Arab News Blog

Fouad Zakariyya, a leading Egyptian philosopher and sophisticated critic of Islamist thought, passed away on Thursday after a long illness. Born in Port Said, he earned his doctorate in philosophy at Cairo’s Ain Shams University in 1956, as the four-year-old Nasser regime took a sharp turn into nationalist populism. His career took him away from Egypt, to Kuwait University, for much of his life. 

While I am not very familiar with Zakariyya’s political involvement as a man of the left (Hossam perhaps can fill in), as a scholar he was a leading advocate for secularism in the Arab world. He saw secularism as a historical necessity for the Arab world, the only possible path to advancement, but was not anti-religious. At the core of his argument was that Islam was too pervasive in the public sphere, and should become a private matter. He was painfully of the way religion was manipulated by both the state and religious groups, whether by Azharites or movements like the Society of Muslim Brothers. He was also scathing about Sadat’s embrace of these groups, and accused him of giving them the false expectation that Egypt would turn into an Islamic state — indeed, by the late 1970s many Islamists were already disappointed with Sadat’s duplicity and would turn radical, eventually assassinating him.

To make his case, Zakariyya became a leading deconstructionist of the intellectual production of Islamists, and engaged in passionate debates with Islamist thinkers such as Hassan Hanafi, notably over the latter’s critique of the European origins of secularism. Not only did Zakariyya not see the European influence on modern secularism as a problem, but he argued that secularism had been an integral part of Islamic culture since its early days, and called for the revival of the secularist tradition in Muslim thinkers like the Mutazallites and Ibn Rushd (Averroes). Without secularism, he argued, the Arab world would not catch up with modernity — and to do so, Arab intellectuals must treat standard Islamic history critically rather than with traditional deference.

Zakariyya leaves behind an oeuvre crowned by Myth and Reality in the Contemporary Islamist Movement, as far as I know the only book of his translated into English, which is one of the best books on Islamism I have read. I particularly appreciated his critique of groups like the Muslim Brothers, which he sees as authoritarian, closed to new ideas, and as promoting groupthink. He was unfortunately vindicated by the arrival of the Muslim Brothers to power in Sudan, where the Numeiri regime enacted the most retrograde policies in the name of Islam. He was also critical of the Islamism of the Gulf elites, which he saw devoid of social justice, and saw the combination of these elites and oil wealth as the “tribalization of Islam.” These local elites, he wrote, allied with the US to maintain power, but gave Westerners political hegemony over the Middle East in exchange. Most of the book, though, engages with the ideas of Islamists, their internal contradictions, and the vagueness of terms such as shura to denote democracy.

Zakariyya also took positions that, among some Arab intellectuals at least, were controversial. He defended Kuwait when it was invaded by Saddam Hussein, a position many saw as pro-imperialist. In 2004, he wrote that the Iraqi insurgency was no national resistance movement, but a bunch of violent ex-Baathists thugs. 

At a time when, against all odds, there is the inkling of a revival of secularist thought in the region, it’s sad to think that most of Zakariyya’s adult life was marked by an Islamic revivalism that, at times, has been terribly destructive. I am curious what Asa’ad AbuKhalil made of him — AbuKhalil shares Zakariyya’s critical take on Islamism (read for instance his The Incoherence of Islamic Fundamentalism [PDF] article) but probably not his politics.

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Via Laura Rosen, in DCbureau/ here

Scores are still being settled from the Iran Iraq War in the 1980s….After transferring to another, smaller helicopter, used to find targets for Iraqi artillery, I got a closer view of how poison gas and every other lethal tool available to Saddam Hussein – all with American approval – were being employed. Hussein’s U.S.-provided arms supplier, Sarkis Soghanalian, had done his job well. As I landed in an abandoned schoolyard at the front a few miles from al-Qurna, where the Garden of Eden supposedly once existed, and crossed by flatboat in the canals Saddam’s army had dug to flood the marshes, I witnessed the endless line of corpses of very old men and adolescents, some children, in tattered Iranian uniforms. The Iranian Mullahs’ defense of the 1979 Revolution and Saddam’s invasion ended festering in Iraqi mud. A million people died in the Iran Iraq War. Almost no one in the United States paid any attention.

