the human province

Raymond Tanter from WINEP and MESH has a post up about why the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), the Iranian militants who have committed terrorist attacks against the regime in Teheran and who were hosted by Saddam's Iraq, should be delisted from the State Department's list of terrorist organizations. Besides the fact that the MEK is against the Iranian regime, basically, his argument boils down to the fact that they haven't committed any acts of terrorism for a few years:

On April 25, Patrick Clawson, deputy director of research at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wrote that designation “should be based only on terrorism issues,” and that State “cited no alleged MEK terrorist activity since 2001, yet have increased allegations pertaining [to] the group’s non-terrorist activities.” Country Reports 2007 continues this trend of making allegations that are irrelevant to terrorist designation.

Tanter attempts to argue that MEK doesn't have the capability to carry out terrorist attacks, whereas we all know that anyone with a back pack, a bus pass and household peroxide can commit an act of terrorism. So while this argument isn't very convincing, he tells us, "de-listing would provide diplomatic leverage over Tehran, as the West is presently failing to constrain the Iranian regime’s nuclear program, sponsorship of terrorism, and subversion of Iraq."

In other words, the US should use a terrorist group for political bargaining. Of course this is nothing new: the Bush family has a long history of using Cuban terrorists to apply pressure on the Castro regime. What's striking, though, is the moral indignation Republicans muster when someone supports talking to groups like Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah (most of the violence committed by the last group having been aimed at military targets). Charges of moral equivalency and weak knees in the face of terror are immediately brandished.

Well, Orlando Bosch blew up a passenger plane killing all 73 civilians aboard. Jose Dionisio Suarez and Virgilio Paz Romero assassinated the Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier in Washington. The Mujahedeen-e Khalq assassinated the deputy chief of the Iranian Armed Forces General Staff, Brigadier General Ali Sayyaad Shirazi and attacked Iranian embassies and installations in 13 different countries at the same time. They also bombed the head office of the Islamic Republic Party and the Prime Minister's office killing 70 people, including the Chief Justice, the President and the Prime Minister.

Either terrorism is an acceptable tactic, or it's not. Washington can't understand why the rest of the world sees America as hypocritical, but Tanter's desire for the US to have its cake and eat it too should give us a hunch. 

UPDATE: Thinking more about this today has reminded me of the question of when a group can legitimately be de-listed as a terrorist organization. If the fact that MEK hasn't committed any acts of terrorism since 2001 is really enough to prove that they've mended their ways, then the same ought to apply to Hezbollah as well, because depending on who was responsible for the Argentinean attacks and the kidnapping of Tannenbaum, they haven't committed any acts of terrorism since 2000, the mid-1990s or even the late 1980s.

Otherwise, supporting terrorist groups or rebels or militias in a neighboring country has long been a staple of statecraft. In Africa, Sudan, Chad, Ethiopia, Uganda and Eritrea each support groups in their neighbors' territory. Iran and Syria support Hamas and Hezbollah; Syria supported the PLO in Jordan; while Israel supported the SLA in Lebanon; and Iran trained the Iraqi Badr Brigage to fight against Saddam. Hell, the first car bomb in Iraq wasn't unleashed by Zarqawi, but rather by Iyad Allawi with the help of the CIA. So while I abhor the use of violence against civilians as a political tool, I'm not naive and do know it happens all over. It's the smug hypocrisy of the "War on Terror" that really gets my goat in the same way that the "Fair and Balanced" slogan annoys me way more than the actual Fox News coverage.

McClatchy has an interesting piece on Iranian Brig. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Revolutionary Guard's Quds Force. The story includes an awfully high percentage of anonymous sources, and the title might be a little hyperbolic, but I think the overall points made are fair enough.

Iran has a lot of sway in Iraq, which is normal. What's silly, though, is that Americans see this as some sort of meddling, because Iranian interests in Iraq are not always the same as American interests (although I'd argue that they coincide much more often than either side would like to admit). If Iran were occupying Mexico or Canada, you can be sure that the US would be "meddling" as well.

As for the actual article, I don't really have too much to add, except that it's important to look at Iranian involvement in Iraq not as a spoiler or as some diabolical force. If the US is going to come to terms with Middle Eastern players (of which Iran has become a major one, due in no small part to American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq), Washington is going to have to look at Teheran (and Damascus and Hezbollah and Hamas, for that matter) as actors who have interests in the region that can't be run over roughshod by America.

This is a reality. So just as when one deals with Zimbabwe, it's necessary to take Pretoria into account, or how when dealing with Burma or North Korea one can't ignore Beijing, the road to peace in Iraq must necessarily pass through Teheran, but not in the way that American hawks would like it to.

I spend a lot of time getting annoyed when people throw around the word "genocide" or "holocaust" when it's not warranted. This often means rebuking Lebanese and Palestinian friends who want to call the Israeli occupation a genocide. The occupation is a lot of things, none of them savory, but a genocide it is not, and calling it one cheapens the word.

So you can imagine my surprise when I saw last night that Israel's deputy defense minister, Matan Vilnai, had threatened Palestinians in Gaza with a "shoah":

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A senior Israeli defense official said on Friday that Palestinians firing rockets from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip would bring upon themselves what he termed a "shoah," the Hebrew word for holocaust or disaster.

The word is rarely used in Israel outside discussions of the Nazi Holocaust of Jews. Many Israelis are loath to countenance its use to describe other contemporary events. Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said the Palestinians faced "new Nazis."

Israeli air strikes have killed at least 33 Gazans, including five children, in the past two days. The army, which carried out additional air strikes on Friday, said most of those killed were militants.

I'm no Hebraist, but according to Reuters and common sense, "shoah," like "holocaust" isn't a word that's tossed around lightly in Israel. And whenever there's a comment by someone like Ahmadinejad, quoting Khomeini, saying that "the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time," we get Israel supporters clamoring for the world to denounce the genocidal intent of the Iranian regime. So will these same people condemn Israel's even more explicit language?

Just the other day on the Olin Institute's Middle Eastern Strategy at Harvard blog, Stephen Peter Rosen was making a fuss about a comment that Ahmadinejad made calling Israel a "black and dirty microbe," informing us that this change in discourse could be "associated with biological attacks or other unconventional mass killings." 

So since Rosen says that he's interested in tracking the discourse between Israel and Iran, I can imagine that the Harvard blog will soon have a post up warning of the impending "shoah" to be visited upon the Gazans. After all, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, right?

Of course not. If we look a the comments to Rosen's post, we're given the simple answer by Harvard's specialist on Armenia, James Russell, that "Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah are obviously murderous and crazy." I knew there was a simple answer!

UPDATE: Melanie Phillips at the Spectator is now claiming that "In Hebrew, the word ‘shoah’ is never used to mean ‘holocaust’ or ‘genocide’ because of the acute historical resonance." (Italics hers.) Someone should get Claude Lanzmann on the phone to let him know he's made a terrible mistake.

And for the record, the Israeli daily Ha'aretz has this to say about the remark:

Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai went as far as threatening a "shoah," the Hebrew word for holocaust or disaster. The word is generally used to refer to the Nazi Holocaust, but a spokesman for Vilnai said the deputy defense minister used the word in the sense of "disaster," saying "he did not mean to make any allusion to the genocide."

I get worried whenever someone calls and immediately asks, "Are you ok?" Today was one of those days. Not too far from my house, there was an explosion. Another car bomb, this time in the Dora/Quarantina suburbs just north of Beirut.

What makes this bomb different from the others is that it was presumably aimed at an American embassy vehicle. It seems that today was Ambassador Feltman's last day, and someone was either trying to whack him or to send him a little going away message. In either case, this is an escalation that we really don't need. So for the first time, non-UNIFIL foreigners have been targeted. If my hunch is right, the US Government won't be likely to take this sort of an attack lying down. It wouldn't surprise me if in a few months or so, we see a car bomb or two targeting whomever Washington thinks tried this. Probably Syrians, Iranians or someone from the March 8 opposition.

For my part, I don't want to speculate on who's behind this latest attack, although I will say that I wouldn't rule out any of the al-Qaeda franchises operating in Lebanon.

Whoever is responsible, it's a sad day for those people who were ruthlessly killed today while going about there everyday business.    

UPDATE: This NYT report puts the blast in Bourj Hammoud, which is closer than I thought. Bourj Hammoud is mostly Armenian, the first suburb past my neighborhood, Mar Mkhail. I often go there for cheap shopping: real Converse Allstars that presumably fell off the back of a Chinese boat, for example, can be found for less than 10 euros a pair. Perhaps I'll go see for myself today where, exactly, the bomb was.

Akiva Eldar has a very non-explicit opinion piece in Ha'aretz about the nuclear weapons in the Middle East. I have the feeling that Israeli laws on its "secret" nuclear program prevent him from being more explicit, but he nonetheless poses a question that I've been asking for some time now:

How can a country, which according to endless foreign reports has kept secret for years several atomic weapons, manage to rally the international community in a struggle against a neighboring country that insists on acquiring nuclear energy? What do Israeli politicians answer to those asking why Iran should not be allowed to acquire the same armaments that are already in the arsenals of neighboring countries, like Pakistan and India? The common response is that "Iran is the sole country whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, declares openly that he intends to destroy the state of Israel." This argument is a double-edged sword, par excellence, used by a country that sports a radiant nuclear glow (according to foreign press reports, of course), and who has a senior minister, one assigned to dealing with strategic threats, who has threatened to bomb the Aswan Dam.

Again without being explicit, he calls for a nuclear weapons-free Middle East, but he says that this should be done "when the conflict is resolved," which seems a little too much like waiting for Godot to me. History has shown that countries that get the bomb are very unlikely to give it up (with the exception of South Africa). So if Israel waits until Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Jordan all have the bomb, a nuke-free Middle East will never happen, because while the chances of Israel giving up the bomb seem slim, the chances of getting all those other states to give it up are nil.   

I was watching CNN last night while hanging pictures and folding laundry, when Wolf Blitzer came on. All in all, it was actually fairly interesting. He interviewed El Baradei from the IAEA, Jordan's Queen Rania, the Turkish ambassador to the US, Barbara Boxer and Trent Lott. The last two were on after everyone else to respond to the issues being discussed.

Boxer was pretty well spoken and moderate about everything until she was asked about the Israeli bombing of Syria last month. El Baradei mentioned that neither the US nor Israel had provided the IAEA with any evidence of a Syrian nuclear program. He then rebuked the Israelis for shooting first and asking questions later instead of using the appropriate organization for such issues: the IAEA. So while Lott and Boxer disagreed on pretty much everything from the Armenian genocide bill to the rhetoric being used by the White House about a possible war against Iran, the one thing that they could agree on was that Israel has "the right to defend itself."

It's really uncanny. Neither said that they had been fully briefed on any intelligence concerning the Israeli strike in Syria, but both of them unequivocally supported it without any reservations. It's to be expected from Lott, but Boxer, who spends much of her time chiding the Bush administration for talking about war in Iran and having gone to war in Iraq has nothing critical to say about Israel's act of war.

Democrats seem to believe that politically speaking, they can be harder on the US, the country they're ostensibly representing, than they can be with Israel, a foreign nation. The more stories I hear about Capitol Hill and the more performances like Boxer's that I see, the more I think that there's truth in Buchanan's remark that Congress is Israeli-occupied territory.

The Bush administration has just recently decided to designate a large chunk of a sovereign nation's armed forces as a terrorist organization. The choice doesn't seem to be final and hasn't been put into effect yet, so it might just be saber rattling to pressure the Iranian government, although it's hard to see what effect this would actually have on the Iranian regime, which is already the target of US economic sanctions.

What's interesting about this is that it's the first time the US has decided to label a state actor as a terrorist organization. The current definition contained in Title 18 of the US Code, Section 2331 is as follows:

Section 2331. Definitions

      As used in this chapter - 
        (1) the term "international terrorism" means activities that - 
          (A) involve violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that
        are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of
        any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed
        within the jurisdiction of the United States or of any State;
          (B) appear to be intended - 
            (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
            (ii) to influence the policy of a government by
          intimidation or coercion; or
            (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass
          destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and

          (C) occur primarily outside the territorial jurisdiction of
        the United States, or transcend national boundaries in terms of
        the means by which they are accomplished, the persons they
        appear intended to intimidate or coerce, or the locale in which
        their perpetrators operate or seek asylum;

What is interesting is that this definition, contrary to many others, does not exclude state actors. As such, every time the CIA or IDF kidnaps or assassinates someone, those organizations are committing acts of international terrorism, according to US Code. People like Noam Chomsky have held the US to its definition for a very long time, but until now, there has been a hesitancy about designating any state actors as terrorist organizations, presumably because that opens the US Government, and those of its allies, even more so to charges of terrorism.

If I were part of the Iranian government, I would bring this up and make a similar designation of the US Government. After all, at a time when CIA agents have been indicted by an Italian judge for kidnapping, it's a charge that is difficult to rebut. 

Via Ezra, I found a website that lets you select quotes from presidential candidates that you agree with without telling you who they are until the end. You have to check the boxes of issues that interest you, so I tried it out on foreign policy (general), Iraq War, Iran, Israel and Palestine and finally, Health Care.

Since most of the quotes I chose to respond to were about foreign policy, it's not surprising that I agree the most with Bill Richardson. After him, Mike Gravel (about whom I know next to nothing), Kucinich and Obama were tied for second place. There were six Republican candidates whom I agreed with on one quote, and one Republican (Ron Paul) whom I agreed with more than a Democrat (Biden) by a score of 4 to 3. I'm pretty sure that if I had done the whole test, including the other domestic quotes, that probably would have switched around. Totally absent from the list of people whom I can agree with about a single thing is Guiliani.

Otherwise, it's interesting to me that on the issue of Israel/Palestine, there weren't very many quotes I agreed with by any of the candidates. I clicked to agree with some of the fairer sounding two-state comments, although deep down, I don't believe a two-state solution is viable in the long term. There were exactly zero candidates who came out for cutting funding to Israel or a one-state solution and only one quote, from Gravel, about negotiating with Hamas:

The US must sponsor negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, including Hamas, with the goal of a two-state solution guaranteeing demilitarized borders, Israel's right to survive and raising Palestinians economic standards.

Of those who took the test, more than half (52.8%) agreed with this statement.

The two most popular quotes that I agreed with were by Richardson and Kucinich, at 80% and 72.86% respectively:

Richardson: "In recent years, American foreign policy has been guided more by dogma than by facts, more by ideology than by history, more by wishful thinking than by reality."

Kucinich: "I support normal bilateral trade with Cuba. Farm communities throughout the U.S. are being denied a natural market in Cuba, and Americans are being denied products from Cuba."

Of course it's hard to generalize these percentages, because like me, most people probably only responded to quotes in the areas that are the most important to them, and so I can imagine that issue like abortion, for example, were ranked as the most important by more conservative people.

In any case, it's an interesting exercise nonetheless, and I've been able to work out that while I agree with Richardson more than anyone else about the issues that are the most important to me, I agree enough with Obama to back him instead since Richardson has nearly no chance of winning the primaries. (I hope he will accept being a vice presidential candidate or nomination as secretary of state.)

Lately, we've been hearing an awful lot about the Iranian threat to Israel. Much of this has been couched in alarmist rhetoric that implies (or even sometimes explicitly says) that Iran is the new Nazi Germany. One of the more problematic facts for this narrative is the existence of the Middle East's second largest Jewish community. After Israel, more Jews live in Iran than in any other country in the region.

It seems, however, that Jewish groups are trying to entice Iranian Jews into moving to Israel -- but without much luck, it seems:

Iran's Jews have given the country a loyalty pledge in the face of cash offers aimed at encouraging them to move to Israel, the arch-enemy of its Islamic rulers.

The incentives - ranging from £5,000 a person to £30,000 for families - were offered from a special fund established by wealthy expatriate Jews in an effort to prompt a mass migration to Israel among Iran's 25,000-strong Jewish community. The offers were made with Israel's official blessing and were additional to the usual state packages it provides to Jews emigrating from the diaspora.

However, the Society of Iranian Jews dismissed them as "immature political enticements" and said their national identity was not for sale.

"The identity of Iranian Jews is not tradable for any amount of money," the society said in a statement. "Iranian Jews are among the most ancient Iranians. Iran's Jews love their Iranian identity and their culture, so threats and this immature political enticement will not achieve their aim of wiping out the identity of Iranian Jews."

The Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv reported that the incentives had been doubled after offers of £2,500 a head failed to attract any Iranian Jews to leave for Israel.

Iran's sole Jewish MP, Morris Motamed, said the offers were insulting and put the country's Jews under pressure to prove their loyalty. "It suggests the Iranian Jew can be encouraged to emigrate by money," he said. "Iran's Jews have always been free to emigrate and three-quarters of them did so after the revolution but 70% of those went to America, not Israel."

Similar efforts have been made to attract French Jews, with Sharon's remarks that they should move to Israel because of anti-Semitism in France. That call, however, was met with similar results (translation mine):

Jewish associations in France also announced their indignation and expressed unequivocal disapproval of Ariel Sharon's remarks. Haïm Korsia, the representative of the Grand Rabbi Joseph Sitruk declared that the question of the Jews of France is "a moot point" because, for him, to speak of "the Jews of France doesn't mean anything; there are French citizens who are Jews, like others have another religion." Richard Prasquier, member of the executive office of CRIF (Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France) affirmed that the call to immigration made by Ariel Sharon threw "oil on the fire in an unacceptable way." Patrick Klugman, former president of the Union of Jewish Students of France (UEJF) and vice president of SOS Racism said that the Israeli Prime Minister was "very ill informed of what is happening in France." As for Theo Klein, the vice president of CRIF, he concluded with a message to Ariel Sharon: "He should let the Jewish community in France deal with its own problems." 

As far as efforts to get European Jews to emigrate to Israel, it seems that, if anything, the current trend is in the opposite direction. With 20% of Israelis eligible for an EU passport, more and more are applying for the bordeaux-colored passports. Ironically, the Jewish Agency for Israel has been pressuring the German government to stop making it easy for Jews from the former Soviet Union to settle there. (In 2003, for example, more Russian Jews chose to go to Germany than to Israel.)

The attempt to encourage Diaspora Jews to make aliyah in general is fairly normal and linked, to my mind, to Israeli and Palestinian demographics. The attempts to target Jews in Iran and France in particular, however, might be an attempt to disprove that Muslims and Jews can live together. In addition to having the largest Jewish community in western Europe (600,000), France, after all, also has the largest Muslim community in the region, making up 10% the French population (mostly from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Senegal). And the claims that Iran is equivalent to Nazi Germany seem kind of silly when it has its own 25,000-strong Jewish population that resists emigrating to Israel and which has a Jewish representative in the Iranian Parliament.

In addition to endangering the case for war with Iran, the Jewish Diaspora weakens the argument for the need for a Jewish state in the first place. Because if Jews can live without fear in the US and Europe, or even in Iran, why shouldn't there be a binational state between the Jordan and the Mediterranean where Jews and Arabs can live with equal rights, regardless of race or creed? 

This is probably so obvious that it doesn't need to be said, but then again, if it didn't need to be said the media wouldn't keep committing the petty sin of calling regimes in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt "moderate." What about Riyadh makes it more moderate than Teheran? It's just as religious, human rights are just as bad (if not worse) and it's much less democratic. So why does the western media insist on calling regimes like that moderate?

What they seem to mean is allied regimes, not moderate regimes. There's nothing moderate about Saudi Arabia, so let's stop pretending there is and call a spade a spade. Riyadh is an American ally -- and probably not a very good one at that. As any number of the unsavory regimes the US is friendly with should tell us, moderation and good relations are not at all the same thing.

I mentioned yesterday that arming the Middle East wasn't a good idea. Brian Whitaker has an interesting piece in the Guardian's Comment is Free section about how the new arms deal for the region could pour gas on the Sunni/Shi'a divide in the Middle East, serving as a "green light for oppression" for ostensibly Sunni regimes to discriminate against their Shi'a citizens in the name of combating Iranian influence:

If the Bush administration's goal was to inflame Sunni-Shia tensions across the region and to spread the sectarian strife in Iraq to neighbouring countries, it would be hard to imagine a more effective way of going about it.

Although Iran is the worldwide centre of Shia Islam, there's an important distinction to be made between Shia Muslims and the Iranian regime. The question is how many people will actually make it. Marginalised Shia communities in the Gulf states and Egypt will undoubtedly feel more threatened, while others will interpret the American move as a green light to oppress them further.

[...]

Viewed from Washington, bolstering tyrannical Sunni regimes against Iran might seem like pragmatism - a convergence of interests. But it's a dangerous sort of pragmatism because the American and Saudi interests are ultimately different. The Saudi government isn't really worried about Tehran; it's worried about keeping the lid on its Shia population in the oil-rich eastern province - and in the long term that can only rebound negatively on the US.

Just as there is a need to recognise that Jews in general are not responsible for the actions of the Israeli government, nor ordinary Muslims for the actions of al-Qaida, Arab states must be careful not to automatically treat their Shia communities as tools of the Iranian government, or encourage the public to think that they are.

What the region needs most right now is not more arms but a concerted effort to promote religious tolerance, to combat religious discrimination and prejudice, and to draw the Arab Shia communities into the political processes of their home countries before it is too late.

Incidentally, Iran is not alone in condemning the arms deals. Even Siniora has been quick to complain about the increased military aid to Israel:

"Prime Minister Fouad Saniora has learned with great dismay, surprise and astonishment" about the U.S. defense package to the Jewish state, a statement released by his office said.

"Continuing to back Israel in such a manner will escalate crises and increase feelings among the Arabs and Muslims that their just causes are ignored while Israel's interests are protected," it said.

"This will raise the feeling of frustration among the Arabs and Muslims, and will therefore boost extremist movements which were born and are feeding on the feeling of (U.S.) bias in favor of Israel."

[...]

"We were hoping that the American efforts would rather help promote peace," Saniora said in the statement.

"If these funds were allocated to consolidate peace (in the Middle East) and bridge the gap between the peoples of the region, or spent on peaceful projects then the American message would have been different," he said.

"This is a very negative message to the Lebanese and Arabs.

"It will boost Israel's aggressiveness and arrogance ...it will allow the Israelis to continue to think that they can avoid the requirements of a just and comprehensive peace by maintaining military superiority," he said.

If those funds were allocated to consolidate peace, indeed. Wouldn't that be a nice change of pace?

The US is finally realizing that Saudi Arabia is not helping things in Iraq, while Iraqi officials have openly accused Saudi Arabia of arming Sunni insurgents, the same, mind you, who have been attacking American forces in Iraq. So why, then, is it that the US is "set to offer huge arms deal" to the kingdom and its neighbors? 

Saudi Arabia is the ninth biggest spender on arms. Why do the Saudis need so many weapons? According to Ha'aretz, it could be part of a larger cold war in the Middle East, which also explains Russian arms deals to Iran and Syria, arms deals between Iran and Syria, and the 25% increase in American military aid to Israel agreed upon by Bush and Olmert, meaning an increase to $3 billion a year.

While this very well might be true, we can't forget that arms sales help out American armament companies with government contracts while giving Middle Eastern states the tools needed to oppress their peoples and arm their various proxies in the region. (I'm including Israel in this, although their weapons are used to oppress Palestinians in the occupied territories and not Israeli citizens.) Obviously, the same pattern of armament and oppression that we see in American allies holds true for Russian weapons sent to Damascus and Teheran.

Eli Khoury recently had a piece in the Boston Globe in which he tells Americans everything they want to hear. He makes the following claims:

1. The majority of Lebanese are with March 14 and this challenges "the prevailing myth that Lebanon is a 'divided' country destined to live along sectarian fault lines."

2. "[T]he majority of people from all across Christian, Shia, and Sunni regions support a Lebanon free from the influence of Iran and Syria."

3. "Lebanon stands at a historic crossroads between being integrated into the international community or remaining under the heavy influences of external forces." And to do this, the United States must "support the government in protecting the upcoming presidential elections from foreign intimidators."

4. "History has proven that the people of Lebanon, despite all myths, have managed to create a nation. Now it needs help as it becomes a state."

