I did not want to frighten her.

Via verbal privilege, the Post gives us a sad account of Mutanabi Street, where Baghdadis used to go to buy books and discuss ideas.

Under former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, Mutanabi Street was the nexus for resistance and freewheeling debates, where underground writers published illegal books that denounced Hussein.

"I wish you could see how it used to be on Fridays," Shatri spoke before he broke down in tears. "You could not even walk. The whole street was filled with books and people. Mutanabi Street is a part of how great Baghdad is."

Then, in a reverent tone, he uttered a proverb known across the Arab world: "Cairo writes. Beirut publishes. And Baghdad reads."

Since 1963, Shatri has peddled books on Mutanabi Street, like a faithful friend, through military rule and political oppression, wars and embargo. Of all the eras he has watched ebb and flow, it is today's Iraq, with its violent nature, that most mocks the proud legacy of Mutanabi Street, he said.

"It means the death of education, the death of the history of the street, the death of the culture of Baghdad," Shatri said.

Two Fridays ago, Shatri took action. He and other members of his writers union gathered in front of his shop. They sipped breakfast tea. Then, at around 9:30 a.m., they poured kerosene over a pile of books and set them aflame.

"I cried when I was burning the books," Shatri said.

"It's a message to the government," said Nakshabandi, who also took part. "It's an S.O.S. Help us. An important part of Baghdad is dying. And it is on its last breath."

"But no one got the message. There was no action."

National Public Radio's Fresh Air has a show on Christian Zionism. Terry Gross interviews Pastor John Hagee, the leader of Christians United for Israel, as well as Israeli journalist, Gershom Gorenberg and American journalist, Max Blumenthal. The interview with Hagee is particularly interesting and disturbing, but it's a shame that Gross lets him off the hook so easily. She lets statements like Muslims "have a mandate to kill all Jews and Christians" go without being challenged. Here are some verses that go directly contrary to this commonly misheld belief:

Sura 5:69 - Surely they that believe, and those of Jewry, and the Christians, and those Sabeaans, whoso believes in God and the Last Day, and works righteousness--their wage waits them with their Lord, and no fear shall be on them, neither shall they sorrow.

Sura 5:82 - ...and you will find the nearest in love to the believers (Muslims) those who say: "We are Christians." That is because amongst them are priests and monks, and they are not proud.

Sura 25:63 - The worshippers of the All-Merciful are they who tread gently upon the earth, and when the ignorant address them, they reply, "Peace!"

Sura 28:55 - And when they hear vain talk, they turn away from it and say: "To us our deeds, and to you yours; peace be to you: we do not seek out the ignorant."

My guess is that it's because she doesn't know enough about Islam to know that that his statements are demonstrably false. But there's not really much excuse for her timidity in questioning the idea that Hurricane Katrina was a punishment from God because New Orleans had too many homosexuals.

A friend sent me a link to George Packer's article in The New Yorker on Bush's recent speech on torture techniques and the Army's response:

Last week, in the guise of calling for fair trials, the President demanded that Congress give him the power to go on torturing detainees in secret prisons and use the evidence obtained against them. And last week the Army honorably closed the holes in moral conduct that the President, his counsel, the Vice-President, the Justice Department, and the Secretary of Defense pried open shortly after September 11th. It did so not only to remove the stain on its reputation and to protect its soldiers but because it cares more about the war than about the next election.

The Canadian government has released a report about the American rendition of Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured for a year until the Syrians realized that he was innocent and then let him go:

A government commission on Monday exonerated a Canadian computer engineer of any ties to terrorism and issued a scathing report that faulted Canada and the United States for his deportation four years ago to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured.

The report on the engineer, Maher Arar, said American officials had apparently acted on inaccurate information from Canadian investigators and then misled Canadian authorities about their plans for Mr. Arar before transporting him to Syria.

"I am able to say categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offense or that his activities constituted a threat to the security of Canada," Justice Dennis R. O?Connor, head of the commission, said at a news conference.

I'm not sure what's more diconceritng, the Canadian government's incompetence or the American government's dishonesty and callous cruelty. I find it interesting that the US will only talk to Damascus when they want someone tortured.

More information about the commission can be found here.

Here is an extract from the report (pdf):

On September 26, 2002, Mr. Arar, who had been in Tunisia with his family, was returning to Canada by plane via Switzerland and the United States. He boarded an American Airlines flight in Zurich and, at about two o?clock in the afternoon, arrived in New York, where he was pulled aside by American customs officials. Two hours later, he was fingerprinted and photographed, and told this was regular procedure. His possessions were searched and his passport photographed.

Mr. Arar was then placed under arrest and strip-searched, an experience he found "humiliating." He was held, first at the John F. Kennedy International Airport and later at the Metropolitan Detention Centre, for 12 days, during which time he was interrogated by American officials. Initially, he was denied access to a lawyer. His request to pray during the interrogation sessions was denied.

On October 8, 2002, Mr. Arar was awakened at three o'clock in the morning and told that he was to be removed to Syria. Mr. Arar told Professor Toope that, at that point, he had begun to cry and say that he would be tortured if sent to Syria. He said he had felt "destroyed."

