At least two proofs show Assad regime lying about its fight against terrorists

Turns out Syrian Foreign Minister Walim Moallem's tape on terrorism in Syria was a big lie. According to AFP, the footage of armed men in Latakia was a Facebook video  of Lebanese men in Tripoli who had posted the video in 2008. A mutilated body presumably in Jisr al-Shughur was in fact that of an Egyptian lynched in the Lebanese village of Katr Maya, as reported by NOW Lebanon. 
No wonder the Assad regime keeps foreign media out of Syria, and no wonder Moallem obstructed accepting Arab monitors into the country. If in a video of less than 10 minutes, at least two proofs emerged showing the Assad regime lying about the existence of terrorists inside Syria, what would media and monitors show if they were ever allowed in?

Russia, Turkey and the false sense of self-aggrandizement

Very interesting Op-Ed in the New York Times today from Dmitri Trenin on US-Russian relations. " For Washington, Russia has fallen far down on the list of priorities. The Russian political and security establishment, by contrast, continues to be obsessed with the United States," Trenin wrote. 
Such description is very accurate, and applies to several other countries around the world. Turkey, for instance, also believes that Washington is obsessed with Ankara and its "leadership role" in the Middle East, whereas the US in fact does not really think of Turkey as such a priority or an important player.

Joint Statement: US-EU Summit

1.  We, the leaders of the United States and the European Union, met today at the White House to affirm our close partnership.  Drawing upon our shared values and experience, and recognizing our deep interdependence, we are committed to ensuring that our partnership brings greater prosperity and security to our 800 million citizens, and to working together to address global challenges.

2.  Since our meeting in Lisbon last November, the global economy has entered a new and difficult phase.  We are committed to working together to reinvigorate economic growth, create jobs, and ensure financial stability.  We will do so by taking actions that address near-term growth concerns, as well as fiscal and financial vulnerabilities, and that strengthen the foundations of long-lasting and balanced growth. In that regard, the United States welcomes the EU’s actions and determination to take all necessary steps to ensure the euro area’s financial stability and resolve the crisis.  The EU looks forward to U.S. action on medium term fiscal consolidation. We agree on the importance of working together with emerging economies to foster policies supporting sustained and balanced global growth.  We recall our commitment to implement fully the outcome of the G20 Cannes Summit.

3.  We recall our G20 commitment to support the multilateral trading system and resist protectionism.  We stand by the Doha Development Agenda mandate and recognize the progress achieved so far, but note that in order to contribute to confidence we must pursue fresh, credible approaches in 2012 to advance the negotiations and pursue new opportunities and challenges.  We look forward to the upcoming Ministerial meeting in Geneva, which provides an important opportunity to work on such approaches. 

4.  We applaud the success of the Transatlantic Economic Council (TEC) on a wide range of issues and welcome the progress achieved in secure trade and supply chain security, electric vehicles and related infrastructure, regulatory practices, small and medium-sized enterprises, and in the Information Communications Technology (ICT) sector.  We encourage the TEC’s continued leadership in helping us avoid unnecessary divergence in regulations and standards that adversely affects trade.  We urge the TEC, together with our regulators and standard-setters to step up cooperation in key sectors such as nanotechnology and raw materials to develop compatible approaches to emerging technologies.  We also instruct the TEC to pursue its work on strategic economic questions, not least in the field of investment, innovation policy, and the protection of intellectual property rights to level the playing field for our companies in third countries, in particular emerging economies. 

5.  We must intensify our efforts to realize the untapped potential of transatlantic economic cooperation to generate new opportunities for jobs and growth, particularly in emerging sectors.  We are committed to making the U.S.-EU trade and investment relationship – already the largest and most integrated in the world – stronger.  To that end, we have directed the TEC to establish a joint High Level Working Group on Jobs and Growth, co-chaired by the U.S. Trade Representative and the European Commissioner for Trade.  We ask the Working Group to identify and assess options for strengthening the U.S.-EU economic relationship, especially those that have the highest potential to support jobs and growth.  The Working Group is to report its recommendations and conclusions to Leaders by the end of 2012, with an interim report in June 2012 on the status of this work.