First point 1: Estimates and eye-witness accounts (including my own) show that there were just as many people, if not more, at the pro-Hezbollah rally back in December that kicked off the sit-in against the government. March 14 can mobilize a lot of people, but then again, so can March 8. This is the very definition of a "divided country." Furthermore, with the exception of the Christians, who are divided between Aoun and Geagea (with the majority aligning themselves with Aoun and Hezbollah), the division is very much sectarian, with the Sunni and Druze on one side and the Shi'a on the other. Moreover, if the country weren't divided, the government could function, and there would be no need for an international tribunal to investigate assassinations in Lebanon.

Point 2: I'm not at all convinced of this. I have seen no concrete evidence to support this, and Khoury offers none. The country seems pretty much evenly divided from here in Beirut, and if there had to be a slant to one side or the other, I'd be inclined to think that March 8 has slightly more support than March 14.

Point 3: It is a typically Lebanese irony that people like Khoury call for independence from "external forces" on one hand while simultaneously seeking intervention by an opposing external force -- Syria/Iran and the US, respectively.

Point 4: This is perhaps the most laughable of Khoury's points. No one is arguing that there isn't a Lebanese state and ought to be one. But to say that history has proven that there is a Lebanese nation? I wonder what history he's thinking of. The history that I'm familiar with (the civil war, recent divisions, sectarian bloodshed in the 19th century) all seems to point to the fact that there are a bunch of nations within Lebanon (or as Charles Glass would say, tribes with flags) but no Lebanese nation. This is the very problem with sectarianism; it strangles true equitable and pluralistic nationalism.

Eli Khoury tries to set himself (and his movement) up as an alternative to sectarianism and the Lebanese status quo, when in reality he's just offering more of the same. The March 14 movement is just as sectarian as is the opposition (if somewhat more prone to make disparaging remarks against the poor and Shi'a). What Lebanon really needs is to find its own way. This means being not only independent of Iran and Syria, but also of the US and France. The confessional system needs to be done away with, and a truly secular state needs to be created. Perhaps if an independent state is created in Lebanon, a Lebanese nation might follow in its footsteps.  

Ezra Klein has a piece calling liberal hawks to task on their rhetoric on Iran. He argues that after getting burned by the obviously bad call to invade Iraq, they're trying to temper their rhetoric on Iran in order to cover their asses in case things go as bad as they did in Mesopotamia:

The new approach is not to refight the battle over the Iraq war, but to argue that those who got it right, or who got it wrong but eventually came to the right answer, are now in danger of overlearning the lessons of the war -- and missing the danger posed by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. An elegant entry into this burgeoning genre comes from Ken Baer in the latest issue of Democracy. "[A] president's past mistakes," writes Baer, "can so preoccupy political leaders that they lose sight of the dangers ahead or the principles they hold dear." In the conclusion of his piece, he warns that progressives must "not use anger at one war as an excuse to blink when confronting a future threat head on."

...The remarkable thing about the growing liberal hawk literature on Iran is its evasiveness -- the unwillingness to speak in concrete terms of both the threat and proposed remedies. The liberal hawks realize they were too eager in counseling war last time, and their explicit statements in support of invasion have caused them no end of trouble since. This time, they will advocate no such thing. But nor will they eschew it. They will simply criticize those who do take a position.

Iran raises several complicated questions, but also a simple one: Do you think military force is called for in preventing Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons?

I've also noticed this. There seems to be a lot of talk from liberal hawks for "getting serious about Iran," whatever that's supposed to mean. At least the right wing hawks explicitly call for bombing Iran, whereas the TNR crowd wants to have its cake and eat it too.

This is a story about a plane that, shortly after taking off, is blown up in the air. Body parts, luggage and even still living passengers plummet to the ground. A man is wrongly accused and his government bullied into paying blood money to the sum of $2.7 billion. The real sponsors of the attack are let off the hook so that the US might invade Iraq in 1991 with Muslim allies.

There is a miscarriage of justice, in which foreign governments manufacture evidence and disregard other possibilities. A Palestinian militant gives an alibi as baby-sitting in Sweden and is not only believed but given immunity for the bombing. There is a Maltese clothing store owner, whose clothes were found in an exploded suitcase in Scotland. Those who speak out against the cover-up are gagged in some cases, indicted as being Iraqi spies in others. An American congressional aid, the daughter of an Alaskan governor, is arrested and injected with mind-altering drugs. Iraq is invaded again.

The truth starts to out, and there is talk of the convicted bomber going free. There is also talk of CIA agents running a heroin smuggling scheme with Hezbollah in order to free American hostages in Lebanon, as well as of a smoldering suitcase full of drugs found somewhere in rural Scotland. Records show that the Iranians paid millions of dollars to a Syrian-backed Palestinian splinter group two days after the bombing and five months after an Iranian civilian carrier was downed by the US and Khomeini vowed that the skies would rain blood and offered $10 million to anyone who would avenge Iran. 

This certainly sounds like a cheap Middle Eastern spy-novel, but it's not. It's Hugh Miles's report on the Lockerbie trial and the seemingly real possibility that the Libyans had nothing to do with it, something that may soon be shown in a Scottish court of law.

If this report is true, then I may have to start giving a little more credence to some of the crazy-sounding conspiracy theories I hear in Lebanon.

Alvaro de Soto, the UN special envoy to the Middle East, recently penned a confidential and very frank end of mission report, which was then leaked to the Guardian. Here is the Guardian's very short summary.

Joshua Landis, for his part, has compiled the parts that deal directly with engaging Syria. Here are some extracts that I found particularly interesting:

4. ...Notwithstanding my strenuous efforts, of which there is plenty of evidence in the DPA cables file, I was never authorized to go to Syria. None of my arguments in favour of going were ever refuted, nor was I given any precise reason for denial of the authorization requested. ...

99. There is an old saying that in the Middle East you can’t make war without Egypt and you can’t make peace without Syria. The first half is no longer valid, but I sense that the second remains true. For the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, keeping Syria at arm’s length is particularly galling. Those who advocate it seem to believe that it is possible to pursue an Israeli-Palestinian track while isolating Damascus....

100. ... I don’t believe they can seriously believe that it is possible to neatly compartmentalize the various fronts and deal with them sequentially, bestowing the favour of attention on well-behaving parties first.

101. In much the same way, does anyone seriously believe that a genuine process between Israel and the Palestinians can progress without Syria being either on board or, at the very least, not opposing it, and without opening some channel for addressing Syria’s grievances? If this should be attempted, we can be sure that a reminder of the Syrian capacity to spoil it wouldn’t be long in arriving.

102. The conventional wisdom is that Israel can’t handle more than one negotiation at a time. As recently as 27 April, in a piece in Haaretz titled “Why Syria must wait”, an Israeli ambassador wrote: “Few would dispute the assertion that the Israeli bridge is incapable of supporting two peace processes, a Syrian and a Palestinian one, at the same time.” I understand the political difficulties involved. But I believe it’s just not possible to completely disaggregate the two, or calmly wait for their turn with the occupier (take a number and have a seat in the waiting room until you are called, please), and that is why the Madrid conference was conceived as it was. This can’t be anything but one more layer of excuses not to negotiate.

These points seem obvious to me. There are those who think that engaging Syria is a waste of time, but one thing they fail to explain is why Damascus should make concessions before negotiating. After all, that's the whole point of negotiating, isn't it? From a purely strategic point of view, why would Syria give up its bargaining chips (meddling in Lebanon and supporting Hezbollah and Hamas) before negotiations have even begun? Would anyone ever ask Israel to give up their occupation of the Golan as a measure of good faith before negotiating with Damascus? Of course not. That's Israel's bargaining chip, and they'd be silly to give it up before making a deal.

This is not to say that I support Syrian meddling in Lebanon; as someone who lives in Beirut and has to put up with it, quite the opposite is true. But I do understand Lebanon's strategic importance to Syria, just as I understand its strategic importance to Palestine, Israel, Iran and the US.

So let's be honest here for a bit. Egypt and Jordan were flukes backed up by US aid money. A real, and just, solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict cannot be piecemeal. There must be a comprehensive peace that includes Palestine, Israel, Syria and Lebanon with the backing of the rest of the Arab states. I've already argued before that it's too late for a two-state solution, so I won't go into that right now, but maybe a two-state solution could be a stopgap for a long-term solution in the form of a single, democratic, secular binational state. But until the time comes when all sides stop stalling and get ready to deal, things are going to be pretty rough in this neck of the woods...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go see for yourself.

Raymond Tanter from WINEP and MESH has a post up about why the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), the Iranian militants who have committed terrorist attacks against the regime in Teheran and who were hosted by Saddam's Iraq, should be delisted from the State Department's list of terrorist organizations. Besides the fact that the MEK is against the Iranian regime, basically, his argument boils down to the fact that they haven't committed any acts of terrorism for a few years:

On April 25, Patrick Clawson, deputy director of research at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wrote that designation “should be based only on terrorism issues,” and that State “cited no alleged MEK terrorist activity since 2001, yet have increased allegations pertaining [to] the group’s non-terrorist activities.” Country Reports 2007 continues this trend of making allegations that are irrelevant to terrorist designation.

Tanter attempts to argue that MEK doesn't have the capability to carry out terrorist attacks, whereas we all know that anyone with a back pack, a bus pass and household peroxide can commit an act of terrorism. So while this argument isn't very convincing, he tells us, "de-listing would provide diplomatic leverage over Tehran, as the West is presently failing to constrain the Iranian regime’s nuclear program, sponsorship of terrorism, and subversion of Iraq."

In other words, the US should use a terrorist group for political bargaining. Of course this is nothing new: the Bush family has a long history of using Cuban terrorists to apply pressure on the Castro regime. What's striking, though, is the moral indignation Republicans muster when someone supports talking to groups like Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah (most of the violence committed by the last group having been aimed at military targets). Charges of moral equivalency and weak knees in the face of terror are immediately brandished.

Well, Orlando Bosch blew up a passenger plane killing all 73 civilians aboard. Jose Dionisio Suarez and Virgilio Paz Romero assassinated the Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier in Washington. The Mujahedeen-e Khalq assassinated the deputy chief of the Iranian Armed Forces General Staff, Brigadier General Ali Sayyaad Shirazi and attacked Iranian embassies and installations in 13 different countries at the same time. They also bombed the head office of the Islamic Republic Party and the Prime Minister's office killing 70 people, including the Chief Justice, the President and the Prime Minister.

Either terrorism is an acceptable tactic, or it's not. Washington can't understand why the rest of the world sees America as hypocritical, but Tanter's desire for the US to have its cake and eat it too should give us a hunch. 

UPDATE: Thinking more about this today has reminded me of the question of when a group can legitimately be de-listed as a terrorist organization. If the fact that MEK hasn't committed any acts of terrorism since 2001 is really enough to prove that they've mended their ways, then the same ought to apply to Hezbollah as well, because depending on who was responsible for the Argentinean attacks and the kidnapping of Tannenbaum, they haven't committed any acts of terrorism since 2000, the mid-1990s or even the late 1980s.

Otherwise, supporting terrorist groups or rebels or militias in a neighboring country has long been a staple of statecraft. In Africa, Sudan, Chad, Ethiopia, Uganda and Eritrea each support groups in their neighbors' territory. Iran and Syria support Hamas and Hezbollah; Syria supported the PLO in Jordan; while Israel supported the SLA in Lebanon; and Iran trained the Iraqi Badr Brigage to fight against Saddam. Hell, the first car bomb in Iraq wasn't unleashed by Zarqawi, but rather by Iyad Allawi with the help of the CIA. So while I abhor the use of violence against civilians as a political tool, I'm not naive and do know it happens all over. It's the smug hypocrisy of the "War on Terror" that really gets my goat in the same way that the "Fair and Balanced" slogan annoys me way more than the actual Fox News coverage.

McClatchy has an interesting piece on Iranian Brig. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Revolutionary Guard's Quds Force. The story includes an awfully high percentage of anonymous sources, and the title might be a little hyperbolic, but I think the overall points made are fair enough.

Iran has a lot of sway in Iraq, which is normal. What's silly, though, is that Americans see this as some sort of meddling, because Iranian interests in Iraq are not always the same as American interests (although I'd argue that they coincide much more often than either side would like to admit). If Iran were occupying Mexico or Canada, you can be sure that the US would be "meddling" as well.

As for the actual article, I don't really have too much to add, except that it's important to look at Iranian involvement in Iraq not as a spoiler or as some diabolical force. If the US is going to come to terms with Middle Eastern players (of which Iran has become a major one, due in no small part to American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq), Washington is going to have to look at Teheran (and Damascus and Hezbollah and Hamas, for that matter) as actors who have interests in the region that can't be run over roughshod by America.

This is a reality. So just as when one deals with Zimbabwe, it's necessary to take Pretoria into account, or how when dealing with Burma or North Korea one can't ignore Beijing, the road to peace in Iraq must necessarily pass through Teheran, but not in the way that American hawks would like it to.

I spend a lot of time getting annoyed when people throw around the word "genocide" or "holocaust" when it's not warranted. This often means rebuking Lebanese and Palestinian friends who want to call the Israeli occupation a genocide. The occupation is a lot of things, none of them savory, but a genocide it is not, and calling it one cheapens the word.

So you can imagine my surprise when I saw last night that Israel's deputy defense minister, Matan Vilnai, had threatened Palestinians in Gaza with a "shoah":

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A senior Israeli defense official said on Friday that Palestinians firing rockets from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip would bring upon themselves what he termed a "shoah," the Hebrew word for holocaust or disaster.

The word is rarely used in Israel outside discussions of the Nazi Holocaust of Jews. Many Israelis are loath to countenance its use to describe other contemporary events. Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said the Palestinians faced "new Nazis."

Israeli air strikes have killed at least 33 Gazans, including five children, in the past two days. The army, which carried out additional air strikes on Friday, said most of those killed were militants.

I'm no Hebraist, but according to Reuters and common sense, "shoah," like "holocaust" isn't a word that's tossed around lightly in Israel. And whenever there's a comment by someone like Ahmadinejad, quoting Khomeini, saying that "the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time," we get Israel supporters clamoring for the world to denounce the genocidal intent of the Iranian regime. So will these same people condemn Israel's even more explicit language?

Just the other day on the Olin Institute's Middle Eastern Strategy at Harvard blog, Stephen Peter Rosen was making a fuss about a comment that Ahmadinejad made calling Israel a "black and dirty microbe," informing us that this change in discourse could be "associated with biological attacks or other unconventional mass killings." 

So since Rosen says that he's interested in tracking the discourse between Israel and Iran, I can imagine that the Harvard blog will soon have a post up warning of the impending "shoah" to be visited upon the Gazans. After all, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, right?

Of course not. If we look a the comments to Rosen's post, we're given the simple answer by Harvard's specialist on Armenia, James Russell, that "Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah are obviously murderous and crazy." I knew there was a simple answer!

UPDATE: Melanie Phillips at the Spectator is now claiming that "In Hebrew, the word ‘shoah’ is never used to mean ‘holocaust’ or ‘genocide’ because of the acute historical resonance." (Italics hers.) Someone should get Claude Lanzmann on the phone to let him know he's made a terrible mistake.

And for the record, the Israeli daily Ha'aretz has this to say about the remark:

Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai went as far as threatening a "shoah," the Hebrew word for holocaust or disaster. The word is generally used to refer to the Nazi Holocaust, but a spokesman for Vilnai said the deputy defense minister used the word in the sense of "disaster," saying "he did not mean to make any allusion to the genocide."

I get worried whenever someone calls and immediately asks, "Are you ok?" Today was one of those days. Not too far from my house, there was an explosion. Another car bomb, this time in the Dora/Quarantina suburbs just north of Beirut.

What makes this bomb different from the others is that it was presumably aimed at an American embassy vehicle. It seems that today was Ambassador Feltman's last day, and someone was either trying to whack him or to send him a little going away message. In either case, this is an escalation that we really don't need. So for the first time, non-UNIFIL foreigners have been targeted. If my hunch is right, the US Government won't be likely to take this sort of an attack lying down. It wouldn't surprise me if in a few months or so, we see a car bomb or two targeting whomever Washington thinks tried this. Probably Syrians, Iranians or someone from the March 8 opposition.

For my part, I don't want to speculate on who's behind this latest attack, although I will say that I wouldn't rule out any of the al-Qaeda franchises operating in Lebanon.

Whoever is responsible, it's a sad day for those people who were ruthlessly killed today while going about there everyday business.    

UPDATE: This NYT report puts the blast in Bourj Hammoud, which is closer than I thought. Bourj Hammoud is mostly Armenian, the first suburb past my neighborhood, Mar Mkhail. I often go there for cheap shopping: real Converse Allstars that presumably fell off the back of a Chinese boat, for example, can be found for less than 10 euros a pair. Perhaps I'll go see for myself today where, exactly, the bomb was.

Akiva Eldar has a very non-explicit opinion piece in Ha'aretz about the nuclear weapons in the Middle East. I have the feeling that Israeli laws on its "secret" nuclear program prevent him from being more explicit, but he nonetheless poses a question that I've been asking for some time now:

How can a country, which according to endless foreign reports has kept secret for years several atomic weapons, manage to rally the international community in a struggle against a neighboring country that insists on acquiring nuclear energy? What do Israeli politicians answer to those asking why Iran should not be allowed to acquire the same armaments that are already in the arsenals of neighboring countries, like Pakistan and India? The common response is that "Iran is the sole country whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, declares openly that he intends to destroy the state of Israel." This argument is a double-edged sword, par excellence, used by a country that sports a radiant nuclear glow (according to foreign press reports, of course), and who has a senior minister, one assigned to dealing with strategic threats, who has threatened to bomb the Aswan Dam.

Again without being explicit, he calls for a nuclear weapons-free Middle East, but he says that this should be done "when the conflict is resolved," which seems a little too much like waiting for Godot to me. History has shown that countries that get the bomb are very unlikely to give it up (with the exception of South Africa). So if Israel waits until Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Jordan all have the bomb, a nuke-free Middle East will never happen, because while the chances of Israel giving up the bomb seem slim, the chances of getting all those other states to give it up are nil.   

I was watching CNN last night while hanging pictures and folding laundry, when Wolf Blitzer came on. All in all, it was actually fairly interesting. He interviewed El Baradei from the IAEA, Jordan's Queen Rania, the Turkish ambassador to the US, Barbara Boxer and Trent Lott. The last two were on after everyone else to respond to the issues being discussed.

Boxer was pretty well spoken and moderate about everything until she was asked about the Israeli bombing of Syria last month. El Baradei mentioned that neither the US nor Israel had provided the IAEA with any evidence of a Syrian nuclear program. He then rebuked the Israelis for shooting first and asking questions later instead of using the appropriate organization for such issues: the IAEA. So while Lott and Boxer disagreed on pretty much everything from the Armenian genocide bill to the rhetoric being used by the White House about a possible war against Iran, the one thing that they could agree on was that Israel has "the right to defend itself."

It's really uncanny. Neither said that they had been fully briefed on any intelligence concerning the Israeli strike in Syria, but both of them unequivocally supported it without any reservations. It's to be expected from Lott, but Boxer, who spends much of her time chiding the Bush administration for talking about war in Iran and having gone to war in Iraq has nothing critical to say about Israel's act of war.

Democrats seem to believe that politically speaking, they can be harder on the US, the country they're ostensibly representing, than they can be with Israel, a foreign nation. The more stories I hear about Capitol Hill and the more performances like Boxer's that I see, the more I think that there's truth in Buchanan's remark that Congress is Israeli-occupied territory.

The Bush administration has just recently decided to designate a large chunk of a sovereign nation's armed forces as a terrorist organization. The choice doesn't seem to be final and hasn't been put into effect yet, so it might just be saber rattling to pressure the Iranian government, although it's hard to see what effect this would actually have on the Iranian regime, which is already the target of US economic sanctions.

What's interesting about this is that it's the first time the US has decided to label a state actor as a terrorist organization. The current definition contained in Title 18 of the US Code, Section 2331 is as follows:

Section 2331. Definitions

      As used in this chapter - 
        (1) the term "international terrorism" means activities that - 
          (A) involve violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that
        are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of
        any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed
        within the jurisdiction of the United States or of any State;
          (B) appear to be intended - 
            (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
            (ii) to influence the policy of a government by
          intimidation or coercion; or
            (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass
          destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and

          (C) occur primarily outside the territorial jurisdiction of
        the United States, or transcend national boundaries in terms of
        the means by which they are accomplished, the persons they
        appear intended to intimidate or coerce, or the locale in which
        their perpetrators operate or seek asylum;

What is interesting is that this definition, contrary to many others, does not exclude state actors. As such, every time the CIA or IDF kidnaps or assassinates someone, those organizations are committing acts of international terrorism, according to US Code. People like Noam Chomsky have held the US to its definition for a very long time, but until now, there has been a hesitancy about designating any state actors as terrorist organizations, presumably because that opens the US Government, and those of its allies, even more so to charges of terrorism.

If I were part of the Iranian government, I would bring this up and make a similar designation of the US Government. After all, at a time when CIA agents have been indicted by an Italian judge for kidnapping, it's a charge that is difficult to rebut. 

Via Ezra, I found a website that lets you select quotes from presidential candidates that you agree with without telling you who they are until the end. You have to check the boxes of issues that interest you, so I tried it out on foreign policy (general), Iraq War, Iran, Israel and Palestine and finally, Health Care.

Since most of the quotes I chose to respond to were about foreign policy, it's not surprising that I agree the most with Bill Richardson. After him, Mike Gravel (about whom I know next to nothing), Kucinich and Obama were tied for second place. There were six Republican candidates whom I agreed with on one quote, and one Republican (Ron Paul) whom I agreed with more than a Democrat (Biden) by a score of 4 to 3. I'm pretty sure that if I had done the whole test, including the other domestic quotes, that probably would have switched around. Totally absent from the list of people whom I can agree with about a single thing is Guiliani.

Otherwise, it's interesting to me that on the issue of Israel/Palestine, there weren't very many quotes I agreed with by any of the candidates. I clicked to agree with some of the fairer sounding two-state comments, although deep down, I don't believe a two-state solution is viable in the long term. There were exactly zero candidates who came out for cutting funding to Israel or a one-state solution and only one quote, from Gravel, about negotiating with Hamas:

The US must sponsor negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, including Hamas, with the goal of a two-state solution guaranteeing demilitarized borders, Israel's right to survive and raising Palestinians economic standards.

Of those who took the test, more than half (52.8%) agreed with this statement.

The two most popular quotes that I agreed with were by Richardson and Kucinich, at 80% and 72.86% respectively:

Richardson: "In recent years, American foreign policy has been guided more by dogma than by facts, more by ideology than by history, more by wishful thinking than by reality."

Kucinich: "I support normal bilateral trade with Cuba. Farm communities throughout the U.S. are being denied a natural market in Cuba, and Americans are being denied products from Cuba."

Of course it's hard to generalize these percentages, because like me, most people probably only responded to quotes in the areas that are the most important to them, and so I can imagine that issue like abortion, for example, were ranked as the most important by more conservative people.

In any case, it's an interesting exercise nonetheless, and I've been able to work out that while I agree with Richardson more than anyone else about the issues that are the most important to me, I agree enough with Obama to back him instead since Richardson has nearly no chance of winning the primaries. (I hope he will accept being a vice presidential candidate or nomination as secretary of state.)

Lately, we've been hearing an awful lot about the Iranian threat to Israel. Much of this has been couched in alarmist rhetoric that implies (or even sometimes explicitly says) that Iran is the new Nazi Germany. One of the more problematic facts for this narrative is the existence of the Middle East's second largest Jewish community. After Israel, more Jews live in Iran than in any other country in the region.

It seems, however, that Jewish groups are trying to entice Iranian Jews into moving to Israel -- but without much luck, it seems:

Iran's Jews have given the country a loyalty pledge in the face of cash offers aimed at encouraging them to move to Israel, the arch-enemy of its Islamic rulers.

The incentives - ranging from £5,000 a person to £30,000 for families - were offered from a special fund established by wealthy expatriate Jews in an effort to prompt a mass migration to Israel among Iran's 25,000-strong Jewish community. The offers were made with Israel's official blessing and were additional to the usual state packages it provides to Jews emigrating from the diaspora.

However, the Society of Iranian Jews dismissed them as "immature political enticements" and said their national identity was not for sale.

"The identity of Iranian Jews is not tradable for any amount of money," the society said in a statement. "Iranian Jews are among the most ancient Iranians. Iran's Jews love their Iranian identity and their culture, so threats and this immature political enticement will not achieve their aim of wiping out the identity of Iranian Jews."

The Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv reported that the incentives had been doubled after offers of £2,500 a head failed to attract any Iranian Jews to leave for Israel.

Iran's sole Jewish MP, Morris Motamed, said the offers were insulting and put the country's Jews under pressure to prove their loyalty. "It suggests the Iranian Jew can be encouraged to emigrate by money," he said. "Iran's Jews have always been free to emigrate and three-quarters of them did so after the revolution but 70% of those went to America, not Israel."

Similar efforts have been made to attract French Jews, with Sharon's remarks that they should move to Israel because of anti-Semitism in France. That call, however, was met with similar results (translation mine):

Jewish associations in France also announced their indignation and expressed unequivocal disapproval of Ariel Sharon's remarks. Haïm Korsia, the representative of the Grand Rabbi Joseph Sitruk declared that the question of the Jews of France is "a moot point" because, for him, to speak of "the Jews of France doesn't mean anything; there are French citizens who are Jews, like others have another religion." Richard Prasquier, member of the executive office of CRIF (Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France) affirmed that the call to immigration made by Ariel Sharon threw "oil on the fire in an unacceptable way." Patrick Klugman, former president of the Union of Jewish Students of France (UEJF) and vice president of SOS Racism said that the Israeli Prime Minister was "very ill informed of what is happening in France." As for Theo Klein, the vice president of CRIF, he concluded with a message to Ariel Sharon: "He should let the Jewish community in France deal with its own problems." 

As far as efforts to get European Jews to emigrate to Israel, it seems that, if anything, the current trend is in the opposite direction. With 20% of Israelis eligible for an EU passport, more and more are applying for the bordeaux-colored passports. Ironically, the Jewish Agency for Israel has been pressuring the German government to stop making it easy for Jews from the former Soviet Union to settle there. (In 2003, for example, more Russian Jews chose to go to Germany than to Israel.)

The attempt to encourage Diaspora Jews to make aliyah in general is fairly normal and linked, to my mind, to Israeli and Palestinian demographics. The attempts to target Jews in Iran and France in particular, however, might be an attempt to disprove that Muslims and Jews can live together. In addition to having the largest Jewish community in western Europe (600,000), France, after all, also has the largest Muslim community in the region, making up 10% the French population (mostly from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Senegal). And the claims that Iran is equivalent to Nazi Germany seem kind of silly when it has its own 25,000-strong Jewish population that resists emigrating to Israel and which has a Jewish representative in the Iranian Parliament.

In addition to endangering the case for war with Iran, the Jewish Diaspora weakens the argument for the need for a Jewish state in the first place. Because if Jews can live without fear in the US and Europe, or even in Iran, why shouldn't there be a binational state between the Jordan and the Mediterranean where Jews and Arabs can live with equal rights, regardless of race or creed? 

This is probably so obvious that it doesn't need to be said, but then again, if it didn't need to be said the media wouldn't keep committing the petty sin of calling regimes in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt "moderate." What about Riyadh makes it more moderate than Teheran? It's just as religious, human rights are just as bad (if not worse) and it's much less democratic. So why does the western media insist on calling regimes like that moderate?

What they seem to mean is allied regimes, not moderate regimes. There's nothing moderate about Saudi Arabia, so let's stop pretending there is and call a spade a spade. Riyadh is an American ally -- and probably not a very good one at that. As any number of the unsavory regimes the US is friendly with should tell us, moderation and good relations are not at all the same thing.

I mentioned yesterday that arming the Middle East wasn't a good idea. Brian Whitaker has an interesting piece in the Guardian's Comment is Free section about how the new arms deal for the region could pour gas on the Sunni/Shi'a divide in the Middle East, serving as a "green light for oppression" for ostensibly Sunni regimes to discriminate against their Shi'a citizens in the name of combating Iranian influence:

If the Bush administration's goal was to inflame Sunni-Shia tensions across the region and to spread the sectarian strife in Iraq to neighbouring countries, it would be hard to imagine a more effective way of going about it.

Although Iran is the worldwide centre of Shia Islam, there's an important distinction to be made between Shia Muslims and the Iranian regime. The question is how many people will actually make it. Marginalised Shia communities in the Gulf states and Egypt will undoubtedly feel more threatened, while others will interpret the American move as a green light to oppress them further.

[...]

Viewed from Washington, bolstering tyrannical Sunni regimes against Iran might seem like pragmatism - a convergence of interests. But it's a dangerous sort of pragmatism because the American and Saudi interests are ultimately different. The Saudi government isn't really worried about Tehran; it's worried about keeping the lid on its Shia population in the oil-rich eastern province - and in the long term that can only rebound negatively on the US.

Just as there is a need to recognise that Jews in general are not responsible for the actions of the Israeli government, nor ordinary Muslims for the actions of al-Qaida, Arab states must be careful not to automatically treat their Shia communities as tools of the Iranian government, or encourage the public to think that they are.

What the region needs most right now is not more arms but a concerted effort to promote religious tolerance, to combat religious discrimination and prejudice, and to draw the Arab Shia communities into the political processes of their home countries before it is too late.

Incidentally, Iran is not alone in condemning the arms deals. Even Siniora has been quick to complain about the increased military aid to Israel:

"Prime Minister Fouad Saniora has learned with great dismay, surprise and astonishment" about the U.S. defense package to the Jewish state, a statement released by his office said.

"Continuing to back Israel in such a manner will escalate crises and increase feelings among the Arabs and Muslims that their just causes are ignored while Israel's interests are protected," it said.

"This will raise the feeling of frustration among the Arabs and Muslims, and will therefore boost extremist movements which were born and are feeding on the feeling of (U.S.) bias in favor of Israel."

[...]

"We were hoping that the American efforts would rather help promote peace," Saniora said in the statement.

"If these funds were allocated to consolidate peace (in the Middle East) and bridge the gap between the peoples of the region, or spent on peaceful projects then the American message would have been different," he said.

"This is a very negative message to the Lebanese and Arabs.

"It will boost Israel's aggressiveness and arrogance ...it will allow the Israelis to continue to think that they can avoid the requirements of a just and comprehensive peace by maintaining military superiority," he said.

If those funds were allocated to consolidate peace, indeed. Wouldn't that be a nice change of pace?

The US is finally realizing that Saudi Arabia is not helping things in Iraq, while Iraqi officials have openly accused Saudi Arabia of arming Sunni insurgents, the same, mind you, who have been attacking American forces in Iraq. So why, then, is it that the US is "set to offer huge arms deal" to the kingdom and its neighbors? 

Saudi Arabia is the ninth biggest spender on arms. Why do the Saudis need so many weapons? According to Ha'aretz, it could be part of a larger cold war in the Middle East, which also explains Russian arms deals to Iran and Syria, arms deals between Iran and Syria, and the 25% increase in American military aid to Israel agreed upon by Bush and Olmert, meaning an increase to $3 billion a year.

While this very well might be true, we can't forget that arms sales help out American armament companies with government contracts while giving Middle Eastern states the tools needed to oppress their peoples and arm their various proxies in the region. (I'm including Israel in this, although their weapons are used to oppress Palestinians in the occupied territories and not Israeli citizens.) Obviously, the same pattern of armament and oppression that we see in American allies holds true for Russian weapons sent to Damascus and Teheran.

Eli Khoury recently had a piece in the Boston Globe in which he tells Americans everything they want to hear. He makes the following claims:

1. The majority of Lebanese are with March 14 and this challenges "the prevailing myth that Lebanon is a 'divided' country destined to live along sectarian fault lines."

2. "[T]he majority of people from all across Christian, Shia, and Sunni regions support a Lebanon free from the influence of Iran and Syria."

3. "Lebanon stands at a historic crossroads between being integrated into the international community or remaining under the heavy influences of external forces." And to do this, the United States must "support the government in protecting the upcoming presidential elections from foreign intimidators."

4. "History has proven that the people of Lebanon, despite all myths, have managed to create a nation. Now it needs help as it becomes a state."

First point 1: Estimates and eye-witness accounts (including my own) show that there were just as many people, if not more, at the pro-Hezbollah rally back in December that kicked off the sit-in against the government. March 14 can mobilize a lot of people, but then again, so can March 8. This is the very definition of a "divided country." Furthermore, with the exception of the Christians, who are divided between Aoun and Geagea (with the majority aligning themselves with Aoun and Hezbollah), the division is very much sectarian, with the Sunni and Druze on one side and the Shi'a on the other. Moreover, if the country weren't divided, the government could function, and there would be no need for an international tribunal to investigate assassinations in Lebanon.

Point 2: I'm not at all convinced of this. I have seen no concrete evidence to support this, and Khoury offers none. The country seems pretty much evenly divided from here in Beirut, and if there had to be a slant to one side or the other, I'd be inclined to think that March 8 has slightly more support than March 14.

Point 3: It is a typically Lebanese irony that people like Khoury call for independence from "external forces" on one hand while simultaneously seeking intervention by an opposing external force -- Syria/Iran and the US, respectively.

Point 4: This is perhaps the most laughable of Khoury's points. No one is arguing that there isn't a Lebanese state and ought to be one. But to say that history has proven that there is a Lebanese nation? I wonder what history he's thinking of. The history that I'm familiar with (the civil war, recent divisions, sectarian bloodshed in the 19th century) all seems to point to the fact that there are a bunch of nations within Lebanon (or as Charles Glass would say, tribes with flags) but no Lebanese nation. This is the very problem with sectarianism; it strangles true equitable and pluralistic nationalism.

Eli Khoury tries to set himself (and his movement) up as an alternative to sectarianism and the Lebanese status quo, when in reality he's just offering more of the same. The March 14 movement is just as sectarian as is the opposition (if somewhat more prone to make disparaging remarks against the poor and Shi'a). What Lebanon really needs is to find its own way. This means being not only independent of Iran and Syria, but also of the US and France. The confessional system needs to be done away with, and a truly secular state needs to be created. Perhaps if an independent state is created in Lebanon, a Lebanese nation might follow in its footsteps.  

Ezra Klein has a piece calling liberal hawks to task on their rhetoric on Iran. He argues that after getting burned by the obviously bad call to invade Iraq, they're trying to temper their rhetoric on Iran in order to cover their asses in case things go as bad as they did in Mesopotamia:

The new approach is not to refight the battle over the Iraq war, but to argue that those who got it right, or who got it wrong but eventually came to the right answer, are now in danger of overlearning the lessons of the war -- and missing the danger posed by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. An elegant entry into this burgeoning genre comes from Ken Baer in the latest issue of Democracy. "[A] president's past mistakes," writes Baer, "can so preoccupy political leaders that they lose sight of the dangers ahead or the principles they hold dear." In the conclusion of his piece, he warns that progressives must "not use anger at one war as an excuse to blink when confronting a future threat head on."

...The remarkable thing about the growing liberal hawk literature on Iran is its evasiveness -- the unwillingness to speak in concrete terms of both the threat and proposed remedies. The liberal hawks realize they were too eager in counseling war last time, and their explicit statements in support of invasion have caused them no end of trouble since. This time, they will advocate no such thing. But nor will they eschew it. They will simply criticize those who do take a position.

Iran raises several complicated questions, but also a simple one: Do you think military force is called for in preventing Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons?

I've also noticed this. There seems to be a lot of talk from liberal hawks for "getting serious about Iran," whatever that's supposed to mean. At least the right wing hawks explicitly call for bombing Iran, whereas the TNR crowd wants to have its cake and eat it too.

This is a story about a plane that, shortly after taking off, is blown up in the air. Body parts, luggage and even still living passengers plummet to the ground. A man is wrongly accused and his government bullied into paying blood money to the sum of $2.7 billion. The real sponsors of the attack are let off the hook so that the US might invade Iraq in 1991 with Muslim allies.

There is a miscarriage of justice, in which foreign governments manufacture evidence and disregard other possibilities. A Palestinian militant gives an alibi as baby-sitting in Sweden and is not only believed but given immunity for the bombing. There is a Maltese clothing store owner, whose clothes were found in an exploded suitcase in Scotland. Those who speak out against the cover-up are gagged in some cases, indicted as being Iraqi spies in others. An American congressional aid, the daughter of an Alaskan governor, is arrested and injected with mind-altering drugs. Iraq is invaded again.

The truth starts to out, and there is talk of the convicted bomber going free. There is also talk of CIA agents running a heroin smuggling scheme with Hezbollah in order to free American hostages in Lebanon, as well as of a smoldering suitcase full of drugs found somewhere in rural Scotland. Records show that the Iranians paid millions of dollars to a Syrian-backed Palestinian splinter group two days after the bombing and five months after an Iranian civilian carrier was downed by the US and Khomeini vowed that the skies would rain blood and offered $10 million to anyone who would avenge Iran. 

This certainly sounds like a cheap Middle Eastern spy-novel, but it's not. It's Hugh Miles's report on the Lockerbie trial and the seemingly real possibility that the Libyans had nothing to do with it, something that may soon be shown in a Scottish court of law.

If this report is true, then I may have to start giving a little more credence to some of the crazy-sounding conspiracy theories I hear in Lebanon.

Alvaro de Soto, the UN special envoy to the Middle East, recently penned a confidential and very frank end of mission report, which was then leaked to the Guardian. Here is the Guardian's very short summary.

Joshua Landis, for his part, has compiled the parts that deal directly with engaging Syria. Here are some extracts that I found particularly interesting:

4. ...Notwithstanding my strenuous efforts, of which there is plenty of evidence in the DPA cables file, I was never authorized to go to Syria. None of my arguments in favour of going were ever refuted, nor was I given any precise reason for denial of the authorization requested. ...

99. There is an old saying that in the Middle East you can’t make war without Egypt and you can’t make peace without Syria. The first half is no longer valid, but I sense that the second remains true. For the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, keeping Syria at arm’s length is particularly galling. Those who advocate it seem to believe that it is possible to pursue an Israeli-Palestinian track while isolating Damascus....

100. ... I don’t believe they can seriously believe that it is possible to neatly compartmentalize the various fronts and deal with them sequentially, bestowing the favour of attention on well-behaving parties first.

101. In much the same way, does anyone seriously believe that a genuine process between Israel and the Palestinians can progress without Syria being either on board or, at the very least, not opposing it, and without opening some channel for addressing Syria’s grievances? If this should be attempted, we can be sure that a reminder of the Syrian capacity to spoil it wouldn’t be long in arriving.

102. The conventional wisdom is that Israel can’t handle more than one negotiation at a time. As recently as 27 April, in a piece in Haaretz titled “Why Syria must wait”, an Israeli ambassador wrote: “Few would dispute the assertion that the Israeli bridge is incapable of supporting two peace processes, a Syrian and a Palestinian one, at the same time.” I understand the political difficulties involved. But I believe it’s just not possible to completely disaggregate the two, or calmly wait for their turn with the occupier (take a number and have a seat in the waiting room until you are called, please), and that is why the Madrid conference was conceived as it was. This can’t be anything but one more layer of excuses not to negotiate.

These points seem obvious to me. There are those who think that engaging Syria is a waste of time, but one thing they fail to explain is why Damascus should make concessions before negotiating. After all, that's the whole point of negotiating, isn't it? From a purely strategic point of view, why would Syria give up its bargaining chips (meddling in Lebanon and supporting Hezbollah and Hamas) before negotiations have even begun? Would anyone ever ask Israel to give up their occupation of the Golan as a measure of good faith before negotiating with Damascus? Of course not. That's Israel's bargaining chip, and they'd be silly to give it up before making a deal.

This is not to say that I support Syrian meddling in Lebanon; as someone who lives in Beirut and has to put up with it, quite the opposite is true. But I do understand Lebanon's strategic importance to Syria, just as I understand its strategic importance to Palestine, Israel, Iran and the US.

So let's be honest here for a bit. Egypt and Jordan were flukes backed up by US aid money. A real, and just, solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict cannot be piecemeal. There must be a comprehensive peace that includes Palestine, Israel, Syria and Lebanon with the backing of the rest of the Arab states. I've already argued before that it's too late for a two-state solution, so I won't go into that right now, but maybe a two-state solution could be a stopgap for a long-term solution in the form of a single, democratic, secular binational state. But until the time comes when all sides stop stalling and get ready to deal, things are going to be pretty rough in this neck of the woods...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go see for yourself.

Raymond Tanter from WINEP and MESH has a post up about why the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), the Iranian militants who have committed terrorist attacks against the regime in Teheran and who were hosted by Saddam's Iraq, should be delisted from the State Department's list of terrorist organizations. Besides the fact that the MEK is against the Iranian regime, basically, his argument boils down to the fact that they haven't committed any acts of terrorism for a few years:

On April 25, Patrick Clawson, deputy director of research at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wrote that designation “should be based only on terrorism issues,” and that State “cited no alleged MEK terrorist activity since 2001, yet have increased allegations pertaining [to] the group’s non-terrorist activities.” Country Reports 2007 continues this trend of making allegations that are irrelevant to terrorist designation.

Tanter attempts to argue that MEK doesn't have the capability to carry out terrorist attacks, whereas we all know that anyone with a back pack, a bus pass and household peroxide can commit an act of terrorism. So while this argument isn't very convincing, he tells us, "de-listing would provide diplomatic leverage over Tehran, as the West is presently failing to constrain the Iranian regime’s nuclear program, sponsorship of terrorism, and subversion of Iraq."

In other words, the US should use a terrorist group for political bargaining. Of course this is nothing new: the Bush family has a long history of using Cuban terrorists to apply pressure on the Castro regime. What's striking, though, is the moral indignation Republicans muster when someone supports talking to groups like Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah (most of the violence committed by the last group having been aimed at military targets). Charges of moral equivalency and weak knees in the face of terror are immediately brandished.

Well, Orlando Bosch blew up a passenger plane killing all 73 civilians aboard. Jose Dionisio Suarez and Virgilio Paz Romero assassinated the Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier in Washington. The Mujahedeen-e Khalq assassinated the deputy chief of the Iranian Armed Forces General Staff, Brigadier General Ali Sayyaad Shirazi and attacked Iranian embassies and installations in 13 different countries at the same time. They also bombed the head office of the Islamic Republic Party and the Prime Minister's office killing 70 people, including the Chief Justice, the President and the Prime Minister.

Either terrorism is an acceptable tactic, or it's not. Washington can't understand why the rest of the world sees America as hypocritical, but Tanter's desire for the US to have its cake and eat it too should give us a hunch. 

UPDATE: Thinking more about this today has reminded me of the question of when a group can legitimately be de-listed as a terrorist organization. If the fact that MEK hasn't committed any acts of terrorism since 2001 is really enough to prove that they've mended their ways, then the same ought to apply to Hezbollah as well, because depending on who was responsible for the Argentinean attacks and the kidnapping of Tannenbaum, they haven't committed any acts of terrorism since 2000, the mid-1990s or even the late 1980s.

Otherwise, supporting terrorist groups or rebels or militias in a neighboring country has long been a staple of statecraft. In Africa, Sudan, Chad, Ethiopia, Uganda and Eritrea each support groups in their neighbors' territory. Iran and Syria support Hamas and Hezbollah; Syria supported the PLO in Jordan; while Israel supported the SLA in Lebanon; and Iran trained the Iraqi Badr Brigage to fight against Saddam. Hell, the first car bomb in Iraq wasn't unleashed by Zarqawi, but rather by Iyad Allawi with the help of the CIA. So while I abhor the use of violence against civilians as a political tool, I'm not naive and do know it happens all over. It's the smug hypocrisy of the "War on Terror" that really gets my goat in the same way that the "Fair and Balanced" slogan annoys me way more than the actual Fox News coverage.

McClatchy has an interesting piece on Iranian Brig. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Revolutionary Guard's Quds Force. The story includes an awfully high percentage of anonymous sources, and the title might be a little hyperbolic, but I think the overall points made are fair enough.

Iran has a lot of sway in Iraq, which is normal. What's silly, though, is that Americans see this as some sort of meddling, because Iranian interests in Iraq are not always the same as American interests (although I'd argue that they coincide much more often than either side would like to admit). If Iran were occupying Mexico or Canada, you can be sure that the US would be "meddling" as well.

As for the actual article, I don't really have too much to add, except that it's important to look at Iranian involvement in Iraq not as a spoiler or as some diabolical force. If the US is going to come to terms with Middle Eastern players (of which Iran has become a major one, due in no small part to American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq), Washington is going to have to look at Teheran (and Damascus and Hezbollah and Hamas, for that matter) as actors who have interests in the region that can't be run over roughshod by America.

This is a reality. So just as when one deals with Zimbabwe, it's necessary to take Pretoria into account, or how when dealing with Burma or North Korea one can't ignore Beijing, the road to peace in Iraq must necessarily pass through Teheran, but not in the way that American hawks would like it to.

I spend a lot of time getting annoyed when people throw around the word "genocide" or "holocaust" when it's not warranted. This often means rebuking Lebanese and Palestinian friends who want to call the Israeli occupation a genocide. The occupation is a lot of things, none of them savory, but a genocide it is not, and calling it one cheapens the word.

So you can imagine my surprise when I saw last night that Israel's deputy defense minister, Matan Vilnai, had threatened Palestinians in Gaza with a "shoah":

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A senior Israeli defense official said on Friday that Palestinians firing rockets from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip would bring upon themselves what he termed a "shoah," the Hebrew word for holocaust or disaster.

The word is rarely used in Israel outside discussions of the Nazi Holocaust of Jews. Many Israelis are loath to countenance its use to describe other contemporary events. Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said the Palestinians faced "new Nazis."

Israeli air strikes have killed at least 33 Gazans, including five children, in the past two days. The army, which carried out additional air strikes on Friday, said most of those killed were militants.

I'm no Hebraist, but according to Reuters and common sense, "shoah," like "holocaust" isn't a word that's tossed around lightly in Israel. And whenever there's a comment by someone like Ahmadinejad, quoting Khomeini, saying that "the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time," we get Israel supporters clamoring for the world to denounce the genocidal intent of the Iranian regime. So will these same people condemn Israel's even more explicit language?

Just the other day on the Olin Institute's Middle Eastern Strategy at Harvard blog, Stephen Peter Rosen was making a fuss about a comment that Ahmadinejad made calling Israel a "black and dirty microbe," informing us that this change in discourse could be "associated with biological attacks or other unconventional mass killings." 

So since Rosen says that he's interested in tracking the discourse between Israel and Iran, I can imagine that the Harvard blog will soon have a post up warning of the impending "shoah" to be visited upon the Gazans. After all, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, right?

Of course not. If we look a the comments to Rosen's post, we're given the simple answer by Harvard's specialist on Armenia, James Russell, that "Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah are obviously murderous and crazy." I knew there was a simple answer!

UPDATE: Melanie Phillips at the Spectator is now claiming that "In Hebrew, the word ‘shoah’ is never used to mean ‘holocaust’ or ‘genocide’ because of the acute historical resonance." (Italics hers.) Someone should get Claude Lanzmann on the phone to let him know he's made a terrible mistake.

And for the record, the Israeli daily Ha'aretz has this to say about the remark:

Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai went as far as threatening a "shoah," the Hebrew word for holocaust or disaster. The word is generally used to refer to the Nazi Holocaust, but a spokesman for Vilnai said the deputy defense minister used the word in the sense of "disaster," saying "he did not mean to make any allusion to the genocide."

I get worried whenever someone calls and immediately asks, "Are you ok?" Today was one of those days. Not too far from my house, there was an explosion. Another car bomb, this time in the Dora/Quarantina suburbs just north of Beirut.

What makes this bomb different from the others is that it was presumably aimed at an American embassy vehicle. It seems that today was Ambassador Feltman's last day, and someone was either trying to whack him or to send him a little going away message. In either case, this is an escalation that we really don't need. So for the first time, non-UNIFIL foreigners have been targeted. If my hunch is right, the US Government won't be likely to take this sort of an attack lying down. It wouldn't surprise me if in a few months or so, we see a car bomb or two targeting whomever Washington thinks tried this. Probably Syrians, Iranians or someone from the March 8 opposition.

For my part, I don't want to speculate on who's behind this latest attack, although I will say that I wouldn't rule out any of the al-Qaeda franchises operating in Lebanon.

Whoever is responsible, it's a sad day for those people who were ruthlessly killed today while going about there everyday business.    