Mr. Arar was taken to New Jersey, put on a corporate jet, and flown to Amman, Jordan, with brief stops in Washington, D.C., Portland, Maine, and Rome, Italy. Throughout the journey, he was chained and shackled in the back of the plane. The shackles were removed only at the end of the trip, when he was given the opportunity to have a meal with his guards. He could not eat.

It was the middle of the night when he arrived in Amman and was transported to a detention centre. He had not slept since leaving New York. He suffered blows at the hands of his Jordanian guards and was blindfolded. He was then taken into a room, where the blindfold was removed. He was asked routine questions and then blindfolded again before being led to a cell. The next morning, he was told that he was going to Syria. Later that day, he was blindfolded and put into a car or van. By the time he arrived at his destination at around five o?clock in the afternoon, Mr. Arar was exhausted, hungry, and terrified. His blindfold was removed, and he saw portraits of Presidents Assad, father and son. Mr. Arar later learned that he was in Syria, in the Far Falestin detention centre, also called the Palestine Branch, which was run by the Syrian Military Intelligence (SMI).

Later that day, Mr. Arar was interrogated for approximately four hours by a man called "George," subsequently identified as George Salloum, the head interrogator at the Palestine Branch. Two other interrogators were present, taking notes. The questions mostly concerned his family. Mr. Arar told Professor Toope that, at this point, he had decided to "say anything" necessary to avoid torture. Although no physical violence was used during this interrogation session, ominous threats were made. Whenever Mr. Arar was slow to answer, George would threaten to use "the chair," a reference Mr. Arar did not understand.

By the next day, October 9, 2002, Mr. Arar was even more exhausted, as he had not been able to sleep in the cell. He was called up for interrogation. When George arrived, he immediately started hitting Mr. Arar. The chair on which Mr. Arar had been sitting was taken away, so that he was now on the floor.

George brought a black cable, which might have been a shredded electrical cable, about two feet long, into the room with him. Mr. Arar told Professor Toope that, when he had seen the cable, he had started to cry. George told Mr. Arar to open his right hand, then raised the cable high and brought it down hard. Mr. Arar recalled the moment vividly; he told Professor Toope that he had felt like a bad Syrian school boy. He stood up and started jumping, but he was forced back down and the process was repeated with his left hand.

Mr. Arar was then made to stand near the door, and the questions began. The theme throughout was "you are a liar." He was given breaks, during which he was put into a different room, where he could hear other people screaming. Sometimes, he was blindfolded and left to stand in the hallway for an hour or more. The screaming continued. Each time Mr. Arar was brought back into the interrogation room, he was beaten about the upper body and asked more questions.

On the second day in the Palestine Branch, the interrogation lasted approximately 10 hours. Day three, October 11, 2002, was the most "intensive" for Mr. Arar. He was questioned for 16 to 18 hours, and was subjected to great physical and psychological abuse. The questions were in part about Abdullah Almalki. Mr. Arar was beaten with the black cable on numerous occasions throughout the day, and was threatened with electric shock, "the chair" and "the tire." The pattern was three or four lashes with the cable, then questions, followed by more beating. After a while, he became so weak that he was disoriented. He remembers being asked if he had trained in Afghanistan. By this time, he was so afraid and in so much pain that he replied, "If you want me to say so." He was asked which border he had crossed and whether he had seen Mr. Almalki in Afghanistan. Mr. Arar told Professor Toope that he had urinated on himself twice during this questioning, and had had to wear the same clothes for the next two and a half months. He had been "humiliated." Mr. Arar was questioned about his relationships with various people, his family, his bank accounts, and his salary. His interrogators could not understand what he did for a living. They did not believe his description of providing services in the computer sector or the amount he said he was paid in salary, which they thought impossibly high. Mr. Arar was beaten for these "lies."

After the beatings on the third day, the interrogation became less intense physically. There was much less use of the cables, and more punching and hitting. On October 16 or 17, even those beatings diminished. However, the threats intensified, and the psychological pressure remained extreme. For example, Mr. Arar was put in "the tire," though not beaten. Warnings about "the chair" were also used to scare him. At the end of each interrogation session, an interrogator would say "tomorrow will be tough" or "tomorrow will be worse for you." Mr. Arar found it almost impossible to sleep for more than two or three hours a night.

Mr. Arar's conditions of detention were atrocious. He was kept in a basement cell that was seven feet high, six feet long, and three feet wide. The cell contained only two thin blankets, a "humidity isolator," and two bottles -- one for water and one for urine. The only source of light in the cell was a small opening in the middle of the ceiling, measuring roughly one foot by two feet.

According to Mr. Arar, cats would sometimes urinate through the opening. There were also rats in the building; Mr. Arar stuffed shoes under the door to his cell to prevent them from entering. The cell was damp and very cold in the winter and stifling in the summer. Mr. Arar was known to guards only by his cell number: Two.

