By Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writer
10/01/06 "Washington Post" -- -- On May 22, 2006, President Bush spoke in Chicago and gave a characteristically upbeat forecast: "Years from now, people will look back on the formation of a unity government in Iraq as a decisive moment in the story of liberty, a moment when freedom gained a firm foothold in the Middle East and the forces of terror began their long retreat."
Two days later, the intelligence division of the Joint Chiefs of Staff circulated a secret intelligence assessment to the White House that contradicted the president's forecast.
Instead of a "long retreat," the report forecast a more violent 2007: "Insurgents and terrorists retain the resources and capabilities to sustain and even increase current level of violence through the next year."
A graph included in the assessment measured attacks from May 2003 to May 2006. It showed some significant dips, but the current number of attacks against U.S.-led coalition forces and Iraqi authorities was as high as it had ever been -- exceeding 3,500 a month. [In July the number would be over 4,500.] The assessment also included a pessimistic report on crude oil production, the delivery of electricity and political progress.
On May 26, the Pentagon released an unclassified report to Congress, required by law, that contradicted the Joint Chiefs' secret assessment. The public report sent to Congress said the "appeal and motivation for continued violent action will begin to wane in early 2007."
There was a vast difference between what the White House and Pentagon knew about the situation in Iraq and what they were saying publicly. But the discrepancy was not surprising. In memos, reports and internal debates, high-level officials of the Bush administration have voiced their concern about the United States' ability to bring peace and stability to Iraq since early in the occupation.
[The release last week of portions of a National Intelligence Estimate concluding that the war in Iraq has become a primary recruitment vehicle for terrorists -- following a series of upbeat speeches by the president -- presented a similar contrast.]
On June 18, 2003, Jay Garner went to see Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to report on his brief tenure in Iraq as head of the postwar planning office. Throughout the invasion and the early days of the war, Garner, a retired Army lieutenant general, had struggled just to get his team into Iraq. Two days after he arrived, Rumsfeld called to tell him that L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer, a 61-year-old terrorism expert and protege of Henry A. Kissinger, would be coming over as the presidential envoy, effectively replacing Garner.
"We've made three tragic decisions," Garner told Rumsfeld.
"Really?" Rumsfeld asked.
"Three terrible mistakes," Garner said.
He cited the first two orders Bremer signed when he arrived, the first one banning as many as 50,000 members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party from government jobs and the second disbanding the Iraqi military. Now there were hundreds of thousands of disorganized, unemployed, armed Iraqis running around.
Third, Garner said, Bremer had summarily dismissed an interim Iraqi leadership group that had been eager to help the United States administer the country in the short term. "Jerry Bremer can't be the face of the government to the Iraqi people. You've got to have an Iraqi face for the Iraqi people."
Garner made his final point: "There's still time to rectify this. There's still time to turn it around."
Rumsfeld looked at Garner for a moment with his take-no-prisoners gaze. "Well," he said, "I don't think there is anything we can do, because we are where we are."
He thinks I've lost it, Garner thought. He thinks I'm absolutely wrong. Garner didn't want it to sound like sour grapes, but facts were facts. "They're all reversible," Garner said again.
"We're not going to go back," Rumsfeld said emphatically.
Later that day, Garner went with Rumsfeld to the White House. But in a meeting with Bush, he made no mention of mistakes. Instead he regaled the president with stories from his time in Baghdad.
In an interview last December, I asked Garner if he had any regrets in not telling the president about his misgivings.
"You know, I don't know if I had that moment to live over again, I don't know if I'd do that or not. But if I had done that -- and quite frankly, I mean, I wouldn't have had a problem doing that -- but in my thinking, the door's closed. I mean, there's nothing I can do to open this door again. And I think if I had said that to the president in front of Cheney and Condoleezza Rice and Rumsfeld in there, the president would have looked at them and they would have rolled their eyes back and he would have thought, 'Boy, I wonder why we didn't get rid of this guy sooner?' "
"They didn't see it coming," Garner added. "As the troops said, they drank the Kool-Aid."
What's the Strategy?
In the fall of 2003 and the winter of 2004, officials of the National Security Council became increasingly concerned about the ability of the U.S. military to counter the growing insurgency in Iraq.
Returning from a visit to Iraq, Robert D. Blackwill, the NSC's top official for Iraq, was deeply disturbed by what he considered the inadequate number of troops on the ground there. He told Rice and Stephen J. Hadley, her deputy, that the NSC needed to do a military review.
"If we have a military strategy, I can't identify it," Hadley said. "I don't know what's worse -- that they have one and won't tell us or that they don't have one."
Rice had made it clear that her authority did not extend to Rumsfeld or the military, so Blackwill never forced the issue with her. Still, he wondered why the president never challenged the military. Why didn't he say to Gen. John P. Abizaid at the end of one of his secure video briefings, "John, let's have another of these on Thursday and what I really want from you is please explain to me, let's take an hour and a half, your military strategy for victory."
After Bush's reelection, Hadley replaced Rice as national security adviser. He made an assessment of the problems from the first term.
"I give us a B-minus for policy development," he told a colleague on Feb. 5, 2005, "and a D-minus for policy execution."
Rice, for her part, hired Philip D. Zelikow, an old friend, and sent him immediately to Iraq. She needed ground truth, a full, detailed report from someone she trusted. Zelikow had a license to go anywhere and ask any question.
On Feb. 10, 2005, two weeks after Rice became secretary of state, Zelikow presented her with a 15-page, single-spaced secret memo. "At this point Iraq remains a failed state shadowed by constant violence and undergoing revolutionary political change," Zelikow wrote.
The insurgency was "being contained militarily," but it was "quite active," leaving Iraqi civilians feeling "very insecure," Zelikow said.
U.S. officials seemed locked down in the fortified Green Zone. "Mobility of coalition officials is extremely limited, and productive government activity is constrained."
Zelikow criticized the Baghdad-centered effort, noting that "the war can certainly be lost in Baghdad, but the war can only be won in the cities and provinces outside Baghdad."
In sum, he said, the United States' effort suffered because it lacked an articulated, comprehensive, unified policy.
Lessons From Kissinger
A powerful, largely invisible influence on Bush's Iraq policy was former secretary of state Kissinger.
"Of the outside people that I talk to in this job," Vice President Cheney told me in the summer of 2005, "I probably talk to Henry Kissinger more than I talk to anybody else. He just comes by and, I guess at least once a month, Scooter [his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby] and I sit down with him."
The president also met privately with Kissinger every couple of months, making him the most regular and frequent outside adviser to Bush on foreign affairs.
Kissinger sensed wobbliness everywhere on Iraq, and he increasingly saw it through the prism of the Vietnam War. For Kissinger, the overriding lesson of Vietnam is to stick it out.
In his writing, speeches and private comments, Kissinger claimed that the United States had essentially won the war in 1972, only to lose it because of the weakened resolve of the public and Congress.
In a column in The Washington Post on Aug. 12, 2005, titled "Lessons for an Exit Strategy," Kissinger wrote, "Victory over the insurgency is the only meaningful exit strategy."
He delivered the same message directly to Bush, Cheney and Hadley at the White House.
Victory had to be the goal, he told all. Don't let it happen again. Don't give an inch, or else the media, the Congress and the American culture of avoiding hardship will walk you back.
He also said that the eventual outcome in Iraq was more important than Vietnam had been. A radical Islamic or Taliban-style government in Iraq would be a model that could challenge the internal stability of the key countries in the Middle East and elsewhere.
Kissinger told Rice that in Vietnam they didn't have the time, focus, energy or support at home to get the politics in place. That's why it had collapsed like a house of cards. He urged that the Bush administration get the politics right, both in Iraq and on the home front. Partially withdrawing troops had its own dangers. Even entertaining the idea of withdrawing any troops could create momentum for an exit that was less than victory.
In a meeting with presidential speechwriter Michael Gerson in early September 2005, Kissinger was more explicit: Bush needed to resist the pressure to withdraw American troops. He repeated his axiom that the only meaningful exit strategy was victory.
"The president can't be talking about troop reductions as a centerpiece," Kissinger said. "You may want to reduce troops," but troop reduction should not be the objective. "This is not where you put the emphasis."
To emphasize his point, he gave Gerson a copy of a memo he had written to President Richard M. Nixon, dated Sept. 10, 1969.
"Withdrawal of U.S. troops will become like salted peanuts to the American public; the more U.S. troops come home, the more will be demanded," he wrote.
The policy of "Vietnamization," turning the fight over to the South Vietnamese military, Kissinger wrote, might increase pressure to end the war because the American public wanted a quick resolution. Troop withdrawals would only encourage the enemy. "It will become harder and harder to maintain the morale of those who remain, not to speak of their mothers."
Two months after Gerson's meeting, the administration issued a 35-page "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq." It was right out of the Kissinger playbook. The only meaningful exit strategy would be victory.
Echoes of Vietnam
Vietnam was also on the minds of some old Army buddies of Gen. Abizaid, the Centcom commander. They were worried that Iraq was slowly turning into Vietnam -- either it would wind down prematurely or become a war that was not winnable.
Some of them, including retired Gen. Wayne A. Downing and James V. Kimsey, a founder of America Online, visited Abizaid in 2005 at his headquarters in Doha, Qatar, and then in Iraq.
Abizaid held to the position that the war was now about the Iraqis. They had to win it now. The U.S. military had done all it could. It was critical, he argued, that they lower the American troop presence. It was still the face of an occupation, with American forces patrolling, kicking down doors and looking at the Iraqi women, which infuriated the Iraqi men.
"We've got to get the [expletive] out," he said.
Abizaid's old friends were worried sick that another Vietnam or anything that looked like Vietnam would be the end of the volunteer army. What's the strategy for winning? they pressed him.
"That's not my job," Abizaid said.
No, it is part of your job, they insisted.
No, Abizaid said. Articulating strategy belonged to others.
Who?
"The president and Condi Rice, because Rumsfeld doesn't have any credibility anymore," he said.
This March, Abizaid was in Washington to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He painted a careful but upbeat picture of the situation in Iraq.
Afterward, he went over to see Rep. John P. Murtha in the Rayburn House Office Building. Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat, had introduced a resolution in Congress calling for American troops in Iraq to be "redeployed" -- the military term for returning troops overseas to their home bases -- "at the earliest practicable date."
"The war in Iraq is not going as advertised," Murtha had said. "It is a flawed policy wrapped in illusion."
Now, sitting at the round dark-wood table in the congressman's office, Abizaid, the one uniformed military commander who had been intimately involved in Iraq from the beginning and who was still at it, indicated he wanted to speak frankly. According to Murtha, Abizaid raised his hand for emphasis, held his thumb and forefinger a quarter of an inch from each other and said, "We're that far apart."
Frustration and a Resignation
That same month, White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. prepared to leave the administration after submitting his resignation to Bush. He felt a sense of relief mixed with the knowledge that he was leaving unfinished business.
"It's Iraq, Iraq, Iraq," Card had told his replacement, Joshua B. Bolten. "Then comes the economy."
One of Card's great worries was that Iraq would be compared to Vietnam. In March, there were 58,249 names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. One of Kissinger's private criticisms of Bush was that he had no mechanism in place, or even an inclination, to consider the downsides of impending decisions. Alternative courses of action were rarely considered.
As best as Card could remember, there had been some informal, blue-sky discussions at times along the lines of "What could we do differently?" But there had been no formal sessions to consider alternatives to staying in Iraq. To his knowledge there were no anguished memos bearing the names of Cheney, Rice, Hadley, Rumsfeld, the CIA, Card himself or anyone else saying "Let's examine alternatives," as had surfaced after the Vietnam era.
Card put it on the generals in the Pentagon and Iraq. If they had come forward and said to the president, "It's not worth it," or, "The mission can't be accomplished," Card was certain, the president would have said "I'm not going to ask another kid to sacrifice for it."
Card was enough of a realist to see that there were two negative aspects to Bush's public persona that had come to define his presidency: incompetence and arrogance. Card did not believe that Bush was incompetent, and so he had to face the possibility that, as Bush's chief of staff, he might have been the incompetent one. In addition, he did not think the president was arrogant.
But the marketing of Bush had come across as arrogant. Maybe it was unfair in Card's opinion, but there it was.
He was leaving. And the man he considered most responsible for the postwar troubles, the one who should have gone, Rumsfeld, was staying.
Bill Murphy Jr. and Christine Parthemore contributed to this report.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
شبكة البصرة
الاثنين 10 رمضان 1427 / 2 تشرين الاول 2006
يرجى الاشارة الى شبكة البصرة عند اعادة النشر او الاقتباس
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
Monday, October 02, 2006
Full text: US intelligence findings
Wednesday 27 September 2006 6:15 AM GMT
Jihadist groups have carried out a number of attacks in Iraq
The full text of the parts of the US National Intelligence Estimate report declassified on Tuesday.
The document was written in April, before the death of al-Qaeda in Iraq leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
United States-led counterterrorism efforts have seriously damaged the leadership of al-Qaeda and disrupted its operations; however, we judge that al-Qaeda will continue to pose the greatest threat by a single terrorist organization to the homeland and US interests abroad.
We also assess that the global jihadist movement, which includes al-Qaeda, affiliated and independent terrorist groups and emerging networks and cells, is spreading and adapting to counterterrorism efforts.
Although we cannot measure the extent of the spread with precision, a large body of all-source reporting indicates that activists identifying themselves as jihadists, although a small percentage of Muslims, are increasing in number and geographic dispersion.
If this trend continues, threats to US interests at home and abroad will become more diverse, leading to increasing attacks worldwide.
Dispersed groups
Greater pluralism and more responsive political systems in Muslim-majority nations would alleviate some of the grievances jihadists exploit.