UPDATE: This NYT report puts the blast in Bourj Hammoud, which is closer than I thought. Bourj Hammoud is mostly Armenian, the first suburb past my neighborhood, Mar Mkhail. I often go there for cheap shopping: real Converse Allstars that presumably fell off the back of a Chinese boat, for example, can be found for less than 10 euros a pair. Perhaps I'll go see for myself today where, exactly, the bomb was.

Akiva Eldar has a very non-explicit opinion piece in Ha'aretz about the nuclear weapons in the Middle East. I have the feeling that Israeli laws on its "secret" nuclear program prevent him from being more explicit, but he nonetheless poses a question that I've been asking for some time now:

How can a country, which according to endless foreign reports has kept secret for years several atomic weapons, manage to rally the international community in a struggle against a neighboring country that insists on acquiring nuclear energy? What do Israeli politicians answer to those asking why Iran should not be allowed to acquire the same armaments that are already in the arsenals of neighboring countries, like Pakistan and India? The common response is that "Iran is the sole country whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, declares openly that he intends to destroy the state of Israel." This argument is a double-edged sword, par excellence, used by a country that sports a radiant nuclear glow (according to foreign press reports, of course), and who has a senior minister, one assigned to dealing with strategic threats, who has threatened to bomb the Aswan Dam.

Again without being explicit, he calls for a nuclear weapons-free Middle East, but he says that this should be done "when the conflict is resolved," which seems a little too much like waiting for Godot to me. History has shown that countries that get the bomb are very unlikely to give it up (with the exception of South Africa). So if Israel waits until Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Jordan all have the bomb, a nuke-free Middle East will never happen, because while the chances of Israel giving up the bomb seem slim, the chances of getting all those other states to give it up are nil.   

I was watching CNN last night while hanging pictures and folding laundry, when Wolf Blitzer came on. All in all, it was actually fairly interesting. He interviewed El Baradei from the IAEA, Jordan's Queen Rania, the Turkish ambassador to the US, Barbara Boxer and Trent Lott. The last two were on after everyone else to respond to the issues being discussed.

Boxer was pretty well spoken and moderate about everything until she was asked about the Israeli bombing of Syria last month. El Baradei mentioned that neither the US nor Israel had provided the IAEA with any evidence of a Syrian nuclear program. He then rebuked the Israelis for shooting first and asking questions later instead of using the appropriate organization for such issues: the IAEA. So while Lott and Boxer disagreed on pretty much everything from the Armenian genocide bill to the rhetoric being used by the White House about a possible war against Iran, the one thing that they could agree on was that Israel has "the right to defend itself."

It's really uncanny. Neither said that they had been fully briefed on any intelligence concerning the Israeli strike in Syria, but both of them unequivocally supported it without any reservations. It's to be expected from Lott, but Boxer, who spends much of her time chiding the Bush administration for talking about war in Iran and having gone to war in Iraq has nothing critical to say about Israel's act of war.

Democrats seem to believe that politically speaking, they can be harder on the US, the country they're ostensibly representing, than they can be with Israel, a foreign nation. The more stories I hear about Capitol Hill and the more performances like Boxer's that I see, the more I think that there's truth in Buchanan's remark that Congress is Israeli-occupied territory.

The Bush administration has just recently decided to designate a large chunk of a sovereign nation's armed forces as a terrorist organization. The choice doesn't seem to be final and hasn't been put into effect yet, so it might just be saber rattling to pressure the Iranian government, although it's hard to see what effect this would actually have on the Iranian regime, which is already the target of US economic sanctions.

What's interesting about this is that it's the first time the US has decided to label a state actor as a terrorist organization. The current definition contained in Title 18 of the US Code, Section 2331 is as follows:

Section 2331. Definitions

      As used in this chapter - 
        (1) the term "international terrorism" means activities that - 
          (A) involve violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that
        are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of
        any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed
        within the jurisdiction of the United States or of any State;
          (B) appear to be intended - 
            (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
            (ii) to influence the policy of a government by
          intimidation or coercion; or
            (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass
          destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and

          (C) occur primarily outside the territorial jurisdiction of
        the United States, or transcend national boundaries in terms of
        the means by which they are accomplished, the persons they
        appear intended to intimidate or coerce, or the locale in which
        their perpetrators operate or seek asylum;

What is interesting is that this definition, contrary to many others, does not exclude state actors. As such, every time the CIA or IDF kidnaps or assassinates someone, those organizations are committing acts of international terrorism, according to US Code. People like Noam Chomsky have held the US to its definition for a very long time, but until now, there has been a hesitancy about designating any state actors as terrorist organizations, presumably because that opens the US Government, and those of its allies, even more so to charges of terrorism.

If I were part of the Iranian government, I would bring this up and make a similar designation of the US Government. After all, at a time when CIA agents have been indicted by an Italian judge for kidnapping, it's a charge that is difficult to rebut. 

Via Ezra, I found a website that lets you select quotes from presidential candidates that you agree with without telling you who they are until the end. You have to check the boxes of issues that interest you, so I tried it out on foreign policy (general), Iraq War, Iran, Israel and Palestine and finally, Health Care.

Since most of the quotes I chose to respond to were about foreign policy, it's not surprising that I agree the most with Bill Richardson. After him, Mike Gravel (about whom I know next to nothing), Kucinich and Obama were tied for second place. There were six Republican candidates whom I agreed with on one quote, and one Republican (Ron Paul) whom I agreed with more than a Democrat (Biden) by a score of 4 to 3. I'm pretty sure that if I had done the whole test, including the other domestic quotes, that probably would have switched around. Totally absent from the list of people whom I can agree with about a single thing is Guiliani.

Otherwise, it's interesting to me that on the issue of Israel/Palestine, there weren't very many quotes I agreed with by any of the candidates. I clicked to agree with some of the fairer sounding two-state comments, although deep down, I don't believe a two-state solution is viable in the long term. There were exactly zero candidates who came out for cutting funding to Israel or a one-state solution and only one quote, from Gravel, about negotiating with Hamas:

The US must sponsor negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, including Hamas, with the goal of a two-state solution guaranteeing demilitarized borders, Israel's right to survive and raising Palestinians economic standards.

Of those who took the test, more than half (52.8%) agreed with this statement.

The two most popular quotes that I agreed with were by Richardson and Kucinich, at 80% and 72.86% respectively:

Richardson: "In recent years, American foreign policy has been guided more by dogma than by facts, more by ideology than by history, more by wishful thinking than by reality."

Kucinich: "I support normal bilateral trade with Cuba. Farm communities throughout the U.S. are being denied a natural market in Cuba, and Americans are being denied products from Cuba."

Of course it's hard to generalize these percentages, because like me, most people probably only responded to quotes in the areas that are the most important to them, and so I can imagine that issue like abortion, for example, were ranked as the most important by more conservative people.

In any case, it's an interesting exercise nonetheless, and I've been able to work out that while I agree with Richardson more than anyone else about the issues that are the most important to me, I agree enough with Obama to back him instead since Richardson has nearly no chance of winning the primaries. (I hope he will accept being a vice presidential candidate or nomination as secretary of state.)

Lately, we've been hearing an awful lot about the Iranian threat to Israel. Much of this has been couched in alarmist rhetoric that implies (or even sometimes explicitly says) that Iran is the new Nazi Germany. One of the more problematic facts for this narrative is the existence of the Middle East's second largest Jewish community. After Israel, more Jews live in Iran than in any other country in the region.

It seems, however, that Jewish groups are trying to entice Iranian Jews into moving to Israel -- but without much luck, it seems:

Iran's Jews have given the country a loyalty pledge in the face of cash offers aimed at encouraging them to move to Israel, the arch-enemy of its Islamic rulers.

The incentives - ranging from £5,000 a person to £30,000 for families - were offered from a special fund established by wealthy expatriate Jews in an effort to prompt a mass migration to Israel among Iran's 25,000-strong Jewish community. The offers were made with Israel's official blessing and were additional to the usual state packages it provides to Jews emigrating from the diaspora.

However, the Society of Iranian Jews dismissed them as "immature political enticements" and said their national identity was not for sale.

"The identity of Iranian Jews is not tradable for any amount of money," the society said in a statement. "Iranian Jews are among the most ancient Iranians. Iran's Jews love their Iranian identity and their culture, so threats and this immature political enticement will not achieve their aim of wiping out the identity of Iranian Jews."

The Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv reported that the incentives had been doubled after offers of £2,500 a head failed to attract any Iranian Jews to leave for Israel.

Iran's sole Jewish MP, Morris Motamed, said the offers were insulting and put the country's Jews under pressure to prove their loyalty. "It suggests the Iranian Jew can be encouraged to emigrate by money," he said. "Iran's Jews have always been free to emigrate and three-quarters of them did so after the revolution but 70% of those went to America, not Israel."

Similar efforts have been made to attract French Jews, with Sharon's remarks that they should move to Israel because of anti-Semitism in France. That call, however, was met with similar results (translation mine):

Jewish associations in France also announced their indignation and expressed unequivocal disapproval of Ariel Sharon's remarks. Haïm Korsia, the representative of the Grand Rabbi Joseph Sitruk declared that the question of the Jews of France is "a moot point" because, for him, to speak of "the Jews of France doesn't mean anything; there are French citizens who are Jews, like others have another religion." Richard Prasquier, member of the executive office of CRIF (Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France) affirmed that the call to immigration made by Ariel Sharon threw "oil on the fire in an unacceptable way." Patrick Klugman, former president of the Union of Jewish Students of France (UEJF) and vice president of SOS Racism said that the Israeli Prime Minister was "very ill informed of what is happening in France." As for Theo Klein, the vice president of CRIF, he concluded with a message to Ariel Sharon: "He should let the Jewish community in France deal with its own problems." 

As far as efforts to get European Jews to emigrate to Israel, it seems that, if anything, the current trend is in the opposite direction. With 20% of Israelis eligible for an EU passport, more and more are applying for the bordeaux-colored passports. Ironically, the Jewish Agency for Israel has been pressuring the German government to stop making it easy for Jews from the former Soviet Union to settle there. (In 2003, for example, more Russian Jews chose to go to Germany than to Israel.)

The attempt to encourage Diaspora Jews to make aliyah in general is fairly normal and linked, to my mind, to Israeli and Palestinian demographics. The attempts to target Jews in Iran and France in particular, however, might be an attempt to disprove that Muslims and Jews can live together. In addition to having the largest Jewish community in western Europe (600,000), France, after all, also has the largest Muslim community in the region, making up 10% the French population (mostly from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Senegal). And the claims that Iran is equivalent to Nazi Germany seem kind of silly when it has its own 25,000-strong Jewish population that resists emigrating to Israel and which has a Jewish representative in the Iranian Parliament.

In addition to endangering the case for war with Iran, the Jewish Diaspora weakens the argument for the need for a Jewish state in the first place. Because if Jews can live without fear in the US and Europe, or even in Iran, why shouldn't there be a binational state between the Jordan and the Mediterranean where Jews and Arabs can live with equal rights, regardless of race or creed? 

This is probably so obvious that it doesn't need to be said, but then again, if it didn't need to be said the media wouldn't keep committing the petty sin of calling regimes in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt "moderate." What about Riyadh makes it more moderate than Teheran? It's just as religious, human rights are just as bad (if not worse) and it's much less democratic. So why does the western media insist on calling regimes like that moderate?

What they seem to mean is allied regimes, not moderate regimes. There's nothing moderate about Saudi Arabia, so let's stop pretending there is and call a spade a spade. Riyadh is an American ally -- and probably not a very good one at that. As any number of the unsavory regimes the US is friendly with should tell us, moderation and good relations are not at all the same thing.

I mentioned yesterday that arming the Middle East wasn't a good idea. Brian Whitaker has an interesting piece in the Guardian's Comment is Free section about how the new arms deal for the region could pour gas on the Sunni/Shi'a divide in the Middle East, serving as a "green light for oppression" for ostensibly Sunni regimes to discriminate against their Shi'a citizens in the name of combating Iranian influence:

If the Bush administration's goal was to inflame Sunni-Shia tensions across the region and to spread the sectarian strife in Iraq to neighbouring countries, it would be hard to imagine a more effective way of going about it.

Although Iran is the worldwide centre of Shia Islam, there's an important distinction to be made between Shia Muslims and the Iranian regime. The question is how many people will actually make it. Marginalised Shia communities in the Gulf states and Egypt will undoubtedly feel more threatened, while others will interpret the American move as a green light to oppress them further.

[...]

Viewed from Washington, bolstering tyrannical Sunni regimes against Iran might seem like pragmatism - a convergence of interests. But it's a dangerous sort of pragmatism because the American and Saudi interests are ultimately different. The Saudi government isn't really worried about Tehran; it's worried about keeping the lid on its Shia population in the oil-rich eastern province - and in the long term that can only rebound negatively on the US.

Just as there is a need to recognise that Jews in general are not responsible for the actions of the Israeli government, nor ordinary Muslims for the actions of al-Qaida, Arab states must be careful not to automatically treat their Shia communities as tools of the Iranian government, or encourage the public to think that they are.

What the region needs most right now is not more arms but a concerted effort to promote religious tolerance, to combat religious discrimination and prejudice, and to draw the Arab Shia communities into the political processes of their home countries before it is too late.

Incidentally, Iran is not alone in condemning the arms deals. Even Siniora has been quick to complain about the increased military aid to Israel:

"Prime Minister Fouad Saniora has learned with great dismay, surprise and astonishment" about the U.S. defense package to the Jewish state, a statement released by his office said.

"Continuing to back Israel in such a manner will escalate crises and increase feelings among the Arabs and Muslims that their just causes are ignored while Israel's interests are protected," it said.

"This will raise the feeling of frustration among the Arabs and Muslims, and will therefore boost extremist movements which were born and are feeding on the feeling of (U.S.) bias in favor of Israel."

[...]

"We were hoping that the American efforts would rather help promote peace," Saniora said in the statement.

"If these funds were allocated to consolidate peace (in the Middle East) and bridge the gap between the peoples of the region, or spent on peaceful projects then the American message would have been different," he said.

"This is a very negative message to the Lebanese and Arabs.

"It will boost Israel's aggressiveness and arrogance ...it will allow the Israelis to continue to think that they can avoid the requirements of a just and comprehensive peace by maintaining military superiority," he said.

If those funds were allocated to consolidate peace, indeed. Wouldn't that be a nice change of pace?

The US is finally realizing that Saudi Arabia is not helping things in Iraq, while Iraqi officials have openly accused Saudi Arabia of arming Sunni insurgents, the same, mind you, who have been attacking American forces in Iraq. So why, then, is it that the US is "set to offer huge arms deal" to the kingdom and its neighbors? 

Saudi Arabia is the ninth biggest spender on arms. Why do the Saudis need so many weapons? According to Ha'aretz, it could be part of a larger cold war in the Middle East, which also explains Russian arms deals to Iran and Syria, arms deals between Iran and Syria, and the 25% increase in American military aid to Israel agreed upon by Bush and Olmert, meaning an increase to $3 billion a year.

While this very well might be true, we can't forget that arms sales help out American armament companies with government contracts while giving Middle Eastern states the tools needed to oppress their peoples and arm their various proxies in the region. (I'm including Israel in this, although their weapons are used to oppress Palestinians in the occupied territories and not Israeli citizens.) Obviously, the same pattern of armament and oppression that we see in American allies holds true for Russian weapons sent to Damascus and Teheran.

Eli Khoury recently had a piece in the Boston Globe in which he tells Americans everything they want to hear. He makes the following claims:

1. The majority of Lebanese are with March 14 and this challenges "the prevailing myth that Lebanon is a 'divided' country destined to live along sectarian fault lines."

2. "[T]he majority of people from all across Christian, Shia, and Sunni regions support a Lebanon free from the influence of Iran and Syria."

3. "Lebanon stands at a historic crossroads between being integrated into the international community or remaining under the heavy influences of external forces." And to do this, the United States must "support the government in protecting the upcoming presidential elections from foreign intimidators."

4. "History has proven that the people of Lebanon, despite all myths, have managed to create a nation. Now it needs help as it becomes a state."

First point 1: Estimates and eye-witness accounts (including my own) show that there were just as many people, if not more, at the pro-Hezbollah rally back in December that kicked off the sit-in against the government. March 14 can mobilize a lot of people, but then again, so can March 8. This is the very definition of a "divided country." Furthermore, with the exception of the Christians, who are divided between Aoun and Geagea (with the majority aligning themselves with Aoun and Hezbollah), the division is very much sectarian, with the Sunni and Druze on one side and the Shi'a on the other. Moreover, if the country weren't divided, the government could function, and there would be no need for an international tribunal to investigate assassinations in Lebanon.

Point 2: I'm not at all convinced of this. I have seen no concrete evidence to support this, and Khoury offers none. The country seems pretty much evenly divided from here in Beirut, and if there had to be a slant to one side or the other, I'd be inclined to think that March 8 has slightly more support than March 14.

Point 3: It is a typically Lebanese irony that people like Khoury call for independence from "external forces" on one hand while simultaneously seeking intervention by an opposing external force -- Syria/Iran and the US, respectively.

Point 4: This is perhaps the most laughable of Khoury's points. No one is arguing that there isn't a Lebanese state and ought to be one. But to say that history has proven that there is a Lebanese nation? I wonder what history he's thinking of. The history that I'm familiar with (the civil war, recent divisions, sectarian bloodshed in the 19th century) all seems to point to the fact that there are a bunch of nations within Lebanon (or as Charles Glass would say, tribes with flags) but no Lebanese nation. This is the very problem with sectarianism; it strangles true equitable and pluralistic nationalism.

Eli Khoury tries to set himself (and his movement) up as an alternative to sectarianism and the Lebanese status quo, when in reality he's just offering more of the same. The March 14 movement is just as sectarian as is the opposition (if somewhat more prone to make disparaging remarks against the poor and Shi'a). What Lebanon really needs is to find its own way. This means being not only independent of Iran and Syria, but also of the US and France. The confessional system needs to be done away with, and a truly secular state needs to be created. Perhaps if an independent state is created in Lebanon, a Lebanese nation might follow in its footsteps.  

Ezra Klein has a piece calling liberal hawks to task on their rhetoric on Iran. He argues that after getting burned by the obviously bad call to invade Iraq, they're trying to temper their rhetoric on Iran in order to cover their asses in case things go as bad as they did in Mesopotamia:

The new approach is not to refight the battle over the Iraq war, but to argue that those who got it right, or who got it wrong but eventually came to the right answer, are now in danger of overlearning the lessons of the war -- and missing the danger posed by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. An elegant entry into this burgeoning genre comes from Ken Baer in the latest issue of Democracy. "[A] president's past mistakes," writes Baer, "can so preoccupy political leaders that they lose sight of the dangers ahead or the principles they hold dear." In the conclusion of his piece, he warns that progressives must "not use anger at one war as an excuse to blink when confronting a future threat head on."

...The remarkable thing about the growing liberal hawk literature on Iran is its evasiveness -- the unwillingness to speak in concrete terms of both the threat and proposed remedies. The liberal hawks realize they were too eager in counseling war last time, and their explicit statements in support of invasion have caused them no end of trouble since. This time, they will advocate no such thing. But nor will they eschew it. They will simply criticize those who do take a position.

Iran raises several complicated questions, but also a simple one: Do you think military force is called for in preventing Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons?

I've also noticed this. There seems to be a lot of talk from liberal hawks for "getting serious about Iran," whatever that's supposed to mean. At least the right wing hawks explicitly call for bombing Iran, whereas the TNR crowd wants to have its cake and eat it too.

This is a story about a plane that, shortly after taking off, is blown up in the air. Body parts, luggage and even still living passengers plummet to the ground. A man is wrongly accused and his government bullied into paying blood money to the sum of $2.7 billion. The real sponsors of the attack are let off the hook so that the US might invade Iraq in 1991 with Muslim allies.

There is a miscarriage of justice, in which foreign governments manufacture evidence and disregard other possibilities. A Palestinian militant gives an alibi as baby-sitting in Sweden and is not only believed but given immunity for the bombing. There is a Maltese clothing store owner, whose clothes were found in an exploded suitcase in Scotland. Those who speak out against the cover-up are gagged in some cases, indicted as being Iraqi spies in others. An American congressional aid, the daughter of an Alaskan governor, is arrested and injected with mind-altering drugs. Iraq is invaded again.

The truth starts to out, and there is talk of the convicted bomber going free. There is also talk of CIA agents running a heroin smuggling scheme with Hezbollah in order to free American hostages in Lebanon, as well as of a smoldering suitcase full of drugs found somewhere in rural Scotland. Records show that the Iranians paid millions of dollars to a Syrian-backed Palestinian splinter group two days after the bombing and five months after an Iranian civilian carrier was downed by the US and Khomeini vowed that the skies would rain blood and offered $10 million to anyone who would avenge Iran. 

This certainly sounds like a cheap Middle Eastern spy-novel, but it's not. It's Hugh Miles's report on the Lockerbie trial and the seemingly real possibility that the Libyans had nothing to do with it, something that may soon be shown in a Scottish court of law.

If this report is true, then I may have to start giving a little more credence to some of the crazy-sounding conspiracy theories I hear in Lebanon.

Alvaro de Soto, the UN special envoy to the Middle East, recently penned a confidential and very frank end of mission report, which was then leaked to the Guardian. Here is the Guardian's very short summary.

Joshua Landis, for his part, has compiled the parts that deal directly with engaging Syria. Here are some extracts that I found particularly interesting:

4. ...Notwithstanding my strenuous efforts, of which there is plenty of evidence in the DPA cables file, I was never authorized to go to Syria. None of my arguments in favour of going were ever refuted, nor was I given any precise reason for denial of the authorization requested. ...

99. There is an old saying that in the Middle East you can’t make war without Egypt and you can’t make peace without Syria. The first half is no longer valid, but I sense that the second remains true. For the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, keeping Syria at arm’s length is particularly galling. Those who advocate it seem to believe that it is possible to pursue an Israeli-Palestinian track while isolating Damascus....

100. ... I don’t believe they can seriously believe that it is possible to neatly compartmentalize the various fronts and deal with them sequentially, bestowing the favour of attention on well-behaving parties first.

101. In much the same way, does anyone seriously believe that a genuine process between Israel and the Palestinians can progress without Syria being either on board or, at the very least, not opposing it, and without opening some channel for addressing Syria’s grievances? If this should be attempted, we can be sure that a reminder of the Syrian capacity to spoil it wouldn’t be long in arriving.

102. The conventional wisdom is that Israel can’t handle more than one negotiation at a time. As recently as 27 April, in a piece in Haaretz titled “Why Syria must wait”, an Israeli ambassador wrote: “Few would dispute the assertion that the Israeli bridge is incapable of supporting two peace processes, a Syrian and a Palestinian one, at the same time.” I understand the political difficulties involved. But I believe it’s just not possible to completely disaggregate the two, or calmly wait for their turn with the occupier (take a number and have a seat in the waiting room until you are called, please), and that is why the Madrid conference was conceived as it was. This can’t be anything but one more layer of excuses not to negotiate.

These points seem obvious to me. There are those who think that engaging Syria is a waste of time, but one thing they fail to explain is why Damascus should make concessions before negotiating. After all, that's the whole point of negotiating, isn't it? From a purely strategic point of view, why would Syria give up its bargaining chips (meddling in Lebanon and supporting Hezbollah and Hamas) before negotiations have even begun? Would anyone ever ask Israel to give up their occupation of the Golan as a measure of good faith before negotiating with Damascus? Of course not. That's Israel's bargaining chip, and they'd be silly to give it up before making a deal.

This is not to say that I support Syrian meddling in Lebanon; as someone who lives in Beirut and has to put up with it, quite the opposite is true. But I do understand Lebanon's strategic importance to Syria, just as I understand its strategic importance to Palestine, Israel, Iran and the US.

So let's be honest here for a bit. Egypt and Jordan were flukes backed up by US aid money. A real, and just, solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict cannot be piecemeal. There must be a comprehensive peace that includes Palestine, Israel, Syria and Lebanon with the backing of the rest of the Arab states. I've already argued before that it's too late for a two-state solution, so I won't go into that right now, but maybe a two-state solution could be a stopgap for a long-term solution in the form of a single, democratic, secular binational state. But until the time comes when all sides stop stalling and get ready to deal, things are going to be pretty rough in this neck of the woods...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go see for yourself.

