Arab News Blog

AP reports on a French reality show where contestants proved willing to administer torture-level shocks to human beings, replicating the findings of the classic Milgram Study at Yale:

The show repeated the classic social psychology experiment of Stanley Milgram of Yale from the early 1960s, which has been successfully demonstrated numerous times around the world. Apparently about 70% of human beings have no independent conscience and will torture others if simply ordered to by a person in authority. The good news is that 30% will resist.

This finding helps explain the “Cheney Effect,” whereby he illegally ordered torture but Americans are not eager to put him on trial for breaking the law. A super-majority is willing to go along with Abu Ghraib, and not blanch when the former vice president talks about being a “big supporter of waterboarding.”

The only way you even got laws against torture is that they were self-interested– forbidding one’s own troops to torture is a way of trying to prevent their being tortured when captured by the enemy (and ensuring there is punishment, a la Nuremburg, for war crimes. Note that Stalin wanted just to summarily execute 50,000 – 100,000 German officers. Roosevelt demurred, jesting that surely 49,000 would be enough. In the end Henry Stimson’s plan for war crimes trial was approved by Truman.

Nowadays, the Liz Cheneys and Bill Kristols prefer Stalin’s methods of summary punishment, and are attacking the whole idea of defense attorneys for enemy combatants, as Matthew Yglesias notes. No doubt the attorneys would inconveniently object to the torture Cheney and Kristol want inflicted.

Anyway, most people don’t get anti-torture laws. What is really hard to explain scientifically is how the US Republican Party got almost none of the ethical 30%. Shouldn’t conscience be roughly equally distributed by party?

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Update: Glenn Greenwald mischievously points out that Fox Cable News anchors expressed amazement at how horrible the French are because of this story, missing the irony that this news channel has been an unremitting cheerleader for torturing people!

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FP/ here

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With Iraqi electoral results finally beginning to be released, with over 60% reporting for many provinces, expect to see a lot of analysis of the results in the coming days on the Middle East Channel and elsewhere.  Reider Visser has already been doing some great work identifying how the Sadrists are catapulting over ISCI candidates thanks to the open list voting system in Baghdad and other provinces.   I was struck this morning by the results in Anbar, where Shaykh Ahmed Abu Risha’s Awakenings List (part of Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani’s Unity of Iraq List), seems headed for a near epic wipe-out.   That is quite a comedown for the heir to Abd al-Sattar Abu Risha’s Anbar Awakening, whose decision to align with the U.S. against al-Qaeda in Iraq’s Islamic State of Iraq in the months before the "Surge" proved so pivotal, and a sign that the leaders of the Awakening may not have found a path to national political power through the ballot box after all.   Is this a cause for concern? 

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The election results are not yet final, but at this point the trend looks clear enough.  With 78% reporting, Abu Risha’s Unity of Iraq List has received less than 32,000 votes and is not only being thoroughly crushed by Ayad Allawi’s Iraqiya List (with almost 220,000 votes) but even trails the supposedly decimated Tawaffuq List (over 40,000 votes).   The fiery Shaykh Ali Hatem Sulayman joined Prime Minister Maliki’s State of Law coalition, but the entire list has yet to reach 5000 votes.  Recruiting the outspoken Hamed al-Hayyes to the primarily Shia Iraqi National Alliance has thus far attracted less than 4000 votes.  Unity of Iraq may just squeak out a single seat, but even that looks like it may be close.  

Over the last few years, most American analysts have argued that these elections would offer a path to power through the ballot box for the leaders of the Awakenings.   Their evident washout in Anbar suggest that they won’t, which may trigger a lot of the fears of those analysts (including me) who for years warned about the dangers of not accommodating Sunnis in the political system or integrating the Awakenings and Sons of Iraq into the state.  But the response thus far suggests reasons to be less worried than in the past.  During last January’s provincial election, when it appeared that Abu Risha’s list had lost,  he threatened to turn Anbar into a "graveyard" for the Islamic Party if his List was not declared the victor.  Despite mounting claims of fraud, I haven’t yet been seeing many such threats this time, and don’t see any reason yet to anticipate that it will trigger the much-feared resurgence of the insurgency. 

That may be because the result does not come out of nowhere.  The Awakenings seem to have lost some of their allure as they failed to deliver rapid improvements in governance or the economy, and as complaints about corruption grew against the new incumbents.  Lots of personal, tribal, and political conflicts have played out in public, while the unifying threat of the intense battle with the Islamic State of Iraq has faded.   The Awakenings have always been fragmented and internally competitive, which was only exacerbated by the formation of electoral lists.    Abu Risha’s highly public flirtation with Prime Minister Maliki did not play well with Anbar’s Sunni citizens, and then he was caught in the national collapse of  Bolani’s list.  Meanwhile, Allawi appears to have captured the mantle of the "Sunni vote" for strategically minded voters, while the de-Ba’athification circus likely focused attention on the national level.  