Over time, as the beatings diminished in intensity, the most disturbing aspect of Mr. Arar's detention came to be the daily horror of living in the tiny, dark and damp cell all alone and with no reading material (except the Koran later on). While at first the cell was a refuge from the infliction of physical pain, later it became a torture in its own right. Mr. Arar described for Professor Toope nights alone in his cell, when he had been unable to sleep on the cold concrete floor and had had to turn over every 15 minutes or so. He had thought of his family constantly, worrying about their finances and safety, and had been "bombarded by memories."

Mr. Arar remained in this cell for 10 months and 10 days, during which he saw almost no sunlight other than when he was transferred for consular visits. His first visit to the courtyard of the prison did not take place until April 2003. Mr. Arar described the cell as "a grave" and a "slow death." By June or July of 2003, he had reached his limit. Although he had tried to keep in shape by doing push-ups and pacing in his cell, he was losing all hope and stopped his modest exercise regime.

In July 2003, one of his interrogators, "Khalid," upon seeing him for the first time in months, told Mr. Arar that his wife would divorce him if she saw him as he was then: thin, listless and crying. The consular visits with Léo Martel, the Canadian consul, provided a little hope and some connection to Mr. Arar's family, but Mr. Arar also found them immensely "frustrating."

On August 20, 2003, Mr. Arar was transferred to Sednaya Prison, where conditions were "like heaven" compared with those in the Palestine Branch. On October 5, 2003, he was released from custody after signing a "confession" given to him in court by a Syrian prosecutor.

Mr. Arar was guilty of being seen with someone who was under surveillance at a café and having this same person listed as an emergency contact on his rental lease. The punishment was being whisked away to Syria where he was tortured and imprisoned for a year.

Is this the war on terror?

The commission report quotes Kofi Annan, who said, "Let us be clear: torture can never be an instrument to fight terror, for torture is an instrument of terror."

Until the US learns this lesson, things are only going to get worse.

I don't really know what to make of this piece in the Post. It's about Bush and his message to the Iranian people. Strangely enough, it seems pretty reasonable and even reasoned:

"I would say to the Iranian people: We respect your history. We respect your culture. We admire the entrepreneurial skills of your people. I would say to the Iranian people that I recognize the importance of your sovereignty -- that you're a proud nation, and you want to have a positive future for your citizens," Bush said, answering quickly and without notes.

"In terms of the nuclear issue," he continued, "I understand that you believe it is in your interest -- your sovereign interest, and your sovereign right -- to have nuclear power.

He even goes on to suggest more cultural and educational exchanges with Iran. There doesn't seem to be any belligerence here, which makes me wonder who has kidnapped Bush and replaced him with an unbelievable simulacrum?

The Progressive has an article strongly against torture in general and the the myth of the ticking bomb scenario in particular.

Here is an interesting extract about the political costs of torture and the slippery slope that the US, as well as other liberal democracies, has slid down before:

The price of torture is unacceptably high because it disgraces and then undermines the country that countenances it. For the French in Algeria, for the Americans in Vietnam, and now for the Americans in Iraq, the costs have been astronomical and have outweighed any gains gathered by torture.

Official sources are nearly unanimous that the yield from the massive Phoenix program, with more than forty prisons across South Vietnam systematically torturing thousands of suspected communists, was surprisingly low. One Pentagon contract study found that, in 1970-71, only 3 percent of the Viet Cong "killed, captured, or rallied were full or probationary Party members above the district level." Not surprisingly, such a brutal pacification effort failed either to crush the Viet Cong or win the support of Vietnamese villagers, contributing to the ultimate U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War.

Similarly, the French army won the Battle of Algiers but soon lost the war for Algeria, in part because their systematic torture delegitimated the larger war effort in the eyes of most Algerians and many French. "You might say that the Battle of Algiers was won through the use of torture," observed British journalist Sir Alistair Horne, "but that the war, the Algerian war, was lost."

Even the comparatively limited torture at Abu Ghraib has done incalculable damage to America's international prestige.

In short, the intelligence gains are soon overwhelmed by political costs as friends and enemies recoil in revulsion at such calculated savagery.

...As we slide down the slippery slope to torture in general, we should also realize that there is a chasm at the bottom called extrajudicial execution. With the agency?s multinational gulag full of dozens, even hundreds, of detainees of dwindling utility, CIA agents, active and retired, have been vocal in their complaints about the costs and inconvenience of limitless, even lifetime, incarceration for these tortured terrorists. The ideal solution to this conundrum from an agency perspective is pump and dump, as in Vietnam?pump the terrorists for information, and then dump the bodies. After all, the systematic French torture of thousands from the Casbah of Algiers in 1957 also entailed more than 3,000 "summary executions" as "an inseparable part" of this campaign, largely, as one French general put it, to ensure that "the machine of justice" not be "clogged with cases." For similar reasons, the CIA's Phoenix program produced, by the agency's own count, over 20,000 extrajudicial killings.

...The use of torture to stop ticking bombs leads ultimately to a cruel choice?either legalize this brutality, à la Dershowitz and Bush, or accept that the logical corollary to state-sanctioned torture is state-sponsored murder, à la Vietnam.