Raymond Tanter from WINEP and MESH has a post up about why the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), the Iranian militants who have committed terrorist attacks against the regime in Teheran and who were hosted by Saddam's Iraq, should be delisted from the State Department's list of terrorist organizations. Besides the fact that the MEK is against the Iranian regime, basically, his argument boils down to the fact that they haven't committed any acts of terrorism for a few years:

On April 25, Patrick Clawson, deputy director of research at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wrote that designation “should be based only on terrorism issues,” and that State “cited no alleged MEK terrorist activity since 2001, yet have increased allegations pertaining [to] the group’s non-terrorist activities.” Country Reports 2007 continues this trend of making allegations that are irrelevant to terrorist designation.

Tanter attempts to argue that MEK doesn't have the capability to carry out terrorist attacks, whereas we all know that anyone with a back pack, a bus pass and household peroxide can commit an act of terrorism. So while this argument isn't very convincing, he tells us, "de-listing would provide diplomatic leverage over Tehran, as the West is presently failing to constrain the Iranian regime’s nuclear program, sponsorship of terrorism, and subversion of Iraq."

In other words, the US should use a terrorist group for political bargaining. Of course this is nothing new: the Bush family has a long history of using Cuban terrorists to apply pressure on the Castro regime. What's striking, though, is the moral indignation Republicans muster when someone supports talking to groups like Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah (most of the violence committed by the last group having been aimed at military targets). Charges of moral equivalency and weak knees in the face of terror are immediately brandished.

Well, Orlando Bosch blew up a passenger plane killing all 73 civilians aboard. Jose Dionisio Suarez and Virgilio Paz Romero assassinated the Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier in Washington. The Mujahedeen-e Khalq assassinated the deputy chief of the Iranian Armed Forces General Staff, Brigadier General Ali Sayyaad Shirazi and attacked Iranian embassies and installations in 13 different countries at the same time. They also bombed the head office of the Islamic Republic Party and the Prime Minister's office killing 70 people, including the Chief Justice, the President and the Prime Minister.

Either terrorism is an acceptable tactic, or it's not. Washington can't understand why the rest of the world sees America as hypocritical, but Tanter's desire for the US to have its cake and eat it too should give us a hunch. 

UPDATE: Thinking more about this today has reminded me of the question of when a group can legitimately be de-listed as a terrorist organization. If the fact that MEK hasn't committed any acts of terrorism since 2001 is really enough to prove that they've mended their ways, then the same ought to apply to Hezbollah as well, because depending on who was responsible for the Argentinean attacks and the kidnapping of Tannenbaum, they haven't committed any acts of terrorism since 2000, the mid-1990s or even the late 1980s.

Otherwise, supporting terrorist groups or rebels or militias in a neighboring country has long been a staple of statecraft. In Africa, Sudan, Chad, Ethiopia, Uganda and Eritrea each support groups in their neighbors' territory. Iran and Syria support Hamas and Hezbollah; Syria supported the PLO in Jordan; while Israel supported the SLA in Lebanon; and Iran trained the Iraqi Badr Brigage to fight against Saddam. Hell, the first car bomb in Iraq wasn't unleashed by Zarqawi, but rather by Iyad Allawi with the help of the CIA. So while I abhor the use of violence against civilians as a political tool, I'm not naive and do know it happens all over. It's the smug hypocrisy of the "War on Terror" that really gets my goat in the same way that the "Fair and Balanced" slogan annoys me way more than the actual Fox News coverage.

McClatchy has an interesting piece on Iranian Brig. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Revolutionary Guard's Quds Force. The story includes an awfully high percentage of anonymous sources, and the title might be a little hyperbolic, but I think the overall points made are fair enough.

Iran has a lot of sway in Iraq, which is normal. What's silly, though, is that Americans see this as some sort of meddling, because Iranian interests in Iraq are not always the same as American interests (although I'd argue that they coincide much more often than either side would like to admit). If Iran were occupying Mexico or Canada, you can be sure that the US would be "meddling" as well.

As for the actual article, I don't really have too much to add, except that it's important to look at Iranian involvement in Iraq not as a spoiler or as some diabolical force. If the US is going to come to terms with Middle Eastern players (of which Iran has become a major one, due in no small part to American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq), Washington is going to have to look at Teheran (and Damascus and Hezbollah and Hamas, for that matter) as actors who have interests in the region that can't be run over roughshod by America.

This is a reality. So just as when one deals with Zimbabwe, it's necessary to take Pretoria into account, or how when dealing with Burma or North Korea one can't ignore Beijing, the road to peace in Iraq must necessarily pass through Teheran, but not in the way that American hawks would like it to.

I spend a lot of time getting annoyed when people throw around the word "genocide" or "holocaust" when it's not warranted. This often means rebuking Lebanese and Palestinian friends who want to call the Israeli occupation a genocide. The occupation is a lot of things, none of them savory, but a genocide it is not, and calling it one cheapens the word.

So you can imagine my surprise when I saw last night that Israel's deputy defense minister, Matan Vilnai, had threatened Palestinians in Gaza with a "shoah":

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A senior Israeli defense official said on Friday that Palestinians firing rockets from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip would bring upon themselves what he termed a "shoah," the Hebrew word for holocaust or disaster.

The word is rarely used in Israel outside discussions of the Nazi Holocaust of Jews. Many Israelis are loath to countenance its use to describe other contemporary events. Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said the Palestinians faced "new Nazis."

Israeli air strikes have killed at least 33 Gazans, including five children, in the past two days. The army, which carried out additional air strikes on Friday, said most of those killed were militants.

I'm no Hebraist, but according to Reuters and common sense, "shoah," like "holocaust" isn't a word that's tossed around lightly in Israel. And whenever there's a comment by someone like Ahmadinejad, quoting Khomeini, saying that "the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time," we get Israel supporters clamoring for the world to denounce the genocidal intent of the Iranian regime. So will these same people condemn Israel's even more explicit language?

Just the other day on the Olin Institute's Middle Eastern Strategy at Harvard blog, Stephen Peter Rosen was making a fuss about a comment that Ahmadinejad made calling Israel a "black and dirty microbe," informing us that this change in discourse could be "associated with biological attacks or other unconventional mass killings." 

So since Rosen says that he's interested in tracking the discourse between Israel and Iran, I can imagine that the Harvard blog will soon have a post up warning of the impending "shoah" to be visited upon the Gazans. After all, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, right?

Of course not. If we look a the comments to Rosen's post, we're given the simple answer by Harvard's specialist on Armenia, James Russell, that "Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah are obviously murderous and crazy." I knew there was a simple answer!

UPDATE: Melanie Phillips at the Spectator is now claiming that "In Hebrew, the word ‘shoah’ is never used to mean ‘holocaust’ or ‘genocide’ because of the acute historical resonance." (Italics hers.) Someone should get Claude Lanzmann on the phone to let him know he's made a terrible mistake.

And for the record, the Israeli daily Ha'aretz has this to say about the remark:

Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai went as far as threatening a "shoah," the Hebrew word for holocaust or disaster. The word is generally used to refer to the Nazi Holocaust, but a spokesman for Vilnai said the deputy defense minister used the word in the sense of "disaster," saying "he did not mean to make any allusion to the genocide."

I get worried whenever someone calls and immediately asks, "Are you ok?" Today was one of those days. Not too far from my house, there was an explosion. Another car bomb, this time in the Dora/Quarantina suburbs just north of Beirut.

What makes this bomb different from the others is that it was presumably aimed at an American embassy vehicle. It seems that today was Ambassador Feltman's last day, and someone was either trying to whack him or to send him a little going away message. In either case, this is an escalation that we really don't need. So for the first time, non-UNIFIL foreigners have been targeted. If my hunch is right, the US Government won't be likely to take this sort of an attack lying down. It wouldn't surprise me if in a few months or so, we see a car bomb or two targeting whomever Washington thinks tried this. Probably Syrians, Iranians or someone from the March 8 opposition.

For my part, I don't want to speculate on who's behind this latest attack, although I will say that I wouldn't rule out any of the al-Qaeda franchises operating in Lebanon.

Whoever is responsible, it's a sad day for those people who were ruthlessly killed today while going about there everyday business.    

UPDATE: This NYT report puts the blast in Bourj Hammoud, which is closer than I thought. Bourj Hammoud is mostly Armenian, the first suburb past my neighborhood, Mar Mkhail. I often go there for cheap shopping: real Converse Allstars that presumably fell off the back of a Chinese boat, for example, can be found for less than 10 euros a pair. Perhaps I'll go see for myself today where, exactly, the bomb was.

Akiva Eldar has a very non-explicit opinion piece in Ha'aretz about the nuclear weapons in the Middle East. I have the feeling that Israeli laws on its "secret" nuclear program prevent him from being more explicit, but he nonetheless poses a question that I've been asking for some time now:

How can a country, which according to endless foreign reports has kept secret for years several atomic weapons, manage to rally the international community in a struggle against a neighboring country that insists on acquiring nuclear energy? What do Israeli politicians answer to those asking why Iran should not be allowed to acquire the same armaments that are already in the arsenals of neighboring countries, like Pakistan and India? The common response is that "Iran is the sole country whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, declares openly that he intends to destroy the state of Israel." This argument is a double-edged sword, par excellence, used by a country that sports a radiant nuclear glow (according to foreign press reports, of course), and who has a senior minister, one assigned to dealing with strategic threats, who has threatened to bomb the Aswan Dam.

Again without being explicit, he calls for a nuclear weapons-free Middle East, but he says that this should be done "when the conflict is resolved," which seems a little too much like waiting for Godot to me. History has shown that countries that get the bomb are very unlikely to give it up (with the exception of South Africa). So if Israel waits until Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Jordan all have the bomb, a nuke-free Middle East will never happen, because while the chances of Israel giving up the bomb seem slim, the chances of getting all those other states to give it up are nil.   

I was watching CNN last night while hanging pictures and folding laundry, when Wolf Blitzer came on. All in all, it was actually fairly interesting. He interviewed El Baradei from the IAEA, Jordan's Queen Rania, the Turkish ambassador to the US, Barbara Boxer and Trent Lott. The last two were on after everyone else to respond to the issues being discussed.

Boxer was pretty well spoken and moderate about everything until she was asked about the Israeli bombing of Syria last month. El Baradei mentioned that neither the US nor Israel had provided the IAEA with any evidence of a Syrian nuclear program. He then rebuked the Israelis for shooting first and asking questions later instead of using the appropriate organization for such issues: the IAEA. So while Lott and Boxer disagreed on pretty much everything from the Armenian genocide bill to the rhetoric being used by the White House about a possible war against Iran, the one thing that they could agree on was that Israel has "the right to defend itself."

It's really uncanny. Neither said that they had been fully briefed on any intelligence concerning the Israeli strike in Syria, but both of them unequivocally supported it without any reservations. It's to be expected from Lott, but Boxer, who spends much of her time chiding the Bush administration for talking about war in Iran and having gone to war in Iraq has nothing critical to say about Israel's act of war.

Democrats seem to believe that politically speaking, they can be harder on the US, the country they're ostensibly representing, than they can be with Israel, a foreign nation. The more stories I hear about Capitol Hill and the more performances like Boxer's that I see, the more I think that there's truth in Buchanan's remark that Congress is Israeli-occupied territory.

The Bush administration has just recently decided to designate a large chunk of a sovereign nation's armed forces as a terrorist organization. The choice doesn't seem to be final and hasn't been put into effect yet, so it might just be saber rattling to pressure the Iranian government, although it's hard to see what effect this would actually have on the Iranian regime, which is already the target of US economic sanctions.

What's interesting about this is that it's the first time the US has decided to label a state actor as a terrorist organization. The current definition contained in Title 18 of the US Code, Section 2331 is as follows:

Section 2331. Definitions

      As used in this chapter - 
        (1) the term "international terrorism" means activities that - 
          (A) involve violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that
        are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of
        any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed
        within the jurisdiction of the United States or of any State;
          (B) appear to be intended - 
            (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
            (ii) to influence the policy of a government by
          intimidation or coercion; or
            (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass
          destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and

          (C) occur primarily outside the territorial jurisdiction of
        the United States, or transcend national boundaries in terms of
        the means by which they are accomplished, the persons they
        appear intended to intimidate or coerce, or the locale in which
        their perpetrators operate or seek asylum;

What is interesting is that this definition, contrary to many others, does not exclude state actors. As such, every time the CIA or IDF kidnaps or assassinates someone, those organizations are committing acts of international terrorism, according to US Code. People like Noam Chomsky have held the US to its definition for a very long time, but until now, there has been a hesitancy about designating any state actors as terrorist organizations, presumably because that opens the US Government, and those of its allies, even more so to charges of terrorism.

If I were part of the Iranian government, I would bring this up and make a similar designation of the US Government. After all, at a time when CIA agents have been indicted by an Italian judge for kidnapping, it's a charge that is difficult to rebut. 

Via Ezra, I found a website that lets you select quotes from presidential candidates that you agree with without telling you who they are until the end. You have to check the boxes of issues that interest you, so I tried it out on foreign policy (general), Iraq War, Iran, Israel and Palestine and finally, Health Care.

Since most of the quotes I chose to respond to were about foreign policy, it's not surprising that I agree the most with Bill Richardson. After him, Mike Gravel (about whom I know next to nothing), Kucinich and Obama were tied for second place. There were six Republican candidates whom I agreed with on one quote, and one Republican (Ron Paul) whom I agreed with more than a Democrat (Biden) by a score of 4 to 3. I'm pretty sure that if I had done the whole test, including the other domestic quotes, that probably would have switched around. Totally absent from the list of people whom I can agree with about a single thing is Guiliani.

Otherwise, it's interesting to me that on the issue of Israel/Palestine, there weren't very many quotes I agreed with by any of the candidates. I clicked to agree with some of the fairer sounding two-state comments, although deep down, I don't believe a two-state solution is viable in the long term. There were exactly zero candidates who came out for cutting funding to Israel or a one-state solution and only one quote, from Gravel, about negotiating with Hamas:

The US must sponsor negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, including Hamas, with the goal of a two-state solution guaranteeing demilitarized borders, Israel's right to survive and raising Palestinians economic standards.

Of those who took the test, more than half (52.8%) agreed with this statement.

The two most popular quotes that I agreed with were by Richardson and Kucinich, at 80% and 72.86% respectively:

Richardson: "In recent years, American foreign policy has been guided more by dogma than by facts, more by ideology than by history, more by wishful thinking than by reality."

Kucinich: "I support normal bilateral trade with Cuba. Farm communities throughout the U.S. are being denied a natural market in Cuba, and Americans are being denied products from Cuba."

Of course it's hard to generalize these percentages, because like me, most people probably only responded to quotes in the areas that are the most important to them, and so I can imagine that issue like abortion, for example, were ranked as the most important by more conservative people.

In any case, it's an interesting exercise nonetheless, and I've been able to work out that while I agree with Richardson more than anyone else about the issues that are the most important to me, I agree enough with Obama to back him instead since Richardson has nearly no chance of winning the primaries. (I hope he will accept being a vice presidential candidate or nomination as secretary of state.)

Lately, we've been hearing an awful lot about the Iranian threat to Israel. Much of this has been couched in alarmist rhetoric that implies (or even sometimes explicitly says) that Iran is the new Nazi Germany. One of the more problematic facts for this narrative is the existence of the Middle East's second largest Jewish community. After Israel, more Jews live in Iran than in any other country in the region.

It seems, however, that Jewish groups are trying to entice Iranian Jews into moving to Israel -- but without much luck, it seems:

Iran's Jews have given the country a loyalty pledge in the face of cash offers aimed at encouraging them to move to Israel, the arch-enemy of its Islamic rulers.

The incentives - ranging from £5,000 a person to £30,000 for families - were offered from a special fund established by wealthy expatriate Jews in an effort to prompt a mass migration to Israel among Iran's 25,000-strong Jewish community. The offers were made with Israel's official blessing and were additional to the usual state packages it provides to Jews emigrating from the diaspora.

However, the Society of Iranian Jews dismissed them as "immature political enticements" and said their national identity was not for sale.

"The identity of Iranian Jews is not tradable for any amount of money," the society said in a statement. "Iranian Jews are among the most ancient Iranians. Iran's Jews love their Iranian identity and their culture, so threats and this immature political enticement will not achieve their aim of wiping out the identity of Iranian Jews."

The Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv reported that the incentives had been doubled after offers of £2,500 a head failed to attract any Iranian Jews to leave for Israel.

Iran's sole Jewish MP, Morris Motamed, said the offers were insulting and put the country's Jews under pressure to prove their loyalty. "It suggests the Iranian Jew can be encouraged to emigrate by money," he said. "Iran's Jews have always been free to emigrate and three-quarters of them did so after the revolution but 70% of those went to America, not Israel."

Similar efforts have been made to attract French Jews, with Sharon's remarks that they should move to Israel because of anti-Semitism in France. That call, however, was met with similar results (translation mine):

Jewish associations in France also announced their indignation and expressed unequivocal disapproval of Ariel Sharon's remarks. Haïm Korsia, the representative of the Grand Rabbi Joseph Sitruk declared that the question of the Jews of France is "a moot point" because, for him, to speak of "the Jews of France doesn't mean anything; there are French citizens who are Jews, like others have another religion." Richard Prasquier, member of the executive office of CRIF (Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France) affirmed that the call to immigration made by Ariel Sharon threw "oil on the fire in an unacceptable way." Patrick Klugman, former president of the Union of Jewish Students of France (UEJF) and vice president of SOS Racism said that the Israeli Prime Minister was "very ill informed of what is happening in France." As for Theo Klein, the vice president of CRIF, he concluded with a message to Ariel Sharon: "He should let the Jewish community in France deal with its own problems." 

As far as efforts to get European Jews to emigrate to Israel, it seems that, if anything, the current trend is in the opposite direction. With 20% of Israelis eligible for an EU passport, more and more are applying for the bordeaux-colored passports. Ironically, the Jewish Agency for Israel has been pressuring the German government to stop making it easy for Jews from the former Soviet Union to settle there. (In 2003, for example, more Russian Jews chose to go to Germany than to Israel.)

The attempt to encourage Diaspora Jews to make aliyah in general is fairly normal and linked, to my mind, to Israeli and Palestinian demographics. The attempts to target Jews in Iran and France in particular, however, might be an attempt to disprove that Muslims and Jews can live together. In addition to having the largest Jewish community in western Europe (600,000), France, after all, also has the largest Muslim community in the region, making up 10% the French population (mostly from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Senegal). And the claims that Iran is equivalent to Nazi Germany seem kind of silly when it has its own 25,000-strong Jewish population that resists emigrating to Israel and which has a Jewish representative in the Iranian Parliament.

In addition to endangering the case for war with Iran, the Jewish Diaspora weakens the argument for the need for a Jewish state in the first place. Because if Jews can live without fear in the US and Europe, or even in Iran, why shouldn't there be a binational state between the Jordan and the Mediterranean where Jews and Arabs can live with equal rights, regardless of race or creed? 

This is probably so obvious that it doesn't need to be said, but then again, if it didn't need to be said the media wouldn't keep committing the petty sin of calling regimes in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt "moderate." What about Riyadh makes it more moderate than Teheran? It's just as religious, human rights are just as bad (if not worse) and it's much less democratic. So why does the western media insist on calling regimes like that moderate?

What they seem to mean is allied regimes, not moderate regimes. There's nothing moderate about Saudi Arabia, so let's stop pretending there is and call a spade a spade. Riyadh is an American ally -- and probably not a very good one at that. As any number of the unsavory regimes the US is friendly with should tell us, moderation and good relations are not at all the same thing.

I mentioned yesterday that arming the Middle East wasn't a good idea. Brian Whitaker has an interesting piece in the Guardian's Comment is Free section about how the new arms deal for the region could pour gas on the Sunni/Shi'a divide in the Middle East, serving as a "green light for oppression" for ostensibly Sunni regimes to discriminate against their Shi'a citizens in the name of combating Iranian influence:

If the Bush administration's goal was to inflame Sunni-Shia tensions across the region and to spread the sectarian strife in Iraq to neighbouring countries, it would be hard to imagine a more effective way of going about it.

Although Iran is the worldwide centre of Shia Islam, there's an important distinction to be made between Shia Muslims and the Iranian regime. The question is how many people will actually make it. Marginalised Shia communities in the Gulf states and Egypt will undoubtedly feel more threatened, while others will interpret the American move as a green light to oppress them further.

[...]

Viewed from Washington, bolstering tyrannical Sunni regimes against Iran might seem like pragmatism - a convergence of interests. But it's a dangerous sort of pragmatism because the American and Saudi interests are ultimately different. The Saudi government isn't really worried about Tehran; it's worried about keeping the lid on its Shia population in the oil-rich eastern province - and in the long term that can only rebound negatively on the US.

Just as there is a need to recognise that Jews in general are not responsible for the actions of the Israeli government, nor ordinary Muslims for the actions of al-Qaida, Arab states must be careful not to automatically treat their Shia communities as tools of the Iranian government, or encourage the public to think that they are.

What the region needs most right now is not more arms but a concerted effort to promote religious tolerance, to combat religious discrimination and prejudice, and to draw the Arab Shia communities into the political processes of their home countries before it is too late.

Incidentally, Iran is not alone in condemning the arms deals. Even Siniora has been quick to complain about the increased military aid to Israel:

"Prime Minister Fouad Saniora has learned with great dismay, surprise and astonishment" about the U.S. defense package to the Jewish state, a statement released by his office said.

"Continuing to back Israel in such a manner will escalate crises and increase feelings among the Arabs and Muslims that their just causes are ignored while Israel's interests are protected," it said.

"This will raise the feeling of frustration among the Arabs and Muslims, and will therefore boost extremist movements which were born and are feeding on the feeling of (U.S.) bias in favor of Israel."

[...]

"We were hoping that the American efforts would rather help promote peace," Saniora said in the statement.

"If these funds were allocated to consolidate peace (in the Middle East) and bridge the gap between the peoples of the region, or spent on peaceful projects then the American message would have been different," he said.

"This is a very negative message to the Lebanese and Arabs.

"It will boost Israel's aggressiveness and arrogance ...it will allow the Israelis to continue to think that they can avoid the requirements of a just and comprehensive peace by maintaining military superiority," he said.

If those funds were allocated to consolidate peace, indeed. Wouldn't that be a nice change of pace?

The US is finally realizing that Saudi Arabia is not helping things in Iraq, while Iraqi officials have openly accused Saudi Arabia of arming Sunni insurgents, the same, mind you, who have been attacking American forces in Iraq. So why, then, is it that the US is "set to offer huge arms deal" to the kingdom and its neighbors? 

Saudi Arabia is the ninth biggest spender on arms. Why do the Saudis need so many weapons? According to Ha'aretz, it could be part of a larger cold war in the Middle East, which also explains Russian arms deals to Iran and Syria, arms deals between Iran and Syria, and the 25% increase in American military aid to Israel agreed upon by Bush and Olmert, meaning an increase to $3 billion a year.

While this very well might be true, we can't forget that arms sales help out American armament companies with government contracts while giving Middle Eastern states the tools needed to oppress their peoples and arm their various proxies in the region. (I'm including Israel in this, although their weapons are used to oppress Palestinians in the occupied territories and not Israeli citizens.) Obviously, the same pattern of armament and oppression that we see in American allies holds true for Russian weapons sent to Damascus and Teheran.

Eli Khoury recently had a piece in the Boston Globe in which he tells Americans everything they want to hear. He makes the following claims:

1. The majority of Lebanese are with March 14 and this challenges "the prevailing myth that Lebanon is a 'divided' country destined to live along sectarian fault lines."

2. "[T]he majority of people from all across Christian, Shia, and Sunni regions support a Lebanon free from the influence of Iran and Syria."

3. "Lebanon stands at a historic crossroads between being integrated into the international community or remaining under the heavy influences of external forces." And to do this, the United States must "support the government in protecting the upcoming presidential elections from foreign intimidators."

4. "History has proven that the people of Lebanon, despite all myths, have managed to create a nation. Now it needs help as it becomes a state."