Still, it can’t help but feel like a sign of the times.  Abu Risha and his late brother were the face of American cooperation with the Sunnis against al-Qaeda.  His defeat, and the general irrelevance of the Awakenings to the Anbar election results, offers one more suggestion of the waning influence of the U.S. and how little cachet such relationships still hold (and, no doubt, of the "betrayal" likely felt by many of its members).   But it also may hold a hopeful sign that Iraq has moved on, with different national political issues and leaving behind even the recent past.   I find it reassuring that I’m not yet seeing much talk of turning Anbar into a graveyard over the election results… though I’ll be watching. 

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Breaking news: late Wednesday evening in Cairo, Abu Mazen and his buddies at the Arab League decided there will be no ‘proximity talks’ between the PLO and Israel.

I’m kind of interested in the way Abu Mazen is getting Amr Moussa to front for him these days. It does indicate a serious lack of his own confidence in the depth of his support among Palestinians… But that matter is tangential to the main story here, which is–

The Amazingly Unsuccessful ‘Diplomatist’ Joe Biden!

Biden, lest we forget, is the man who in an interview with George Stephanopoulos last July, publicly gave Israel carte blanche to attack Iran whenever it wanted.

Biden was also, back in the pre-2003 day, one of Ahmed Chalabi’s main supporters in the U.S., and an enthusiastic backer of the idea of partitioning Iraq.

Since he became Vice-President, Biden has had a role “orchestrating” Washington’s Iraq policy on behalf of the president… Well, we’ve seen how that’s been going… To be fair, that is not as horrendously badly as it might have been going… But it hasn’t been going brilliantly, either– certainly not as brilliantly as most of the US MSM have been saying.

Biden has not done a particularly good job there, I think.

But he has really been bombing in Palestine.

Yes, of course we can and should lay the primary blame for what’s been happening in Jerusalem this past couple of days squarely on the Israeli government, the body that greeted Biden, on his first visit to Israel as vice-president, with not one but two announcements about the construction of new settler housing.

Notable that Yossi Sarid writes in Thursday’s Haaretz that,

Don’t believe Benjamin Netanyahu for one moment when he says he “never knew” [about the 1,600 new settler housing units announced Tuesday.] The Jerusalem planning committee is only too aware of what the bosses want, and the government has decided to step up construction in greater Jerusalem. Dispossession and taking possession, kicking out and moving in – that’s what it’s all about.

Sarid also gave us these additional details about Biden’s time in Israel:

This is one visit Joe Biden will not quickly forget. First he was compelled to sit through 25 minutes of an annoying speech in his honor by our president. Shimon Peres really believes that he is the destination for pilgrims from all over the world who drink in his musings and are intoxicated by his vision.

Later, Biden was given a certificate memorializing his mother, but the glass broke. Once again, Bibi didn’t pay attention, leaned on it and shattered it. No fear, his speeches have always diverted attention from such mishaps. And finally, to add a finishing touch of infuriating disgrace, the Haredi neighborhood Ramat Shlomo was dumped on the vice-presidential head.

Truth be told, the Obama administration just about asked for this slap. In Jerusalem, the lesson has been learned that the White House doesn’t fulfill its obligations – it just goes through the motions by issuing insincere rebukes.

Insincere rebukes, indeed.

Juan Cole and Pat Lang, two very seasoned analysts of Middle eastern dynamics, are just two of the people who say that, on hearing of the new settlement construction, Biden should simply have ordered up his plane and left Israel, rather than sitting there, going through the rest of the charade of the visit, while saying something on the record about how the Obama administration “condemns” the new construction.

I’m assuming Biden decided on this course of action after consultation with Washington. (He took 90 minutes to decide what to do.) Do he and his boss the Prez have no idea how disgusted most of the people in the world are with the fact that, though from time to time Washington might say something critical of Israel– meantime Washington never holds Israel to serious account, for anything, including “grave breaches of international humanitarian law” like implanting its settlers into occupied territories?

And the U.S. Congress continues to shovel money to Israel. U.S. diplomacy continues to get completely bent out of shape by defending Israel’s actions in every international forum, at every turn, and by zealously pursuing Israel-driven agendas throughout the entire Middle East, including with regard to Iraq and Iran.