I've thought often about peace deals that include offers of amnesty for war criminals. Should justice be sacrificed for peace? The case of Pinochet comes to mind as one in which a former tyrant was given immunity when he left power (although it was stripped from him nearly 10 years later, first by British and Spanish courts -- the latter with a claim to universal jurisdiction -- and only later by Chile itself).

There has been a recent cease-fire put in place in Northern Uganda, where Joseph Kony (who is wanted by the International Criminal Court) and his Lord's Resistance Army have been using abducted children as soldiers to terrorize the people in Acholiland, killing and torturing thousands in their rebel war against the government in Kampala.

Kony has said that he will end the rebellion if, and only if, he is granted amnesty. This is in line with the traditional Acholi practice of reconciliation called mataput, in which a wrong-doer drinks a bitter root and is forgiven by those he has harmed (in many cases, fellow villagers whose ears, lips or noses have been cut off). There has been talk since 2004 of Uganda retracting its case in the International Criminal Court in return for an end to the conflict through such traditional reconciliation processes, some of which involve stepping on an egg and then being forgiven. And in the past, such practices have had an effect on weakening the cult leader's rebellion:

But it's not just geopolitics that's weakening Kony. It's also a powerful ethic of forgiveness -- one that parallels South Africa's famous reconciliation efforts after apartheid.

In the local Acholi tribe there's a traditional ceremony in which elders place an egg -- the symbol of new life -- on the ground. A repentant wrongdoer then steps on the egg. The act symbolizes the opening of a new life. The person is welcomed back into the village family. This and other ceremonies are being used to reintegrate former LRA soldiers, despite their awful acts. Pressured by local leaders, the government also offers legal amnesty to former fighters.

A major reason for the forgiveness is that so many LRA fighters were abducted as children. They were often forced to kill civilians -- or be killed themselves. "The child was innocent -- taken forcefully and forced to commit the crime," says Sheik Musa Khalil of the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative. "Forgiveness is the only way to solve this conflict."

The attitude has put local leaders at odds with the UN's International Criminal Court, which aims to prosecute Kony and others. But the news of the amnesty being broadcast via radio into the bush has spurred increasing numbers of rebels to desert Kony.

While I can see how the issue of child soldiers, particularly ones who were drugged and abducted, is morally complex and perhaps well-served by such traditional forgiveness practices (providing that there is a disarming and reintigration process included), I have to admit that I feel uneasy about letting people like Joseph Kony off the hook so easily, and groups like Amnesty International agrees.

Is peace in Northern Uganda worth letting Kony live the rest of his life a free man? Probably. Would I feel good about making the call? Definitely not.

The Columbia Journalism Review has an excellent piece by Eric Umansky that takes an in-depth look at the media's torture coverage and Congress's overall lack of interest in examining the issue:

Reporters and news organizations deserve enormous credit for exposing the abuse and torture of detainees during the U.S. war on terror, more than other institutions or individuals. Without [The New York Times'] Carlotta Gall, The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, The Washington Post's Dana Priest, and many other reporters, we might well never have learned of the abuse and torture that have occurred in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere.

But just as sweeping attacks against "the media" are too reductive, so too are plaudits. And when the record on torture coverage is examined in detail, an ambiguous picture emerges: in the post-9/11 days, some reporters offered detailed accusations and reports of abuse and torture, only to be met with skepticism by their own editors. Stories were buried, played down, or ignored -- a reluctance that is much diminished but still bubbles up with regard to the culpability of policymakers.

What is true and what is significant are two different matters. Everybody agrees that journalists are supposed to ascertain the truth. As for deciding what is significant, reporters and editors make that judgment, too, all the time -- what story leads on the front page, or gets played inside, what story gets followed up. And when it comes to very sensitive material, like torture, many journalists would prefer to rely on others to be the first to decide that something is significant. To do otherwise would mean sticking your neck out.

When stories about abuse did finally get attention, what was new was often less the revelations themselves than how they were presented and the prominence they were given. Simply put, a scandal wasn?t a scandal or a scoop a scoop until it was played as one. But after the September 11 attacks, most news organizations were reluctant to go there. "Being fair is one thing; being excessively worried that we might not be portraying the military in a fair light is another," says Roger Cohen [of The New York Times. "For a while there, we lost that balance."

Newsroom ambivalence is not the only impediment to covering this difficult story, of course. For one thing, with the exception of Senator John McCain's 2005 antitorture amendment -- the coverage of which turned out to have been shallow and excessively focused on personalities -- Congress has shown a studied lack of interest in torture. There have been no sustained congressional hearings, and a proposed independent investigation has long been blocked by the congressional leadership.

Complicating matters has been the Bush administration's savvy defense. It has pushed back against calls for an independent, overarching investigation of abuses. Instead, there have been a dizzying number of fractured, limited-authority reports, all of which reporters have diligently sought to cover. But many of the reports are classified and ultimately heavily redacted, and none of them have looked specifically at the connection between policymakers and abuse. Indeed, the stonewalling has been part of a larger, smarter strategy: rather than defending its policies of abuse, the administration has denied the policies exist.