6.  We recognize the vital role of the U.S.-EU Energy Council in fostering cooperation on energy security, renewables and other clean energy technologies, energy efficiency, and effective policies for facilitating trade and bringing clean energy technologies to market.  We affirm the value of common approaches toward safe and sustainable development of energy resources and the diversification of supplies.  We also call for reinforced bilateral and multilateral cooperation with a special focus on critical materials, smart grid technologies, hydrogen and fuel cell technologies, and nuclear fusion. 

7.  On climate change, we affirm our intent to work closely together to ensure a positive, balanced outcome in Durban, including mitigation, transparency and financing.  We stand fully behind the commitments we made last year in Cancun.  We affirm that Durban should deliver on operationalizing the Cancun agreements and helping the international community move a step further towards a comprehensive, global framework with the participation of all, including robust and transparent greenhouse gas emissions reduction commitments by all major economies, recalling the 2°C objective agreed upon in Cancun.  With this in mind, we will cooperate closely in other relevant fora, notably the Major Economies Forum.  We also intend to work together to address other global sources of emissions, including from the aviation and maritime sectors, in the appropriate multilateral forums and consistent with applicable agreements.

8.  As the leading donors of development assistance, we reaffirm our commitment to aid effectiveness, recognizing that our joint efforts to advance division of labor, transparency, country ownership, and accountability will enhance the impact of our assistance.  We are coordinating our preparations for the 4^th High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, and will continue to work closely to strengthen partnerships among all development stakeholders, accelerate progress toward the Millennium Development Goals, and address the challenges encountered in fragile states.  In 2012, we have committed to make information on foreign assistance programs more accessible and compatible with international standards, and will encourage the OECD DAC to become an international hub for aid transparency.  We request the U.S.-EU Development Dialogue to pursue with vigor our joint efforts in areas such as food security, climate change, health and the MDGs.  We agreed on the importance of close cooperation on security and development in the Sahel, the Horn of Africa and Afghanistan.

9.  The events in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya over the past year offer an historic opportunity for successful democratic reform in the Arab world, inclusive economic and social development, and regional integration.  The unfolding democratic process in Tunisia is an encouraging example of the potential for democratic transition.  Egypt today has just begun a complex election process as the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces begins to transfer authority over civilian functions to a new government.  Still, considerable challenges lie ahead.  As the two largest providers of foreign assistance to the region who share core principles and values that have helped our own societies and economies to integrate, we pledge to support the democratic transitions underway, as well as broader political and economic reform in the region, including the constitutional reforms in Jordan and Morocco.  In Libya we are working together on short term assistance and needs assessments, and will continue to seek new opportunities for greater cooperation, in coordination with the Transitional National Council and the UN, to meet the needs of the Libyan people.

10.  Jointly, and through the Deauville Partnership effort, we intend to promote democracy, peace, and prosperity, and to increase economic growth and integration in the Middle East and North Africa.  We are committed to collaborate closely in areas such as support for democratic transitions, strengthening the positive role of civil society, and health and education programming.  We also extend our support to making women’s rights a legal and practical reality in the region.  We share a strong interest in economic reform and will also jointly promote best practices that support trade, investment, and job creation and deepen intra-regional trade and integration.  We are both eager to increase our trade and investment links with the region.  We plan to work in partnership with international financial institutions to ensure robust donor coordination and in particular to ratify quickly necessary changes to the agreement establishing the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development to allow lending in the region.

11.  We call on the Syrian government to end violence immediately, permit the immediate entry of human rights observers and international journalists, and allow for a peaceful and democratic transition.  We also welcome the agreement for political transition in Yemen and call on all political actors to help implement it in good faith, and in accordance with UNSCR 2014.

12.  We reaffirm the Quartet Statement adopted in New York on 23 September 2011 that provides a framework for direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, and we call on the two parties to engage actively in this effort.