More than two decades and two Gulf Wars later, the United States, Saudi Arabia and Israel face the same Hobson’s choice – this time with an insular and defensive Iran. By removing Saddam Hussein, we created a more powerful and ambitious Iran…..

While the Obama administration prepares for a military conflict with Iran, it is important for us to understand some of the secret history between Iran and the United States that complicates the planning and unnecessarily puts our soldiers and sailors in harm’s way. What follows is one story about how that happened.

Iran has been preparing for an attack since 1988, after a U.S. Navy ship, the USS Vincennes, illegally operating inside Iran’s territorial waters, accidentally shot down Iran Air Flight 655. After the shoot down, the Iranian leadership began a weapons buying spree to counter the threat posed by the powerful American fleet in the Persian Gulf that threatened them and could attack at will.

Sometimes reporters end up in the middle of a story. That is what happened to me. I was in France in June 1997 to attend the Paris Air Show. One of my sources, arms dealer Sarkis Soghanalian, had shifted his operations to Paris after being sent to jail by the George H.W. Bush administration for doing the United States’ bidding in Iraq and serving as the Reagan administration’s arms dealer of choice to Saddam Hussein. He was released after helping the Clinton administration combat Hezbollah’s counterfeiting operations in Lebanon.

…….Soghanalian introduced me to M. Ping, the CPMEIC representative, who was, in fact, a Chinese intelligence official. …… Ping ignored his host’s awkward lie and, instead, talked business with Soghanalian……..

Ping enthusiastically described the new missiles he wanted Soghanalian to peddle. The missiles were cheap ($60,000) and so were the launch and support equipment. The missiles were as good as any in the U.S. arsenal and could be equipped with nuclear, chemical, biological or conventional warheads. Ping told Soghanalian that components for hundreds of the missiles had been shipped to Iran and, within weeks, would be operational against all shipping in the Gulf. The Chinese wanted Soghanalian to sell the systems throughout the world. (This meeting took place after China had promised the Clinton administration that it would cease construction of these systems.)……

I followed Soghanalian and Ping out, raced to my hotel the Mermoz, and called a U.S. weapons expert who was a longtime source. I asked him, “How many C-802s does the U.S. think Iran has?” The source called back a few minutes later with the answer: “Less than a dozen.” I told him that the Chinese had told Soghanalian, in my presence, that China had shipped key parts for just under 200 missiles. There was silence at the other end of the phone. My source asked: “Can you leave Paris for Washington?” I said that I had another few days of work.

Late that night I received a call from the front desk with a message to meet Veronique at a café around the corner from the Israeli Embassy in Paris. Over a drink, she handed me Ping’s file and said: “The French are involved in this missile deal. You need to be very careful. They are China’s hidden partner.”

…….. I asked one CIA official what the United States knew about the C-802. The answer was not reassuring: “The U.S. doesn’t have one. We don’t know how to defend [against] it.”

I returned to Paris, armed with details of everything the government then knew about the C-802, which was not much. Over the next five days, I would learn that in the early 1980s Sarkis had arranged for Iraq to use the U.S. Army’s supercomputers at Aberdeen, Maryland to redesign its Scud missiles. …….Information from that project, along with other sensitive material, was now in the hands of the Chinese and had gone into the improved C-802…….

“This missile you expressed concern about is worse than you know,” Sarkis said. “The Chinese have put a greater range on it than they have claimed. They are getting over-horizon capability for the weapon. . . . I am in a bad position here. I have to do what I am doing. There are things I can’t tell you, but tell the Navy that I can still get them an 802 through Jordan. All I need is the cost. $60,000. They can take it apart, study it, and then I will deliver it to the king.”

Independently, I obtained documents from sources in and out of the United States that indicated that the DOD and CIA had little knowledge of the C-802’s design. With this information I began to put together a picture of what had happened.

Not long after the Vincennes incident in 1988, the Iranian Revolutionary Council turned to terrorism through Libya and Hezbollah for retaliation. Simultaneously, they began to explore ways to increase Iranian defenses against U.S. ships. The first efforts included increased purchases of advanced Chinese Silkworm missiles.