The whole piece is worth a read, and if you're like me, you'll notice that some of the big stories like rendition and CIA black sites were actually broken much earlier than you remember -- sometimes years earlier.

The Post reports that the International Atomic Energy Agency found that parts of the House's report on Iran and its nuclear capabilities were "outrageous and dishonest."

This obviously brings back memories of similar debates between Republicans and IAEA on Iraq's WMD capabilities. It also brings back memories (via A Tiny Revolution) of Iraq coverage in the US prior to the war. The Post covered the House report on the front page, whereas its rebuttal was stuck on page 17. This despite the Post's admission that they dropped the ball when it came to questioning the administration's claims about Iraq:

"The paper was not front-paging stuff," said Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks. "Administration assertions were on the front page. Things that challenged the administration were on A18 on Sunday or A24 on Monday. There was an attitude among editors: Look, we're going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?"

In retrospect, said Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr., "we were so focused on trying to figure out what the administration was doing that we were not giving the same play to people who said it wouldn't be a good idea to go to war and were questioning the administration's rationale. Not enough of those stories were put on the front page. That was a mistake on my part."

Across the country, "the voices raising questions about the war were lonely ones," Downie said. "We didn't pay enough attention to the minority."

These confessions ran in the Post two years ago. It seems that no one has learned any lessons down there...

I woke up Tuesday morning to the news that the US embassy in Damascus had been attacked. It seems that the Syrian forces (and perhaps American marines) killed three of the four attackers and stopped them from exploding another car full of explosives (accounts vary, but it sounds like one car bomb was detonated).

Perhaps I've spent too much time in Lebanon, where the Syrian presence is still felt (if only from the ka'ak sellers on the street who are rumored to be Syrian mukhabarat agents), but I can't help but wondering if Damascus wasn't somehow involved in this attack or at least failed to prevent it. Syria is a police state where the mukhabarat keeps pretty close tabs on everyone, especially Sunni militants, and it seems suprising that something like this could happen without the state's knowledge, particulary as the American embassy is so close to the presidential residence.

Either the intelligence apparatus's grip on things in Damascus is slipping, or the government decided that it might be to its advantage to stop such a plot as it was unfolding instead of before it actually happened. Both hypotheses seem possible to me, and both are disconcerting in very different ways.

In Al Jazeera Magazine (which is out of Dubai and London and has no relation to Al Jazeera the television channel), there is speculation that the attacks were planned either by the US or Syria. While the article focuses on the idea that the US was behind the attack, they do mention another hypothesis from the London daily Al-Quds al-Arabi:

Meanwhile, Syrian opposition figure [Mohammad Marwan Suweidan, a former Syrian Army officer] has called Tuesday['s] attack on the U.S. embassy "a foolish act conducted by a naive regime aimed to mislead the Syrian people and send a warning to the U.S. administration," the London-based Al-Quds al-Arabi reported earlier.

It should be noted that Al Jazeera Magazine (as opposed to Al Jazeera the cable station and website) is relatively unknown to me. I'm not sure how accurate their reporting is, and I haven't been able to find the Al-Quds al-Arabi article to verify that Suweidan really made such an accusation. Furthermore, it should be disclosed that he is part of Rifaat Assad's exiled opposition. Rifaat is Bashar's uncle and was exiled after a failed coup attempt in the 1983. He was also in charge of the massacre at Hama, where he led the "Defence Brigades" in killing 10,000 to 25,000 people.

All this to say that I don't know if Rifaat or his supporters are reliable sources; however, something seems fishy about this attack.

Since I missed my train back to Paris on Tuesday night, I stayed another day in London. The trip was a good one, and in addition to seeing an old friend from Prague, I was able to see some friends who left Beirut this summer like me.

While I was there, I did some book shopping at the London Review Bookshop and at the book market under the Waterloo bridge. I bought Dubravka Ugresic's Thank You for Not Reading: Essays on Literary Trivia, Sven Lindqvist's A History of Bombing, Isaac Deutcher's 3-volume biography of Trotsky and Eliot Weinberger's Muhammad.

I'll be in London for a long weekend and won't be back until Tuesday night. I probably won't be posting while I'm gone...

I will, however, be visiting the London Review's book store.

The BBC sponsored a mock war crimes trial for Israel and Hizbollah. Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch acts as prosecutor and finds that both sides are guilty of crimes of war. His main arguments are that Hizbollah used weapons that are nearly impossible to control with much accuracy, resulting in attacks on Israeli civilians and that Israel assumed that after civilians had been warned of upcoming attacks, anyone who was still in that area was a legitimate target.

The BBC moderated a letter-writing debate in four parts (1, 2, 3, and 4) between a Lebanese man named Saleem in Beirut and an Israeli man named Gordon in a border town called Shlomi.

They both remain civil, and while they disagree on most issues, they both agree that they'd like to live in peace. Here are some extracts.