13.  On Iran, we share deep concern about activities relating to the possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program, as highlighted in the latest International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General’s report and the November 18 Board of Governors’ resolution.  We stress our determination to ensure that Iran complies with its obligations, including abiding by United Nations Security Council resolutions, and to cooperate fully with the IAEA to address the international community’s serious concerns over the nature of its nuclear program.  We reaffirm our commitment to work toward a diplomatic solution, implement UN Security Council Resolution 1929 (2010) and other relevant Security Council Resolutions, and consider additional measures given Iran’s continued failure to abide by its international obligations.  We also note the recent plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to the United States, the sanctions we have imposed thereafter on five individuals including the head of the Qods Force, and our determination to ensure the perpetrators and their accomplices are held to account.

14.  With regard to the EU’s Eastern neighbors, we are working together to support democracy, resolve protracted conflicts, foster economic modernisation, and advance their political association and economic integration with the EU, recognizing in this regard the importance of the EU’s Eastern Partnership.  We insist that the Government of Belarus immediately release and rehabilitate its political prisoners, and make progress towards respect for the principles of democracy, the rule of law, and human rights; and call on the Government of Ukraine to make good on commitments to uphold democratic values and the rule of law, notably to ensure a fair, transparent and impartial process in trials related to members of the former Government including any appeal in the case of Ms Tymoshenko.  The right of appeal should not be compromised by imposing limitations on the defendants’ ability to stand in future elections in Ukraine, including the parliamentary elections scheduled for next year.

15. We pledge to continue our close cooperation in the western Balkans and reaffirm our commitment to preserve stability and to support the reforms needed to move the region forward on its path to Euro-Atlantic integration. 

16.  The United States and the EU have a strategic interest in enhancing co-operation on political, economic, security, and human rights issues in the Asia-Pacific region to advance peace, stability and prosperity.  We intend to increase our dialogue on Asia-Pacific issues and coordinate activities to demonstrate an enduring, high-level commitment to the region and encourage regional integration, including through the region’s multilateral organizations.

17.  We note our continued efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan, with particular attention to plans for the December 5 Bonn Conference on Afghanistan and the international community’s long-term commitment to support sustainable security and economic development in Afghanistan, based on effective and accountable institutions of governance and sustainable assistance levels, after the planned drawdown of international military forces.  We support economic development and wider reforms in Pakistan and note Pakistan’s important role and ongoing commitment to combating terrorism and achieving peace and stability in Afghanistan and South Asia. 

18.  We note the considerable progress made since our last meeting in Lisbon on our commitments on a wide range of transnational security issues that affect our citizens.  We welcome the successful completion of negotiations on a new Passenger Name Record agreement, and look forward to its early adoption and ratification.  We are determined to finalize negotiations on a comprehensive U.S.-EU data privacy and protection agreement that provides a high level of privacy protection for all individuals and thereby facilitates the exchange of data needed to fight crime and terrorism.  We reaffirm our desire to complete secure visa-free travel arrangements between the US and all Member States of the EU as soon as possible and consistent with applicable, domestic legislation.  We look forward to a positive outcome for Administration-supported legislation that would refine the criteria for the Visa Waiver Program.

19.  We encourage continued efforts to extend our partnership on counter-terrorism cooperation, both bilaterally and multilaterally, including through the UN.  We applaud the establishment of the Global Counter-Terrorism Forum, and our cooperation to combat terrorist financing.  We strongly support continuation of our joint efforts to empower diaspora communities to counter violent extremism.

20.  To strengthen our collaboration on conflict prevention and crisis response, already ongoing in many theaters, the U.S. and EU signed a framework agreement in May 2011 that facilitates U.S. civilian participation in EU crisis management missions.  As the trans-Atlantic community faces the challenges of crisis management in an era of fiscal austerity, we encourage further work to strengthen the EU-NATO strategic partnership in crisis management, including on capabilities development, ahead of the 2012 NATO Summit, in the spirit of mutual reinforcement, inclusiveness, and decision-making autonomy.