First point 1: Estimates and eye-witness accounts (including my own) show that there were just as many people, if not more, at the pro-Hezbollah rally back in December that kicked off the sit-in against the government. March 14 can mobilize a lot of people, but then again, so can March 8. This is the very definition of a "divided country." Furthermore, with the exception of the Christians, who are divided between Aoun and Geagea (with the majority aligning themselves with Aoun and Hezbollah), the division is very much sectarian, with the Sunni and Druze on one side and the Shi'a on the other. Moreover, if the country weren't divided, the government could function, and there would be no need for an international tribunal to investigate assassinations in Lebanon.

Point 2: I'm not at all convinced of this. I have seen no concrete evidence to support this, and Khoury offers none. The country seems pretty much evenly divided from here in Beirut, and if there had to be a slant to one side or the other, I'd be inclined to think that March 8 has slightly more support than March 14.

Point 3: It is a typically Lebanese irony that people like Khoury call for independence from "external forces" on one hand while simultaneously seeking intervention by an opposing external force -- Syria/Iran and the US, respectively.

Point 4: This is perhaps the most laughable of Khoury's points. No one is arguing that there isn't a Lebanese state and ought to be one. But to say that history has proven that there is a Lebanese nation? I wonder what history he's thinking of. The history that I'm familiar with (the civil war, recent divisions, sectarian bloodshed in the 19th century) all seems to point to the fact that there are a bunch of nations within Lebanon (or as Charles Glass would say, tribes with flags) but no Lebanese nation. This is the very problem with sectarianism; it strangles true equitable and pluralistic nationalism.

Eli Khoury tries to set himself (and his movement) up as an alternative to sectarianism and the Lebanese status quo, when in reality he's just offering more of the same. The March 14 movement is just as sectarian as is the opposition (if somewhat more prone to make disparaging remarks against the poor and Shi'a). What Lebanon really needs is to find its own way. This means being not only independent of Iran and Syria, but also of the US and France. The confessional system needs to be done away with, and a truly secular state needs to be created. Perhaps if an independent state is created in Lebanon, a Lebanese nation might follow in its footsteps.  

Ezra Klein has a piece calling liberal hawks to task on their rhetoric on Iran. He argues that after getting burned by the obviously bad call to invade Iraq, they're trying to temper their rhetoric on Iran in order to cover their asses in case things go as bad as they did in Mesopotamia:

The new approach is not to refight the battle over the Iraq war, but to argue that those who got it right, or who got it wrong but eventually came to the right answer, are now in danger of overlearning the lessons of the war -- and missing the danger posed by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. An elegant entry into this burgeoning genre comes from Ken Baer in the latest issue of Democracy. "[A] president's past mistakes," writes Baer, "can so preoccupy political leaders that they lose sight of the dangers ahead or the principles they hold dear." In the conclusion of his piece, he warns that progressives must "not use anger at one war as an excuse to blink when confronting a future threat head on."

...The remarkable thing about the growing liberal hawk literature on Iran is its evasiveness -- the unwillingness to speak in concrete terms of both the threat and proposed remedies. The liberal hawks realize they were too eager in counseling war last time, and their explicit statements in support of invasion have caused them no end of trouble since. This time, they will advocate no such thing. But nor will they eschew it. They will simply criticize those who do take a position.

Iran raises several complicated questions, but also a simple one: Do you think military force is called for in preventing Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons?

I've also noticed this. There seems to be a lot of talk from liberal hawks for "getting serious about Iran," whatever that's supposed to mean. At least the right wing hawks explicitly call for bombing Iran, whereas the TNR crowd wants to have its cake and eat it too.

This is a story about a plane that, shortly after taking off, is blown up in the air. Body parts, luggage and even still living passengers plummet to the ground. A man is wrongly accused and his government bullied into paying blood money to the sum of $2.7 billion. The real sponsors of the attack are let off the hook so that the US might invade Iraq in 1991 with Muslim allies.

There is a miscarriage of justice, in which foreign governments manufacture evidence and disregard other possibilities. A Palestinian militant gives an alibi as baby-sitting in Sweden and is not only believed but given immunity for the bombing. There is a Maltese clothing store owner, whose clothes were found in an exploded suitcase in Scotland. Those who speak out against the cover-up are gagged in some cases, indicted as being Iraqi spies in others. An American congressional aid, the daughter of an Alaskan governor, is arrested and injected with mind-altering drugs. Iraq is invaded again.

The truth starts to out, and there is talk of the convicted bomber going free. There is also talk of CIA agents running a heroin smuggling scheme with Hezbollah in order to free American hostages in Lebanon, as well as of a smoldering suitcase full of drugs found somewhere in rural Scotland. Records show that the Iranians paid millions of dollars to a Syrian-backed Palestinian splinter group two days after the bombing and five months after an Iranian civilian carrier was downed by the US and Khomeini vowed that the skies would rain blood and offered $10 million to anyone who would avenge Iran. 

This certainly sounds like a cheap Middle Eastern spy-novel, but it's not. It's Hugh Miles's report on the Lockerbie trial and the seemingly real possibility that the Libyans had nothing to do with it, something that may soon be shown in a Scottish court of law.

If this report is true, then I may have to start giving a little more credence to some of the crazy-sounding conspiracy theories I hear in Lebanon.

Alvaro de Soto, the UN special envoy to the Middle East, recently penned a confidential and very frank end of mission report, which was then leaked to the Guardian. Here is the Guardian's very short summary.

Joshua Landis, for his part, has compiled the parts that deal directly with engaging Syria. Here are some extracts that I found particularly interesting:

4. ...Notwithstanding my strenuous efforts, of which there is plenty of evidence in the DPA cables file, I was never authorized to go to Syria. None of my arguments in favour of going were ever refuted, nor was I given any precise reason for denial of the authorization requested. ...

99. There is an old saying that in the Middle East you can’t make war without Egypt and you can’t make peace without Syria. The first half is no longer valid, but I sense that the second remains true. For the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, keeping Syria at arm’s length is particularly galling. Those who advocate it seem to believe that it is possible to pursue an Israeli-Palestinian track while isolating Damascus....

100. ... I don’t believe they can seriously believe that it is possible to neatly compartmentalize the various fronts and deal with them sequentially, bestowing the favour of attention on well-behaving parties first.

101. In much the same way, does anyone seriously believe that a genuine process between Israel and the Palestinians can progress without Syria being either on board or, at the very least, not opposing it, and without opening some channel for addressing Syria’s grievances? If this should be attempted, we can be sure that a reminder of the Syrian capacity to spoil it wouldn’t be long in arriving.

102. The conventional wisdom is that Israel can’t handle more than one negotiation at a time. As recently as 27 April, in a piece in Haaretz titled “Why Syria must wait”, an Israeli ambassador wrote: “Few would dispute the assertion that the Israeli bridge is incapable of supporting two peace processes, a Syrian and a Palestinian one, at the same time.” I understand the political difficulties involved. But I believe it’s just not possible to completely disaggregate the two, or calmly wait for their turn with the occupier (take a number and have a seat in the waiting room until you are called, please), and that is why the Madrid conference was conceived as it was. This can’t be anything but one more layer of excuses not to negotiate.

These points seem obvious to me. There are those who think that engaging Syria is a waste of time, but one thing they fail to explain is why Damascus should make concessions before negotiating. After all, that's the whole point of negotiating, isn't it? From a purely strategic point of view, why would Syria give up its bargaining chips (meddling in Lebanon and supporting Hezbollah and Hamas) before negotiations have even begun? Would anyone ever ask Israel to give up their occupation of the Golan as a measure of good faith before negotiating with Damascus? Of course not. That's Israel's bargaining chip, and they'd be silly to give it up before making a deal.

This is not to say that I support Syrian meddling in Lebanon; as someone who lives in Beirut and has to put up with it, quite the opposite is true. But I do understand Lebanon's strategic importance to Syria, just as I understand its strategic importance to Palestine, Israel, Iran and the US.

So let's be honest here for a bit. Egypt and Jordan were flukes backed up by US aid money. A real, and just, solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict cannot be piecemeal. There must be a comprehensive peace that includes Palestine, Israel, Syria and Lebanon with the backing of the rest of the Arab states. I've already argued before that it's too late for a two-state solution, so I won't go into that right now, but maybe a two-state solution could be a stopgap for a long-term solution in the form of a single, democratic, secular binational state. But until the time comes when all sides stop stalling and get ready to deal, things are going to be pretty rough in this neck of the woods...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go see for yourself.

Raymond Tanter from WINEP and MESH has a post up about why the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), the Iranian militants who have committed terrorist attacks against the regime in Teheran and who were hosted by Saddam's Iraq, should be delisted from the State Department's list of terrorist organizations. Besides the fact that the MEK is against the Iranian regime, basically, his argument boils down to the fact that they haven't committed any acts of terrorism for a few years:

On April 25, Patrick Clawson, deputy director of research at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wrote that designation “should be based only on terrorism issues,” and that State “cited no alleged MEK terrorist activity since 2001, yet have increased allegations pertaining [to] the group’s non-terrorist activities.” Country Reports 2007 continues this trend of making allegations that are irrelevant to terrorist designation.

Tanter attempts to argue that MEK doesn't have the capability to carry out terrorist attacks, whereas we all know that anyone with a back pack, a bus pass and household peroxide can commit an act of terrorism. So while this argument isn't very convincing, he tells us, "de-listing would provide diplomatic leverage over Tehran, as the West is presently failing to constrain the Iranian regime’s nuclear program, sponsorship of terrorism, and subversion of Iraq."

In other words, the US should use a terrorist group for political bargaining. Of course this is nothing new: the Bush family has a long history of using Cuban terrorists to apply pressure on the Castro regime. What's striking, though, is the moral indignation Republicans muster when someone supports talking to groups like Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah (most of the violence committed by the last group having been aimed at military targets). Charges of moral equivalency and weak knees in the face of terror are immediately brandished.

Well, Orlando Bosch blew up a passenger plane killing all 73 civilians aboard. Jose Dionisio Suarez and Virgilio Paz Romero assassinated the Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier in Washington. The Mujahedeen-e Khalq assassinated the deputy chief of the Iranian Armed Forces General Staff, Brigadier General Ali Sayyaad Shirazi and attacked Iranian embassies and installations in 13 different countries at the same time. They also bombed the head office of the Islamic Republic Party and the Prime Minister's office killing 70 people, including the Chief Justice, the President and the Prime Minister.

Either terrorism is an acceptable tactic, or it's not. Washington can't understand why the rest of the world sees America as hypocritical, but Tanter's desire for the US to have its cake and eat it too should give us a hunch. 

UPDATE: Thinking more about this today has reminded me of the question of when a group can legitimately be de-listed as a terrorist organization. If the fact that MEK hasn't committed any acts of terrorism since 2001 is really enough to prove that they've mended their ways, then the same ought to apply to Hezbollah as well, because depending on who was responsible for the Argentinean attacks and the kidnapping of Tannenbaum, they haven't committed any acts of terrorism since 2000, the mid-1990s or even the late 1980s.

Otherwise, supporting terrorist groups or rebels or militias in a neighboring country has long been a staple of statecraft. In Africa, Sudan, Chad, Ethiopia, Uganda and Eritrea each support groups in their neighbors' territory. Iran and Syria support Hamas and Hezbollah; Syria supported the PLO in Jordan; while Israel supported the SLA in Lebanon; and Iran trained the Iraqi Badr Brigage to fight against Saddam. Hell, the first car bomb in Iraq wasn't unleashed by Zarqawi, but rather by Iyad Allawi with the help of the CIA. So while I abhor the use of violence against civilians as a political tool, I'm not naive and do know it happens all over. It's the smug hypocrisy of the "War on Terror" that really gets my goat in the same way that the "Fair and Balanced" slogan annoys me way more than the actual Fox News coverage.

McClatchy has an interesting piece on Iranian Brig. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Revolutionary Guard's Quds Force. The story includes an awfully high percentage of anonymous sources, and the title might be a little hyperbolic, but I think the overall points made are fair enough.

Iran has a lot of sway in Iraq, which is normal. What's silly, though, is that Americans see this as some sort of meddling, because Iranian interests in Iraq are not always the same as American interests (although I'd argue that they coincide much more often than either side would like to admit). If Iran were occupying Mexico or Canada, you can be sure that the US would be "meddling" as well.

As for the actual article, I don't really have too much to add, except that it's important to look at Iranian involvement in Iraq not as a spoiler or as some diabolical force. If the US is going to come to terms with Middle Eastern players (of which Iran has become a major one, due in no small part to American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq), Washington is going to have to look at Teheran (and Damascus and Hezbollah and Hamas, for that matter) as actors who have interests in the region that can't be run over roughshod by America.

This is a reality. So just as when one deals with Zimbabwe, it's necessary to take Pretoria into account, or how when dealing with Burma or North Korea one can't ignore Beijing, the road to peace in Iraq must necessarily pass through Teheran, but not in the way that American hawks would like it to.

I spend a lot of time getting annoyed when people throw around the word "genocide" or "holocaust" when it's not warranted. This often means rebuking Lebanese and Palestinian friends who want to call the Israeli occupation a genocide. The occupation is a lot of things, none of them savory, but a genocide it is not, and calling it one cheapens the word.

So you can imagine my surprise when I saw last night that Israel's deputy defense minister, Matan Vilnai, had threatened Palestinians in Gaza with a "shoah":

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A senior Israeli defense official said on Friday that Palestinians firing rockets from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip would bring upon themselves what he termed a "shoah," the Hebrew word for holocaust or disaster.

The word is rarely used in Israel outside discussions of the Nazi Holocaust of Jews. Many Israelis are loath to countenance its use to describe other contemporary events. Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said the Palestinians faced "new Nazis."

Israeli air strikes have killed at least 33 Gazans, including five children, in the past two days. The army, which carried out additional air strikes on Friday, said most of those killed were militants.

I'm no Hebraist, but according to Reuters and common sense, "shoah," like "holocaust" isn't a word that's tossed around lightly in Israel. And whenever there's a comment by someone like Ahmadinejad, quoting Khomeini, saying that "the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time," we get Israel supporters clamoring for the world to denounce the genocidal intent of the Iranian regime. So will these same people condemn Israel's even more explicit language?

Just the other day on the Olin Institute's Middle Eastern Strategy at Harvard blog, Stephen Peter Rosen was making a fuss about a comment that Ahmadinejad made calling Israel a "black and dirty microbe," informing us that this change in discourse could be "associated with biological attacks or other unconventional mass killings." 

So since Rosen says that he's interested in tracking the discourse between Israel and Iran, I can imagine that the Harvard blog will soon have a post up warning of the impending "shoah" to be visited upon the Gazans. After all, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, right?

Of course not. If we look a the comments to Rosen's post, we're given the simple answer by Harvard's specialist on Armenia, James Russell, that "Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah are obviously murderous and crazy." I knew there was a simple answer!

UPDATE: Melanie Phillips at the Spectator is now claiming that "In Hebrew, the word ‘shoah’ is never used to mean ‘holocaust’ or ‘genocide’ because of the acute historical resonance." (Italics hers.) Someone should get Claude Lanzmann on the phone to let him know he's made a terrible mistake.

And for the record, the Israeli daily Ha'aretz has this to say about the remark:

Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai went as far as threatening a "shoah," the Hebrew word for holocaust or disaster. The word is generally used to refer to the Nazi Holocaust, but a spokesman for Vilnai said the deputy defense minister used the word in the sense of "disaster," saying "he did not mean to make any allusion to the genocide."

I get worried whenever someone calls and immediately asks, "Are you ok?" Today was one of those days. Not too far from my house, there was an explosion. Another car bomb, this time in the Dora/Quarantina suburbs just north of Beirut.

What makes this bomb different from the others is that it was presumably aimed at an American embassy vehicle. It seems that today was Ambassador Feltman's last day, and someone was either trying to whack him or to send him a little going away message. In either case, this is an escalation that we really don't need. So for the first time, non-UNIFIL foreigners have been targeted. If my hunch is right, the US Government won't be likely to take this sort of an attack lying down. It wouldn't surprise me if in a few months or so, we see a car bomb or two targeting whomever Washington thinks tried this. Probably Syrians, Iranians or someone from the March 8 opposition.

For my part, I don't want to speculate on who's behind this latest attack, although I will say that I wouldn't rule out any of the al-Qaeda franchises operating in Lebanon.

Whoever is responsible, it's a sad day for those people who were ruthlessly killed today while going about there everyday business.    

UPDATE: This NYT report puts the blast in Bourj Hammoud, which is closer than I thought. Bourj Hammoud is mostly Armenian, the first suburb past my neighborhood, Mar Mkhail. I often go there for cheap shopping: real Converse Allstars that presumably fell off the back of a Chinese boat, for example, can be found for less than 10 euros a pair. Perhaps I'll go see for myself today where, exactly, the bomb was.

Akiva Eldar has a very non-explicit opinion piece in Ha'aretz about the nuclear weapons in the Middle East. I have the feeling that Israeli laws on its "secret" nuclear program prevent him from being more explicit, but he nonetheless poses a question that I've been asking for some time now:

How can a country, which according to endless foreign reports has kept secret for years several atomic weapons, manage to rally the international community in a struggle against a neighboring country that insists on acquiring nuclear energy? What do Israeli politicians answer to those asking why Iran should not be allowed to acquire the same armaments that are already in the arsenals of neighboring countries, like Pakistan and India? The common response is that "Iran is the sole country whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, declares openly that he intends to destroy the state of Israel." This argument is a double-edged sword, par excellence, used by a country that sports a radiant nuclear glow (according to foreign press reports, of course), and who has a senior minister, one assigned to dealing with strategic threats, who has threatened to bomb the Aswan Dam.

Again without being explicit, he calls for a nuclear weapons-free Middle East, but he says that this should be done "when the conflict is resolved," which seems a little too much like waiting for Godot to me. History has shown that countries that get the bomb are very unlikely to give it up (with the exception of South Africa). So if Israel waits until Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Jordan all have the bomb, a nuke-free Middle East will never happen, because while the chances of Israel giving up the bomb seem slim, the chances of getting all those other states to give it up are nil.   

I was watching CNN last night while hanging pictures and folding laundry, when Wolf Blitzer came on. All in all, it was actually fairly interesting. He interviewed El Baradei from the IAEA, Jordan's Queen Rania, the Turkish ambassador to the US, Barbara Boxer and Trent Lott. The last two were on after everyone else to respond to the issues being discussed.

Boxer was pretty well spoken and moderate about everything until she was asked about the Israeli bombing of Syria last month. El Baradei mentioned that neither the US nor Israel had provided the IAEA with any evidence of a Syrian nuclear program. He then rebuked the Israelis for shooting first and asking questions later instead of using the appropriate organization for such issues: the IAEA. So while Lott and Boxer disagreed on pretty much everything from the Armenian genocide bill to the rhetoric being used by the White House about a possible war against Iran, the one thing that they could agree on was that Israel has "the right to defend itself."

It's really uncanny. Neither said that they had been fully briefed on any intelligence concerning the Israeli strike in Syria, but both of them unequivocally supported it without any reservations. It's to be expected from Lott, but Boxer, who spends much of her time chiding the Bush administration for talking about war in Iran and having gone to war in Iraq has nothing critical to say about Israel's act of war.

Democrats seem to believe that politically speaking, they can be harder on the US, the country they're ostensibly representing, than they can be with Israel, a foreign nation. The more stories I hear about Capitol Hill and the more performances like Boxer's that I see, the more I think that there's truth in Buchanan's remark that Congress is Israeli-occupied territory.

The Bush administration has just recently decided to designate a large chunk of a sovereign nation's armed forces as a terrorist organization. The choice doesn't seem to be final and hasn't been put into effect yet, so it might just be saber rattling to pressure the Iranian government, although it's hard to see what effect this would actually have on the Iranian regime, which is already the target of US economic sanctions.

What's interesting about this is that it's the first time the US has decided to label a state actor as a terrorist organization. The current definition contained in Title 18 of the US Code, Section 2331 is as follows:

Section 2331. Definitions

      As used in this chapter - 
        (1) the term "international terrorism" means activities that - 
          (A) involve violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that
        are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of
        any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed
        within the jurisdiction of the United States or of any State;
          (B) appear to be intended - 
            (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
            (ii) to influence the policy of a government by
          intimidation or coercion; or
            (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass
          destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and

          (C) occur primarily outside the territorial jurisdiction of
        the United States, or transcend national boundaries in terms of
        the means by which they are accomplished, the persons they
        appear intended to intimidate or coerce, or the locale in which
        their perpetrators operate or seek asylum;

What is interesting is that this definition, contrary to many others, does not exclude state actors. As such, every time the CIA or IDF kidnaps or assassinates someone, those organizations are committing acts of international terrorism, according to US Code. People like Noam Chomsky have held the US to its definition for a very long time, but until now, there has been a hesitancy about designating any state actors as terrorist organizations, presumably because that opens the US Government, and those of its allies, even more so to charges of terrorism.

If I were part of the Iranian government, I would bring this up and make a similar designation of the US Government. After all, at a time when CIA agents have been indicted by an Italian judge for kidnapping, it's a charge that is difficult to rebut. 

Via Ezra, I found a website that lets you select quotes from presidential candidates that you agree with without telling you who they are until the end. You have to check the boxes of issues that interest you, so I tried it out on foreign policy (general), Iraq War, Iran, Israel and Palestine and finally, Health Care.

Since most of the quotes I chose to respond to were about foreign policy, it's not surprising that I agree the most with Bill Richardson. After him, Mike Gravel (about whom I know next to nothing), Kucinich and Obama were tied for second place. There were six Republican candidates whom I agreed with on one quote, and one Republican (Ron Paul) whom I agreed with more than a Democrat (Biden) by a score of 4 to 3. I'm pretty sure that if I had done the whole test, including the other domestic quotes, that probably would have switched around. Totally absent from the list of people whom I can agree with about a single thing is Guiliani.

Otherwise, it's interesting to me that on the issue of Israel/Palestine, there weren't very many quotes I agreed with by any of the candidates. I clicked to agree with some of the fairer sounding two-state comments, although deep down, I don't believe a two-state solution is viable in the long term. There were exactly zero candidates who came out for cutting funding to Israel or a one-state solution and only one quote, from Gravel, about negotiating with Hamas:

The US must sponsor negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, including Hamas, with the goal of a two-state solution guaranteeing demilitarized borders, Israel's right to survive and raising Palestinians economic standards.

Of those who took the test, more than half (52.8%) agreed with this statement.

The two most popular quotes that I agreed with were by Richardson and Kucinich, at 80% and 72.86% respectively:

Richardson: "In recent years, American foreign policy has been guided more by dogma than by facts, more by ideology than by history, more by wishful thinking than by reality."

Kucinich: "I support normal bilateral trade with Cuba. Farm communities throughout the U.S. are being denied a natural market in Cuba, and Americans are being denied products from Cuba."

Of course it's hard to generalize these percentages, because like me, most people probably only responded to quotes in the areas that are the most important to them, and so I can imagine that issue like abortion, for example, were ranked as the most important by more conservative people.

In any case, it's an interesting exercise nonetheless, and I've been able to work out that while I agree with Richardson more than anyone else about the issues that are the most important to me, I agree enough with Obama to back him instead since Richardson has nearly no chance of winning the primaries. (I hope he will accept being a vice presidential candidate or nomination as secretary of state.)

Lately, we've been hearing an awful lot about the Iranian threat to Israel. Much of this has been couched in alarmist rhetoric that implies (or even sometimes explicitly says) that Iran is the new Nazi Germany. One of the more problematic facts for this narrative is the existence of the Middle East's second largest Jewish community. After Israel, more Jews live in Iran than in any other country in the region.

It seems, however, that Jewish groups are trying to entice Iranian Jews into moving to Israel -- but without much luck, it seems:

Iran's Jews have given the country a loyalty pledge in the face of cash offers aimed at encouraging them to move to Israel, the arch-enemy of its Islamic rulers.

The incentives - ranging from £5,000 a person to £30,000 for families - were offered from a special fund established by wealthy expatriate Jews in an effort to prompt a mass migration to Israel among Iran's 25,000-strong Jewish community. The offers were made with Israel's official blessing and were additional to the usual state packages it provides to Jews emigrating from the diaspora.

However, the Society of Iranian Jews dismissed them as "immature political enticements" and said their national identity was not for sale.

"The identity of Iranian Jews is not tradable for any amount of money," the society said in a statement. "Iranian Jews are among the most ancient Iranians. Iran's Jews love their Iranian identity and their culture, so threats and this immature political enticement will not achieve their aim of wiping out the identity of Iranian Jews."

The Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv reported that the incentives had been doubled after offers of £2,500 a head failed to attract any Iranian Jews to leave for Israel.

Iran's sole Jewish MP, Morris Motamed, said the offers were insulting and put the country's Jews under pressure to prove their loyalty. "It suggests the Iranian Jew can be encouraged to emigrate by money," he said. "Iran's Jews have always been free to emigrate and three-quarters of them did so after the revolution but 70% of those went to America, not Israel."

Similar efforts have been made to attract French Jews, with Sharon's remarks that they should move to Israel because of anti-Semitism in France. That call, however, was met with similar results (translation mine):

Jewish associations in France also announced their indignation and expressed unequivocal disapproval of Ariel Sharon's remarks. Haïm Korsia, the representative of the Grand Rabbi Joseph Sitruk declared that the question of the Jews of France is "a moot point" because, for him, to speak of "the Jews of France doesn't mean anything; there are French citizens who are Jews, like others have another religion." Richard Prasquier, member of the executive office of CRIF (Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France) affirmed that the call to immigration made by Ariel Sharon threw "oil on the fire in an unacceptable way." Patrick Klugman, former president of the Union of Jewish Students of France (UEJF) and vice president of SOS Racism said that the Israeli Prime Minister was "very ill informed of what is happening in France." As for Theo Klein, the vice president of CRIF, he concluded with a message to Ariel Sharon: "He should let the Jewish community in France deal with its own problems." 

As far as efforts to get European Jews to emigrate to Israel, it seems that, if anything, the current trend is in the opposite direction. With 20% of Israelis eligible for an EU passport, more and more are applying for the bordeaux-colored passports. Ironically, the Jewish Agency for Israel has been pressuring the German government to stop making it easy for Jews from the former Soviet Union to settle there. (In 2003, for example, more Russian Jews chose to go to Germany than to Israel.)

The attempt to encourage Diaspora Jews to make aliyah in general is fairly normal and linked, to my mind, to Israeli and Palestinian demographics. The attempts to target Jews in Iran and France in particular, however, might be an attempt to disprove that Muslims and Jews can live together. In addition to having the largest Jewish community in western Europe (600,000), France, after all, also has the largest Muslim community in the region, making up 10% the French population (mostly from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Senegal). And the claims that Iran is equivalent to Nazi Germany seem kind of silly when it has its own 25,000-strong Jewish population that resists emigrating to Israel and which has a Jewish representative in the Iranian Parliament.

In addition to endangering the case for war with Iran, the Jewish Diaspora weakens the argument for the need for a Jewish state in the first place. Because if Jews can live without fear in the US and Europe, or even in Iran, why shouldn't there be a binational state between the Jordan and the Mediterranean where Jews and Arabs can live with equal rights, regardless of race or creed? 

This is probably so obvious that it doesn't need to be said, but then again, if it didn't need to be said the media wouldn't keep committing the petty sin of calling regimes in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt "moderate." What about Riyadh makes it more moderate than Teheran? It's just as religious, human rights are just as bad (if not worse) and it's much less democratic. So why does the western media insist on calling regimes like that moderate?

What they seem to mean is allied regimes, not moderate regimes. There's nothing moderate about Saudi Arabia, so let's stop pretending there is and call a spade a spade. Riyadh is an American ally -- and probably not a very good one at that. As any number of the unsavory regimes the US is friendly with should tell us, moderation and good relations are not at all the same thing.

I mentioned yesterday that arming the Middle East wasn't a good idea. Brian Whitaker has an interesting piece in the Guardian's Comment is Free section about how the new arms deal for the region could pour gas on the Sunni/Shi'a divide in the Middle East, serving as a "green light for oppression" for ostensibly Sunni regimes to discriminate against their Shi'a citizens in the name of combating Iranian influence:

If the Bush administration's goal was to inflame Sunni-Shia tensions across the region and to spread the sectarian strife in Iraq to neighbouring countries, it would be hard to imagine a more effective way of going about it.

Although Iran is the worldwide centre of Shia Islam, there's an important distinction to be made between Shia Muslims and the Iranian regime. The question is how many people will actually make it. Marginalised Shia communities in the Gulf states and Egypt will undoubtedly feel more threatened, while others will interpret the American move as a green light to oppress them further.

[...]

Viewed from Washington, bolstering tyrannical Sunni regimes against Iran might seem like pragmatism - a convergence of interests. But it's a dangerous sort of pragmatism because the American and Saudi interests are ultimately different. The Saudi government isn't really worried about Tehran; it's worried about keeping the lid on its Shia population in the oil-rich eastern province - and in the long term that can only rebound negatively on the US.

Just as there is a need to recognise that Jews in general are not responsible for the actions of the Israeli government, nor ordinary Muslims for the actions of al-Qaida, Arab states must be careful not to automatically treat their Shia communities as tools of the Iranian government, or encourage the public to think that they are.

What the region needs most right now is not more arms but a concerted effort to promote religious tolerance, to combat religious discrimination and prejudice, and to draw the Arab Shia communities into the political processes of their home countries before it is too late.

Incidentally, Iran is not alone in condemning the arms deals. Even Siniora has been quick to complain about the increased military aid to Israel:

"Prime Minister Fouad Saniora has learned with great dismay, surprise and astonishment" about the U.S. defense package to the Jewish state, a statement released by his office said.

"Continuing to back Israel in such a manner will escalate crises and increase feelings among the Arabs and Muslims that their just causes are ignored while Israel's interests are protected," it said.

"This will raise the feeling of frustration among the Arabs and Muslims, and will therefore boost extremist movements which were born and are feeding on the feeling of (U.S.) bias in favor of Israel."

[...]

"We were hoping that the American efforts would rather help promote peace," Saniora said in the statement.

"If these funds were allocated to consolidate peace (in the Middle East) and bridge the gap between the peoples of the region, or spent on peaceful projects then the American message would have been different," he said.

"This is a very negative message to the Lebanese and Arabs.

"It will boost Israel's aggressiveness and arrogance ...it will allow the Israelis to continue to think that they can avoid the requirements of a just and comprehensive peace by maintaining military superiority," he said.

If those funds were allocated to consolidate peace, indeed. Wouldn't that be a nice change of pace?

The US is finally realizing that Saudi Arabia is not helping things in Iraq, while Iraqi officials have openly accused Saudi Arabia of arming Sunni insurgents, the same, mind you, who have been attacking American forces in Iraq. So why, then, is it that the US is "set to offer huge arms deal" to the kingdom and its neighbors? 

Saudi Arabia is the ninth biggest spender on arms. Why do the Saudis need so many weapons? According to Ha'aretz, it could be part of a larger cold war in the Middle East, which also explains Russian arms deals to Iran and Syria, arms deals between Iran and Syria, and the 25% increase in American military aid to Israel agreed upon by Bush and Olmert, meaning an increase to $3 billion a year.

While this very well might be true, we can't forget that arms sales help out American armament companies with government contracts while giving Middle Eastern states the tools needed to oppress their peoples and arm their various proxies in the region. (I'm including Israel in this, although their weapons are used to oppress Palestinians in the occupied territories and not Israeli citizens.) Obviously, the same pattern of armament and oppression that we see in American allies holds true for Russian weapons sent to Damascus and Teheran.

Eli Khoury recently had a piece in the Boston Globe in which he tells Americans everything they want to hear. He makes the following claims:

1. The majority of Lebanese are with March 14 and this challenges "the prevailing myth that Lebanon is a 'divided' country destined to live along sectarian fault lines."

2. "[T]he majority of people from all across Christian, Shia, and Sunni regions support a Lebanon free from the influence of Iran and Syria."

3. "Lebanon stands at a historic crossroads between being integrated into the international community or remaining under the heavy influences of external forces." And to do this, the United States must "support the government in protecting the upcoming presidential elections from foreign intimidators."

4. "History has proven that the people of Lebanon, despite all myths, have managed to create a nation. Now it needs help as it becomes a state."

First point 1: Estimates and eye-witness accounts (including my own) show that there were just as many people, if not more, at the pro-Hezbollah rally back in December that kicked off the sit-in against the government. March 14 can mobilize a lot of people, but then again, so can March 8. This is the very definition of a "divided country." Furthermore, with the exception of the Christians, who are divided between Aoun and Geagea (with the majority aligning themselves with Aoun and Hezbollah), the division is very much sectarian, with the Sunni and Druze on one side and the Shi'a on the other. Moreover, if the country weren't divided, the government could function, and there would be no need for an international tribunal to investigate assassinations in Lebanon.

Point 2: I'm not at all convinced of this. I have seen no concrete evidence to support this, and Khoury offers none. The country seems pretty much evenly divided from here in Beirut, and if there had to be a slant to one side or the other, I'd be inclined to think that March 8 has slightly more support than March 14.

Point 3: It is a typically Lebanese irony that people like Khoury call for independence from "external forces" on one hand while simultaneously seeking intervention by an opposing external force -- Syria/Iran and the US, respectively.

Point 4: This is perhaps the most laughable of Khoury's points. No one is arguing that there isn't a Lebanese state and ought to be one. But to say that history has proven that there is a Lebanese nation? I wonder what history he's thinking of. The history that I'm familiar with (the civil war, recent divisions, sectarian bloodshed in the 19th century) all seems to point to the fact that there are a bunch of nations within Lebanon (or as Charles Glass would say, tribes with flags) but no Lebanese nation. This is the very problem with sectarianism; it strangles true equitable and pluralistic nationalism.

Eli Khoury tries to set himself (and his movement) up as an alternative to sectarianism and the Lebanese status quo, when in reality he's just offering more of the same. The March 14 movement is just as sectarian as is the opposition (if somewhat more prone to make disparaging remarks against the poor and Shi'a). What Lebanon really needs is to find its own way. This means being not only independent of Iran and Syria, but also of the US and France. The confessional system needs to be done away with, and a truly secular state needs to be created. Perhaps if an independent state is created in Lebanon, a Lebanese nation might follow in its footsteps.  

Ezra Klein has a piece calling liberal hawks to task on their rhetoric on Iran. He argues that after getting burned by the obviously bad call to invade Iraq, they're trying to temper their rhetoric on Iran in order to cover their asses in case things go as bad as they did in Mesopotamia:

The new approach is not to refight the battle over the Iraq war, but to argue that those who got it right, or who got it wrong but eventually came to the right answer, are now in danger of overlearning the lessons of the war -- and missing the danger posed by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. An elegant entry into this burgeoning genre comes from Ken Baer in the latest issue of Democracy. "[A] president's past mistakes," writes Baer, "can so preoccupy political leaders that they lose sight of the dangers ahead or the principles they hold dear." In the conclusion of his piece, he warns that progressives must "not use anger at one war as an excuse to blink when confronting a future threat head on."

...The remarkable thing about the growing liberal hawk literature on Iran is its evasiveness -- the unwillingness to speak in concrete terms of both the threat and proposed remedies. The liberal hawks realize they were too eager in counseling war last time, and their explicit statements in support of invasion have caused them no end of trouble since. This time, they will advocate no such thing. But nor will they eschew it. They will simply criticize those who do take a position.

Iran raises several complicated questions, but also a simple one: Do you think military force is called for in preventing Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons?

I've also noticed this. There seems to be a lot of talk from liberal hawks for "getting serious about Iran," whatever that's supposed to mean. At least the right wing hawks explicitly call for bombing Iran, whereas the TNR crowd wants to have its cake and eat it too.

This is a story about a plane that, shortly after taking off, is blown up in the air. Body parts, luggage and even still living passengers plummet to the ground. A man is wrongly accused and his government bullied into paying blood money to the sum of $2.7 billion. The real sponsors of the attack are let off the hook so that the US might invade Iraq in 1991 with Muslim allies.

There is a miscarriage of justice, in which foreign governments manufacture evidence and disregard other possibilities. A Palestinian militant gives an alibi as baby-sitting in Sweden and is not only believed but given immunity for the bombing. There is a Maltese clothing store owner, whose clothes were found in an exploded suitcase in Scotland. Those who speak out against the cover-up are gagged in some cases, indicted as being Iraqi spies in others. An American congressional aid, the daughter of an Alaskan governor, is arrested and injected with mind-altering drugs. Iraq is invaded again.

The truth starts to out, and there is talk of the convicted bomber going free. There is also talk of CIA agents running a heroin smuggling scheme with Hezbollah in order to free American hostages in Lebanon, as well as of a smoldering suitcase full of drugs found somewhere in rural Scotland. Records show that the Iranians paid millions of dollars to a Syrian-backed Palestinian splinter group two days after the bombing and five months after an Iranian civilian carrier was downed by the US and Khomeini vowed that the skies would rain blood and offered $10 million to anyone who would avenge Iran. 

This certainly sounds like a cheap Middle Eastern spy-novel, but it's not. It's Hugh Miles's report on the Lockerbie trial and the seemingly real possibility that the Libyans had nothing to do with it, something that may soon be shown in a Scottish court of law.

If this report is true, then I may have to start giving a little more credence to some of the crazy-sounding conspiracy theories I hear in Lebanon.

Alvaro de Soto, the UN special envoy to the Middle East, recently penned a confidential and very frank end of mission report, which was then leaked to the Guardian. Here is the Guardian's very short summary.

Joshua Landis, for his part, has compiled the parts that deal directly with engaging Syria. Here are some extracts that I found particularly interesting:

4. ...Notwithstanding my strenuous efforts, of which there is plenty of evidence in the DPA cables file, I was never authorized to go to Syria. None of my arguments in favour of going were ever refuted, nor was I given any precise reason for denial of the authorization requested. ...

99. There is an old saying that in the Middle East you can’t make war without Egypt and you can’t make peace without Syria. The first half is no longer valid, but I sense that the second remains true. For the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, keeping Syria at arm’s length is particularly galling. Those who advocate it seem to believe that it is possible to pursue an Israeli-Palestinian track while isolating Damascus....

100. ... I don’t believe they can seriously believe that it is possible to neatly compartmentalize the various fronts and deal with them sequentially, bestowing the favour of attention on well-behaving parties first.

101. In much the same way, does anyone seriously believe that a genuine process between Israel and the Palestinians can progress without Syria being either on board or, at the very least, not opposing it, and without opening some channel for addressing Syria’s grievances? If this should be attempted, we can be sure that a reminder of the Syrian capacity to spoil it wouldn’t be long in arriving.

102. The conventional wisdom is that Israel can’t handle more than one negotiation at a time. As recently as 27 April, in a piece in Haaretz titled “Why Syria must wait”, an Israeli ambassador wrote: “Few would dispute the assertion that the Israeli bridge is incapable of supporting two peace processes, a Syrian and a Palestinian one, at the same time.” I understand the political difficulties involved. But I believe it’s just not possible to completely disaggregate the two, or calmly wait for their turn with the occupier (take a number and have a seat in the waiting room until you are called, please), and that is why the Madrid conference was conceived as it was. This can’t be anything but one more layer of excuses not to negotiate.

These points seem obvious to me. There are those who think that engaging Syria is a waste of time, but one thing they fail to explain is why Damascus should make concessions before negotiating. After all, that's the whole point of negotiating, isn't it? From a purely strategic point of view, why would Syria give up its bargaining chips (meddling in Lebanon and supporting Hezbollah and Hamas) before negotiations have even begun? Would anyone ever ask Israel to give up their occupation of the Golan as a measure of good faith before negotiating with Damascus? Of course not. That's Israel's bargaining chip, and they'd be silly to give it up before making a deal.

This is not to say that I support Syrian meddling in Lebanon; as someone who lives in Beirut and has to put up with it, quite the opposite is true. But I do understand Lebanon's strategic importance to Syria, just as I understand its strategic importance to Palestine, Israel, Iran and the US.

So let's be honest here for a bit. Egypt and Jordan were flukes backed up by US aid money. A real, and just, solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict cannot be piecemeal. There must be a comprehensive peace that includes Palestine, Israel, Syria and Lebanon with the backing of the rest of the Arab states. I've already argued before that it's too late for a two-state solution, so I won't go into that right now, but maybe a two-state solution could be a stopgap for a long-term solution in the form of a single, democratic, secular binational state. But until the time comes when all sides stop stalling and get ready to deal, things are going to be pretty rough in this neck of the woods...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go see for yourself.

Raymond Tanter from WINEP and MESH has a post up about why the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), the Iranian militants who have committed terrorist attacks against the regime in Teheran and who were hosted by Saddam's Iraq, should be delisted from the State Department's list of terrorist organizations. Besides the fact that the MEK is against the Iranian regime, basically, his argument boils down to the fact that they haven't committed any acts of terrorism for a few years:

On April 25, Patrick Clawson, deputy director of research at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wrote that designation “should be based only on terrorism issues,” and that State “cited no alleged MEK terrorist activity since 2001, yet have increased allegations pertaining [to] the group’s non-terrorist activities.” Country Reports 2007 continues this trend of making allegations that are irrelevant to terrorist designation.

Tanter attempts to argue that MEK doesn't have the capability to carry out terrorist attacks, whereas we all know that anyone with a back pack, a bus pass and household peroxide can commit an act of terrorism. So while this argument isn't very convincing, he tells us, "de-listing would provide diplomatic leverage over Tehran, as the West is presently failing to constrain the Iranian regime’s nuclear program, sponsorship of terrorism, and subversion of Iraq."

In other words, the US should use a terrorist group for political bargaining. Of course this is nothing new: the Bush family has a long history of using Cuban terrorists to apply pressure on the Castro regime. What's striking, though, is the moral indignation Republicans muster when someone supports talking to groups like Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah (most of the violence committed by the last group having been aimed at military targets). Charges of moral equivalency and weak knees in the face of terror are immediately brandished.

Well, Orlando Bosch blew up a passenger plane killing all 73 civilians aboard. Jose Dionisio Suarez and Virgilio Paz Romero assassinated the Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier in Washington. The Mujahedeen-e Khalq assassinated the deputy chief of the Iranian Armed Forces General Staff, Brigadier General Ali Sayyaad Shirazi and attacked Iranian embassies and installations in 13 different countries at the same time. They also bombed the head office of the Islamic Republic Party and the Prime Minister's office killing 70 people, including the Chief Justice, the President and the Prime Minister.

Either terrorism is an acceptable tactic, or it's not. Washington can't understand why the rest of the world sees America as hypocritical, but Tanter's desire for the US to have its cake and eat it too should give us a hunch. 

UPDATE: Thinking more about this today has reminded me of the question of when a group can legitimately be de-listed as a terrorist organization. If the fact that MEK hasn't committed any acts of terrorism since 2001 is really enough to prove that they've mended their ways, then the same ought to apply to Hezbollah as well, because depending on who was responsible for the Argentinean attacks and the kidnapping of Tannenbaum, they haven't committed any acts of terrorism since 2000, the mid-1990s or even the late 1980s.

Otherwise, supporting terrorist groups or rebels or militias in a neighboring country has long been a staple of statecraft. In Africa, Sudan, Chad, Ethiopia, Uganda and Eritrea each support groups in their neighbors' territory. Iran and Syria support Hamas and Hezbollah; Syria supported the PLO in Jordan; while Israel supported the SLA in Lebanon; and Iran trained the Iraqi Badr Brigage to fight against Saddam. Hell, the first car bomb in Iraq wasn't unleashed by Zarqawi, but rather by Iyad Allawi with the help of the CIA. So while I abhor the use of violence against civilians as a political tool, I'm not naive and do know it happens all over. It's the smug hypocrisy of the "War on Terror" that really gets my goat in the same way that the "Fair and Balanced" slogan annoys me way more than the actual Fox News coverage.

McClatchy has an interesting piece on Iranian Brig. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Revolutionary Guard's Quds Force. The story includes an awfully high percentage of anonymous sources, and the title might be a little hyperbolic, but I think the overall points made are fair enough.

Iran has a lot of sway in Iraq, which is normal. What's silly, though, is that Americans see this as some sort of meddling, because Iranian interests in Iraq are not always the same as American interests (although I'd argue that they coincide much more often than either side would like to admit). If Iran were occupying Mexico or Canada, you can be sure that the US would be "meddling" as well.

As for the actual article, I don't really have too much to add, except that it's important to look at Iranian involvement in Iraq not as a spoiler or as some diabolical force. If the US is going to come to terms with Middle Eastern players (of which Iran has become a major one, due in no small part to American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq), Washington is going to have to look at Teheran (and Damascus and Hezbollah and Hamas, for that matter) as actors who have interests in the region that can't be run over roughshod by America.

This is a reality. So just as when one deals with Zimbabwe, it's necessary to take Pretoria into account, or how when dealing with Burma or North Korea one can't ignore Beijing, the road to peace in Iraq must necessarily pass through Teheran, but not in the way that American hawks would like it to.

I spend a lot of time getting annoyed when people throw around the word "genocide" or "holocaust" when it's not warranted. This often means rebuking Lebanese and Palestinian friends who want to call the Israeli occupation a genocide. The occupation is a lot of things, none of them savory, but a genocide it is not, and calling it one cheapens the word.

So you can imagine my surprise when I saw last night that Israel's deputy defense minister, Matan Vilnai, had threatened Palestinians in Gaza with a "shoah":

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A senior Israeli defense official said on Friday that Palestinians firing rockets from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip would bring upon themselves what he termed a "shoah," the Hebrew word for holocaust or disaster.

The word is rarely used in Israel outside discussions of the Nazi Holocaust of Jews. Many Israelis are loath to countenance its use to describe other contemporary events. Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said the Palestinians faced "new Nazis."

Israeli air strikes have killed at least 33 Gazans, including five children, in the past two days. The army, which carried out additional air strikes on Friday, said most of those killed were militants.

I'm no Hebraist, but according to Reuters and common sense, "shoah," like "holocaust" isn't a word that's tossed around lightly in Israel. And whenever there's a comment by someone like Ahmadinejad, quoting Khomeini, saying that "the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time," we get Israel supporters clamoring for the world to denounce the genocidal intent of the Iranian regime. So will these same people condemn Israel's even more explicit language?

Just the other day on the Olin Institute's Middle Eastern Strategy at Harvard blog, Stephen Peter Rosen was making a fuss about a comment that Ahmadinejad made calling Israel a "black and dirty microbe," informing us that this change in discourse could be "associated with biological attacks or other unconventional mass killings." 

So since Rosen says that he's interested in tracking the discourse between Israel and Iran, I can imagine that the Harvard blog will soon have a post up warning of the impending "shoah" to be visited upon the Gazans. After all, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, right?

Of course not. If we look a the comments to Rosen's post, we're given the simple answer by Harvard's specialist on Armenia, James Russell, that "Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah are obviously murderous and crazy." I knew there was a simple answer!

UPDATE: Melanie Phillips at the Spectator is now claiming that "In Hebrew, the word ‘shoah’ is never used to mean ‘holocaust’ or ‘genocide’ because of the acute historical resonance." (Italics hers.) Someone should get Claude Lanzmann on the phone to let him know he's made a terrible mistake.

And for the record, the Israeli daily Ha'aretz has this to say about the remark:

Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai went as far as threatening a "shoah," the Hebrew word for holocaust or disaster. The word is generally used to refer to the Nazi Holocaust, but a spokesman for Vilnai said the deputy defense minister used the word in the sense of "disaster," saying "he did not mean to make any allusion to the genocide."

I get worried whenever someone calls and immediately asks, "Are you ok?" Today was one of those days. Not too far from my house, there was an explosion. Another car bomb, this time in the Dora/Quarantina suburbs just north of Beirut.

What makes this bomb different from the others is that it was presumably aimed at an American embassy vehicle. It seems that today was Ambassador Feltman's last day, and someone was either trying to whack him or to send him a little going away message. In either case, this is an escalation that we really don't need. So for the first time, non-UNIFIL foreigners have been targeted. If my hunch is right, the US Government won't be likely to take this sort of an attack lying down. It wouldn't surprise me if in a few months or so, we see a car bomb or two targeting whomever Washington thinks tried this. Probably Syrians, Iranians or someone from the March 8 opposition.

For my part, I don't want to speculate on who's behind this latest attack, although I will say that I wouldn't rule out any of the al-Qaeda franchises operating in Lebanon.

Whoever is responsible, it's a sad day for those people who were ruthlessly killed today while going about there everyday business.    