And these actions by the administration and Congress put the lives of U.S. service-members deployed around the world, often in pursuit of Israel-driven agendas, in significant additional risk.

Regarding Biden, Pat Lang has this intriguing little vignette in his latest post:

I was in Biden’s senate office on one occasion when Biden’s Zionism boiled over in a truly repulsive display of temper. I was there with my Arab employer to visit the senator… The Arab made some pro forma positive reference to the “peace process.” Biden flew into a rage, grew red in the face and shouted that this was an insincere lie and that his guest knew that it was only Arab stubbornness that prevented “little Israel’ from living in peace. His “guest” sat through this with what dignity he could manage. I would have walked out on him if I had been alone.

Assuming that the vignette’s true– and I tend to trust Lang on that– it reveals quite a few disturbing things about Biden. Not just the guy’s knee-jerk pro-Israelism, which is endemic just about everywhere in Congress, with a few notable exceptions. But also his evident lack of any diplomatic skills. I mean, why fly into a pro-Israeli rage like that if an Arab guest should happen to mention the “peace process”? What on earth good was he hoping to achieve by doing that? Nothing that I can think of– except to vent his own feelings.

… And meanwhile, George Mitchell, Mr. “Senior Peace Envoy”, has completely dropped off the map.

It is honestly not clear to me at all, right now, what it is that Obama and his people are hoping to achieve in the Arab-Israeli arena. Their entire “peace diplomacy” is in shambles. It’s as if Obama really doesn’t care any more about any of the lofty– but oh-so-important– goals he articulated back in the first days and weeks of his presidency. But he should realize that letting his “peace diplomacy” fall into disarray, as he has now done, is something that will have consequences far, far beyond Israel and Palestine. And quite possibly, more rapidly than anyone in Washington realizes.

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Welcome to the Middle East Channel! 

Some of you may have wondered why I haven’t been posting much lately.  Part of the reason is that I’ve been working hard on putting together the Middle East Channel at ForeignPolicy.com.  Creating this site has been my dream for a long time.  With today’s launch, it’s finally come true, after half a year of hard work, with the enthusiastic support of the leadership at Foreign Policy  and a vibrant partnership with Daniel Levy and Amjad Atallah’s Middle East Task Force at the New America Foundation.  It’s also sponsored by the Project on Middle East Political Science, a new network of political scientists specializing in the Middle East which I have been putting together with the support of a generous grant from the Carnegie Corporation — much more on that soon! 

I can’t think of a better way to explain what we’re trying to than to quote in full the "Welcome" post which we’ve put up to announce the Middle East Channel:

The world is hardly lacking for opinions about the
Middle East. But quantity should not be mistaken for quality: Too much of the
public debate about the issues of the Middle East is dominated by partisan
bickering and poorly informed punditry.

Foreign Policy’s Middle East Channel is something
different: a vibrant and decidedly non-partisan new site where real expertise
and experience take priority over shouting, where the daily debate is informed
by dispassionate analysis and original reporting all too often lacking from the
stale and talking-point-laden commentary that sadly dominates most coverage of
the region today. Its contributors range from academics to former policymakers,
from journalists on the ground to established analysts — with an emphasis on
introducing voices from Middle East itself. Most importantly, the Middle East
Channel comes to you doctrine-free, open to political viewpoints of all kinds –
but demanding honesty, civility, and genuine expertise.

Our scope is broad: Israel and its neighbors, Iran’s
nuclear program and domestic politics, Iraq, Islamist movements, the Gulf,
Turkey, and North Africa, and the struggle for reform and democracy. The
Middle East Channel will highlight links between issues and areas of this diverse
region of 400 million — as well as provide a unique perspective on America’s
challenges there. We’ll have regular interviews with Middle East and Washington
players, sharp commentary on the news of the day, and original analysis of new
ideas and trends in the region.

The Middle East Channel is edited by Marc Lynch
of George Washington University and the Project on Middle East Political
Science and Amjad
Atallah and Daniel Levy,
co-directors of the Middle East Task Force at the New America Foundation.
Lynch, who writes the Abu
Aardvark Middle East blog on ForeignPolicy.com, is an expert
on Arab media and politics and is the author most recently of Voices
of the New Arab Public: Al-Jazeera, Iraq, and Middle East Politics Today.
Atallah is an expert in the law of conflict and post-conflict situations and a
former advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team. Levy was an advisor to
former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and is a leading commentator on
Israeli politics and Middle East peace.

You can follow the site on Twitter,
sign up for our RSS
feed,
and subscribe to our twice-weekly email updates to get the latest on what’s
happening on the Middle East Channel and beyond.