Over time, such progress, together with sustained, multifaceted programmes aimed at the vulnerabilities of the jihadist movement and continued pressure on al-Qaeda, could erode support for the jihadists.
We assess that the global jihadist movement is decentralised, lacks a coherent global strategy and is becoming more diffuse.
New jihadist networks and cells, with anti-American agendas, are increasingly likely to emerge.
The confluence of shared purpose and dispersed actors will make it harder to find and undermine jihadist groups.
We assess that the operational threat from self-radicalised cells will grow in importance to US counterterrorism efforts, particularly abroad but also in the homeland.
Iraq impact
The jihadists regard Europe as an important venue for attacking Western interests.
Extremist networks inside the extensive Muslim diasporas in Europe facilitate recruitment and staging for urban attacks, as illustrated by the 2004 Madrid and 2005 London bombings.
We assess that the Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives; perceived jihadist success there would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere.
The Iraq conflict has become the "cause celebre" for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world, and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.
Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight.
Unpopular politics
We assess that the underlying factors fuelling the spread of the movement outweigh its vulnerabilities and are likely to do so for the duration of the timeframe of this estimate.
Four underlying factors are fuelling the spread of the jihadist movement:
1. Entrenched grievances, such as corruption, injustice, and fear of Western domination, leading to anger, humiliation and a sense of powerlessness.
2. The Iraq jihad.
3. The slow pace of real and sustained economic, social and political reforms in many Muslim majority nations.
4. Pervasive anti-US sentiment among most Muslims, all of which jihadists exploit.
Concomitant vulnerabilities in the jihadist movement have emerged that, if fully exposed and exploited, could begin to slow the spread of the movement.
They include dependence on the continuation of Muslim-related conflicts, the limited appeal of the jihadists' radical ideology, the emergence of respected voices of moderation and criticism of the violent tactics employed against mostly Muslim citizens.
The jihadists' greatest vulnerability is that their ultimate political solution - an ultraconservative interpretation of Shariah-based governance spanning the Muslim world - is unpopular with the vast majority of Muslims.
Exposing the religious and political straitjacket that is implied by the jihadists' propaganda would help to divide them from the audiences they seek to persuade.
Recent condemnations of violence and extremist religious interpretations by a few notable Muslim clerics signal a trend that could facilitate the growth of a constructive alternative to jihadist ideology: peaceful political activism.
This also could lead to the consistent and dynamic participation of broader Muslim communities in rejecting violence, reducing the ability of radicals to capitalize on passive community support.
In this way, the Muslim mainstream emerges as the most powerful weapon in the war on terror.
Al-Zarqawi
Countering the spread of the jihadist movement will require co-ordinated multilateral efforts that go well beyond operations to capture or kill terrorist leaders.
If democratic reform efforts in Muslim-majority nations progress over the next five years, political participation probably would drive a wedge between intransigent extremists and groups willing to use the political process to achieve their local objectives.
Nonetheless, attendant reforms and potentially destabilizing transitions will create new opportunities for jihadists to exploit.
Al-Qaeda, now merged with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's network, is exploiting the situation in Iraq to attract new recruits and donors and to maintain its leadership role.
The loss of main leaders, particularly Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and al-Zarqawi, in rapid succession, probably would cause the group to fracture into smaller groups.
Although like-minded individuals would endeavor to carry on the mission, the loss of these main leaders would exacerbate
strains and disagreements.
We assess that the resulting splinter groups would, at least for a time, pose a less serious threat to US interests than does al-Qaeda.
Should al-Zarqawi continue to evade capture and scale back attacks against Muslims, we assess he could broaden his popular appeal and present a global threat.
The increased role of Iraqis in managing the operations of al-Qaeda in Iraq might lead veteran foreign jihadists to focus their efforts on external operations.
Other affiliated Sunni-extremist organizations, such as Jemaah Islamiya, Ansar al-Sunnah and several North African groups, unless countered, are likely to expand their reach and become more capable of multiple and/or mass-casualty attacks outside their traditional areas of operation.
Wider concern
We assess that such groups pose less of a danger to the homeland than does al-Qaeda, but will pose varying degrees of threat to our allies and to US interests abroad.
The focus of their attacks is likely to ebb and flow between local regime targets and regional or global ones.
We judge that most jihadist groups - both well-known and newly formed - will use improvised explosive devices and suicide attacks, focused primarily on soft targets, to implement their asymmetric warfare strategy, and that they will attempt to conduct sustained terrorist attacks in urban environments.
Fighters with experience in Iraq are a potential source of leadership for jihadists pursuing these tactics.
(Chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapon) capabilities will continue to be sought by jihadist groups.
While Iran, and to a lesser extent Syria, remain the most active state sponsors of terrorism, many other states will be unable to prevent territory or resources from being exploited by terrorists.
Anti-US and anti-globalisation sentiment is on the rise and fuelling other radical ideologies.
This could prompt some leftist, nationalist or separatist groups to adopt terrorist methods to attack US interests.
The radicalization process is occurring more quickly, more widely, and more anonymously in the internet age, raising the likelihood of surprise attacks by unknown groups whose members and supporters may be difficult to pinpoint.
We judge that groups of all stripes will increasingly use the internet to communicate, propagandise, recruit, train and obtain logistical and financial support.
AP
By
You can find this article at:
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/96B66353-9F35-4685-B6F9-5DF1F25A1C35.htm
Jihadist groups have carried out a number of attacks in Iraq
The full text of the parts of the US National Intelligence Estimate report declassified on Tuesday.
The document was written in April, before the death of al-Qaeda in Iraq leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
United States-led counterterrorism efforts have seriously damaged the leadership of al-Qaeda and disrupted its operations; however, we judge that al-Qaeda will continue to pose the greatest threat by a single terrorist organization to the homeland and US interests abroad.
We also assess that the global jihadist movement, which includes al-Qaeda, affiliated and independent terrorist groups and emerging networks and cells, is spreading and adapting to counterterrorism efforts.
Although we cannot measure the extent of the spread with precision, a large body of all-source reporting indicates that activists identifying themselves as jihadists, although a small percentage of Muslims, are increasing in number and geographic dispersion.
If this trend continues, threats to US interests at home and abroad will become more diverse, leading to increasing attacks worldwide.
Dispersed groups
Greater pluralism and more responsive political systems in Muslim-majority nations would alleviate some of the grievances jihadists exploit.
Over time, such progress, together with sustained, multifaceted programmes aimed at the vulnerabilities of the jihadist movement and continued pressure on al-Qaeda, could erode support for the jihadists.
We assess that the global jihadist movement is decentralised, lacks a coherent global strategy and is becoming more diffuse.
New jihadist networks and cells, with anti-American agendas, are increasingly likely to emerge.
The confluence of shared purpose and dispersed actors will make it harder to find and undermine jihadist groups.
We assess that the operational threat from self-radicalised cells will grow in importance to US counterterrorism efforts, particularly abroad but also in the homeland.
Iraq impact
The jihadists regard Europe as an important venue for attacking Western interests.
Extremist networks inside the extensive Muslim diasporas in Europe facilitate recruitment and staging for urban attacks, as illustrated by the 2004 Madrid and 2005 London bombings.
We assess that the Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives; perceived jihadist success there would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere.
The Iraq conflict has become the "cause celebre" for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world, and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.
Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight.
Unpopular politics
We assess that the underlying factors fuelling the spread of the movement outweigh its vulnerabilities and are likely to do so for the duration of the timeframe of this estimate.
Four underlying factors are fuelling the spread of the jihadist movement:
1. Entrenched grievances, such as corruption, injustice, and fear of Western domination, leading to anger, humiliation and a sense of powerlessness.
2. The Iraq jihad.
3. The slow pace of real and sustained economic, social and political reforms in many Muslim majority nations.
4. Pervasive anti-US sentiment among most Muslims, all of which jihadists exploit.
Concomitant vulnerabilities in the jihadist movement have emerged that, if fully exposed and exploited, could begin to slow the spread of the movement.
They include dependence on the continuation of Muslim-related conflicts, the limited appeal of the jihadists' radical ideology, the emergence of respected voices of moderation and criticism of the violent tactics employed against mostly Muslim citizens.
The jihadists' greatest vulnerability is that their ultimate political solution - an ultraconservative interpretation of Shariah-based governance spanning the Muslim world - is unpopular with the vast majority of Muslims.
Exposing the religious and political straitjacket that is implied by the jihadists' propaganda would help to divide them from the audiences they seek to persuade.
Recent condemnations of violence and extremist religious interpretations by a few notable Muslim clerics signal a trend that could facilitate the growth of a constructive alternative to jihadist ideology: peaceful political activism.
This also could lead to the consistent and dynamic participation of broader Muslim communities in rejecting violence, reducing the ability of radicals to capitalize on passive community support.
In this way, the Muslim mainstream emerges as the most powerful weapon in the war on terror.
Al-Zarqawi
Countering the spread of the jihadist movement will require co-ordinated multilateral efforts that go well beyond operations to capture or kill terrorist leaders.
If democratic reform efforts in Muslim-majority nations progress over the next five years, political participation probably would drive a wedge between intransigent extremists and groups willing to use the political process to achieve their local objectives.
Nonetheless, attendant reforms and potentially destabilizing transitions will create new opportunities for jihadists to exploit.
Al-Qaeda, now merged with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's network, is exploiting the situation in Iraq to attract new recruits and donors and to maintain its leadership role.
The loss of main leaders, particularly Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and al-Zarqawi, in rapid succession, probably would cause the group to fracture into smaller groups.
Although like-minded individuals would endeavor to carry on the mission, the loss of these main leaders would exacerbate
strains and disagreements.
We assess that the resulting splinter groups would, at least for a time, pose a less serious threat to US interests than does al-Qaeda.
Should al-Zarqawi continue to evade capture and scale back attacks against Muslims, we assess he could broaden his popular appeal and present a global threat.
The increased role of Iraqis in managing the operations of al-Qaeda in Iraq might lead veteran foreign jihadists to focus their efforts on external operations.
Other affiliated Sunni-extremist organizations, such as Jemaah Islamiya, Ansar al-Sunnah and several North African groups, unless countered, are likely to expand their reach and become more capable of multiple and/or mass-casualty attacks outside their traditional areas of operation.
Wider concern
We assess that such groups pose less of a danger to the homeland than does al-Qaeda, but will pose varying degrees of threat to our allies and to US interests abroad.
The focus of their attacks is likely to ebb and flow between local regime targets and regional or global ones.
We judge that most jihadist groups - both well-known and newly formed - will use improvised explosive devices and suicide attacks, focused primarily on soft targets, to implement their asymmetric warfare strategy, and that they will attempt to conduct sustained terrorist attacks in urban environments.
Fighters with experience in Iraq are a potential source of leadership for jihadists pursuing these tactics.
(Chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapon) capabilities will continue to be sought by jihadist groups.
While Iran, and to a lesser extent Syria, remain the most active state sponsors of terrorism, many other states will be unable to prevent territory or resources from being exploited by terrorists.
Anti-US and anti-globalisation sentiment is on the rise and fuelling other radical ideologies.
This could prompt some leftist, nationalist or separatist groups to adopt terrorist methods to attack US interests.
The radicalization process is occurring more quickly, more widely, and more anonymously in the internet age, raising the likelihood of surprise attacks by unknown groups whose members and supporters may be difficult to pinpoint.
We judge that groups of all stripes will increasingly use the internet to communicate, propagandise, recruit, train and obtain logistical and financial support.
AP
By
You can find this article at:
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/96B66353-9F35-4685-B6F9-5DF1F25A1C35.htm
Two soldiers' deaths highlight crisis in US morale
Monday October 2, 2006
By Cole Moreton
The troops are exhausted. They need reinforcements. Tanks are broken and there is no money to repair them. Fighting is fierce, morale low.
These sound like the complaints of British soldiers in Afghanistan - only last week an officer there declared he was quitting in disgust after his men had to borrow bullets from Canadians during a battle.
But the loudest complaints are not from the British. It is the US Army that is now in revolt. General Peter Schoomaker, its leader, is refusing to submit a budget to the Pentagon because he says his troops need billions of extra dollars to go on doing what is expected of them.
The news has shocked British squaddies, who are used to seeing the Americans as better equipped, better supported and better paid. If even the Yanks are in trouble, what hope can the Brits have?
Lance Corporal Jon Hetherington and Specialist Andrew Velez were both 22 when they died in Afghanistan this northern summer. They held similar ranks. Their lives and deaths reveal the differences between the allies, and puncture the myths.
The British Army says its soldiers are better equipped now than ever. The Ministry of Defence says troops on the frontline "have all got everything they need". Extra helicopters have been sent and the Army has spent $1.4 billion on new Mastiff vehicles to replace its ageing Land-Rovers.
The gear is arriving, even as the fighting has eased. But when troops like Lance Corporal Hetherington were deployed to Afghanistan this year, they were equipped to keep the peace and rebuild schools.
They coped, heroically, with the unexpected ferocity of the Taleban, some units fighting night and day for a month. But when equipment broke down under extreme use, roads became impassable and air support failed, they were in trouble. Reports suggest some ran out of ammunition, food and water.
Hetherington died in Musa Qala in the early hours of August 27. He had served his country for six years, a length of service which earns a British corporal $67,293 a year. A US equivalent, such as Specialist Velez, is paid around $70,246. The difference is that the US soldier in a war zone pays no tax. He may also have received up to $71,680 for enlisting, enough to lift a family from poverty. The British get no such payment, but the idea is being considered as recruiting levels fall.
The two forces have very different attitudes. British troops are now experienced peacekeepers, but those serving alongside Americans complain their allies believe "peacekeeping is for wimps". This has led to claims of excessive force.