21.  We reaffirm the commitments enshrined in the joint declaration on non-proliferation and disarmament we adopted in 2009 and the joint statement on UNSCR 1540 in 2011.  We support the conclusions and recommendations of the May 2010 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, including the Action Plan and proposed 2012 Middle East conference.  We are determined to promote the IAEA’s safeguards, Additional Protocol, and the highest standards of safety and security for peaceful uses of nuclear energy, the Nuclear Security Summit objectives, a successful Biological Weapons Convention Review Conference, and the convening of a Diplomatic Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty in 2012.

22.  We share a commitment to a single, global Internet, and will resist unilateral efforts to weaken the security, reliability, or independence of its operations— recognizing that respect for fundamental freedoms online, and joint efforts to strengthen security, are mutually reinforcing.  We welcome the progress made by the U.S.-EU Working Group on Cybersecurity and Cybercrime, notably the successful Cyber Atlantic 2011 exercise.  We endorse its ambitious goals for 2012, including combating online sexual abuse of children; enhancing the security of domain names and Internet Protocol addresses; promotion of international ratification, including by all EU Member States, of the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime ideally by year’s end; establishing appropriate information exchange mechanisms to jointly engage with the private sector; and confronting the unfair market access barriers that U.S. and European technology companies face abroad.

23.  Our meeting today is proof that a strong U.S.-EU partnership is crucial to building a more secure, democratic, and prosperous world.  We know that our ability to respond to and overcome the global challenges we face is increased by the degree to which we can act in close coordination and cooperation.  We will continue to seek every opportunity to increase our cooperation.

Jordan Starts to Shake

Nicolas Pelham
The New York Review of Books


To measure the sturdiness of King Abdullah of Jordan against the tide of upheaval sweeping the Arab world, go to Tafila, an impoverished town tucked into a sandy bowl encircled by the Moabite Mountains 110 miles south of the royal seat of Amman. Outside the courthouse where four youths recently awaited trial on charges of cursing the king, a crime punishable in this hitherto deferential kingdom by up to three years in jail, one hundred protesters continue cussing the king, until the order comes from on high to let the four go.

Such protests are growing in intensity and geographic reach, degrading the royal stature with every chant. Last season’s innuendo against his courtiers and queen has become this season’s naked repudiation of the King. In September, demonstrators chanted S-S-S, a deliberately ambiguous call for both the regime’sislah, Arabic for reform, and isqat, overthrow. The protesters outside Tafila’s courthouse dispense with such niceties, spicing the crude one-liners with which Egypt’s revolutionaries toppled Hosni Mubarak with cheeky Bedouin rhyming couplets: “O Abdullah son of Hussein/Qadaffi’s a goner, whither your reign?”

Among the flashy young men who staff the royal court, it is common to dismiss the protests as coming from unruly poor peasants after money and jobs. But in the more sober milieux of their parents where much of Jordan’s business is conducted, the King’s inability to impose his will on the south is a cause of greater unease. For though peripheral and small in number, comprising 10 percent of the kingdom’s six million subjects, the tribesmen dominate the ranks of his security apparatus. If their dissatisfaction grows, some might be tempted, as in Egypt, to jettison their leader in order to preserve their power. Doomsday may yet be far off, but, a former senior Jordanian intelligence official tells me, each month seems worse than the last. By way of comparison he cites Black September of 1970, when an armed force rose up against the King, only this time the forces challenging his rule are those already running the country, not Palestinians opposing it.

Under Abdullah’s father, King Hussein, the alliance between the monarch and his East Bank tribesmen was so sacrosanct that Jordan was often called the Bedouin Kingdom. Perhaps because the tribes seem so secondary to King Abdullah’s grandiose plans for modernization and economic expansion, he has had much less time for them. He and his Palestinian-born wife, Rania, have publicly campaigned against tribal law such as honor killing and actively forged a new patronage network, rooted in the Westernized urban high life of their mushrooming capital.