I’ll still be blogging here under my own name, while co-directing and co-editing the Middle East Channel.  Feel free to send me your ideas for stories or feedback.   Here we go!  

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So now, Washington’s “leadership” of the Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy looks poised to rush forward to… 1949, and the proximity talks that Ralph Bunche convened in Rhodes that year.

Haaretz’s reporters tell us there,

the American administration is hoping the sides will declare the beginning of indirect talks [on Sunday] morning, ahead of the arrival of U.S. Vice President Joe Biden on Monday.

These “proximity talks” have been touted by U.S. officials as some kind of big deal, even though they are a major step back from what Obama was promising when he came into office 14 months ago.

The P.A. leadership has until now merely been asking that, if the Netanyahu government wants to talk, it should first comply with its own commitments under the 2002 Road Map. But they’ve gotten no support from Washington for that position, and Washington has been putting big pressure on Abu Mazen, including through Egypt, Jordan, etc., with the aim of getting him back into talks– any talks, never mind about what!

The problem is not whether the two “sides” talk to each other; or how close they are when they take; or what shape table or configuration of hotel they might employ. The problem is getting Israel to end its illegal occupation of Palestinian land.

When Saddam Hussein occupied Kuwait in 1990, was Pres. G.H. W. Bush concerned about getting Iraqi and Kuwaiti leaders into a room together– or in rooms in the same hotel together– to “negotiate” a resolution? Of course he wasn’t… Although, just possibly, there might have been a negotiated outcome to have been had. But he never gave anyone a serious chance to explore that avenue. Five and a half months after Saddam’s forces moved into Kuwait, the international alliance that Bush brought together acted swiftly to evict them.

In the OPTs, the occupation has now gone on for nearly 43 years.

Israel has no more claim to the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan than Iraq had to Kuwait. Claims of “holy places” and such don’t confer sovereign rights. Everywhere in the world, people have places they consider somehow sacred in other countries… and they go to visit them on pilgrimages. That’s how it is.

International law concerns itself with quite different matters; and in the matter of the Israeli-occupied lands the Security Council has clearly stated the inacceptability of Israel’s acquisition of those territories by force.

… In Palestine meanwhile, Abu Mazen’s apparent decision to take part in the upcoming “proximity talks” farce has come in for a lot of criticism, including from one rather unexpected source: Muhammad Dahlan.

Maan News reported today that,

If the American policy is to “waste time pretending we are in negotiations” as Israel continues to build settlements and claim Palestinian heritage sites, Dahlan said, there is no point to go ahead with the talks.

“We have been sick of the occupation for years, and sick of negotiations since 2000,” he said, referring to the start of the Second Intifada following civil unrest around a failure of the Oslo Accords.

Oh dear. It looks as if the project to rebuild Fateh’s organizational integrity that was pursued with such fanfare last summer didn’t do quite as well as hoped.

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On Wednesday morning, three suicide bombers attacked the HQ of the provincial government, a police station, and a hospital in Baquba, the capital of Diyala Province east of Baghdad, killing at least 16 persons and wounding over 40. (The report of the explosion at the government building comes via Aljazeera Arabic.) The attack was probably undertaken by militant Sunni Arabs intent on creating an atmosphere of fear intended to keep voters home on the coming Sunday.

Diyala is a mixed province with a slight Sunni Arab majority. The Shiite minority, however, dominated its politics from 2003-2008, possibly with help from neighboring Iran. In response, Sunni Arabs launched a determined insurgency, making Diyala one of the more dangerous provinces in the country.

In January 2009, a Sunni Arab-dominated provincial council came to power. In the aftermath, however, arrest warrants were issued by the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad for several provincial council members, who were suspected of links to insurgent guerrilla groups, and who had to go into hiding. The police and military in Baquba are disproportionately Shiite, which is one of the reasons the Sunni Arab guerrillas would have attacked them.

On February 26, a forum participant had posted a statement attributed to an Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of the radical Sunni Arab ‘Islamic State of Iraq,’ which ridiculed Iraq’s elections. Translated by the USG Open Source Center, it said,

‘” The Islamic State in Iraq Will Participate in the Iraqi Elections, using their own methods. They (the Islamic State in Iraq) have picked several apostate figures that its soldiers will vote for, either with an explosive device or an explosive belt, God willing.

“The Initial Results of Elections According to Jihadist Sources

“The Ministry of War of the Islamic State of Iraq has won first place in the jihadist elections in the Land of the Two Rivers, and destroyed most of the election posts.

” The Electoral Program of the Al-Qa’ida Organization

“1- Purifying and liberating the land of the caliphate (governing system) from the Crusaders and applying God’s Shari’ah [religious law] in the Land of the Two Rivers.