The British Army has been based on regimental tradition, but some disgruntled soldiers say it is being dismantled by a reorganisation that has seen famous regiments such as the Black Watch absorbed into others.
Links with areas of the country where sons followed fathers into service were being broken, said a former Black Watch officer, along with the sense of belonging. "The Americans think, 'God, if only we had that system'. But now everything we value is under attack."
Few US soldiers can fault the immense investment in their kit, but the psychological demands on them appear greater. The British spend six months in action before returning to their home base to rest and train.
This has been eroded lately, but the intention remains. Americans must complete a two-year tour of duty before a year off. Some returning from Iraq have been stopped and told to go back.
The pressure got to Velez. In 2004 his brother, a corporal, was killed in the battle of Fallujah. He escorted the body home to Texas, asking his father, "Do you know how hard it was to talk to Fred when he was in a box of ice?" Despite hallucinations, he returned to the frontline. But on July 25, in camp in Sharon, he shot himself.
"Poor sod," said a British infantryman when told the story.
"We get bollock-all support from home, from the politicians and you lot in the media, but at least we get to come home, if we're lucky.
"What the Yanks expect from their boys, frankly, it shocks me."
THE GI v THE SQUADDIE - WHOSE KIT IS BEST?
By Cole Moreton
The troops are exhausted. They need reinforcements. Tanks are broken and there is no money to repair them. Fighting is fierce, morale low.
These sound like the complaints of British soldiers in Afghanistan - only last week an officer there declared he was quitting in disgust after his men had to borrow bullets from Canadians during a battle.
But the loudest complaints are not from the British. It is the US Army that is now in revolt. General Peter Schoomaker, its leader, is refusing to submit a budget to the Pentagon because he says his troops need billions of extra dollars to go on doing what is expected of them.
The news has shocked British squaddies, who are used to seeing the Americans as better equipped, better supported and better paid. If even the Yanks are in trouble, what hope can the Brits have?
Lance Corporal Jon Hetherington and Specialist Andrew Velez were both 22 when they died in Afghanistan this northern summer. They held similar ranks. Their lives and deaths reveal the differences between the allies, and puncture the myths.
The British Army says its soldiers are better equipped now than ever. The Ministry of Defence says troops on the frontline "have all got everything they need". Extra helicopters have been sent and the Army has spent $1.4 billion on new Mastiff vehicles to replace its ageing Land-Rovers.
The gear is arriving, even as the fighting has eased. But when troops like Lance Corporal Hetherington were deployed to Afghanistan this year, they were equipped to keep the peace and rebuild schools.
They coped, heroically, with the unexpected ferocity of the Taleban, some units fighting night and day for a month. But when equipment broke down under extreme use, roads became impassable and air support failed, they were in trouble. Reports suggest some ran out of ammunition, food and water.
Hetherington died in Musa Qala in the early hours of August 27. He had served his country for six years, a length of service which earns a British corporal $67,293 a year. A US equivalent, such as Specialist Velez, is paid around $70,246. The difference is that the US soldier in a war zone pays no tax. He may also have received up to $71,680 for enlisting, enough to lift a family from poverty. The British get no such payment, but the idea is being considered as recruiting levels fall.
The two forces have very different attitudes. British troops are now experienced peacekeepers, but those serving alongside Americans complain their allies believe "peacekeeping is for wimps". This has led to claims of excessive force.
The British Army has been based on regimental tradition, but some disgruntled soldiers say it is being dismantled by a reorganisation that has seen famous regiments such as the Black Watch absorbed into others.
Links with areas of the country where sons followed fathers into service were being broken, said a former Black Watch officer, along with the sense of belonging. "The Americans think, 'God, if only we had that system'. But now everything we value is under attack."
Few US soldiers can fault the immense investment in their kit, but the psychological demands on them appear greater. The British spend six months in action before returning to their home base to rest and train.
This has been eroded lately, but the intention remains. Americans must complete a two-year tour of duty before a year off. Some returning from Iraq have been stopped and told to go back.
The pressure got to Velez. In 2004 his brother, a corporal, was killed in the battle of Fallujah. He escorted the body home to Texas, asking his father, "Do you know how hard it was to talk to Fred when he was in a box of ice?" Despite hallucinations, he returned to the frontline. But on July 25, in camp in Sharon, he shot himself.
"Poor sod," said a British infantryman when told the story.
"We get bollock-all support from home, from the politicians and you lot in the media, but at least we get to come home, if we're lucky.
"What the Yanks expect from their boys, frankly, it shocks me."
THE GI v THE SQUADDIE - WHOSE KIT IS BEST?
Thursday, September 28, 2006
Saddam's trial wouldn't pass for justice in a dictatorship
By Boris Johnson
(Filed: 28/09/2006)
There is one last excuse for those of us who were so trusting as to support the war in Iraq — and that excuse is disintegrating before our eyes.
We were soon proved wrong in our assumption that the Pentagon had serious plans for post-war reconstruction: the Americans hadn't a clue. We were hopelessly wrong in imagining that the Iraqis would somehow work together to build a brighter tomorrow: they are engaged in a civil war of ever mounting savagery.
But we optimists clutched at one final consolation, one solid benefit that we had conferred on the Iraqi people. We may have triggered a war that has so far claimed the lives of 58,000 people, most of them innocent civilians; and yet, amid all the carnage and the suicides and the beheadings, we persuaded ourselves that we had installed one shining Western institution to be an example to the benighted Middle East. At least, we preened ourselves, we have put that monster Saddam Hussein on trial, hmmm? At least we have shown Johnny Arab what we mean by due process, hey what?
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How pathetic and how hollow that boast seems now. The Saddam trial is a disgrace to justice that ought to be prorogued or transferred to another country. The latest judge has just suspended the session because he was unable to control the increasingly self-confident ravings of the bearded and staring-eyedpresidentt, and, when proceedings resume on October 9, they will still be a mixture of farce and tragedy.
We like to claim that this is an "open court", but the deliberations are often so embarrassing that the microphones are turned off. When the Iraqis are allowed to watch the actual session, they see a hideous hybrid of Western due process and the traditional Iraqi kangaroo court, taking place against a background of murder and mayhem.
The result is legal chaos. The first judge was called Barawiz Mahomed Mahmoud al-Merani, and he got the hearing off to a flying start by being assassinated in March 2005. The next trembling jurist to be handed the gavel was called Rizgar Armin, but under him the court soon resembled a class of nightmare 16-year-olds in the charge of a seriously rattled supply teacher. He gave up in January, claiming ill-health.
The Iraqi court officials then announced that his number two would be taking over, a distinguished and learned geezer called Sayeed al-Hammashi. Everybody agreed that he would be a fabulous choice, until it was pointed out to the Americans that he was a former member of Saddam's ruling Ba'ath party, and, ahem, his nomination was withdrawn.
They then found a Kurdish judge, one Abdel Rahman, and he seemed ideal. Surely, everyone said, we can rely on a Kurd to come down hard on Saddam for his crimes at Halabjah. But Abdel Rahman resigned shortly afterwards, claiming that he had come under unbearable political pressure.
The fifth judge to officiate was the splendid Abdullah al-Amiri, who lasted right up until this month, mainly by seeming to go rather easy on Saddam. On September 19, however, he blew it by intervening in an extraordinary exchange between Saddam and a gnarled old Kurdish witness.
The witness was relating how he had been to see Saddam to plead for the lives of his family, and Saddam was saying, well, it was hardly the act of a dictator to have audiences with humble Kurdish peasants. At which point the judge intervened, and said — in what will go down as the single most off-message remark of the whole Iraq conflict: "You are not a dictator. You were never a dictator. The people around a person make him a dictator. Not just you. This happens everywhere."
At which a visibly moved Saddam bowed his head and thanked his lordship for his support. You can imagine the American monitors watching this in numb disbelief; you can imagine the chewing of the Downing Street curtains.
Under Iraq's bizarre constitution the judge was sacked by the politicians, and judge number six is currently trying and failing to keep order in class. Seven people connected with the trial have so far been killed, including three of Saddam's lawyers. His chief defence lawyer, Khami al-Obaidi, was abducted, tortured and murdered by men claiming to be from the interior ministry.
How on earth can the Iraqis have faith in the impartiality of these proceedings, when witnesses, lawyers and judges are being indiscriminately threatened, tortured, killed and sacked? It is amazing to think Britain spent £2 million, and the Americans £73 million, training Iraqi lawyers and judges for this charade.
Have you heard our Foreign Secretary protesting about what is going on? Who is our Foreign Secretary, by the way? The British position is to wait and hope that the Iraqis will hurry up and top him; itself a rather creepy approach, since we are meant to have a principled opposition to the death penalty.
Of course, Saddam should be tried, but it makes no sense to do it against a background of a civil war in which he is, alas, still a figurehead. Nuremburg may have been victor's justice, as Sadakat Kadri observes in his magisterial history, The Trial. But those hearings at least took place when the war was conclusively won and was overwhelmingly believed to have been worth fighting.
Saddam is being tried when the war to remove him is increasingly recognised as a disaster, not least by the American intelligence services. He is being tried when men loyal to him are still fighting and killing. He is being tried by judges who are either in awe of him or who tell him softly that he was "not a dictator". In the words of Cicero, laws are silent when swords are unsheathed.
The coalition should stop the pretence that the Iraqis can do this themselves. Saddam should be removed from Baghdad, where his presence is just aggravating the conflict, and be tried for his manifold barbarity in the Hague.
Of course, it means riding roughshod over the Iraqis, but then there is nothing new in that. All they can see on their screens at the moment is a variant of the show-trials they remember from the Ba'athist era, except that the judges keep getting whacked. As someone once said, if this is justice, then I am a banana.
Boris Johnson is MP for Henley
(Filed: 28/09/2006)
There is one last excuse for those of us who were so trusting as to support the war in Iraq — and that excuse is disintegrating before our eyes.
We were soon proved wrong in our assumption that the Pentagon had serious plans for post-war reconstruction: the Americans hadn't a clue. We were hopelessly wrong in imagining that the Iraqis would somehow work together to build a brighter tomorrow: they are engaged in a civil war of ever mounting savagery.
But we optimists clutched at one final consolation, one solid benefit that we had conferred on the Iraqi people. We may have triggered a war that has so far claimed the lives of 58,000 people, most of them innocent civilians; and yet, amid all the carnage and the suicides and the beheadings, we persuaded ourselves that we had installed one shining Western institution to be an example to the benighted Middle East. At least, we preened ourselves, we have put that monster Saddam Hussein on trial, hmmm? At least we have shown Johnny Arab what we mean by due process, hey what?
advertisement
How pathetic and how hollow that boast seems now. The Saddam trial is a disgrace to justice that ought to be prorogued or transferred to another country. The latest judge has just suspended the session because he was unable to control the increasingly self-confident ravings of the bearded and staring-eyedpresidentt, and, when proceedings resume on October 9, they will still be a mixture of farce and tragedy.
We like to claim that this is an "open court", but the deliberations are often so embarrassing that the microphones are turned off. When the Iraqis are allowed to watch the actual session, they see a hideous hybrid of Western due process and the traditional Iraqi kangaroo court, taking place against a background of murder and mayhem.
The result is legal chaos. The first judge was called Barawiz Mahomed Mahmoud al-Merani, and he got the hearing off to a flying start by being assassinated in March 2005. The next trembling jurist to be handed the gavel was called Rizgar Armin, but under him the court soon resembled a class of nightmare 16-year-olds in the charge of a seriously rattled supply teacher. He gave up in January, claiming ill-health.
The Iraqi court officials then announced that his number two would be taking over, a distinguished and learned geezer called Sayeed al-Hammashi. Everybody agreed that he would be a fabulous choice, until it was pointed out to the Americans that he was a former member of Saddam's ruling Ba'ath party, and, ahem, his nomination was withdrawn.
They then found a Kurdish judge, one Abdel Rahman, and he seemed ideal. Surely, everyone said, we can rely on a Kurd to come down hard on Saddam for his crimes at Halabjah. But Abdel Rahman resigned shortly afterwards, claiming that he had come under unbearable political pressure.
The fifth judge to officiate was the splendid Abdullah al-Amiri, who lasted right up until this month, mainly by seeming to go rather easy on Saddam. On September 19, however, he blew it by intervening in an extraordinary exchange between Saddam and a gnarled old Kurdish witness.
The witness was relating how he had been to see Saddam to plead for the lives of his family, and Saddam was saying, well, it was hardly the act of a dictator to have audiences with humble Kurdish peasants. At which point the judge intervened, and said — in what will go down as the single most off-message remark of the whole Iraq conflict: "You are not a dictator. You were never a dictator. The people around a person make him a dictator. Not just you. This happens everywhere."
At which a visibly moved Saddam bowed his head and thanked his lordship for his support. You can imagine the American monitors watching this in numb disbelief; you can imagine the chewing of the Downing Street curtains.
Under Iraq's bizarre constitution the judge was sacked by the politicians, and judge number six is currently trying and failing to keep order in class. Seven people connected with the trial have so far been killed, including three of Saddam's lawyers. His chief defence lawyer, Khami al-Obaidi, was abducted, tortured and murdered by men claiming to be from the interior ministry.
How on earth can the Iraqis have faith in the impartiality of these proceedings, when witnesses, lawyers and judges are being indiscriminately threatened, tortured, killed and sacked? It is amazing to think Britain spent £2 million, and the Americans £73 million, training Iraqi lawyers and judges for this charade.
Have you heard our Foreign Secretary protesting about what is going on? Who is our Foreign Secretary, by the way? The British position is to wait and hope that the Iraqis will hurry up and top him; itself a rather creepy approach, since we are meant to have a principled opposition to the death penalty.