UPDATE: This NYT report puts the blast in Bourj Hammoud, which is closer than I thought. Bourj Hammoud is mostly Armenian, the first suburb past my neighborhood, Mar Mkhail. I often go there for cheap shopping: real Converse Allstars that presumably fell off the back of a Chinese boat, for example, can be found for less than 10 euros a pair. Perhaps I'll go see for myself today where, exactly, the bomb was.

Akiva Eldar has a very non-explicit opinion piece in Ha'aretz about the nuclear weapons in the Middle East. I have the feeling that Israeli laws on its "secret" nuclear program prevent him from being more explicit, but he nonetheless poses a question that I've been asking for some time now:

How can a country, which according to endless foreign reports has kept secret for years several atomic weapons, manage to rally the international community in a struggle against a neighboring country that insists on acquiring nuclear energy? What do Israeli politicians answer to those asking why Iran should not be allowed to acquire the same armaments that are already in the arsenals of neighboring countries, like Pakistan and India? The common response is that "Iran is the sole country whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, declares openly that he intends to destroy the state of Israel." This argument is a double-edged sword, par excellence, used by a country that sports a radiant nuclear glow (according to foreign press reports, of course), and who has a senior minister, one assigned to dealing with strategic threats, who has threatened to bomb the Aswan Dam.

Again without being explicit, he calls for a nuclear weapons-free Middle East, but he says that this should be done "when the conflict is resolved," which seems a little too much like waiting for Godot to me. History has shown that countries that get the bomb are very unlikely to give it up (with the exception of South Africa). So if Israel waits until Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Jordan all have the bomb, a nuke-free Middle East will never happen, because while the chances of Israel giving up the bomb seem slim, the chances of getting all those other states to give it up are nil.   

I was watching CNN last night while hanging pictures and folding laundry, when Wolf Blitzer came on. All in all, it was actually fairly interesting. He interviewed El Baradei from the IAEA, Jordan's Queen Rania, the Turkish ambassador to the US, Barbara Boxer and Trent Lott. The last two were on after everyone else to respond to the issues being discussed.

Boxer was pretty well spoken and moderate about everything until she was asked about the Israeli bombing of Syria last month. El Baradei mentioned that neither the US nor Israel had provided the IAEA with any evidence of a Syrian nuclear program. He then rebuked the Israelis for shooting first and asking questions later instead of using the appropriate organization for such issues: the IAEA. So while Lott and Boxer disagreed on pretty much everything from the Armenian genocide bill to the rhetoric being used by the White House about a possible war against Iran, the one thing that they could agree on was that Israel has "the right to defend itself."

It's really uncanny. Neither said that they had been fully briefed on any intelligence concerning the Israeli strike in Syria, but both of them unequivocally supported it without any reservations. It's to be expected from Lott, but Boxer, who spends much of her time chiding the Bush administration for talking about war in Iran and having gone to war in Iraq has nothing critical to say about Israel's act of war.

Democrats seem to believe that politically speaking, they can be harder on the US, the country they're ostensibly representing, than they can be with Israel, a foreign nation. The more stories I hear about Capitol Hill and the more performances like Boxer's that I see, the more I think that there's truth in Buchanan's remark that Congress is Israeli-occupied territory.

The Bush administration has just recently decided to designate a large chunk of a sovereign nation's armed forces as a terrorist organization. The choice doesn't seem to be final and hasn't been put into effect yet, so it might just be saber rattling to pressure the Iranian government, although it's hard to see what effect this would actually have on the Iranian regime, which is already the target of US economic sanctions.

What's interesting about this is that it's the first time the US has decided to label a state actor as a terrorist organization. The current definition contained in Title 18 of the US Code, Section 2331 is as follows:

Section 2331. Definitions

      As used in this chapter - 
        (1) the term "international terrorism" means activities that - 
          (A) involve violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that
        are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of
        any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed
        within the jurisdiction of the United States or of any State;
          (B) appear to be intended - 
            (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
            (ii) to influence the policy of a government by
          intimidation or coercion; or
            (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass
          destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and

          (C) occur primarily outside the territorial jurisdiction of
        the United States, or transcend national boundaries in terms of
        the means by which they are accomplished, the persons they
        appear intended to intimidate or coerce, or the locale in which
        their perpetrators operate or seek asylum;

What is interesting is that this definition, contrary to many others, does not exclude state actors. As such, every time the CIA or IDF kidnaps or assassinates someone, those organizations are committing acts of international terrorism, according to US Code. People like Noam Chomsky have held the US to its definition for a very long time, but until now, there has been a hesitancy about designating any state actors as terrorist organizations, presumably because that opens the US Government, and those of its allies, even more so to charges of terrorism.

If I were part of the Iranian government, I would bring this up and make a similar designation of the US Government. After all, at a time when CIA agents have been indicted by an Italian judge for kidnapping, it's a charge that is difficult to rebut. 

Via Ezra, I found a website that lets you select quotes from presidential candidates that you agree with without telling you who they are until the end. You have to check the boxes of issues that interest you, so I tried it out on foreign policy (general), Iraq War, Iran, Israel and Palestine and finally, Health Care.

Since most of the quotes I chose to respond to were about foreign policy, it's not surprising that I agree the most with Bill Richardson. After him, Mike Gravel (about whom I know next to nothing), Kucinich and Obama were tied for second place. There were six Republican candidates whom I agreed with on one quote, and one Republican (Ron Paul) whom I agreed with more than a Democrat (Biden) by a score of 4 to 3. I'm pretty sure that if I had done the whole test, including the other domestic quotes, that probably would have switched around. Totally absent from the list of people whom I can agree with about a single thing is Guiliani.

Otherwise, it's interesting to me that on the issue of Israel/Palestine, there weren't very many quotes I agreed with by any of the candidates. I clicked to agree with some of the fairer sounding two-state comments, although deep down, I don't believe a two-state solution is viable in the long term. There were exactly zero candidates who came out for cutting funding to Israel or a one-state solution and only one quote, from Gravel, about negotiating with Hamas:

The US must sponsor negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, including Hamas, with the goal of a two-state solution guaranteeing demilitarized borders, Israel's right to survive and raising Palestinians economic standards.

Of those who took the test, more than half (52.8%) agreed with this statement.

The two most popular quotes that I agreed with were by Richardson and Kucinich, at 80% and 72.86% respectively:

Richardson: "In recent years, American foreign policy has been guided more by dogma than by facts, more by ideology than by history, more by wishful thinking than by reality."

Kucinich: "I support normal bilateral trade with Cuba. Farm communities throughout the U.S. are being denied a natural market in Cuba, and Americans are being denied products from Cuba."

Of course it's hard to generalize these percentages, because like me, most people probably only responded to quotes in the areas that are the most important to them, and so I can imagine that issue like abortion, for example, were ranked as the most important by more conservative people.

In any case, it's an interesting exercise nonetheless, and I've been able to work out that while I agree with Richardson more than anyone else about the issues that are the most important to me, I agree enough with Obama to back him instead since Richardson has nearly no chance of winning the primaries. (I hope he will accept being a vice presidential candidate or nomination as secretary of state.)

Lately, we've been hearing an awful lot about the Iranian threat to Israel. Much of this has been couched in alarmist rhetoric that implies (or even sometimes explicitly says) that Iran is the new Nazi Germany. One of the more problematic facts for this narrative is the existence of the Middle East's second largest Jewish community. After Israel, more Jews live in Iran than in any other country in the region.

It seems, however, that Jewish groups are trying to entice Iranian Jews into moving to Israel -- but without much luck, it seems:

Iran's Jews have given the country a loyalty pledge in the face of cash offers aimed at encouraging them to move to Israel, the arch-enemy of its Islamic rulers.

The incentives - ranging from £5,000 a person to £30,000 for families - were offered from a special fund established by wealthy expatriate Jews in an effort to prompt a mass migration to Israel among Iran's 25,000-strong Jewish community. The offers were made with Israel's official blessing and were additional to the usual state packages it provides to Jews emigrating from the diaspora.

However, the Society of Iranian Jews dismissed them as "immature political enticements" and said their national identity was not for sale.

"The identity of Iranian Jews is not tradable for any amount of money," the society said in a statement. "Iranian Jews are among the most ancient Iranians. Iran's Jews love their Iranian identity and their culture, so threats and this immature political enticement will not achieve their aim of wiping out the identity of Iranian Jews."

The Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv reported that the incentives had been doubled after offers of £2,500 a head failed to attract any Iranian Jews to leave for Israel.

Iran's sole Jewish MP, Morris Motamed, said the offers were insulting and put the country's Jews under pressure to prove their loyalty. "It suggests the Iranian Jew can be encouraged to emigrate by money," he said. "Iran's Jews have always been free to emigrate and three-quarters of them did so after the revolution but 70% of those went to America, not Israel."

Similar efforts have been made to attract French Jews, with Sharon's remarks that they should move to Israel because of anti-Semitism in France. That call, however, was met with similar results (translation mine):

Jewish associations in France also announced their indignation and expressed unequivocal disapproval of Ariel Sharon's remarks. Haïm Korsia, the representative of the Grand Rabbi Joseph Sitruk declared that the question of the Jews of France is "a moot point" because, for him, to speak of "the Jews of France doesn't mean anything; there are French citizens who are Jews, like others have another religion." Richard Prasquier, member of the executive office of CRIF (Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France) affirmed that the call to immigration made by Ariel Sharon threw "oil on the fire in an unacceptable way." Patrick Klugman, former president of the Union of Jewish Students of France (UEJF) and vice president of SOS Racism said that the Israeli Prime Minister was "very ill informed of what is happening in France." As for Theo Klein, the vice president of CRIF, he concluded with a message to Ariel Sharon: "He should let the Jewish community in France deal with its own problems." 

As far as efforts to get European Jews to emigrate to Israel, it seems that, if anything, the current trend is in the opposite direction. With 20% of Israelis eligible for an EU passport, more and more are applying for the bordeaux-colored passports. Ironically, the Jewish Agency for Israel has been pressuring the German government to stop making it easy for Jews from the former Soviet Union to settle there. (In 2003, for example, more Russian Jews chose to go to Germany than to Israel.)

The attempt to encourage Diaspora Jews to make aliyah in general is fairly normal and linked, to my mind, to Israeli and Palestinian demographics. The attempts to target Jews in Iran and France in particular, however, might be an attempt to disprove that Muslims and Jews can live together. In addition to having the largest Jewish community in western Europe (600,000), France, after all, also has the largest Muslim community in the region, making up 10% the French population (mostly from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Senegal). And the claims that Iran is equivalent to Nazi Germany seem kind of silly when it has its own 25,000-strong Jewish population that resists emigrating to Israel and which has a Jewish representative in the Iranian Parliament.

In addition to endangering the case for war with Iran, the Jewish Diaspora weakens the argument for the need for a Jewish state in the first place. Because if Jews can live without fear in the US and Europe, or even in Iran, why shouldn't there be a binational state between the Jordan and the Mediterranean where Jews and Arabs can live with equal rights, regardless of race or creed? 

This is probably so obvious that it doesn't need to be said, but then again, if it didn't need to be said the media wouldn't keep committing the petty sin of calling regimes in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt "moderate." What about Riyadh makes it more moderate than Teheran? It's just as religious, human rights are just as bad (if not worse) and it's much less democratic. So why does the western media insist on calling regimes like that moderate?

What they seem to mean is allied regimes, not moderate regimes. There's nothing moderate about Saudi Arabia, so let's stop pretending there is and call a spade a spade. Riyadh is an American ally -- and probably not a very good one at that. As any number of the unsavory regimes the US is friendly with should tell us, moderation and good relations are not at all the same thing.

I mentioned yesterday that arming the Middle East wasn't a good idea. Brian Whitaker has an interesting piece in the Guardian's Comment is Free section about how the new arms deal for the region could pour gas on the Sunni/Shi'a divide in the Middle East, serving as a "green light for oppression" for ostensibly Sunni regimes to discriminate against their Shi'a citizens in the name of combating Iranian influence:

If the Bush administration's goal was to inflame Sunni-Shia tensions across the region and to spread the sectarian strife in Iraq to neighbouring countries, it would be hard to imagine a more effective way of going about it.

Although Iran is the worldwide centre of Shia Islam, there's an important distinction to be made between Shia Muslims and the Iranian regime. The question is how many people will actually make it. Marginalised Shia communities in the Gulf states and Egypt will undoubtedly feel more threatened, while others will interpret the American move as a green light to oppress them further.

[...]

Viewed from Washington, bolstering tyrannical Sunni regimes against Iran might seem like pragmatism - a convergence of interests. But it's a dangerous sort of pragmatism because the American and Saudi interests are ultimately different. The Saudi government isn't really worried about Tehran; it's worried about keeping the lid on its Shia population in the oil-rich eastern province - and in the long term that can only rebound negatively on the US.

Just as there is a need to recognise that Jews in general are not responsible for the actions of the Israeli government, nor ordinary Muslims for the actions of al-Qaida, Arab states must be careful not to automatically treat their Shia communities as tools of the Iranian government, or encourage the public to think that they are.

What the region needs most right now is not more arms but a concerted effort to promote religious tolerance, to combat religious discrimination and prejudice, and to draw the Arab Shia communities into the political processes of their home countries before it is too late.

Incidentally, Iran is not alone in condemning the arms deals. Even Siniora has been quick to complain about the increased military aid to Israel:

"Prime Minister Fouad Saniora has learned with great dismay, surprise and astonishment" about the U.S. defense package to the Jewish state, a statement released by his office said.

"Continuing to back Israel in such a manner will escalate crises and increase feelings among the Arabs and Muslims that their just causes are ignored while Israel's interests are protected," it said.

"This will raise the feeling of frustration among the Arabs and Muslims, and will therefore boost extremist movements which were born and are feeding on the feeling of (U.S.) bias in favor of Israel."

[...]

"We were hoping that the American efforts would rather help promote peace," Saniora said in the statement.

"If these funds were allocated to consolidate peace (in the Middle East) and bridge the gap between the peoples of the region, or spent on peaceful projects then the American message would have been different," he said.

"This is a very negative message to the Lebanese and Arabs.

"It will boost Israel's aggressiveness and arrogance ...it will allow the Israelis to continue to think that they can avoid the requirements of a just and comprehensive peace by maintaining military superiority," he said.

If those funds were allocated to consolidate peace, indeed. Wouldn't that be a nice change of pace?

The US is finally realizing that Saudi Arabia is not helping things in Iraq, while Iraqi officials have openly accused Saudi Arabia of arming Sunni insurgents, the same, mind you, who have been attacking American forces in Iraq. So why, then, is it that the US is "set to offer huge arms deal" to the kingdom and its neighbors? 

Saudi Arabia is the ninth biggest spender on arms. Why do the Saudis need so many weapons? According to Ha'aretz, it could be part of a larger cold war in the Middle East, which also explains Russian arms deals to Iran and Syria, arms deals between Iran and Syria, and the 25% increase in American military aid to Israel agreed upon by Bush and Olmert, meaning an increase to $3 billion a year.

While this very well might be true, we can't forget that arms sales help out American armament companies with government contracts while giving Middle Eastern states the tools needed to oppress their peoples and arm their various proxies in the region. (I'm including Israel in this, although their weapons are used to oppress Palestinians in the occupied territories and not Israeli citizens.) Obviously, the same pattern of armament and oppression that we see in American allies holds true for Russian weapons sent to Damascus and Teheran.

Eli Khoury recently had a piece in the Boston Globe in which he tells Americans everything they want to hear. He makes the following claims:

1. The majority of Lebanese are with March 14 and this challenges "the prevailing myth that Lebanon is a 'divided' country destined to live along sectarian fault lines."

2. "[T]he majority of people from all across Christian, Shia, and Sunni regions support a Lebanon free from the influence of Iran and Syria."

3. "Lebanon stands at a historic crossroads between being integrated into the international community or remaining under the heavy influences of external forces." And to do this, the United States must "support the government in protecting the upcoming presidential elections from foreign intimidators."

4. "History has proven that the people of Lebanon, despite all myths, have managed to create a nation. Now it needs help as it becomes a state."

First point 1: Estimates and eye-witness accounts (including my own) show that there were just as many people, if not more, at the pro-Hezbollah rally back in December that kicked off the sit-in against the government. March 14 can mobilize a lot of people, but then again, so can March 8. This is the very definition of a "divided country." Furthermore, with the exception of the Christians, who are divided between Aoun and Geagea (with the majority aligning themselves with Aoun and Hezbollah), the division is very much sectarian, with the Sunni and Druze on one side and the Shi'a on the other. Moreover, if the country weren't divided, the government could function, and there would be no need for an international tribunal to investigate assassinations in Lebanon.

Point 2: I'm not at all convinced of this. I have seen no concrete evidence to support this, and Khoury offers none. The country seems pretty much evenly divided from here in Beirut, and if there had to be a slant to one side or the other, I'd be inclined to think that March 8 has slightly more support than March 14.

Point 3: It is a typically Lebanese irony that people like Khoury call for independence from "external forces" on one hand while simultaneously seeking intervention by an opposing external force -- Syria/Iran and the US, respectively.

Point 4: This is perhaps the most laughable of Khoury's points. No one is arguing that there isn't a Lebanese state and ought to be one. But to say that history has proven that there is a Lebanese nation? I wonder what history he's thinking of. The history that I'm familiar with (the civil war, recent divisions, sectarian bloodshed in the 19th century) all seems to point to the fact that there are a bunch of nations within Lebanon (or as Charles Glass would say, tribes with flags) but no Lebanese nation. This is the very problem with sectarianism; it strangles true equitable and pluralistic nationalism.

Eli Khoury tries to set himself (and his movement) up as an alternative to sectarianism and the Lebanese status quo, when in reality he's just offering more of the same. The March 14 movement is just as sectarian as is the opposition (if somewhat more prone to make disparaging remarks against the poor and Shi'a). What Lebanon really needs is to find its own way. This means being not only independent of Iran and Syria, but also of the US and France. The confessional system needs to be done away with, and a truly secular state needs to be created. Perhaps if an independent state is created in Lebanon, a Lebanese nation might follow in its footsteps.  

Ezra Klein has a piece calling liberal hawks to task on their rhetoric on Iran. He argues that after getting burned by the obviously bad call to invade Iraq, they're trying to temper their rhetoric on Iran in order to cover their asses in case things go as bad as they did in Mesopotamia:

The new approach is not to refight the battle over the Iraq war, but to argue that those who got it right, or who got it wrong but eventually came to the right answer, are now in danger of overlearning the lessons of the war -- and missing the danger posed by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. An elegant entry into this burgeoning genre comes from Ken Baer in the latest issue of Democracy. "[A] president's past mistakes," writes Baer, "can so preoccupy political leaders that they lose sight of the dangers ahead or the principles they hold dear." In the conclusion of his piece, he warns that progressives must "not use anger at one war as an excuse to blink when confronting a future threat head on."

...The remarkable thing about the growing liberal hawk literature on Iran is its evasiveness -- the unwillingness to speak in concrete terms of both the threat and proposed remedies. The liberal hawks realize they were too eager in counseling war last time, and their explicit statements in support of invasion have caused them no end of trouble since. This time, they will advocate no such thing. But nor will they eschew it. They will simply criticize those who do take a position.

Iran raises several complicated questions, but also a simple one: Do you think military force is called for in preventing Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons?

I've also noticed this. There seems to be a lot of talk from liberal hawks for "getting serious about Iran," whatever that's supposed to mean. At least the right wing hawks explicitly call for bombing Iran, whereas the TNR crowd wants to have its cake and eat it too.

This is a story about a plane that, shortly after taking off, is blown up in the air. Body parts, luggage and even still living passengers plummet to the ground. A man is wrongly accused and his government bullied into paying blood money to the sum of $2.7 billion. The real sponsors of the attack are let off the hook so that the US might invade Iraq in 1991 with Muslim allies.

There is a miscarriage of justice, in which foreign governments manufacture evidence and disregard other possibilities. A Palestinian militant gives an alibi as baby-sitting in Sweden and is not only believed but given immunity for the bombing. There is a Maltese clothing store owner, whose clothes were found in an exploded suitcase in Scotland. Those who speak out against the cover-up are gagged in some cases, indicted as being Iraqi spies in others. An American congressional aid, the daughter of an Alaskan governor, is arrested and injected with mind-altering drugs. Iraq is invaded again.

The truth starts to out, and there is talk of the convicted bomber going free. There is also talk of CIA agents running a heroin smuggling scheme with Hezbollah in order to free American hostages in Lebanon, as well as of a smoldering suitcase full of drugs found somewhere in rural Scotland. Records show that the Iranians paid millions of dollars to a Syrian-backed Palestinian splinter group two days after the bombing and five months after an Iranian civilian carrier was downed by the US and Khomeini vowed that the skies would rain blood and offered $10 million to anyone who would avenge Iran. 

This certainly sounds like a cheap Middle Eastern spy-novel, but it's not. It's Hugh Miles's report on the Lockerbie trial and the seemingly real possibility that the Libyans had nothing to do with it, something that may soon be shown in a Scottish court of law.

If this report is true, then I may have to start giving a little more credence to some of the crazy-sounding conspiracy theories I hear in Lebanon.

Alvaro de Soto, the UN special envoy to the Middle East, recently penned a confidential and very frank end of mission report, which was then leaked to the Guardian. Here is the Guardian's very short summary.

Joshua Landis, for his part, has compiled the parts that deal directly with engaging Syria. Here are some extracts that I found particularly interesting:

4. ...Notwithstanding my strenuous efforts, of which there is plenty of evidence in the DPA cables file, I was never authorized to go to Syria. None of my arguments in favour of going were ever refuted, nor was I given any precise reason for denial of the authorization requested. ...

99. There is an old saying that in the Middle East you can’t make war without Egypt and you can’t make peace without Syria. The first half is no longer valid, but I sense that the second remains true. For the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, keeping Syria at arm’s length is particularly galling. Those who advocate it seem to believe that it is possible to pursue an Israeli-Palestinian track while isolating Damascus....

100. ... I don’t believe they can seriously believe that it is possible to neatly compartmentalize the various fronts and deal with them sequentially, bestowing the favour of attention on well-behaving parties first.

101. In much the same way, does anyone seriously believe that a genuine process between Israel and the Palestinians can progress without Syria being either on board or, at the very least, not opposing it, and without opening some channel for addressing Syria’s grievances? If this should be attempted, we can be sure that a reminder of the Syrian capacity to spoil it wouldn’t be long in arriving.

102. The conventional wisdom is that Israel can’t handle more than one negotiation at a time. As recently as 27 April, in a piece in Haaretz titled “Why Syria must wait”, an Israeli ambassador wrote: “Few would dispute the assertion that the Israeli bridge is incapable of supporting two peace processes, a Syrian and a Palestinian one, at the same time.” I understand the political difficulties involved. But I believe it’s just not possible to completely disaggregate the two, or calmly wait for their turn with the occupier (take a number and have a seat in the waiting room until you are called, please), and that is why the Madrid conference was conceived as it was. This can’t be anything but one more layer of excuses not to negotiate.

These points seem obvious to me. There are those who think that engaging Syria is a waste of time, but one thing they fail to explain is why Damascus should make concessions before negotiating. After all, that's the whole point of negotiating, isn't it? From a purely strategic point of view, why would Syria give up its bargaining chips (meddling in Lebanon and supporting Hezbollah and Hamas) before negotiations have even begun? Would anyone ever ask Israel to give up their occupation of the Golan as a measure of good faith before negotiating with Damascus? Of course not. That's Israel's bargaining chip, and they'd be silly to give it up before making a deal.

This is not to say that I support Syrian meddling in Lebanon; as someone who lives in Beirut and has to put up with it, quite the opposite is true. But I do understand Lebanon's strategic importance to Syria, just as I understand its strategic importance to Palestine, Israel, Iran and the US.

So let's be honest here for a bit. Egypt and Jordan were flukes backed up by US aid money. A real, and just, solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict cannot be piecemeal. There must be a comprehensive peace that includes Palestine, Israel, Syria and Lebanon with the backing of the rest of the Arab states. I've already argued before that it's too late for a two-state solution, so I won't go into that right now, but maybe a two-state solution could be a stopgap for a long-term solution in the form of a single, democratic, secular binational state. But until the time comes when all sides stop stalling and get ready to deal, things are going to be pretty rough in this neck of the woods...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go see for yourself.