China proposed to Iran that they enter into a contract for a new defense, an anti-ship cruise missile. I was not surprised that China and Iran, both embargoed countries, would work together on such a project. But two components for the missile involved technologies beyond China’s capability. A more technologically advanced nation had to be recruited to obtain these crucial elements. That nation was France. Message traffic intercepted by the United States and Britain through the ECHELON eavesdropping system proved that China began working with France in the late 1980s to supply parts for Chinese weapons systems. Subsequently, French companies agreed to supply precision parts that China could not produce on its own. China also enjoyed a relationship with Israel that gave both countries great advantages in weapons development. After Beijing crushed the pro-democracy movement in 1989, the United States and Europe embargoed arms shipments and technology to China. France ignored the embargo. So did Israel.

Israel and Iraq had two things in common. Both had a close relationship with China and both had exclusive access to the U.S. Army Laboratory at Aderdeen, home to our main weapons supercomputers at the time. Because China was working closely with the Iraqis (and Gerald Bull who had close connections to the laboratory), technology from the lab got into the hands of the Chinese.

By 2001 the Chinese had stopped shipping C-802s to Iran, but Iran had, by then, reversed engineered the missile and was successfully building a much more advanced version than China had in its own arsenal. ….. that kind of maneuverability that makes the C-802 so difficult to defend against, according to Navy weapons experts.

I learned that the Iranians felt cheated by the Chinese on the C-802 deal and had hired a notorious Syrian arms dealer to represent them against the Chinese. I obtained the official CIA biography of the arms dealer Monzer al-Kassar, who had been brought into the deal before Soghanalian. French intelligence, distrustful of al-Kassar, instructed Soghanalian to work with the Chinese after their falling out with Iran…..

A few days later Soghanalian called me back and said the Yemeni authorities said “the explosives used were a warhead from a C-802 missile.” The C-802 can be launched from patrol boats, trucks or helicopters. Soghanalian insisted the explosives the terrorists detonated against the hull of the USS Cole were not, as widely believed, some bundled plastic explosives but a C-802 warhead.

It seemed unlikely to me that Iran would sell such a valuable asset so easily traced back to them to Al Qaeda. Sarkis insisted the “Iranians are not that stupid and neither are the Chinese.” I asked him who had access to a C-802 warhead with ties to Al Qaeda. “The Israelis and French think it is Monzer.” Soghanalian said al-Kassar “has a history of selling to Hezbollah and other terrorist groups, especially in Latin America.” I called al-Kassar in Marbella, Spain, and asked him for an interview about his work on the C-802. He refused to talk to me and said, “I do not discuss customer business.” One of his best customers had close relations with Iran and Hezbollah…”

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Roger Cohen in the NYTimes/ here

“… the 31-year gridlock in Iranian-American relations endures. Sarah Palin, no less, is now urging Obama to “declare war on Iran” to save his presidency. She’s not alone. Daniel Pipes, the conservative commentator, called a recent National Review column: “How to save the Obama Presidency: Bomb Iran.”

There’s nothing new in U.S. hawks reducing Iran to a nuclear abstraction, its 70 million citizens subsumed into a putative warhead, its civilization ignored and its historical grievances against the United States glossed over — all in the name of making Persia a U.S. electoral pawn and a threat that demands bombs.

But the war option remains unthinkable, a potential disaster for the United States and Israel. It’s therefore worth outlining, before the drumbeat intensifies in the run-up to the mid-term U.S. elections, 10 truths about Iran.

1.Iran’s hardliners thrive on isolation. The game-changing pursuit of dialogue with Iran is not incompatible with support of the Green movement; rather it complements that backing…..

2. The Iranian response to Obama has been erratic, not least in the aborted Geneva deal of Oct. 1, 2009, that would have seen Iran’s low enriched uranium (L.E.U.) shipped out the country and the eventual return of uranium enriched to 20 percent (well below weapons grade) for use in a Tehran medical research reactor. The crumbling of this accord, victim of Iran’s political divisions, left Obama and his top Iran aides bitterly frustrated. They are to this day. It would have created breathing space for broader talks.

But Iran says the idea is alive: “We think all parties have shown their political will to fulfill this exchange” (Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, Feb. 5). ….This deal is still a door opener. Sanctions are a cul-de-sac.

3. Deterrence is powerful. The United States should, as Hillary Clinton has suggested, be building a “defense umbrella” for friendly gulf states alarmed by Iran’s nuclear program. The cleverest remark of Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Iran was: “The only way you end up not having a nuclear-capable Iran is for the Iranian government to decide that their security is diminished by having those weapons.”…..