Of course, Saddam should be tried, but it makes no sense to do it against a background of a civil war in which he is, alas, still a figurehead. Nuremburg may have been victor's justice, as Sadakat Kadri observes in his magisterial history, The Trial. But those hearings at least took place when the war was conclusively won and was overwhelmingly believed to have been worth fighting.
Saddam is being tried when the war to remove him is increasingly recognised as a disaster, not least by the American intelligence services. He is being tried when men loyal to him are still fighting and killing. He is being tried by judges who are either in awe of him or who tell him softly that he was "not a dictator". In the words of Cicero, laws are silent when swords are unsheathed.
The coalition should stop the pretence that the Iraqis can do this themselves. Saddam should be removed from Baghdad, where his presence is just aggravating the conflict, and be tried for his manifold barbarity in the Hague.
Of course, it means riding roughshod over the Iraqis, but then there is nothing new in that. All they can see on their screens at the moment is a variant of the show-trials they remember from the Ba'athist era, except that the judges keep getting whacked. As someone once said, if this is justice, then I am a banana.
Boris Johnson is MP for Henley
Saturday, September 23, 2006
Rise Up Against the Empire
President Hugo Chavez, Address to the United Nations.
Please Click on the title to read and see the Video.
Please Click on the title to read and see the Video.
Friday, September 15, 2006
The Day That Changed Everything Wasn't 9/11
By Ira Chernus
09/12/06 "TomDispatch.com " -- -- Yes, it changed everything -- not September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers collapsed, but November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and left the U.S. at sea, drifting without an enemy in a strange new world.
Through four decades of the Cold War, Americans had been able to feel reasonably united in their determination to fight evil. And everyone, even children, knew the name of the evildoers: "the commies." Within two years after the Wall fell, the Soviet Union had simply disappeared. In the U.S., nobody really knew how to fight evil now, or even who the evildoers were. The world's sole remaining superpower was "running out of demons," as Colin Powell complained.
Amid the great anguish of September 11, 2001, it was hard to sense the paradoxical but very real feeling of relief that flooded across the country. After a decade adrift with no foes to oppose, Americans could sink back into a comfortingly black-and-white world, neatly divided into the good guys and the bad guys, the innocent and the guilty. In the hands of the Bush administration, "terrorists," modest as their numbers might have been, turned out to be remarkably able stand-ins for a whole empire-plus of "commies." They became our all-purpose symbol for the evil that fills our waking nightmares.
Today the very word "terrorist" conjures up anxiety-ridden images worthy of the Cold War era -- images of an unpredictable world always threatening to spin out of control. As then, so now, sinister evil is said to lurk everywhere -- even right next door -- always ready to spring upon unsuspecting victims.
Historians, considering the last decades of our history, are well aware that millions of Americans didn't need the attacks of 9/11 to fear that their world was spinning out of control. As the Cold War waned, profound differences on "values" issues (previously largely kept under wraps) came out of the closet. Societal anxiety rose. Many wondered how long a nation could endure if it had no consensus on "moral matters" and no obvious authority figures to turn to. Many feared they would lose their moral anchor in an increasingly confusing and challenging world.
This was the real terror that the Bush administration played upon when the Twin Towers fell. It took no time at all for the President to be right on Manichaean message: "We've seen that evil is real." "It is enough to know that evil, like goodness, exists." He did not have to say the rest explicitly, because (with a sigh of relief and endless rites of ceremonial mourning) Americans understood it: Goodness exists here in the good old USA. How do we know? Because evil itself attacked us and we are so firmly committed to fighting it.
Such circular logic fed public discourse from the springs of a deeply buried unconscious longing for power, clarity, and innocence. Once again we could stand tall in the world, the dazzling hyperpower of hyperpowers. As long as we were fighting evil, we had to be the good guys. If we weren't so good, why would we be so determined to fight the supposedly new evil of global terrorism?
Of course, it worked the other way around, too: The only way to prove that we were good was by hunting out and fighting evil. If we were to keep on feeling certain that we were the good guys, a steady supply of bad guys was a necessity -- and the post-Cold War decade just hadn't done its job providing them. So it could easily seem more appealing to launch a generational Global War on Terror that would keep the "terrorists" around permanently. What better way to keep on proving our virtue than by combating and containing them forever?
The New Normalcy
The neoconservatives understand all this perfectly well -- and well before September 11, 2001. For years, they had dreamed of preserving American virtue (and American global dominance) by flaunting American military might. They just needed an ongoing series of excuses to do the flaunting. The attacks of 9/11 gave them their chance.
Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleezza Rice (all products of the Cold War era) said it clearly in the weeks following the attack. Their new war would not be a straightforward World War II-style march to victory. It would be more like… well, the war they knew, the Cold War, with its endless string of conflicts, crises, containments, and battles in the frontier lands of what used to be called the Third World. And it would be forever.
As Cheney put it, "There's not going to be an end date when we're going to say, ‘There, it's all over with.'" And he classically summed things up this way: "Many of the steps we have now been forced to take will become permanent in American life. … I think of it as the new normalcy.'' The neocons were glad to see the war on terrorism revive memories of the days when -- they imagine -- we contained the commies, learned to stop worrying, and loved the bomb (despite all its terror).
It was a strange love that they remembered so fondly. Polls made it clear that we never really stopped worrying then -- and polls make it clear that we still haven't now. Now, as then, we just bury the terror ever deeper and console ourselves as best we can with the mercilessness of our enemies and the relative safety of our own neck of the woods.
A recent poll tells us that only 14% of Americans feel safer now than they did five years ago. Seventy-nine percent expect another attack on U.S. soil within the next year, and 60% think it's likely in the next few months. Four out of five say that "we will always have to live with the threat of terrorism," though only one in five admits to being "personally very concerned about an attack" in his or her own area. A Florida woman captured the prevailing mood when she told a reporter: "When I stop to think about it, I don't feel very safe. But then again, on a day-to-day basis, I feel fine." As Rep. Peter King, chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, put it: "It's like we live in two parallel existences."
Those words should sound awfully familiar to anyone who lived through the Cold War years. The war on terrorism has revived the Cold War mindset, in which we are all citizens of a national insecurity state. The terror of impending annihilation from a vast, conspiratorial, and evil enemy has again become the vague backdrop of everyday life. To assure ourselves of our absolute goodness, we must see the enemy as absolute evil; not a collection of human beings bent on harming us, but a network of monsters bent on -- and capable of -- destroying us utterly. In other words, Cheney's "new normalcy" is but a version of an older, deeper apocalyptic terror. Every loss -- of a diplomatic conflict or an economic tussle or a pair of skyscrapers -- is once again framed as a portent of looming doom for the nation. Any successful attack upon us, we are told, could bring down the curtain of Armageddon.
Here's the irony. Unlike the nuclear-armed Soviet Union in the Cold War years, terrorists cannot actually threaten to obliterate our country or destroy the planet. But each apocalyptic warning of war to the death by the Bush administration only hastens another kind of loss -- the loss of the American imperial power they so prize.
Cornered Empire?
Even if actual extinction doesn't threaten, when it seems to, a nation, like an animal, is tempted to fight back with no holds barred. That's the attitude Bush and the neocons have tried to inculcate since 9/11. It's the only attitude, they insist, that can save America's military might and moral fiber. Indeed, for hard-core neocons, the main point of their global-war-on-terror policies is to revive this very Cold War mentality.
Yet those policies have obviously backfired terribly. The war on terrorism was supposed to build a new American century -- a unipolar world in which the U.S. would reign supreme. But every day it looks more and more like the 21st century will be the multipolar century, with any number of powerful nations and regional groupings successfully challenging U.S. economic, diplomatic, and military preeminence.
Bush and his neocon advisors certainly don't bear all the blame for an American imperial decline. But their utter misreading of the nature of U.S. military power and their lack of interest in economic and diplomatic realities has certainly hastened along a process that, in some fashion, was bound to happen anyway.
The United States reached the peak of its power in the late 1940s. The meat-grinder of World War II had chewed up all the other great powers and their colonial empires, too. In the ensuing decades, as the others recovered and once-dominated nations like China and India broke free and gained traction, the world moved inevitably toward a multipolar future.
Cold war presidents from Truman to Reagan hastened the process by building up U.S. allies like Germany and Japan in order to stave off the evil empire. And they sometimes even heeded the call of those allies to refrain from using military force (or too much of it anyway), lest a global war be triggered. Empowering our allies, while keeping them militarily subservient, actually helped them grab a bigger slice of the global economic pie, encouraging the rise of multipolarism. Big mistake, the neocons declared as, after 9/11, they set the Bush administration on an aggressive course of unilateralism, aiming at their dream of a New-Rome-style unipolarism.
Looking back, it's easy to see what a big mistake they made -- even in their own terms. Their unilateralism and militarism accelerated to near warp speed the decline of U.S. power and influence around the world. Every military blow or threatened blow only multiplied American enemies; every shock-and-awe action only created more opposition, even from increasingly standoffish allies. In the years to come, for an economically weakened "last superpower," there will be more and more occasions, on more and more fronts, when the U.S. will meet its match and have to back down. None of these will spell doom for us. But in context of the national insecurity state, they're likely to be framed as apocalyptic defeats, harbingers of the end time itself, and, above all, good reason to fight back blindly with all our might.
This is the vicious circle from Hell. The Bush administration's aggressive policies weaken U.S. power. Then its officials try to frighten the public into supporting the very same aggressive policies. We were stuck in a similar cycle, only half-recognized, throughout the Cold War years, and there's no end in sight. So far, it looks like not much has changed at all since 9/11.
But we don't have to stay stuck. There's nothing inevitable about history. Some 160 years after the French Revolution, Chinese Prime Minister Zhou Enlai was asked how that event had changed the world. "It's too soon to tell," Zhou replied impishly. Five short years after 9/11, it's way too soon to tell if the attacks of that day actually "changed everything," or if they changed much of anything at all.
Already, there is a growing awareness that the Bush Global War on Terror is doing more harm than good. Even from the foreign policy elite we can hear (though still often faintly) voices saying it's time to call it off. For now, the talk is narrowly focused on our imperial well-being -- the weakening of U.S. power and interests around the world.
Perhaps, as losses mount, Americans will eventually see the more important truth: Simplistic moralism and a pervasive fear of apocalyptic disaster weaken our society here at home. They make every step toward positive change look like a looming danger and that plays right into the hands of conservatives who are dedicated to preventing the change we need so badly. If the failed war on terror eventually teaches us this lesson, 9/11 will turn out to be the day that did indeed change everything
Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His latest book is Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin. He can be contacted at chernus@colorado.edu
Tuesday, September 05, 2006
A Demand for Hussein's Release
Sunni Chieftains Also Urge Resistance Against U.S-Led Forces
By Amit R. Paley and Saad Sarhan
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, September 3, 2006; A18
BAGHDAD, Sept. 2 -- A coalition of 300 Iraqi tribal leaders on Saturday demanded the release of Saddam Hussein so he could reclaim the presidency and also called for armed resistance against U.S.-led forces.
The clan chieftains, most of them Sunni Arabs, included the head of the 1.5 million-member al-Obeidi tribe, said they planned to hold rallies in Sunni cities throughout the country to insist that Hussein be freed and that the charges against him and his co-defendants be dropped.
Hussein is being tried on charges of genocide and other alleged crimes arising from the Iraqi government's killing and forced relocation of ethnic Kurds in 1988, and he is awaiting a verdict in a trial that concluded in late July in the mass killings of Shiites after an assassination attempt against him in 1982.
During Hussein's dictatorship, positions of power in the military and the ruling Baath Party were held overwhelmingly by Sunni Arabs, a minority that formed the backbone of the Iraqi insurgency after Hussein was toppled in 2003.
"If the demand is not carried out, we will lead a general, sweeping and popular uprising," said Sheik Wassfy al-Assy, brother of the chief of the Obeidi tribe, which hosted a meeting of the clan leaders on Monday in Ramal, a village 55 miles southwest of Kirkuk. "As for whether [Hussein] will be reinstated in his post as president after his release, that will be up to him."
Thursday, August 31, 2006
No Bravery
James Blunt - No Bravery Lyrics
There are children standing here,
Arms outstretched into the sky,
Tears drying on their face.
He has been here.
Brothers lie in shallow graves.
Fathers lost without a trace.
A nation blind to their disgrace,
Since he's been here.
And I see no bravery,
No bravery in your eyes anymore.
Only sadness.
Houses burnt beyond repair.
The smell of death is in the air.
A woman weeping in despair says,
He has been here.
Tracer lighting up the sky.
It's another families' turn to die.
A child afraid to even cry out says,
He has been here.
And I see no bravery,
No bravery in your eyes anymore.
Only sadness.
There are children standing here,
Arms outstretched into the sky,
But no one asks the question why,
He has been here.
Old men kneel and accept their fate.
Wives and daughters cut and raped.
A generation drenched in hate.
Yes, he has been here.
And I see no bravery,
No bravery in your eyes anymore.
Only sadness.
Please Click on the Title to hear the song
There are children standing here,
Arms outstretched into the sky,
Tears drying on their face.
He has been here.
Brothers lie in shallow graves.
Fathers lost without a trace.
A nation blind to their disgrace,
Since he's been here.
And I see no bravery,
No bravery in your eyes anymore.
Only sadness.
Houses burnt beyond repair.
The smell of death is in the air.
A woman weeping in despair says,
He has been here.
Tracer lighting up the sky.
It's another families' turn to die.
A child afraid to even cry out says,
He has been here.
And I see no bravery,
No bravery in your eyes anymore.
Only sadness.
There are children standing here,
Arms outstretched into the sky,
But no one asks the question why,
He has been here.
Old men kneel and accept their fate.
Wives and daughters cut and raped.
A generation drenched in hate.
Yes, he has been here.
And I see no bravery,
No bravery in your eyes anymore.