Beyond their immediate playground in West Amman lies a conurbation stretching twenty-five miles and incorporating over half of Jordan’s six million people, the great majority of them Palestinian (but now including hundreds of thousands of refugees from Iraq). Much of it is a morass of teeming Palestinian refugee camps, the largest in existence. Senior officials call it Jordan’s Tora Bora, for the Muslim militants it has fostered. But over the decades the squalor has receded. With few opportunities for Palestinians in the public sector, some turned to private business, and with the economic liberalization of King Abdullah’s early years they found fresh opportunities for work. And as incomes have risen, many have left the camps and built their own homes in the capital’s sprawling suburbs.

While the lot of Jordanians of Palestinian origin has improved, that of Jordan’s indigenous East Bankers has slumped. The public sector—where most hitherto found work—has either stagnated or disappeared, thanks to the King’s privatization of public utilities and the mineral companies in the south. Fadi Ubaydeen, one of the young cursers in Tafila whom the King tried to prosecute, is a jobless twenty-three-year-old who emerged from Tafila’s courthouse wearing shredded plastic sandals. Married with three children, he lives with his parents and sister’s family—fourteen people crammed into a single-bedroom hovel. Their front door is a dirty brown blanket, strung up like the flap of a tent. When I visited, his mother was stirring four plastic tubs of milk she pasteurizes for a few dollars a day. Light splinters through the bedroom ceiling, where the rains have eroded the algae-green plaster.

The Ubaydeens’ deprivation is far from unique. Indeed, Fadi’s father considers himself relatively prosperous, for he has a television and scrapes together enough to cook mansef, the tribesman’s traditional staple of lamb’s head doused in goat yogurt, for the Muslim Festival of the Sacrifice. For others, the prices of meat, electricity, and water from the privatized utility companies are rising beyond reach. They look with envy at the health care and education—the means of upward mobility—that the UN doles out to Palestinian refugee families. None of the students with the top one hundred highest marks in last year’s tawjihi, or final secondary school exams, were southerners.

In the past the Hashemites bought their East Bankers’ acquiescence by doling out titles and stipends in the security forces and political establishment. Thanks to flagrant gerrymandering, rural areas with Bedouin Arab populations were awarded disproportionate representation over the urban areas where Palestinians are concentrated. Though a minority, East Bankers received 85 percent of the parliamentary seats in the elections a year ago, and were awarded twenty-two of the twenty-eight posts in the last government.

But the King is finding it hard to make the old contract stick. The financial burden is too great for a kingdom in the grip of recession. So far this year, a Jordanian fiscal expert told me, the King has added over a billion dollars to subsidies, created 21,000 new security positions, and inflated the bureaucracy with a welter of new municipalities. Even so, the birth rate is climbing far faster than the state can create jobs. For want of finance, the large-scale infrastructure projects of which Abdullah is so fond have stalled.

Money is not the King’s only problem. A government job or legislative seat is not worth what it was. King Abdullah has repeatedly treated parliament as an inconvenience, dissolved it, and ruled by decree. On the Freedom House’s scale of political rights, the kingdom has slid from 3 at the time of King Abdullah’s accession, when it was one of the most progressive regimes in the Arab world, to 6, a classification for “not free.”

In place of the old political structures, the King and Queen prefer consulting their coterie of predominantly Palestinian business associates, who East Bankers fear are set on taking over the country plot by plot from its indigenous inhabitants. From their seat of power in West Amman, they allegedly want to turn Jordan into Palestine, thereby settling Israel’s refugee problem at Jordan’s expense. “We’re red Indians in our own country,” says Hamoud al-Faiz, a sheikh from Bani Sakhr, a desert tribe southeast of Amman that, perhaps because of its reputation for martial prowess, has played a prominent role in arousing the resentment of East Bankers. He says he feels like a foreigner in his own capital, estranged from the moneyed youth who cast the keys of their fancy convertibles to liveried valets at the gates of Amman’s bars.