4.Sanctions will not alter Iran’s policy, and will further enrich the Revolutionary Guards who control sanction-circumventing channels from Dubai, but they will buy some time for further probing of engagement.

I’m told that’s how Obama, who remains intellectually committed to the idea of an Iran breakthrough, views them: a necessity in the light of Congressional and Israeli pressure, (any difference?) but not a likely means to get sanctions-inured Iran to change course….

5.Attacking Iran has known consequences. Saddam Hussein did so in 1980 — and thereby cemented Ayatollah Khomeini’s theocratic revolution by uniting diverse factions (socialist, liberal and others) in national defense.

Because the United States and Europe armed Iraq in that war, and Saddam then gassed the Iranians, resentment runs deep: I’ve often been shown war wounds in Tehran on arms and legs as a single word is uttered, “America.” The generation of young officers in that war, like Ahmadinejad, now runs Iran and constitutes the New Right. (Blowback is not limited to Afghanistan.) But most Iranians are under 35 and drawn to the United States.

The one sure way to defeat the Green movement, frustrate Iranian youth, unite Iranians in patriotic defiance, reinforce the New Right, put Iran on a crash course to a bomb, and buttress the regime — as in 1980 — is to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. As Gates has said, “There is no military option that does anything more than buy time” — and not much, at that.

6.Iran’s defiance of U.N. resolutions… Still, I.A.E.A. inspectors are in Iran, …… it is clear that there is still time — at least a couple of years — for a bargain that would persuade Iran to do what Brazil, Argentina and South Africa did before it.

7. The shifts since the June 12 elections are seismic. ….. Iran is far more volatile than a year ago. I doubt that it could manage a peaceful transition were Khamenei, 70, to die…..

8.Israel and Iran are not neighbors. Both are strangers — one Jewish, the other Shiite — in the Sunni Arab sea that is the Middle East. They have never fought a war. They enjoyed everything short of diplomatic relations under the shah and productive relations for a decade after the revolution, when Israel sided with Iran against Iraq. Their enmity is fierce but not inevitable. For Israel, already at war with Arabs, opening a new war front against Persia would be disastrous: Muslim anger would overflow…. U.S. security and the American quest for stability in Iraq and Afghanistan would be compromised. Israel can prevent an Iranian bomb through working with America on measures short of war. Its own large nuclear arsenal and second strike capacity gives it the assurances it needs to pursue that course.

9.A peaceful Iraq, a quieter Afghanistan and any Israeli-Palestinian rapprochement demand Iranian involvement. Outside the tent Iran is a disruptive force. Inside the tent it can help America on multiple fronts and outgrow its violent revolutionary impetuosity. That’s still a game-changing proposition, as radical as the U.S.-China breakthrough of 1972 that changed the world. Obama must shut out the baying crowds and focus on the prize.

10.Iran is the original Heartbreak Hotel. It crushes people with its tragedy. Since at least the 1930s it has veered between forced westernization (“westoxification” to its critics) and theocratic imposition, banning the hijab and then making it compulsory, reaching for pluralism and then crushing it, opening its society and then slamming it shut.

….. It is time for Iran to find the balance between faith and pluralism that has eluded it for a century. It is time for the United States to help Iran’s emergence from isolation — not with Palin’s jingoism, nor empty punishments, nor bombs — but through firmness allied to creative diplomacy and sustained involvement.

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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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Cold analysis by Bob Baer, in the WSJ/ here

“…… In America’s war on terror, there has been a conspicuous absence of classical assassination. The closest thing to it was when the CIA kidnapped an Egyptian cleric in Milan and rendered him to Egypt in 2003. Most of the CIA agents behind the rendition were identified because, like the assassins in Dubai, the agents apparently did not understand that you can’t put a large team on the ground in a modern country and not leave a digital footprint. It took a matter of days for the Italian prosecutors to trace their supposedly sterile phone to their hotels, and from there to their true-name email accounts and telephone calls to family. We might as well have let Delta Force do it with helicopters with American insignia on the side.

Israel has yet to feel the real cost of the hit in Dubai. But the longer it is covered in the press, the higher the cost.