Only sadness.
Please Click on the Title to hear the song
Sunday, August 27, 2006
Winning Arab hearts and minds
Chavez of Arabia? [courtesy: the presidential office]
By Dima Khatib, Latin America Correspondent
Friday 18 August 2006, 14:15 Makka Time, 11:15 GMT
Billions of dollars spent, tens of thousands of lives lost, hundreds of hours of televised speeches and press conferences, extensive diplomatic efforts, political and military plans, years in Iraq, and much more.
None of this helped the US to achieve its president's announced goal of "winning the hearts and minds of the Arab people". Instead, George Bush seems to have lost the hearts and minds of many who had been supportive of US plans for the Middle East.
Someone else in the Americas seems to have the secret formula for achieving that goal; much more quickly and cheaply.
Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president, found himself at the centre of Middle Eastern politics when he announced that he was withdrawing his most senior diplomat from Israel, the Venezuelan charge d'affaires in Tel Aviv. Not for something Israel did to his country, but for what it does to Palestinians and Lebanese thousands of miles away.
The action was preceded by Chavez's repeated condemnation of what he describes as Israel's "aggression" against Lebanese land and its "genocide" against the Lebanese people. He was the first head of state to say such harsh words towards Israel after violence broke out on the Israeli Lebanese border last month, even before that of any Arab or Muslim country.
"I don't want to be an Arab. From now on I shall be Venezuelan"
Today on many Arabic internet sites one can read comments such as: "I am Palestinian but my president is Chavez, not Abu Mazen." Or: "I don't want to be an Arab. From now on I shall be Venezuelan."
In Gaza and Ramallah in the Palestinian Territories I am told that next to Arafat's and Che Guevara's posters, a new poster of Chavez is being added.
On world television channels one could even see Venezuelan flags in demonstrations in Beirut, next to Lebanese and Palestinian flags, and in many prominent newspapers across the Arab World, columnists wondered: why can't Arab leaders do what a Latin American non-Arab non-Muslim leader dared do?
Naturally, some anti-Chavez Venezuelans would rush to warn their president's Arab fans of what they say is the real Chavez: an authoritarian who is ruining their country.
But that would still not change much for his Middle Eastern supporters. When one internet user wrote saying that Chavez was a "dictator like Fidel Castro", the replies flooded the website one after the other defending Chavez and insulting the person who had criticised him.
Chavez's opponents see his position as a mere political manoeuvre to support his ally, Iran, and to attack his traditional enemy: the US, or the "empire" as he calls it. They also think that he wants to increase his popularity worldwide.
That could be true. But what is undoubtedly true is that Chavez's affinity with Arabs is nothing new. He often mentions them in his speeches and tells stories of his adventures with Arab leaders in their faraway lands. He admires the desert. He says he is a Nasserite (referring to the late nationalist president of Egypt, Gamal Abdul Nasser). He mentions Iraq more than Arab leaders do and never misses an opportunity to "salute the Iraqi resistance against imperialist forces".
This solidarity with Arab causes is widely shared by most Venezuelans, and also by most Latin Americans, especially the poor. Many marched in the streets of Caracas and other cities in Venezuela - as well as in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Colombia and elsewhere - to show solidarity with the Lebanese and Palestinians in their plight.
Israel reacted slowly and rather indifferently to Chavez's decision to withdraw his diplomat, as though it was of little importance. Only after several days did it call its ambassador to Caracas for consultation.
Then Chavez went further, to say that he was probably going to break diplomatic relations altogether with Israel, a state with which he is not interested in sharing any business, offices or anything else.
The state of relations between the two countries at the moment is unclear. Nobody knows how long the Venezuelan charge d'affaires will stay away from Tel Aviv. Nor does anyone really know whether or when the Israeli ambassador is due back in Venezuela. The Israeli embassy still operates normally in Caracas.
But none of those details matters any more. What has been said and done will not be forgotten by any of the parties involved.
Accusations
Jewish people in Venezuela say they have received threats and feel uneasy about the whole thing. Security was tightened around all Jewish facilities in Caracas and nobody there was willing to give a comment to Al Jazeera. Some prominent Jewish figures spoke on local media and accused Chavez of being an anti-Semite.
At the same time, Chavez may well be accused of harbouring Hezbollah units. Last week there was talk on Western and Israeli media about such units abroad.
Whatever the consequence of Chavez's uncompromising position with Israel, it is evident that it embarrassed Arab leaders
Whatever the consequence of Chavez's uncompromising position with Israel, it is evident that it embarrassed Arab leaders, as none of them cut or even downgraded ties with Israel despite all the massacres its army has committed in Lebanon and Palestine.
Those leaders whom he always praised and considered as his "brothers" might not like him as much as they did when he summoned them in Caracas in 2000 to put the oil prices up within Opec.
They surely do not like his closeness to Iran, which is seen by many as trying to spread its influence over the Middle East. And they probably feel that his continuous, provocative anti-Bush statements are too compromising.
Chavez probably realises all of that. For years he strove to forge alliances with Arab governments and share projects to break the current world economic order in which, as he sees it, third-world countries are all tied to the big powers and not to each other.
Chavez with the emir of Qatar, who is a close personal friend
But he has seemingly given up on his Arab counterparts, or most of them at least, now that he has come to realise that they are not anti-imperialist - not even anti-Israeli - and that some strongly dislike his ally, Iran.
He and the whole world saw how close and obedient Arab leaders are to the US and how far and detached from their people they have grown. If what happened in Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon is not enough to make them speak out and stand up to defend Arab dignity, then nothing will.
That is where Chavez's talent to communicate with the man on the street comes in to fill the gap and make him more popular than Arab leaders in their own countries.
One internet user writes: "I wish there were elections to elect the leader of the Arab Umma [Islamic Nation] and I am sure 100 per cent that Chavez will win the elections although he is Venezuelan."
Legendary
It will be interesting to see what course official Venezuelan-Arab relations will take.
The sure thing is that in the mind of millions of Arabs, Chavez is now in the same league as Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, and other "heroic" Arab figures.
At a time when nationalism in the Arab world is linked to Islamic movements such as Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon, both branded as terrorist movements by Washington, Chavez represents a very different trend.
He does not belong to or lead a religious movement; he is not - yet - classified by Washington as terrorist; he is, unlike Arab leaders, a democratically elected president and an anti-imperialist socialist who has no equal at the moment in the Arab world.
Chavez is a hero to more than his fellow Venezuelans
No wonder some Arab internet users call for cloning him to make sure they get a copy to replace their own leader.
Would there be a "Chavez of Arabia" just like the legendary "Lawrence of Arabia", the Englishman who won the trust and sympathy of Arabs in the desert when they were under English mandate?
History will decide. But for now, to many Arabs online he is "an honourable man in a world of few men" that many declare they are "ready to die for".
Aljazeera
Thursday, August 24, 2006
Iraq: time for plan B
US-led policy has manifestly failed, and things are getting worse. It's time to leave.
Andrew Murray
August 21, 2006 05:40 PM
The Iraq war has been a massive boost to Osama bin Laden. "It validated so much of what he has said and told Muslims: that the Americans want Arab oil; that the Americans will destroy any Muslim regime that appears to be powerful; the Americans will destroy any country that appears to be a threat to the Israelis; and they're willing to invade any Muslim country if it suits their interests."
Not a Stop the War Coalition press release, as it happens, but the considered opinion of the CIA agent who for 10 years led the team, now disbanded, tasked with finding the al-Qaida leader. Indeed, by now it no longer seems hyperbole to describe the Iraq invasion and occupation as the greatest miscalculation of US policy since Vietnam, and of British policy since the second world war.
While the world's eyes have been fixed on Lebanon, the situation in Iraq has plumbed its lowest depths yet. A report in the New York Times last week highlighted the following developments:
· The number of bomb attacks carried out or attempted by the insurgency in July - 2,625 - was the highest total yet during the war, and the daily average of attacks against US forces is running at twice the rate it was in January.
· A senior Pentagon official asserts that the Iraqi resistance "has more public support and is demonstrably more capable in numbers of people active ... than at any point in time."
· The number of US soldiers wounded in attacks has risen from 287 in January to 518 in July, although better protection has led to a small drop in the number deaths.
· Some 70% of bomb attacks are directed at US or other occupying forces, 20% at Iraqi forces and only 10% at civilians.
· The attempt to subdue Baghdad, launched in June, has failed.
· One source privy to White House thinking is quoted as saying "senior administration officials ... are considering alternatives other than democracy" for Iraq. It has been reported elsewhere that Bush believes that the Maliki government is insufficiently grateful to the US in public.
In other developments, Turkish and Iranian forces are concerting military operations against Iraqi Kurdistan; the possibility of incursions by the Turkish army is growing; and British troops were engaged in a fierce battle with local tribes near Basra last Wednesday. All this before even considering the escalating civil conflict the policies of the US occupation have stimulated.
So, in summary, the resistance to the occupation is stronger than ever - militarily and politically. The political project of a united puppet Iraq with democratic forms may now be abandoned in favour of some more dictatorial "solution" that would certainly fragment the country, and a new conflict around Iraqi Kurdistan is looming. Tony Blair and Nick Cohen must be so proud.
Time, I would think, for plan B. And here is at least a draft of it - peace proposals from two of the resistance groups based in the mainly Sunni centre of the country, courtesy of al-Sabah newspaper. The key points include:
· Set a timetable for the withdrawal of occupying forces.
· Release detainees
· Reconstruct the defence and interior ministries, disarming militias.
· Suspend contracts with foreign companies
· Revise the constitution and hold new elections
· Recognise the legal right to resistance.
Anyone got a better plan?
Andrew Murray
August 21, 2006 05:40 PM
The Iraq war has been a massive boost to Osama bin Laden. "It validated so much of what he has said and told Muslims: that the Americans want Arab oil; that the Americans will destroy any Muslim regime that appears to be powerful; the Americans will destroy any country that appears to be a threat to the Israelis; and they're willing to invade any Muslim country if it suits their interests."
Not a Stop the War Coalition press release, as it happens, but the considered opinion of the CIA agent who for 10 years led the team, now disbanded, tasked with finding the al-Qaida leader. Indeed, by now it no longer seems hyperbole to describe the Iraq invasion and occupation as the greatest miscalculation of US policy since Vietnam, and of British policy since the second world war.
While the world's eyes have been fixed on Lebanon, the situation in Iraq has plumbed its lowest depths yet. A report in the New York Times last week highlighted the following developments:
· The number of bomb attacks carried out or attempted by the insurgency in July - 2,625 - was the highest total yet during the war, and the daily average of attacks against US forces is running at twice the rate it was in January.
· A senior Pentagon official asserts that the Iraqi resistance "has more public support and is demonstrably more capable in numbers of people active ... than at any point in time."
· The number of US soldiers wounded in attacks has risen from 287 in January to 518 in July, although better protection has led to a small drop in the number deaths.
· Some 70% of bomb attacks are directed at US or other occupying forces, 20% at Iraqi forces and only 10% at civilians.
· The attempt to subdue Baghdad, launched in June, has failed.
· One source privy to White House thinking is quoted as saying "senior administration officials ... are considering alternatives other than democracy" for Iraq. It has been reported elsewhere that Bush believes that the Maliki government is insufficiently grateful to the US in public.
In other developments, Turkish and Iranian forces are concerting military operations against Iraqi Kurdistan; the possibility of incursions by the Turkish army is growing; and British troops were engaged in a fierce battle with local tribes near Basra last Wednesday. All this before even considering the escalating civil conflict the policies of the US occupation have stimulated.
So, in summary, the resistance to the occupation is stronger than ever - militarily and politically. The political project of a united puppet Iraq with democratic forms may now be abandoned in favour of some more dictatorial "solution" that would certainly fragment the country, and a new conflict around Iraqi Kurdistan is looming. Tony Blair and Nick Cohen must be so proud.
Time, I would think, for plan B. And here is at least a draft of it - peace proposals from two of the resistance groups based in the mainly Sunni centre of the country, courtesy of al-Sabah newspaper. The key points include:
· Set a timetable for the withdrawal of occupying forces.
· Release detainees
· Reconstruct the defence and interior ministries, disarming militias.
· Suspend contracts with foreign companies
· Revise the constitution and hold new elections
· Recognise the legal right to resistance.
Anyone got a better plan?
Plant of the apes
Bush's Plant of the apes, that's what the Resistance side in
New video from the Iraqi Resistance.
click the Title for the video
New video from the Iraqi Resistance.
click the Title for the video
Tuesday, August 22, 2006
The New Arab World
The Arab nation has passed a threshold, a culture of resistance rising in unity
By Hana Abdul Ilah Al Bayaty
08/18/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- The project for a new Middle East was stillborn and is now buried. There is a democratic renaissance sweeping the Arab world that calls for independence, an Arab Palestine, unity, justice and democracy. It cannot be stopped. The political map of the region is being redrawn, but not by the Americans, nor the Israelis. The success of this renaissance is a gift for us all, pointing as it does towards a renewal of the international order along the lines of justice and the defence of human values. The page has been turned on 50 years of US-Israeli foreign policy. It is a new era. The tide has turned. Only how much destruction the bloodthirsty US-Israeli war machine will be able to inflict before it admits defeat remains to be seen and depends on our ability to resist globally. Arab victory is certain.