By regional standards the turnout of protesters has been puny. Few rallies attract more than five thousand demonstrators; many are attended by only a few score. It is possible to visit the capital and not hear their cries. East as well as West Bankers appear reluctant to join a movement whose slogans are openly seditious. But what the protests lack in numbers, they compensate for in tenacity and depth. Across the kingdom bushfires have erupted that the King seems unable to quench. When at the end of October I took the desert highway from the capital down to Tafila, I encountered tales of unrest along the kingdom’s north–south spine. A few minutes outside Amman, tribesmen had blocked the airport road, denouncing the omission of their hamlet from the group of new municipalities the King’s men had announced would be established for rural areas. Further south, more tribesmen blocked access to a Saudi-owned cement plant, in protest at its refusal to hire more local labor. Further on, hundreds of head-high iron tubes stand in the desert, abandoned by a Turkish company building a pipeline for groundwater from the Saudi border. Its workers had fled after two of its Syrian laborers were killed, apparently by locals who wanted their jobs.

Moreover, the protesters claim they tap a hidden groundswell of support, which sometimes breaks through the fear barrier. At a rally last month in Amman, Ahmed Obediat, a former prime minister and an ex-chief of the Mukhabarat, the intelligence apparatus, stood in the front row. In a country where the Mukhabarat’s grip is so omnipresent that even a taxi driver needs its approval each year to keep his license, his presence was remarkable. In Tafila, garbagemen at work down the hill from the courthouse uniformly repudiate the protesters as traitors and profess their loyalty to the King, but later one catches up with me and apologizes that an informer had been in their midst. “The protesters speak for all of us,” says the road-sweeper. “We know the King is a thief.”

Such backstabbing is audible at all levels of the kingdom’s hierarchy, from garbage collectors to bankers’ boardrooms. “King Hussein used to be our father, this king is our son,” says a senior politician who worked with him closely in the early years of his reign, but now doubts he is up to the job. “He’s still riding a motorcycle, swearing, and playing the Internet. And after ten years he has not changed.” Once-loyal East Bank parliamentarians, too, are increasingly acting like an opposition. In October they forced through a law banning Jordanians with dual nationality from holding senior positions. This was read not only as a move against Palestinians, who as refugees are more likely than East Bankers to hold second passports, but the King, whose Welsh mother I found chatting with friends in a tearoom near the American embassy in Amman. “There’s no place for double agents in our palace,” a former parliamentarian from Tafila told me.

The jibes are increasingly personal. After a decade on the throne East Bank critics still deride Abdullah as an outsider who does not represent them. Despite the King’s improved fluency in Arabic, protest leaders often switch into English, in order, they say, to help him understand. Another chief object of their bile is Queen Rania, a Palestinian born in Kuwait, whom East Bankers condemn for her Parisian-style extravagance, and regard as the power behind the King, or as they dub him, the Queen’s husband. “Divorce your wife,” cry the crowds at some of their rallies, a sign of contempt in a society where family honor is paramount. Their seventeen-year-old son, Crown Prince Hussein, faces similar calls for his dismissal: since his mother is Palestinian, he must be too, and thus ineligible to be Jordan’s king. While still insisting that they remain loyal to the Hashemite family, many tribesmen openly flaunt their preference for the King’s half-brother, Hamza, who was crown prince until King Abdullah rescinded his status seven years ago. Some tribesmen openly call for Hamza’s restoration, citing his better Arabic and uncanny likeness to his father.

Such rank xenophobia makes it easy to dismiss the protesters as people bent on imposing what Adnan Abu Odeh, a one-time royal courtier of Palestinian stock who fell afoul of the King, calls “an ethnocratic irredentist regime.” While calling for parliament to be sovereign, most shun the recalibration of electoral boundaries to ensure equal rights for all Jordan’s citizens. And many protesters seem reluctant to criticize those parts of state power that are firmly in East Bank hands, most notably the Mukhabarat. Leith Shbailat, a well-known critic of the Hashemites and former parliamentarian from Tafila, sidesteps the issue. “If we can reform the King, the rest will follow,” he replies, when I ask how he would reform the security services.