And was Mr. Mabhouh worth it? Other than taking revenge for killing the two Israeli soldiers, he will be quickly replaced. Arms dealing is not a professional skill, and as long as Hamas’s militants are at war with Israel they will find people to buy arms and smuggle them into Gaza. In short, it’s looking more and more like Mr. Mabhouh’s assassination was a serious policy failure.

In cold prose, it sounds inhuman, but there should be a cost-benefit calculation in deciding whether to assassinate an enemy. With all of the new technology available to any government who can afford it, that cost has gone up astronomically. Plausible deniability is out the window. Obviously, if we had known with any specificity 9/11 was coming, we would have ignored the high cost and tried to assassinate Osama bin Laden. And there’s certainly an argument to be made that we should have assassinated Saddam Hussein rather than invade Iraq. The bottom line, it seems to me, is that assassination is justified if it keeps us out of a war. But short of that, it’s not. The Mabhouhs of the world are best pursued by relentless diplomatic pressure and the rule of law.”

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“…. In many ways, Turkey’s rise as a major diplomatic player on the Iraqi stage serves as a counterpoint to Iran’s magnified role, with both pro-actively promoting their interests by attempting to reintegrate Iraq into the region on their own terms. That stands in stark contrast to Iraq’s Arab neighbors, who have utterly failed to seriously prepare for the United States’ impending withdrawal………Turkey’s strategy toward Iraq’s Kurds has largely been predicated on a policy of golden handcuffs to temper nationalist inclinations: Annual trade with the region now totals over $5 billion, and the KRG’s reliance on Turkey as its primary outlet to the outside world has created a degree of effectively coercive economic dependence.

Turkey’s involvement in Iraq mirrors, if on a smaller scale, that of Iran, the natural beneficiary in grand strategic terms of the fall of Saddam Hussein. Iran’s magnified role in post-war Iraq is in many ways driven by geography, history, commerce and religious ties, as well as by Tehran’s support to many of the Iraqi political organizations while in exile. But Iran’s influence is also a reflection of the broader regional environment and the unimaginative, tentative, and self-defeating approach of the Arab world.

To be fair, the Arab world faced a difficult dilemma in Iraq, complicated by bitter recent history and the divisive U.S. invasion. Baghdad’s nascent Shiite-led government has been wary of engaging with the broader region, due to still-fresh memories of Arab acquiescence and silence in the face of Saddam Hussein’s brutal repression. The descent into sectarian civil war in 2005-2007 particularly fanned tensions with the Sunni Arab world, while the historical legacy of Iraq’s crushing debt burden from the Iran-Iraq War complicated Baghdad’s relations with the Gulf Arab states and continues to be a source of friction…….

For the Arab states, their initial coolness toward Iraq was driven by the overwhelming unpopularity of the U.S. invasion in the region and a fear of being associated with the U.S. project in Iraq. The perception of an overbearing Iranian role in Baghdad further fueled the new “Arab Cold War”……..

Yet despite these formidable hurdles, Turkey’s example should be instructive. Ankara shifted toward a pragmatic strategy of engagement to frame its bilateral affairs and magnify its influence. While Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and other Arab states have re-established diplomatic relations, their efforts to deepen relations with Iraq have not extended far beyond the bare minimum of diplomatic protocol.

For the United States, the reintegration of Iraq into the Arab world should be a key plank of any post-withdrawal regional strategy seeking to establish the basis for long-term stability ….But regional reintegration will be lopsided without active Arab participation. While U.S. influence within Iraq has decreased, its ability to prod its Arab allies and its willingness to prioritize Arab outreach to Iraq within its bilateral relations with these countries remains an important tool to secure Iraqi goodwill and shape regional security dynamics. With the impending drawdown of U.S. troops, the Arab states’ worst fears regarding an expanding Iranian sphere of influence will only be exacerbated by their own lethargy. Without a perceptible shift in approach, the Arab world will be party to a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

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In the New Yorker/ here

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Today, the WaPo had an editorial filled with inaccuracies about Syria’s record and just oozing pure venom for the Syrian government.

The title is, “Don’t expect progress from talking to Syria.”

I’m still trying to figure out why editorial page editor Fred Hiatt feels obliged to publish such hate-filled, inaccurate, and incendiary garbage.