The project for a new Middle East was based upon three myths and lies. All were intertwined and originate from the discriminatory assertion at the heart of Occidental imperialism that Arabs are naturally backward. According to the first lie, Arabs are unable to develop democratic movements and naturally support dictatorial, extremist regimes (the definition of which always lies in the mind of Western powers). The “free” world should therefore, like charity, bring democracy to the region. The second lie follows that due to their backwardness, the Arabs cannot defeat Israel and must accept the dispossession its inception forced upon them as a fait accompli. Following successive humiliating Arab defeats (1948, 1967, 1973) while trying to bring an end to the alien Zionist occupation of Palestinian land, the US and its local client regimes tried to force upon the Arab people the belief that Israel is invincible, underlining the logic of normalisation and the second class status of Arabs. The third virulent lie is that nothing unites the Arabs, their backwardness and tribalism leads them to sectarian and feudal forms of organisation.
American empire is exceptional in that contrary to all previous empires it does not herald the promise of universalist values but instead brazenly declares its goal as the propagation of its own interests. The implementation of its strategy serves only the welfare of local, feudal, corrupted warlords, denying even the right to life to local populations. In the space of three years, US occupation and its stooges have attempted — and still attempt — to destroy Iraq both as a state and a nation. In the long tradition of divide to rule, they tried to deprive the Iraqi people of their unifying Arabo-Muslim identity by promoting sectarian forces. It resulted in the rape of the Iraqi nation, the plunder and theft of its resources, and the cold-blooded killing of its citizens. Meanwhile, democratically elected Palestinian representatives are abducted by Israel; the population starved as stated policy, continually subject to military attack. The latest criminal assault on Lebanon exposed the faultlines once and for all. US refusals to call for a ceasefire — to stop the criminal slaughter of Lebanese civilians and the destruction of their infrastructure which lasted four weeks — outraged all Arab people and millions worldwide. We knew it, but now no one can doubt it: US-Israeli plans for the region are the enemy of our people.
The myth of Israel’s invincibility also collapsed along with the justifications of servile Arab regimes for the continued repression of their own people. While entire Arab armies have in the past been defeated within days, Hizbullah proved not only its endurance but also its swift ability to change military tactics in tune with events while retaining its composure and humility in defending Arabs everywhere. The dignity alone that Hizbullah’s triumph has afforded to Arabs is a signal of, and is essential to, the defeat of Zionism. For 30 years Arabs have been assigned to second-class status. In just over 30 days they have thrown off this worthless mantle as though it were nothing. The blow is not just to Zionism. Hizbullah’s military maturity and communications prowess has exposed the cowardliness and impotence of all Arab regimes who pretend to be nationalist but who advocate for, and repress in the name of, normalisation with Zionism. Hizbullah, within days, did more for democracy in the Arab world than Arab regimes achieved in years, the latter forced to retract their recriminations against the former in the face of popular pressure.
In Lebanon the third enduring myth about Arabs being unable to think except along sectarian lines collapsed magnificently. Perhaps the US-Israeli strategists thought it would be easier, following 15 years of civil war for Lebanon to rapidly fall into civil strife. They don’t learn, but struggling people do. Lebanese unity behind Hizbullah — as much as 87 per cent according to polls — destroyed the myth that Arabs can never unite. Likewise after three years of relentless attempts to create civil strife in Iraq by any means, the US occupation has not managed to pitch Iraqis against each other. Never in 4000 years have Iraqis been sectarian. That occupation-linked sectarian militias are fighting each other and killing thousands of civilians is not a sign of sectarianism in Iraq. It is a US-imposed tactic of bringing chaos to decimate the inherent unity of Iraqi and Arabo-Muslim identity. Along with Zionism’s ill-fated misadventure in Lebanon, it failed before the invasion. Rather, there is a growing movement across the region that believes in the skills, maturity, will and ability of the united Arabs to liberate themselves from post-colonial agendas. Never will this movement accept the existence of a state created on their land to serve foreign capitalist interests.
Across generations and regardless of the ideology embraced or the leader embodying the movement, rising Arab struggles adopted the same slogans: independence, unity, Arab Palestine — with people of different faiths living as equal citizens and in peace — and an efficient state. Today, the youth of the nation is eager for real justice and democracy and adopts the same slogans. The servile Arab regimes, already deeply isolated from and fearful of their own people, failed to understand this growing movement of resistance and further alienated themselves — as proven by ignominious statements absolving Zionist aggression. Their fate, along with the US-Israeli project, is cast. Israel’s systematic destruction of Lebanese national infrastructure, which passed without comment from Washington, exposed unequivocally that the US-Zionist project cares nothing for Arab advancement. The War on terror is a war on all forms of resistance to US-styled globalisation and its imposition by military power.
Since the very day the occupation forces came to Iraq and the Iraqi state collapsed, there has been an uprising by all Iraqi movements and organisations; including those defending women, or unemployed youth, human rights organisations, trade unions, professional syndicates, agencies defending environmental issues and the rights of prisoners, and all other cultural and political organisations, side-by-side with provincial and tribal communities and peaceful and armed resistance groups. They have all risen following an unwritten political agenda that symbolises the whole society and derives its legitimacy from the deep sense of belonging to Arab and Islamic tenets. Likewise, the Lebanese civil resistance swift organisation to defend their land and sovereignty, as proven by the south Lebanese’s refugees’ insistence to return despite the presence of unexploded cluster bombs, and the Lebanese peoples’ unequivocal support for Hizbullah regardless of their respective political background, proves the same tendency. The interest of the lower and middle class have merged and will result in a never ending social and if necessary armed struggle to achieve independence, justice and democracy. The youth of the nation, which believes and trusts in the richness of its culture and civilisation will not accept selling short the rights of the country and the nation. It is confident of carrying the technical and intellectual skills to administer its own resources for the benefit of all, without foreign interference in their internal affairs.
Attempts to choke Arab development cannot but fail. The three main currents developed by Arab societies — nationalists, Islamists and leftists — are intrinsically anti-imperialist and therefore opposed to US-Israeli regional designs. For nationalists, retaining control of national resources to serve the general interest is sacrosanct. For leftists, opposing the international chains of imperialism and globalisation is a baseline. For Islamists, resistance to foreign occupation — as written in the Quran — is a duty. Their interest lays currently in achieving unity in the struggle. They are united by their Arabo-Muslim identity. They share common principles and values as follows: the natural resources, material heritage, and the riches of culture and civilisation are the property of the totality of the people. The totality of citizens constitutes the people. The people are the sole source of sovereignty and of constitutional, political and judicial legitimacy. Government is responsible and accountable to all the citizens. Solidarity between citizens — between generations, the able and ill, the elderly and young, the orphan and every human being who finds himself in a state of weakness — should form the basis of any government’s social policy. The general interest is the justification and basis for the operation of the state, with every citizen, free of all forms of discrimination, sharing in the fruits of national wealth and social development. In struggling against military-imperial powers, the Arabs fight in defence of values around which a majority in the world gathers in consensus.
What US-Israeli neo-imperialists have to offer is not only contrary to the interests of the Arab people, it is immoral. Never in history has a single political agenda — US-Zionist imperial dominion — been opposed by so many, in all countries, and across all continents. The Arab liberation struggle stands at the forefront of this global rejection and is the centre of an historic battle not between civilisations but for civilisation. Thus it is Israel, not the Arab nation, which stands in violation of rafts of UN resolutions, daily committing new atrocities in Gaza or the West Bank at the same time as it bombs residential areas in Beirut in violation of international humanitarian law — the baseline of civil protection against state terrorism. It is the United States that presides over a situation in Baghdad whereby government-supported death squads sweep and terrorise whole neighbourhoods and in the month of July alone more than 1800 corpses appeared strewn around the city, hundreds marked with signs of sadistic torture. To prevail in this context marks not only a victory for all Arabs, but all peoples in the human struggle towards freedom and justice. When in the centre of the storm Arabs fight with their lives for a better world they challenge the same neoliberal and neoconservative elite classes that waves of anti-globalisation activists, civil society movements, and democracy and human rights advocates worldwide oppose.
Resistance is a matter of situation. Not all should or can carry arms. Tel Aviv and Washington are desperate. The edifice of their military superiority and moral authority is shattered. Not even chemical weapons, which Israel uses freely in Gaza and Lebanon as the US used in Tel Afar, Ramadi and Fallujah, can bring the Arab people and its ever-widening culture of resistance to its knees. Empire is already buried. Short of annihilating every Arab to the last woman, child and man, US-Israeli plans are already defeated. But there is no room for complacency. Now is the time for the people of this world to endorse and support the Arab struggle globally.
Every advocate of an alternative world should play a part in supporting the transformation that the renaissance of Arab struggles heralds. Whereas brute force has too often decided history, in the new world there will be no peace without justice, and no justice without the right of return for every displaced Palestinian; the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of the occupation from Iraq, along with the cancellation of all laws, treaties and agreements passed since the illegal invasion of the country; respect of Lebanese sovereignty and the condemnation and prosecution of Israel for the numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity it has perpetrated in Lebanon and in Gaza; that all Arab states and people which have been aggressed should receive fair reparations and compensations for the human and material loses they’ve endured; that all political prisoners should be set free immediately. Until these requirements are met, global civil disobedience is not only justified, it is a moral duty.
The writer is a member of the Executive Committee of The BRussells Tribunal (www.brusselstribunal.org). 20 August 2006.
By Hana Abdul Ilah Al Bayaty
08/18/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- The project for a new Middle East was stillborn and is now buried. There is a democratic renaissance sweeping the Arab world that calls for independence, an Arab Palestine, unity, justice and democracy. It cannot be stopped. The political map of the region is being redrawn, but not by the Americans, nor the Israelis. The success of this renaissance is a gift for us all, pointing as it does towards a renewal of the international order along the lines of justice and the defence of human values. The page has been turned on 50 years of US-Israeli foreign policy. It is a new era. The tide has turned. Only how much destruction the bloodthirsty US-Israeli war machine will be able to inflict before it admits defeat remains to be seen and depends on our ability to resist globally. Arab victory is certain.
The project for a new Middle East was based upon three myths and lies. All were intertwined and originate from the discriminatory assertion at the heart of Occidental imperialism that Arabs are naturally backward. According to the first lie, Arabs are unable to develop democratic movements and naturally support dictatorial, extremist regimes (the definition of which always lies in the mind of Western powers). The “free” world should therefore, like charity, bring democracy to the region. The second lie follows that due to their backwardness, the Arabs cannot defeat Israel and must accept the dispossession its inception forced upon them as a fait accompli. Following successive humiliating Arab defeats (1948, 1967, 1973) while trying to bring an end to the alien Zionist occupation of Palestinian land, the US and its local client regimes tried to force upon the Arab people the belief that Israel is invincible, underlining the logic of normalisation and the second class status of Arabs. The third virulent lie is that nothing unites the Arabs, their backwardness and tribalism leads them to sectarian and feudal forms of organisation.
American empire is exceptional in that contrary to all previous empires it does not herald the promise of universalist values but instead brazenly declares its goal as the propagation of its own interests. The implementation of its strategy serves only the welfare of local, feudal, corrupted warlords, denying even the right to life to local populations. In the space of three years, US occupation and its stooges have attempted — and still attempt — to destroy Iraq both as a state and a nation. In the long tradition of divide to rule, they tried to deprive the Iraqi people of their unifying Arabo-Muslim identity by promoting sectarian forces. It resulted in the rape of the Iraqi nation, the plunder and theft of its resources, and the cold-blooded killing of its citizens. Meanwhile, democratically elected Palestinian representatives are abducted by Israel; the population starved as stated policy, continually subject to military attack. The latest criminal assault on Lebanon exposed the faultlines once and for all. US refusals to call for a ceasefire — to stop the criminal slaughter of Lebanese civilians and the destruction of their infrastructure which lasted four weeks — outraged all Arab people and millions worldwide. We knew it, but now no one can doubt it: US-Israeli plans for the region are the enemy of our people.
The myth of Israel’s invincibility also collapsed along with the justifications of servile Arab regimes for the continued repression of their own people. While entire Arab armies have in the past been defeated within days, Hizbullah proved not only its endurance but also its swift ability to change military tactics in tune with events while retaining its composure and humility in defending Arabs everywhere. The dignity alone that Hizbullah’s triumph has afforded to Arabs is a signal of, and is essential to, the defeat of Zionism. For 30 years Arabs have been assigned to second-class status. In just over 30 days they have thrown off this worthless mantle as though it were nothing. The blow is not just to Zionism. Hizbullah’s military maturity and communications prowess has exposed the cowardliness and impotence of all Arab regimes who pretend to be nationalist but who advocate for, and repress in the name of, normalisation with Zionism. Hizbullah, within days, did more for democracy in the Arab world than Arab regimes achieved in years, the latter forced to retract their recriminations against the former in the face of popular pressure.
In Lebanon the third enduring myth about Arabs being unable to think except along sectarian lines collapsed magnificently. Perhaps the US-Israeli strategists thought it would be easier, following 15 years of civil war for Lebanon to rapidly fall into civil strife. They don’t learn, but struggling people do. Lebanese unity behind Hizbullah — as much as 87 per cent according to polls — destroyed the myth that Arabs can never unite. Likewise after three years of relentless attempts to create civil strife in Iraq by any means, the US occupation has not managed to pitch Iraqis against each other. Never in 4000 years have Iraqis been sectarian. That occupation-linked sectarian militias are fighting each other and killing thousands of civilians is not a sign of sectarianism in Iraq. It is a US-imposed tactic of bringing chaos to decimate the inherent unity of Iraqi and Arabo-Muslim identity. Along with Zionism’s ill-fated misadventure in Lebanon, it failed before the invasion. Rather, there is a growing movement across the region that believes in the skills, maturity, will and ability of the united Arabs to liberate themselves from post-colonial agendas. Never will this movement accept the existence of a state created on their land to serve foreign capitalist interests.