The Mukhabarat has been unusually hands-off in its treatment of the protesters. Despite the occasional use of beltajia, plainclothes bully boys, to disperse rallies, only one demonstrator has been killed in nine months of protests, a most humane figure by regional standards. Some openly wonder whether the protesters and police are acting in tandem. “The security forces have not yet intervened, but if they do they will act to support us,” says a retired army general during our drive down to Tafila, revealing himself to be a republican. A prickly local journalist insists that the protesters are counterrevolutionaries serving the old forces of repression. “If the Arab Spring is about equal rights, liberty, and majority rule, then these demos have nothing to do with the Arab Spring,” a one-time royal confidante agreed.

But the East Bankers confronting the King do not fit so neatly into such stereotypes. For such a humdrum country, the debate is surprisingly febrile. In a tumbledown office where the popular committee of Madaba, a town south of Amman famed for its ancient Roman mosaics, is holding its first meeting, delegates argue over the contents of their proposed constitutional reforms. A bank manager condemns the system of royal privileges, or makarim, such as university scholarships, and insists that free education should be a constitutional right. Several want to clip the King’s prerogative to hire and fire the prime minister. The youngest delegate, a highly articulate seventeen-year-old who quotes Rousseau, wants oversight of the military budget; he says the Mukhabarat expelled him from high school because of his political activism.

On their way to another rally by minibus, the delegates practice their latest slogans, this time against the Mukhabarat. “Write Reports, and Hand them in/You won’t scare us with your Informing.” They insist on giving their names, not they say because they want jobs to silence them, but rather to puncture the stranglehold of self-censorship they claim is hobbling Jordan’s political development.

With old taboos crumbling, the King appears uncertain about how to respond. “The King has never gambled in his life. He hates gambling,” insists a one-time confidante. “But how can he rebut them? Answering the allegations would just give them credence.” Some detect signs of strain. Close-ups of the King beamed onto giant LCD screens at a recent conference revealed the royal countenance to be red, puffy, and bereft of its boyish charm. A Western diplomat called him paranoid, and suggested that the more ill-at-ease East Bankers make the King feel, the more he shuns them. When his motorcade made a rare visit to Tafila last summer, the townspeople and the King’s escort pelted each other with stones.

Abdullah’s relationship with the tribes has never been easy. I remember his faltering effort to call a convocation of the tribes to join his support for the 2003US-led invasion of Iraq. Liberating Iraq meant the end of the regime from whose trade and subsidies they had greatly benefited. (Faced with a similar predicament a decade earlier after the US mobilized its forces to roll back Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait, his father, King Hussein, had opted to lose his Western and Gulf funding rather than incur the wrath of the East Bank tribes.) Arriving bumpily on the back of a camel in the rose-red southern desert of Humeima, Abdullah sat on the dais behind a posse of black-garbed bodyguards who rotated their machine guns at the assembled tribesmen; he then scuttled off in a helicopter without publicly uttering a word, cutting short the tribal custom of sharing a meal.

Rather than risk further missteps, Abdullah prefers the more appreciative company of foreigners. In 2010, he reportedly spent more time out of his kingdom than in it. In the atmosphere created by the Arab awakening he has come under pressure to prune his travel expenses, and he now brings foreigners to Jordan. On the eve of Fadi Ubaydeen’s scheduled trial, he feted delegates from the Davos-based World Economic Forum with a champagne reception in his Dead Sea resort, sealing off public access for miles around the Dead Sea. The pretext for the meeting was “creating jobs,” but bankers warned of impending bankruptcy if Jordan’s wage bill was not further slashed. The complacent resplendence smacked uncomfortably, noted a doctor, of the latter years of the Shah.

Some Jordanians insist that a courageous leader could have promulgated a bill of liberties and new social charter, in which he would hand real power to the parliament. East Bankers in turn would accept a fairer redistribution of Jordan’s franchise, and West Bankers a fairer redistribution of their wealth. There were hints that King Abdullah had considered this. Earlier this year he said that future cabinets would be formed according to the results of parliamentary elections, and at the Dead Sea forum he spoke of opening “a gate of democracy for stakeholders.” But the package of measures accompanying such grandiose statements leaves the King’s powers almost entirely unchanged.