From Saleem:

Maybe you could send me some oranges from my grandfather's orchards. From the land he had to leave in 1948 - which is exactly where you live. My grandfather used to own acres and acres of land where your settlement now is. It's such a coincidence, of all the Lebanese and all the Israelis to be in a debate...

My mother's village is al-Bassa, now called Bezet. I have a picture of my grandmother on that land in 1946. It's less than 2km from Shlomi where you are. Where was your maternal grandmother in 1946?

Israel must return our land. Then I will be the first person to cross the borders and offer you a case of fresh Lebanese apples.

From Gordon:

Yes, we came through unharmed. We had rockets falling to the left of us, and rockets to the right, and our next-door neighbour was killed. But we made it.

Via the Plank, The Hill reports that Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), the vice chairman of the Armed Services panel and chairman of the Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee, is introducing a bill to cut the civilian leadership (read: Bush and Rumsfeld) out of the loop for deciding when troops should withdraw from Iraq. His resolution would make it the generals' decision, thus making the decision a military one and not a political one, he says.

The resolution would express the sense of the House that military commanders should put in place a system of criteria to assess the capability of Iraqi security forces. Once those criteria are met, the mission in Iraq would be considered complete and the president could begin withdrawing troops.

Weldon is one of the foremost Republican military experts in the House, and he is considered to have a good chance of succeeding Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) as chairman of the Armed Services Committee at the end of 2008 should Republicans keep control of the lower chamber.

This obviously brings up issues of the chain of command, since the military is always answerable to civilian leadership. If there is really this much question as to the president's judgement and that of his cabinet, it seems like the logical thing to do would be to get rid of the president, not set a precedent for changing the basic structure of the chain of command.

Using stumble upon, I came across a timeline of US intervention done by Adbusters, including "coups, humanitarian incursions, covert actions, proxy armies, freedom fighters/terrorists and multilateral offenses."

It starts in 1801 on the Barbary Coast and goes up to 2004 in Haiti, covering Honduras, Guatemala, Libya, Vietnam and Angola along the way.

It's an interesting little presentation, and I'm impressed that stumble upon found it for me.

The Times reports that Israel has decided to end the blockade on Lebanon, which is technically true since Israel did announce the lifting of the blockade. However, what the Times didn't mention is that several airlines had already decided to break the blockade:

In a sign the embargo may be eroding, British Airways/BMED said it was resuming direct flights to Beirut after the British government had given assurances that it would be safe to do so.

Lebanon's Middle East Airlines and Royal Jordanian began flying regularly into the capital last month, but have complied with Israel's insistence that all such flights go via Amman. Qatar Airways resumed direct flights to Beirut on Monday.

In addition to Qatar and British Airways, Gulf Air had also announced that they were resuming flights as of Saturday. It seems that commercial airlines that have flouted the blockade would be newsworthy, but the Times either didn't know about this or didn't think that their readers should.

Of course, the good news is that with the air blockade being lifted, this means that the sea embargo will be lifted as well. I never understood why the Israelis bothered with the air and sea embargos, unless it was just to flex Tel Aviv's muscles and illustrate that Israel can decide who comes and goes. Because the real routes that Israel needs to be worry about as far as arms resupplying goes, are the ground routes. Iranian arms shipments are overland through Syria, and the Lebanese-Syrian border is long, poorly defined and very porous. And this is the one way in and out of the country that they can't really control. Or rather their control is clumsier and involves the bombing of bridges and roads, like the road to Damascus, which was bombed and shut down, forcing people to flee the country by the northern route.

According to The Sunday Times and via Juan Cole, Israel is preparing for war with Syria and Iran. Of course, this plan has backers in the Pentagon, as well as Richard Perle:

While the American State Department favours engaging with President Bashar Assad of Syria in the hope of detaching him from the Iranian alliance, hawks believe Israel missed a golden opportunity to strike at Syria during the Hezbollah conflict.

"If they had acted against Syria during this last kerfuffle, the war might have ended more quickly and better," Perle added. "Syrian military installations are sitting ducks and the Syrian air force could have been destroyed on the ground in a couple of days." Assad set off alarm bells in Israel when he said during the war in Lebanon: "If we do not obtain the occupied Golan Heights by peaceful means, the resistance option is there." ...

Advocates of political engagement believe a war with Syria could unleash Islamic fundamentalist terror in what has hitherto been a stable dictatorship. Some voices in the Pentagon are not impressed by that argument.

"If Syria spirals into chaos, at least they?ll be taking on each other rather than heading for Jerusalem," said one insider.

This is obviously just what we need, another toppled Middle Eastern dictator in a sectarian country with a strong Islamist opposition and no one willing or capable of picking up the pieces.

The New York Review has a good analysis of recent events in the Middle East by Robert Malley, who was Special Assistant to President Clinton for Arab-Israeli Affairs and is currently Middle East and North Africa Program Director at the International Crisis Group:

For Israel, as well as Hamas and Hezbollah, the most costly blow is the one to which they will be seen as having surrendered. The conflict is no longer about achieving a specific objective -- releasing a soldier, say, or capturing defined territory. It is about something more intangible, and so more serious: establishing one's power of deterrence, defining the rules of the game, showing who is boss. Such confrontations may subside, and they may even pause. They will not end.