Across generations and regardless of the ideology embraced or the leader embodying the movement, rising Arab struggles adopted the same slogans: independence, unity, Arab Palestine — with people of different faiths living as equal citizens and in peace — and an efficient state. Today, the youth of the nation is eager for real justice and democracy and adopts the same slogans. The servile Arab regimes, already deeply isolated from and fearful of their own people, failed to understand this growing movement of resistance and further alienated themselves — as proven by ignominious statements absolving Zionist aggression. Their fate, along with the US-Israeli project, is cast. Israel’s systematic destruction of Lebanese national infrastructure, which passed without comment from Washington, exposed unequivocally that the US-Zionist project cares nothing for Arab advancement. The War on terror is a war on all forms of resistance to US-styled globalisation and its imposition by military power.
Since the very day the occupation forces came to Iraq and the Iraqi state collapsed, there has been an uprising by all Iraqi movements and organisations; including those defending women, or unemployed youth, human rights organisations, trade unions, professional syndicates, agencies defending environmental issues and the rights of prisoners, and all other cultural and political organisations, side-by-side with provincial and tribal communities and peaceful and armed resistance groups. They have all risen following an unwritten political agenda that symbolises the whole society and derives its legitimacy from the deep sense of belonging to Arab and Islamic tenets. Likewise, the Lebanese civil resistance swift organisation to defend their land and sovereignty, as proven by the south Lebanese’s refugees’ insistence to return despite the presence of unexploded cluster bombs, and the Lebanese peoples’ unequivocal support for Hizbullah regardless of their respective political background, proves the same tendency. The interest of the lower and middle class have merged and will result in a never ending social and if necessary armed struggle to achieve independence, justice and democracy. The youth of the nation, which believes and trusts in the richness of its culture and civilisation will not accept selling short the rights of the country and the nation. It is confident of carrying the technical and intellectual skills to administer its own resources for the benefit of all, without foreign interference in their internal affairs.
Attempts to choke Arab development cannot but fail. The three main currents developed by Arab societies — nationalists, Islamists and leftists — are intrinsically anti-imperialist and therefore opposed to US-Israeli regional designs. For nationalists, retaining control of national resources to serve the general interest is sacrosanct. For leftists, opposing the international chains of imperialism and globalisation is a baseline. For Islamists, resistance to foreign occupation — as written in the Quran — is a duty. Their interest lays currently in achieving unity in the struggle. They are united by their Arabo-Muslim identity. They share common principles and values as follows: the natural resources, material heritage, and the riches of culture and civilisation are the property of the totality of the people. The totality of citizens constitutes the people. The people are the sole source of sovereignty and of constitutional, political and judicial legitimacy. Government is responsible and accountable to all the citizens. Solidarity between citizens — between generations, the able and ill, the elderly and young, the orphan and every human being who finds himself in a state of weakness — should form the basis of any government’s social policy. The general interest is the justification and basis for the operation of the state, with every citizen, free of all forms of discrimination, sharing in the fruits of national wealth and social development. In struggling against military-imperial powers, the Arabs fight in defence of values around which a majority in the world gathers in consensus.
What US-Israeli neo-imperialists have to offer is not only contrary to the interests of the Arab people, it is immoral. Never in history has a single political agenda — US-Zionist imperial dominion — been opposed by so many, in all countries, and across all continents. The Arab liberation struggle stands at the forefront of this global rejection and is the centre of an historic battle not between civilisations but for civilisation. Thus it is Israel, not the Arab nation, which stands in violation of rafts of UN resolutions, daily committing new atrocities in Gaza or the West Bank at the same time as it bombs residential areas in Beirut in violation of international humanitarian law — the baseline of civil protection against state terrorism. It is the United States that presides over a situation in Baghdad whereby government-supported death squads sweep and terrorise whole neighbourhoods and in the month of July alone more than 1800 corpses appeared strewn around the city, hundreds marked with signs of sadistic torture. To prevail in this context marks not only a victory for all Arabs, but all peoples in the human struggle towards freedom and justice. When in the centre of the storm Arabs fight with their lives for a better world they challenge the same neoliberal and neoconservative elite classes that waves of anti-globalisation activists, civil society movements, and democracy and human rights advocates worldwide oppose.
Resistance is a matter of situation. Not all should or can carry arms. Tel Aviv and Washington are desperate. The edifice of their military superiority and moral authority is shattered. Not even chemical weapons, which Israel uses freely in Gaza and Lebanon as the US used in Tel Afar, Ramadi and Fallujah, can bring the Arab people and its ever-widening culture of resistance to its knees. Empire is already buried. Short of annihilating every Arab to the last woman, child and man, US-Israeli plans are already defeated. But there is no room for complacency. Now is the time for the people of this world to endorse and support the Arab struggle globally.
Every advocate of an alternative world should play a part in supporting the transformation that the renaissance of Arab struggles heralds. Whereas brute force has too often decided history, in the new world there will be no peace without justice, and no justice without the right of return for every displaced Palestinian; the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of the occupation from Iraq, along with the cancellation of all laws, treaties and agreements passed since the illegal invasion of the country; respect of Lebanese sovereignty and the condemnation and prosecution of Israel for the numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity it has perpetrated in Lebanon and in Gaza; that all Arab states and people which have been aggressed should receive fair reparations and compensations for the human and material loses they’ve endured; that all political prisoners should be set free immediately. Until these requirements are met, global civil disobedience is not only justified, it is a moral duty.
The writer is a member of the Executive Committee of The BRussells Tribunal (www.brusselstribunal.org). 20 August 2006.
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
The Best Guerrilla Force in the World
By Edward Cody and Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, August 14, 2006; A01
BEIRUT, Aug. 14 -- Hezbollah's irregular fighters stood off the modern Israeli army for a month in the hills of southern Lebanon thanks to extraordinary zeal and secrecy, rigorous training, tight controls over the population, and a steady flow of Iranian money to acquire effective weaponry, according to informed assessments in Lebanon and Israel.
"They are the best guerrilla force in the world," said a Lebanese specialist who has sifted through intelligence on Hezbollah for more than two decades and strongly opposes the militant Shiite Muslim movement.
Because Hezbollah was entrenched in friendly Shiite-inhabited villages and underground bunkers constructed in secret over several years, a withering Israeli air campaign and a tank-led ground assault were unable to establish full control over a border strip and sweep it clear of Hezbollah guerrillas -- one of Israel's main declared war aims. Largely as a result, the U.N. Security Council resolution approved unanimously Friday night fell short of the original objectives laid out by Israel and the Bush administration when the conflict began July 12.
As the declared U.N. cease-fire went into effect Monday morning, many Lebanese -- particularly among the Shiites who make up an estimated 40 percent of the population -- had already assessed Hezbollah's endurance as a military success despite the devastation wrought across Lebanon by Israeli bombing.
Hezbollah's staying power on the battlefield came from a classic fish-in-the-sea advantage enjoyed by guerrillas on their home ground, hiding in their own villages and aided by their relatives. Hasan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, summed up the guerrilla strategy in a televised address during the conflict when he said, "We are not a regular army and we will not fight like a regular army."
The group's battlefield resilience also came from an unusual combination of zeal and disciplined military science, said the Lebanese specialist with access to intelligence information, who spoke on condition he not be identified by name.
The fighters' Islamic faith and intense indoctrination reduced their fear of death, he noted, giving them an advantage in close-quarters combat and in braving airstrikes to move munitions from post to post. Hezbollah leaders also enhanced fighters' willingness to risk death by establishing the Martyr's Institute, with an office in Tehran, that guarantees living stipends and education fees for the families of fighters who die on the front.
"If you are waiting for a white flag coming out of the Hezbollah bunker, I can assure you it won't come," Brig. Gen. Ido Nehushtan, a member of the Israeli army's general staff, said in a briefing for reporters in the northern Israeli village of Gosherim. "They are extremists, they will go all the way."
Moreover, Hezbollah's military leadership carefully studied military history, including the Vietnam War, the Lebanese expert said, and set up a training program with help from Iranian intelligence and military officers with years of experience in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. The training was matched to weapons that proved effective against Israeli tanks, he added, including the Merkava main battle tank with advanced armor plating.
Wire-guided and laser-guided antitank missiles were the most effective and deadly Hezbollah weapons, according to Israeli military officers and soldiers. A review of Israel Defense Forces records showed that the majority of Israeli combat deaths resulted from missile hits on armored vehicles -- or on buildings where Israeli soldiers set up observation posts or conducted searches.
Most of the antitank missiles, Israeli officers noted, could be dragged out of caches and quickly fired with two- or three-man launching teams at distances of 3,200 yards or more from their targets. One of the most effective was the Russian-designed Sagger 2, a wire-guided missile with a range of 550 to 3,200 yards.
In one hidden bunker, Israeli soldiers discovered night-vision camera equipment connected to computers that fed coordinates of targets to the Sagger 2 missile, according to Israeli military officials who described the details from photographs they said soldiers took inside the bunker.
Some antitank missiles also can be used to attack helicopters, which has limited the military's use of choppers in rescues and other operations. On Saturday, Hezbollah shot down a CH-53 Sikorsky helicopter in Lebanon, killing all five crew members, according to the Israeli military. As of late Sunday, Israeli troops still had been unable to retrieve the bodies because of fierce fighting in the area of the crash.
The Hezbollah arsenal, which also included thousands of missiles and rockets to be fired against northern Israel's towns and villages, was paid for with a war chest kept full by relentless fundraising among Shiites around the world and, in particular, by funds provided by Iran, said the intelligence specialist. The amount of Iranian funds reaching Hezbollah was estimated at $25 million a month, but some reports suggested it increased sharply, perhaps doubled, after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took over as president in Tehran last year, the specialist said.
Fawaz Trabulsi, a Lebanese professor who helped lead Palestinian-allied militia forces against the Israeli army in 1982, noted that Hezbollah's fight has differed in several respects from that mounted by the Palestine Liberation Organization during the 1980s. In that war, Israeli forces punched straight northward and reached Beirut in a few days with only minor resistance, he recalled, saying Israeli officers seemed to think they could duplicate that performance against Hezbollah.
One reason for the sharp difference is that Israeli intelligence had much less detail on Hezbollah forces, tactics and equipment than it had on the PLO, which was infiltrated by a network of spies, said Trabulsi, now a political science professor at Lebanese American University. "Hezbollah is not penetrated at all," he said.
Nehushtan, the Israeli general, said the Israeli military had enough information to appreciate the fighting ability and weaponry of Hezbollah as the conflict opened. In addition, Israeli warplanes have hit pinpoint targets throughout the fighting, presumably on the basis of real-time intelligence reaching the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv through drones and other surveillance equipment. Other observers, however, said the sweep of fighting over the last month -- when Israel on several occasions said it controlled the terrain, only to continue fighting in the same border villages -- suggested intelligence had not provided an adequate appreciation of the battlefield.
"I think it's no secret that the Israeli military didn't have the intelligence on this," said Richard Straus, who publishes the Middle East Policy Survey newsletter in Washington. "They didn't know what Hezbollah had, how it had built up, what it was capable of."
Another difference that gave Hezbollah fighters an edge is the experience they acquired in combating Israeli troops during the nearly two decades of Israeli occupation in southern Lebanon that ended in 2000. In contrast, Palestinian guerrillas had gained most of their experience fighting Lebanese militias in the civil war here -- using nothing more than assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades -- and were unprepared and unequipped to resist the advance of Israel's modern army.
"The difference is in training, the difference is in weapons, but the big difference is that most of the Palestinians had never engaged in fighting Israel," Trabulsi said. "They were used to fighting a civil war in Lebanon."
Hezbollah's resistance to penetration by Israeli intelligence was part of a culture of secrecy extreme even by the standards of underground guerrilla forces. The code fit with a tendency toward secrecy in the Shiite stream of Islam, called faqih . It also fit with a sense of solidarity against others that Lebanese Shiites have been imbued with since the beginning of their emergence as a political force in the mid-1970s, when their first organization was called the Movement of the Deprived.
One young Lebanese doctor learned that her brother had been a Hezbollah fighter for several years only when the movement notified her he had been killed, colleagues said. Similarly, a Lebanese man found out his brother was a senior Hezbollah militia officer only when informed of his death; the brother had cloaked occasional trips to Tehran by saying he was trying to start an import-export business.
Reporters who over the last month went to the bombed-out sections of southern Beirut suburbs where Hezbollah had its headquarters were approached within minutes by young men asking who they were and what they were doing there. Interviews with the people living there, most of whom were ardent Hezbollah supporters, were not allowed, the young men said. Around the battlefields of south Lebanon, however, the militia was busy fighting Israeli troops and hiding from airstrikes.
Reporters were free to move as much as they dared, since they, too, feared being hit by Israeli jets.
Even the movement's political leadership was kept in the dark about many military and intelligence activities, Trabulsi noted. Ghaleb Abu-Zeinab, a member of Hezbollah's political bureau, said in an interview, for instance, that he was not informed about operations on "the field," Hezbollah shorthand for the villages and hillsides across southern Lebanon where the battle raged.
"They have a military and intelligence organization totally separated from the political organization," Trabulsi said.
A dramatic example of the secrecy and careful preparations for conflict with Israel was Hezbollah's al-Manar television. The station has kept broadcasting its mix of news and propaganda from hidden studios throughout the fighting, despite repeated Israeli airstrikes against relay towers and antennas across the country. Lebanese said some of the broadcasts seemed to include coded messages to Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanon. But as with most things about Hezbollah, they were not really sure.
Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, used al-Manar to make a number of speeches rallying his followers and explaining his strategy. With his cleric's turban and student's mien, appearing on the screen in pre-taped broadcasts, he was perhaps the biggest secret of all, hunted by Israeli warplanes and hiding in a location about which Lebanese could only guess.
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, August 14, 2006; A01
BEIRUT, Aug. 14 -- Hezbollah's irregular fighters stood off the modern Israeli army for a month in the hills of southern Lebanon thanks to extraordinary zeal and secrecy, rigorous training, tight controls over the population, and a steady flow of Iranian money to acquire effective weaponry, according to informed assessments in Lebanon and Israel.