Here are just a few of the notable inaccuracies in this screed:

“Having carried out a campaign of political murder in Lebanon, including the killing of a prime minister for which he has yet to be held accountable, Mr. Assad continues to insist on a veto over the Lebanese government… “

The truth here:

(1) No-one has yet been able to substantiate the many accusations that hostile forces have made against Pres. Bashar al-Asad regarding the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese PM Rafiq Hariri. This, despite the involvement of scores of highly-paid international investigators in the commission that was jointly established by the UN and the Lebanese government to investigate the affair and the Hague-based Special tribunal that was the successor to the commission. Last April, in fact, the Hague tribunal ordered that four pro-Syrian figures who had been high-ranking officers in the Lebanese security forces pup until the assassination should be freed from jail, given the paucity of evidence against them.

(2) Meanwhile, in response to the demands that rose loudly in Lebanon after the Hariri killing that Syria should withdraw the security forces it had kept in Lebanon since 1976 (when they went in at the behest of Washington), Asad did indeed withdraw all Syria’s troops from Lebanon within the couple of months right after the killing. Then, in October 2008, Syria formally recognized Lebanon’s independence for the first time ever. (All previous Syrian governments, including the most pro-western of them, had always, ever since Syria was established as a separate country in the 1920s, claimed that Lebanon was a part of it.) After Syria’s recognition of Lebanon’s independence, the two countries exchanged ambassadors.

(3) Last December, Lebanese PM Saad al-Hariri made a state visit to Damascus, where he held talks with Asad. Hariri is a very pro-western politician, and the son of the slain former premier. Haaretz reported that Hariri told a press conference held in the Lebanese embassy in Damascus that,

I saw all positive signals from President Assad in all issues and we agreed on opening a new phase in our relations… The talks were excellent and frank… It all depends on the future….We want to build a future that serves the interests of the two countries.

Ah, but Fred Hiatt claims he “knows better” about the state of Syrian-Lebanese relations than Hariri does??

… More Hiatt:

“[Asad] continues to facilitate massive illegal shipments of Iranian arms to Hezbollah, dangerously setting the stage for another war with Israel, and to host the most hard-line elements of the Hamas leadership. He continues to harbor exiled leaders of Saddam Hussein’s regime and to allow suicide bombers to flow into Iraq for use by al-Qaeda… He has promised to check suicide bombers bound for Iraq but has never done so… “

Where to begin with all this nonsense?

(1) Lebanon is a sovereign country that has the right to defend itself against Israel’s daily continuing incursions and provocations in the way it judges best. Thus far, its government has decided to do so in conjunction with Hizbullah’s paramilitary capabilities. If someone wants to prevent another war between Israel and Lebanon, wouldn’t they be advised to call on Israel to stop its incessant violations of the border between the two countries? Ah, but not Hiatt…

(2) Hamas’s over-all leadership is indeed headquartered in Damascus. But all who study the organization carefully (though not Fred Hiatt) recognize that the Damascus-based leaders range from the middle to the more flexible end of the (anyway narrow) spectrum of opinion in the organization’s leading ranks. They are a moderating influence within Hamas– and very, very far from being “the most hard-line elements.”

(3) On the accusations about Damascus’s policies with respect to Iraq– where is the evidence for the claims Hiatt makes?? In the talks I had with officials in Damascus last year, it was clear that cooperation with Washington against the threat they judged that they both jointly faced from any renewed descent into chaos in Iraq was the single greatest motivator the Syrian government had for improving its relations with Washington. What evidence does Hiatt have that might outweigh the evidence I and numerous others have gathered on this question?

… So why do I even both spending time trying to correct the many gross inaccuracies included in this text? Because despite its many, many shortcomings, the WaPo is still a very influential newspaper in Washington DC, and in political circles throughout this country. Most people in the U.S. political elite don’t have the time to study carefully the actions and record of this or that foreign country… So they might well be inclined to “take the word” of a WaPo editorial regarding whether engagement with the current Syrian government is a worthwhile venture or not.

But why has the WaPo departed so hugely from the standards of accuracy and truth-telling that it once used to uphold?

That, I don’t feel qualified to answer. But the paper should certainly be held to account for these inaccuracies– and for the escalatory, war-mongering kind of atmosphere that they tend to feed.