The whole article is worth reading. Malley has a really good grasp of the overall situation, and he's far from optimistic.

To my mind, until this conflict can be pushed back to the more manageable domain of territorial dispute, things are going to keep getting worse. The first step, as I keep insisting, is land for peace in the Golan Heights and the Shebaa Farms. Syria has precise territorial demands and no religious ideological claims, which makes Iran, and to a lesser extent Hizbollah, a strange bedfellow for the staunchly secular Ba'ath regime. And if Israel could get Syria out of the way by giving up the occupied Golan Heights, then they could break the direct line between Hizbollah and Iran. Furthermore, they could use the occasion to broker a peace with Lebanon by releasing prisoners and giving back the Shebaa farms. (A subsequent water-sharing deal could be attempted for the aquifer-rich area if Israel really thinks it's worth the effort; in any case, Israel seems to be moving more and more toward desalination schemes, so such a water-sharing agreement might not even be necessary.)

And if they were to include Hizbollah in the negotiations process, then they could not only be sure to get the Lebanese government to visa the peace plan, but they would have explicit and public agreement from Hizbollah, which would go a long way toward removing any excuse that the Party of God might have for continuing attacks against Israel.

In Sudan, Khartoum is trying to stop the African Union force currently in Darfur from being folded into a larger UN force with a stronger mandate as called for last week. Khartoum has been massing troops at El Fasher, getting ready to attack the rebels in a move that will likely involve many more dead civilians and the genocide that has become a force of habit in Khartoum's counter-insurgency strategy.

The AU force has always been under-equipped (both in terms of matériel and mandate), but its financial resources and mandate are about to run out at the end of the month. The Sudanese government has given the AU a choice: either continue as is with funding from the Arab League, which unsuprisingly supports Khartoum, or leave:

[T]he commander of the African forces in Darfur, Gen. Collins Ihekire, said in an interview last week that accepting the money would leave the African Union hopelessly compromised.

"It could become a kind of blackmail," General Ihekire said. "The viability of the force would depend on the charity of Sudan and its friends."

This is an obvious attempt to stop the force from being incorporated into a UN force, and Mustafa Osman Ismail, President Bashir, recently said, "Sudan will not accept those troops to be transformed into part of a UN force."

I'm not sure how this can be countered. Perhaps Khartoum is hoping that the EU will give more money to the AU force in order to keep it from Arab League money, thus maintaining the status quo.

In any case, the AU has decided to end its mandate on 30 September. It is unclear though if this is the final word. The AU might be deciding to call Khartoum's bluff, and the fact that the latest cease-fire was brokered and monitored by the AU might raise the issue of the cease-fire disappearing when the AU mandate expires. But then again, this might be just what Khartoum wants.

Martin Peretz at The New Republic writes about his frustration that no one is stopping the genocide in Darfur. I'm glad that he's bringing more attention to this conflict that is too often forgotten in the shuffle, but there are some ridiculous points in his little piece:

One might think that Afro-American organizations in the States and African-American politicians might raise their voices against this infamy. But no. You see, George Bush has actually done this. And he certainly can't be in the right. I wish he would go further and, as our editorial in this week's TNR hard copy edition urges, with the U.K., Canada, France, Germany, Australia and, yes, Israel, deploy the troops necessary to save the lives of those whose lives have not yet been taken or simply destroyed.

First of all, Obama Barack and other black lawmakers have been bringing attention to the issue, and seven members of the Congressional Black Caucus were arrested while protesting in front of the Sudanese embassy. So while I agree that the world as a whole has not been giving this issue the attention it deserves, Peretz's dig at black groups is unfair.

This also made me think of a recent review in The Nation about the understandable ambivalence that many black Americans have felt about Africa. So while I think we all have a moral responsibility to Darfur as humans, I'm not sure that black people have should be held any more responsible than the rest of the world just because they're black.

Second, Israeli troops? Is he crazy? The Sudanese government has already stated that any foreign troops will be seen as invaders and fought by Khartoum's forces, so it seems obvious that the more African and Arabic any intervention would be, the better chance it would have of success. American troops (and maybe even British ones) would already be a bad idea, but sending Israelis would guarantee the already likely scenario that such a conflict would be spinned as a religious war against foreign infidel usupers. Peretz should know better than to even suggest such an obviously wrongheaded idea.

My father and I are fighting again. He lives in Alabama, and I live in Paris, and this summer, in Beirut. Consequently, our fighting is done by e-mail and long-distance telephone calls. The first call in our latest fight came when I was in Beirut as the war was starting. I couldn't sleep, because even in my apartment in Hamra, the Sunni neighborhood by the American University of Beirut, the Israeli bombs, missiles and shells were shaking me awake every night. Understandably, he was worried about me, and I could tell that the fact that he could do nothing to get me out of Lebanon was getting to him.