"They are the best guerrilla force in the world," said a Lebanese specialist who has sifted through intelligence on Hezbollah for more than two decades and strongly opposes the militant Shiite Muslim movement.
Because Hezbollah was entrenched in friendly Shiite-inhabited villages and underground bunkers constructed in secret over several years, a withering Israeli air campaign and a tank-led ground assault were unable to establish full control over a border strip and sweep it clear of Hezbollah guerrillas -- one of Israel's main declared war aims. Largely as a result, the U.N. Security Council resolution approved unanimously Friday night fell short of the original objectives laid out by Israel and the Bush administration when the conflict began July 12.
As the declared U.N. cease-fire went into effect Monday morning, many Lebanese -- particularly among the Shiites who make up an estimated 40 percent of the population -- had already assessed Hezbollah's endurance as a military success despite the devastation wrought across Lebanon by Israeli bombing.
Hezbollah's staying power on the battlefield came from a classic fish-in-the-sea advantage enjoyed by guerrillas on their home ground, hiding in their own villages and aided by their relatives. Hasan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, summed up the guerrilla strategy in a televised address during the conflict when he said, "We are not a regular army and we will not fight like a regular army."
The group's battlefield resilience also came from an unusual combination of zeal and disciplined military science, said the Lebanese specialist with access to intelligence information, who spoke on condition he not be identified by name.
The fighters' Islamic faith and intense indoctrination reduced their fear of death, he noted, giving them an advantage in close-quarters combat and in braving airstrikes to move munitions from post to post. Hezbollah leaders also enhanced fighters' willingness to risk death by establishing the Martyr's Institute, with an office in Tehran, that guarantees living stipends and education fees for the families of fighters who die on the front.
"If you are waiting for a white flag coming out of the Hezbollah bunker, I can assure you it won't come," Brig. Gen. Ido Nehushtan, a member of the Israeli army's general staff, said in a briefing for reporters in the northern Israeli village of Gosherim. "They are extremists, they will go all the way."
Moreover, Hezbollah's military leadership carefully studied military history, including the Vietnam War, the Lebanese expert said, and set up a training program with help from Iranian intelligence and military officers with years of experience in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. The training was matched to weapons that proved effective against Israeli tanks, he added, including the Merkava main battle tank with advanced armor plating.
Wire-guided and laser-guided antitank missiles were the most effective and deadly Hezbollah weapons, according to Israeli military officers and soldiers. A review of Israel Defense Forces records showed that the majority of Israeli combat deaths resulted from missile hits on armored vehicles -- or on buildings where Israeli soldiers set up observation posts or conducted searches.
Most of the antitank missiles, Israeli officers noted, could be dragged out of caches and quickly fired with two- or three-man launching teams at distances of 3,200 yards or more from their targets. One of the most effective was the Russian-designed Sagger 2, a wire-guided missile with a range of 550 to 3,200 yards.
In one hidden bunker, Israeli soldiers discovered night-vision camera equipment connected to computers that fed coordinates of targets to the Sagger 2 missile, according to Israeli military officials who described the details from photographs they said soldiers took inside the bunker.
Some antitank missiles also can be used to attack helicopters, which has limited the military's use of choppers in rescues and other operations. On Saturday, Hezbollah shot down a CH-53 Sikorsky helicopter in Lebanon, killing all five crew members, according to the Israeli military. As of late Sunday, Israeli troops still had been unable to retrieve the bodies because of fierce fighting in the area of the crash.
The Hezbollah arsenal, which also included thousands of missiles and rockets to be fired against northern Israel's towns and villages, was paid for with a war chest kept full by relentless fundraising among Shiites around the world and, in particular, by funds provided by Iran, said the intelligence specialist. The amount of Iranian funds reaching Hezbollah was estimated at $25 million a month, but some reports suggested it increased sharply, perhaps doubled, after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took over as president in Tehran last year, the specialist said.
Fawaz Trabulsi, a Lebanese professor who helped lead Palestinian-allied militia forces against the Israeli army in 1982, noted that Hezbollah's fight has differed in several respects from that mounted by the Palestine Liberation Organization during the 1980s. In that war, Israeli forces punched straight northward and reached Beirut in a few days with only minor resistance, he recalled, saying Israeli officers seemed to think they could duplicate that performance against Hezbollah.
One reason for the sharp difference is that Israeli intelligence had much less detail on Hezbollah forces, tactics and equipment than it had on the PLO, which was infiltrated by a network of spies, said Trabulsi, now a political science professor at Lebanese American University. "Hezbollah is not penetrated at all," he said.
Nehushtan, the Israeli general, said the Israeli military had enough information to appreciate the fighting ability and weaponry of Hezbollah as the conflict opened. In addition, Israeli warplanes have hit pinpoint targets throughout the fighting, presumably on the basis of real-time intelligence reaching the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv through drones and other surveillance equipment. Other observers, however, said the sweep of fighting over the last month -- when Israel on several occasions said it controlled the terrain, only to continue fighting in the same border villages -- suggested intelligence had not provided an adequate appreciation of the battlefield.
"I think it's no secret that the Israeli military didn't have the intelligence on this," said Richard Straus, who publishes the Middle East Policy Survey newsletter in Washington. "They didn't know what Hezbollah had, how it had built up, what it was capable of."
Another difference that gave Hezbollah fighters an edge is the experience they acquired in combating Israeli troops during the nearly two decades of Israeli occupation in southern Lebanon that ended in 2000. In contrast, Palestinian guerrillas had gained most of their experience fighting Lebanese militias in the civil war here -- using nothing more than assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades -- and were unprepared and unequipped to resist the advance of Israel's modern army.
"The difference is in training, the difference is in weapons, but the big difference is that most of the Palestinians had never engaged in fighting Israel," Trabulsi said. "They were used to fighting a civil war in Lebanon."
Hezbollah's resistance to penetration by Israeli intelligence was part of a culture of secrecy extreme even by the standards of underground guerrilla forces. The code fit with a tendency toward secrecy in the Shiite stream of Islam, called faqih . It also fit with a sense of solidarity against others that Lebanese Shiites have been imbued with since the beginning of their emergence as a political force in the mid-1970s, when their first organization was called the Movement of the Deprived.
One young Lebanese doctor learned that her brother had been a Hezbollah fighter for several years only when the movement notified her he had been killed, colleagues said. Similarly, a Lebanese man found out his brother was a senior Hezbollah militia officer only when informed of his death; the brother had cloaked occasional trips to Tehran by saying he was trying to start an import-export business.
Reporters who over the last month went to the bombed-out sections of southern Beirut suburbs where Hezbollah had its headquarters were approached within minutes by young men asking who they were and what they were doing there. Interviews with the people living there, most of whom were ardent Hezbollah supporters, were not allowed, the young men said. Around the battlefields of south Lebanon, however, the militia was busy fighting Israeli troops and hiding from airstrikes.
Reporters were free to move as much as they dared, since they, too, feared being hit by Israeli jets.
Even the movement's political leadership was kept in the dark about many military and intelligence activities, Trabulsi noted. Ghaleb Abu-Zeinab, a member of Hezbollah's political bureau, said in an interview, for instance, that he was not informed about operations on "the field," Hezbollah shorthand for the villages and hillsides across southern Lebanon where the battle raged.
"They have a military and intelligence organization totally separated from the political organization," Trabulsi said.
A dramatic example of the secrecy and careful preparations for conflict with Israel was Hezbollah's al-Manar television. The station has kept broadcasting its mix of news and propaganda from hidden studios throughout the fighting, despite repeated Israeli airstrikes against relay towers and antennas across the country. Lebanese said some of the broadcasts seemed to include coded messages to Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanon. But as with most things about Hezbollah, they were not really sure.
Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, used al-Manar to make a number of speeches rallying his followers and explaining his strategy. With his cleric's turban and student's mien, appearing on the screen in pre-taped broadcasts, he was perhaps the biggest secret of all, hunted by Israeli warplanes and hiding in a location about which Lebanese could only guess.
Wednesday, August 02, 2006
US has to choose: Israel or the Middle East
The G8 convened just as Israel's tanks pounded Palestinian towns, villages and refugee camps, while a few miles away its warplanes set Lebanon’s skies ablaze, turning its nights into an inferno of bombs, death and misery.
Scores of innocent people have lost their lives. Villages have been levelled, and bridges, hospitals, roads, airports, fuel storage facilities and even milk factories have been destroyed. Years of regeneration effort are reduced to rubble. Pressure from the Americans and their British and German allies is such that no mention is made of a ceasefire in the statement issued. Israel is given leave to impose its agenda on Lebanon at gunpoint. After all, Ehud Olmert had said it: there can be no talk of a ceasefire, since "Israel needs more time". This unconditional support for Israel as it invades, occupies, demolishes, maims and massacres puts the entire Western moral and political order to the test. While evangelising about democracy and reform, the US and increasingly Europe continue to give Israel open leave punish the Palestinian people collectively for their electoral choice, through air raids, ground incursions, siege and starvation. "The M While preaching freedom to the people of the region, the US and many Western countries do not hesitate to provide political cover for the illegal seizure and occupation of Arab land in Palestine, Lebanon and Syria. And while filling the air with demands for the release of two captured Israeli soldiers, it turns a blind eye to the 10,000 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians languishing in Israeli jails, about 4,000 of whom are detained administratively without charge or trial. The US has to know it cannot aid and abet aggressive occupation and rampant expansionism while hoping to "win Muslims’ hearts and minds". The two cannot go together Breaking what has been a taboo for decades, Professors John Mearsheimer and Steve Walt concluded in their article "The Israeli Lobby" that American foreign policy is more representative of Israeli than American national interests. The US Middle East policy is contrary to the long-term strategic interests of the United States. The alliance between the US and Israel is not something new. Since the end of the 1950s, preserving Israel's security was passed from the British to the US. Ever since, American national interests have been seen as wedded to those of the state of Israel. However, what is new is that Israel has moved from a proxy at the service of British/American interest in the strategic Middle East to a definer of American policy itself. It has become customary for consecutive British and American administrations to provide full support for Israel in its invasions, incursions and wars. With Bush and Blair, however, the usual frigid calls for restraint have vanished, making way for assertions of Israel’s right to defend itself and combat terrorism. This is as though Israel were a wretched occupied country, not the world’s fourth-largest military force and the region’s sole nuclear power. It has repeatedly invaded its neighbours’ lands, colonising the Egyptian Sinai desert, Lebanon, the Syrian Golan Heights and the Palestinian territories. While preaching freedom to the people of the region, the US and many Western countries do not hesitate to provide political cover for the illegal seizure and occupation of Arab land in Palestine, Lebanon and Syria Since 1979 Israel has received over $130 billion and continues to receive nearly 40 per cent of total US foreign aid. Direct American aid to Israel in recent years has exceeded $3.5 billion annually, with an additional $1 billion through other sources, and has been supported almost unanimously in congress, even by liberal Democrats who normally insist on linking aid to human rights and international law. Israel’s long record of violation of international law is made possible by the heavy diplomatic support guaranteed by the US. In the past 30 years, the latter has used its veto in the Security Council to protect Israel from international criticism, censure, or sanction, more than 40 times. The last one was on July 13, 2006, when it blocked a draft resolution condemning Israel’s attacks on the Gaza Strip and demanding an end to the tragic humanitarian crisis in the Palestinian territories. The US has to know it cannot aid and abet aggressive occupation and rampant expansionism while hoping to "win Muslims’ hearts and minds". The two cannot go together. A series of reports and surveys have indicated growing animosity to the United States in the Muslim world. The latest was a Pew Research Centre poll of six Muslim countries (Indonesia, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan, and Morocco). An earlier Pew Global Attitudes survey of 50 nations in 2002 and 2003 found that the US was less popular in the Middle East than any other part of the world. Even in Turkey, a longstanding US ally, 83% had an unfavourable opinion of the US, matching levels in Jordan and Palestine. Today, the survey concludes: "The US remains largely disliked in the region. Anti-Americanism in the region is driven largely by aversion to US policies, such as the war on Iraq, the war on terrorism and US support for Israel." No amount of PR or media propaganda can improve those troubled relations. The problem is not with the marketing, as American statesmen like to believe, but with the product itself. It is with the great strategies pursued in the region. Two facts are becoming clearer by the day: Israel is increasingly turning into a burden on itself, on its guardians, as well as on its countless victims; and that the people of the region will never accept an Israeli Middle East. Sooner or later the US will have to decide between the whole Middle East along with the Muslim world beyond, and its Israeli ally. There lies the problem and the remedy. Soumaya Ghannoushi is a researcher at the School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London.
In its latest military operation in the Gaza Strip, which has left more than 200 civilians dead, many of whom are children, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) have abducted the Palestinian deputy prime minister, along with two cabinet ministers and 56 parliamentarians. On July 1 its warplanes attacked the headquarters of the recently elected Palestinian prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh.
No wonder that most have lost faith in the American-led rhetoric of democracy, human rights and reform.
Much of the region’s troubles issue from this increasing convergence between American and Israeli policy in the Middle East. The similarity between the two strategies concocted in Tel Aviv and Washington is such that it has become increasingly difficult to tell which is which.
Its massive military arsenal has been used to impose and expand illegal settlement, pursue collective punishment of the local populations and terrorise its neighbours through raids, kidnappings, assassinations, massacres, violations of air space and territorial waters and detentions of scores of prisoners with impunity.
So long as the US insists on imposing Israel as its chief agent in its overarching designs to rearrange the map of the Middle East within a master/slave relation, it will reap nothing but more disasters and chronic chaos.
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