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The great divide between liberal Jewish Americans and the Israeli Right has lurked as an issue since the Likud Party first challenged Labor dominance in the late 1970s. It is now coming to a boiling point, even as Israel’s reputation in the world is sinking. As rightwing policies more visibly fail, the Likudniks are flailing around making fools of themselves by smearing critics of those policies as racists. (Anyone who knows how Likud supporters talk among themselves about Arabs and other outsiders can only be amused at their impudent hypocrisy in playing the race card.)

The mess that Mossad’s mercenaries (some of them possibly from the Fateh Palestinian faction also opposed to Hamas) made of a routine political assassination in Dubai of a Hamas agent funneling arms from Iran is a blow against Ithe image of daring, stone-cold competence cultivated by the Israeli security establishment. The killing went smoothly, but it transpires that the assassins had not only stolen the passport identities of British and Irish citizens, but those of several Israeli dual citizens originally from the UK, as well. Mossad thus made potential problems for those passport holders for the rest of their lives, since Interpol will be interested every time the numbers pop up at an airport check-in.

The incident has roiled diplomatic relations with Ireland and the UK. But it is also controversial in Israel (not the assassination but the bumbling clumsy identity theft against Israeli citizens). After all, branding an innocent Israeli an assassin is a sort of blood libel. Indeed, casual political assassination as a routine Israeli method of statecraft makes many Jews uncomfortable, as is visible in Steven Spielberg’s film, Munich.

But the harbingers of isolation are numerous. The Netanyahu government has largely defied President Obama’s requests for a halt to the colonization of the West Bank (a freeze on building new settlements in part of the West Bank, while existing settlements are expanded and Palestinians are thrown in the street in Jerusalem does not count).

The Israeli siege of the children of Gaza, some of whom are looking skinnier, is impossible to justify and provoked even a US congressman to urge a forceful breaking of the blockade. The Goldstone Report on Israeli war crimes (and which also acknowledges Hamas war crimes) for the United Nations is likely to attain an official status of a sort denied to previous such clear-eyed examinations of Israeli military action. (Israel’s leadership suffered not the least from dropping nearly a million cluster bombs on the civilian farms of southern Lebanon in the last 3 days of the 2006 Lebanon War, though this targeting of civilians was illegal and the US Congress had stipulated that the weapons could not be used that way).

The reactionary parties of Likud, Shas, and Yisrael Beitenu have nothing in common with the vast majority of Jewish Americans, who voted for Barack Obama and are generally more progressive than non-Jewish Americans. The establishment of a liberal Jewish lobby, J Street, which supports a two-state solution (Israel and Palestine side by side), is a manifestation of the increasing unease of progessive Jewish Americans with the policies and aggressive wars of rightwing Israeli governments. Jewish Americans have been key to the securing of many of our civil liberties in this country and a major voice for peace and for culture and the arts, and a thug like Avigdor Lieberman as foreign minister surely makes many of them uneasy. It is no accident that the Likud government has snubbed a delegation of US Congress members to Israel who support J Street. The Netanyahu government is all about colonizing more of the West Bank and preventing the rise of a Palestinian state.

Then you have Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein supporting the movement to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza civilians, including children.

The Israeli occupation and colonization of the West Bank provoked former president Jimmy Carter to warn of an Apartheid situation. Although he was viciously attacked by the likes of Alan Dershowitz and subjected to the typical dirty tricks deployed by fanatical nationalists of all stripes, he has been vindicated by remarks of Israeli politician Ehud Barak, who just said the same thing Carter had.

The occupation is also provoking an increasing move to boycott Israel, especially firms and concerns based in the West Bank settlements or connected to the Lebanon and Gaza Wars. The second largest union of Canadian federal employees has joined such a boycott. During the Gaza War, Scandinavian grocery chains cancelled their orders for Israeli fruit, and the South African longshoremen declined to unload Israeli ships.

It is anxiety over the prospect that the current far-right Netanyahu government is becoming increasingly isolated from the world community, including the Obama administration in the US, and from a new generation of progressive Jewish Americans that explains the rash of scurrilous charges of ‘anti-Semitism’ being thrown around by the ‘Israel-can-do-no-wrong’ crowd in recent days.