“2- Establishing an Islamic state and getting rid of the legislators and legislative councils based on infidel democracy.

“3- Expanding the field of jihadist work to liberate Muslim countries from occupation, especially the Al-Aqsa Mosque[in Israeli-ruled Jerusalem], the cradle of prophets and messengers, and purifying it of the cowardly Zionists, following in the steps of Salah al-Din [Saladin].

“4- Applying God’s Shari’ah on Earth, establishing an Islamic caliphate, and unifying the Muslim point of view under the banner of monotheism and jihad.’

Opinion polling shows that only a tiny minority of Iraqi Sunni Arabs find these ideas attractive, and support for them has fallen dramatically in recent years.

As though a resurgence of Sunni Arab radicalism were not enough, the Associated Press has gotten hold of a warrant issued by Iraq’s Supreme Court for the arrest of Shiite clerical leader Muqtada al-Sadr, dated February 7 of this year. The surprise renewal of the warrant, originally issued under the American administration of Paul Bremer in 2004, threatens to roil Iraq. Sadr stands accused of ordering the killing of Majid al-Khoei on April 10, 2003, on the latter’s return to the holy city of Najaf from exile in London. Al-Khoei was killed by enraged mobs of nativist Sadr followers in part because his return seemed to have been sponsored by London and Washington, D.C. That the death was an assassination ordered by al-Sadr as opposed to the spiralling out of control of an urban mob has not been proven.

The American-inspired arrest warrant was allowed to lapse as part of the Bush administration’s truce with the Shiite leader. His Sadr Movement came to be a significant player in parliament, with over 10% of the seats, and his Mahdi Army militia was at one point in control of significant swathes of southern Iraqi cities as well as the capital. The Sadr Movement is part of the National Iraqi Alliance, which groups several important Shiite religious parties, and which seems set to gain between a sixth and a fifth of seats in the parliamentary elections scheduled for the coming Sunday.

The al-Maliki government denied that it had engineered the reemergence of the arrest warrant, and indeed denied that the warrant existed.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports in Arabic that the Sadr Movement blamed al-Maliki for the issuance of the warrant and called it ‘psychological warfare’ against the Sadr Movement.

There is now certainly a suspicious pattern whereby the major challengers to al-Maliki’s State of Law coalition have run into sudden and unexpected legal problems in the run-up to the election. Salih Mutlak, a Sunni Arab ally of Iyad Allawi’s National Iraqi List, was disqualified from running on grounds that he was too close to the banned Baath Party that had been led by Saddam Hussein. The move potentially weakened the Iraqiya List.

Now the National Iraqi Alliance is being targeted for demoralization, with one of its chief leaders indicted anew on a 6-year-old charge that had seemed to lapse. Ironically, the Sadr Movement’s support had catapulted PM al-Maliki into power in spring of 2006, before the two broke with one another in summer 2007 over al-Maliki’s unwillingness to set a timetable for US withdrawal and to cease teleconferencing with President George W. Bush.

Iraqis point out that few major Iraqi politicians have clean hands, as McClatchy reports.

The greatest danger of these political maneuverings is that they may reignite guerrilla and militia violence in Iraq, and possibly impede the scheduled withdrawal of the US military. Both Sunni Arab guerrillas and Mahdi Army militiamen have been major sources of instability in Iraq at some points in the past six years. Some Sunni Arabs are worried about a resurgence of sectarian violence.

On the other hand, experienced Iraq hand Nir Rosen believes that all the talk about the reemergence of sectarian conflict is completely overblown. One reason Rosen may be right is that the Sunni Arabs decisively lost the civil war and were largely ethnically cleansed from Baghdad, so it is not clear that they have the social base to put up a further fight.

Aljazeera English reports on the campaign techniques being used in Iraq:

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Al Jazeera/ English/ here

“…. In the video, al-Balawi also accused Jordan of providing information for the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, in 2006 as well as that of Imad Mughniyeh, the Hezbollah commander who died in a car bomb in Damascus in 2008.

“The Jordanian intelligence apparatus has a record which emboldens them to such behavior, but with Allah’s permission, after this operation, they will never stand on their feet again,” he said.

Al-Balawi, a doctor, hailed from the same hometown of Zarqa as al-Zarqawi and was a prolific contributor to jihadist websites.

But he was never able to realise his dream of joining the jihad until he was arrested by Jordanian security.”

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Killing of ‘ruthless’ Abu Sayyaf commander inflicts major blow on Al Qaeda-linked group, military says.
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In the New Yorker/ here

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