At the end of the call, he gave me some fatherly advice: "Watch yourself, and be careful of Hezbollah." I told him that if I had anything to worry about, it was getting hit by an Israeli bomb. This introduced the conversation that both of us had been trying to avoid since the war began. He told me that Israel was just defending itself from terrorists, and I quipped that I didn't think there were too many terrorists hiding inside the milk factory that had just been bombed. In the end, and to my father's credit, he said that the question was academic in any case. But being my father's son, I couldn't leave it at that: "No, Dad, it's a very concrete question, because if I die here, chances are that it will be the Israelis that kill me."

Normally, my father and I let these disagreements get out of control. Usually, I'll respond to what I see as his uninformed and simplistic ideas, often condescendingly, and then he'll get really angry and the name-calling will commence. I think both of us would sum up the other's position in a single sentence: "his mind's made up; don't confuse him with the facts." I'm ashamed to admit that during the Christmas holidays before the war started in Iraq, our disagreement about the sagacity and rationale of the impending invasion nearly escalated into a fistfight. This is not an exaggeration. Each of us stood, angry and with heaving chest pointed outward, in the living room between the gun cabinet and the fireplace decorated with stockings and holly, waiting for the other to have the bad sense to throw the first punch.

I'm back in Paris now, and since I returned, I've received several e-mails from my father on the Middle East, all of them forwarded from elsewhere. In one, a Middle East specialist (comedian Dennis Miller) explains to us that there is no such thing as Palestinians and that we should call these people "Arabs who can't accomplish anything in life and would rather wrap themselves in the seductive melodrama of eternal struggle and death." In another message, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert tells us that he refuses to apologize about the civilian deaths in Lebanon and that if we continue to withhold our support from his noble fight, when the final solution comes, we of the "the free and enlightened world, will go down" along with the Israelis.

The worst message of the bunch, which I received from two different family members, asks whether or not one can be a good Muslim and a Good American. Of course, the answer is no, for several reasons, among which we find the following:

Theologically - no. Because his allegiance is to Allah, the moon God of Arabia.

Domestically - no. Because he is instructed to marry four women and beat and scourge his wife when she disobeys him.

Intellectually - no. Because he cannot accept the American Constitution since it is based on Biblical principles and he believes the Bible to be corrupt.

As coincidence would have it, I received this e-mail from my father a week before seeing a Gallup poll on American prejudice toward Muslims. The numbers in this poll are shocking on several accounts: 22 percent of Americans say they would not like to have a Muslim as a neighbor; 51 percent believe US Muslims are not loyal to the United States; and 34 percent think Muslims in the US are sympathetic to al-Qaeda. But what shocked me the most was that 39 percent advocate requiring American Muslims to carry special identification.

One of my weaknesses is that I cannot sit by and listen to someone say something altogether stupid without opening my mouth to rebut the most asinine of the person's remarks. This is especially true for me in e-mail exchanges. I feel compelled to respond to my father's messages citing accounts from the press and, in the case of Israel and Lebanon, a report from Human Rights Watch that squarely accuses Israel of war crimes. I'm not really sure what I hope to gain from this obvious waste of time, since my father would never admit to being wrong.

His rebuttals are almost always the same: your sources are Jew-hating liars. "Human Rights Watch are some of the biggest liars around." "Quoting organizations that hate the Jews, just like the UN ... is dishonest." Everyone has an agenda, especially The New York Times, the United Nations, Human Rights Watch and, it seems, myself as well, although to be completely honest, I can't figure out what my agenda might be.

During the war while I was in Beirut, I wrote a letter to the editor that was published in The New York Times. A friend of mine in Paris forwarded the letter to my father by e-mail, and he responded saying that he couldn't trust the Gray Lady anymore. (He can, of course, trust Fox News to call it like it is.) I'm not really sure when he ever trusted the Times, but that's not the point. The point is that one would think that he would trust me, his son.

During the war, I was in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the occupied territories and Israel. One would think that he would trust, or at least listen to, what I have to say about the affair. But he doesn't: "you can B.S. yourself if you want to, but your desire for your agenda clouds your logic."

My father and I represent two distinct parts of our not-so-united states of America. We're both from Alabama, and we can both be stubborn asses, but that's about where the similarities end -- or at least that's where I'd like to think they end. I'm not really sure what has created the gap between my father and me when it comes to politics. My first reflex is to assume that it has a lot to do with travel and education, but I know that's not true, since there are many Americans who agree with my father, many of whom are erudite and well-traveled, although they argue with perhaps a little more nuance and a little less name-calling. And if anyone has the strength of numbers on his side in America, it's my father, not me.

But finally, this consensus is what worries me the most. My father's solution to the Middle East is to "bomb the Arabs back into the stone age." And really, he's not very far from Israeli General Dan Halutz's comment that Israel would "turn back the clock in Lebanon by twenty years," which is what the IDF did. My father supports that, and he's against the "European mindset," insofar as Israel is concerned, because he thinks that given the chance, the world"s Muslims would destroy world Jewry once and for all and that the Europeans would do their best to help them on their way. Ironically enough, he's very likely part of the 39 percent of Americans who think Muslims in the US should have to carry special identification. I would ask him myself what he thinks, but we're not talking right now.