You had Leon Wieseltier’s unsubstantiated and shameful attack on Andrew Sullivan, which Sullivan effectively refuted — as did Glenn Greenwald, Matthew Ygglesias, and a number of others. As Greenwald points out, the use of the ‘anti-Semitism’ charge against ordinary every day non-bigotted people who just don’t agree with some policy of Israel or of the American Enterprise Institute risks making the term meaningless and cheapening it, which can hardly be good for the Jews.

Meanwhile, the main strategy of the Israeli and Jewish-American Right to preserve Israeli capacity to continue the colonization and to act belligerently in the region had been the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. That strategem has failed, as I argued in Salon. The Shiite fundamentalists who have taken over Baghdad are pro-Hizbullah and pro-Palestinian. (Hizbullah was in part set up by the Islamic Mission Party, Da’wa, of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and Da’wa supported Hamas in the recent Gaza War). Moreover, Baghdad has ceased helping contain Iran for the Sunni Arab world and the West, and is now a close ally of Tehran. The prospect of a well-armed, 250,000-man Iraqi army now being reconstituted, and riddled with agents of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, must be a matter of consternation for Israelis. Only Jordan separates them from Iraq, now an outpost of the Shiite religious parties allied with Khamenei. The Neoconservatives, such as Richard Perle, David Frum, Paul Wolfowitz, Irv Lewis Libby, Michael Rubin, Douglas Feith, John Bolton, Larry Franklin and others thus not only shot themselves in the foot, but they shot Israel in the chest.

This Iraq strategy, which intended to stop the Rabin peace process and prevent the return of Gaza and the West Bank to the Palestinians for their state, was laid out by Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and other Neoconservatives in a white paper for Bibi Netanyahu in 1996. Many of the authors were subsequently put in high office by Bush-Cheney and pushed for an American war on Iraq with dirty tricks and false propaganda in 2002-2003. They included Canadian gadfly journalist David Frum, who authored Bush’s 2002 ‘Axis of Evil’ speech in consultation with Perle. The mostly Jewish Neoconservatives were only one faction in the Bush-Cheney coalition that wanted regime change in Baghdad, which included the Christian Right, Big Oil, and the military-industrial complex. However influential, they were not ‘in control’ and most Jewish Americans opposed their ideas and policies.

Frum, a Canadian who only became naturalized as a US citizen in 2007, was important in the early years of the Bush presidency and crafted many of the falsehoods and propaganda points that got up the Iraq War. He bears a heavy responsibility for the unnecessary deaths of over 4000 US military personnel, for the deaths of some 600,000 Iraqis, and for the displacement of nearly 4 million Iraqis. In a just world, David Frum would be on trial for his role in severe violations of international law, as would Bush, Cheney, Perle, and the rest of those bald-faced liars and warmongers.

To cover his prevarications and failed policies, Frum joined Wieseltier in playing the anti-Semitism card at CNN this week, piling on Sullivan but also smearing yours truly. His exhibit A was a passage in which I complained about supporters of the Israeli Likud party attempting to enlist the US military to fight wars on behalf of that party’s platform. The column was mainly about Larry Franklin, a Catholic, who went to jail on espionage charges for passing classified Pentagon documents to AIPAC and the Israeli embassy.

Since supporters of the Likud government, Christian and Jewish, are even now attempting to foment a US war on Iran on behalf of rightwing objectives in Israel (Iran is no more a threat to the United States than Iraq had been), I rather stand by my condemnation of them.

As someone who travels to Israel, collaborates on research with Israeli colleagues, supports Israelis’ right to live normal and fulfilling lives in security, and recently stayed in a kubbutz, I am puzzled by Frum’s innuendo. I am critical of Israeli policy in Gaza and the West Bank, but then so are former prime ministers Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak; I think I probably haven’t said anything on the issue that clear-eyed Israelis haven’t already said themselves.

But I will complain about David Frum’s dual loyalties. I am very suspicious of a rightwing Stephen Harper-style Canadian becoming so influential in the United States. I like my Canadians in their normal, sane estate. I fear he may be influencing my country in directions that benefit rightwing Canadian politicians and war industries in Ottawa. Although Canada has also leant us treasures like William Shatner, Dan Akroyd and Paul Schaeffer, for which I’m grateful, the latter never became ensconced in the halls of power or encouraged anyone to fire a shot in anger off the set.

End/ (Not Continued)

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