Instead he has resorted to continuously rotating advisers, which some say is a sign of indecisiveness and panic. In October he changed his government for the second time in a year, as well as his intelligence chief and head of the royal court. In place of the old prime minister, an East Bank general with a reputation as an Islamist basher, he appointed Aoun Khasawneh, a judge at the International Criminal Court, who immediately called on the Muslim Brotherhood, the country’s most organized political force with a groundswell of Palestinian support, to join his government. In a bid to further bolster his legitimacy, the King also made overtures to Khalid Meshal, the leader of Hamas, whom he had banished twelve years earlier, soon after acceding to the throne. His expulsion, said Khasawneh, was a mistake, indicating that Meshal, himself a Jordanian national, might be welcome back.

Though the Muslim Brotherhood declined to join the government, the new policy has succeeded in buying their silence, at least for now. The Brotherhood has become studiously agnostic on supporting the demonstrations. Its daily newspaper, al-Sabil, publishes details of forthcoming protests on some days, not others, as if tempering its support with the concessions it can extract from the King. Zaki Bani Irshad, the head of its political wing, still sports a picture of the King in his office, albeit with a wistfully Islamist wisp of a beard. The minority of Palestinians who took to the streets when the protests first erupted in January have largely retreated indoors. (Only two hundred responded to calls for a million to march near the Israeli embassy after the ransacking of Israel’s Cairo embassy.)

Has the King prescribed the wrong medicine? Perhaps. By shifting from one camp to the next he has inflamed tensions, not calmed them, and accelerated the transition of East Bankers from prime protectors of the monarchy to prime opposition. Even before the new government had been sworn in, a crowd resumed braying outside the prime minister’s gates. Some demanded the King’s impeachment for pilfering tribal lands, and called for substituting the “royal” anthem, “Long Live the King,” with a “national” one. Rather than uphold the law against insults to the royal name, the security forces, who come from the same stock as the protesters, stood by and watched.

Yet while the King’s domestic policy inflames their sense of dissatisfaction, his foreign policy bolsters their power. To fund his rising expenditure, he has sought help from foreign backers. The United States remains a major donor. Last year it paid $818 million, making Jordan, after Israel, the largest per capita recipient of American aid. But courtiers view President Obama as an increasingly ineffectual ally—”We’ve lost hope that the US can do anything,” bemoans a royal confidante—and have begun seeking more robust alternatives. Foremost among them is Saudi Arabia and its club of fellow Arabian Peninsula kingdoms, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), which is anxious to maintain the fiction that monarchies are somehow more resilient to the Arab awakening than republics. This year Saudi Arabia surpassed America’s funding with over $1 billion in aid, and invited the King to apply for GCC membership. To cement the relationship, the Saudis are close to completing a new Amman embassy that could soon exceed America’s—hitherto the largest—in size, grandeur, and visibility. “Saudi Arabia has lost Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and Yemen. They can’t afford to lose Jordan too,” explains a former prime minister. Four generations after the Saudis ousted the Hashemites from the Arabian Peninsula, he mused, they are now inviting them to return.

In return Jordan is putting what it claims is the Arab world’s most professional armed force at the GCC‘s disposal. The King, say Jordanians, dispatched hundreds of security personnel to join the GCC‘s Peninsula Shield defensive to crush Bahrain’s popular rising. Some Jordanians complain they have become the Gulf’s mercenaries. But in their new guise as the Gulf’s security contractor, the East Bankers have found a new role. Jordan’s inclusion in a larger club of Bedouin tribes further enhances their status and leverage in dealing with the kingdom’s Palestinian majority.

In its increasing subservience to reactionary Gulf emirates, the kingdom could increasingly come to resemble one. As elsewhere in the Gulf, a minority of Arab Bedouin clans would rule the roost, while the nonindigenous majority would find themselves relegated to second-class citizens or guest workers. Hopes of political and economic reform will be put on ice, and Gulf largesse will relieve pressure to hold to account those parts of the state budget that are currently outside parliamentary review, like military expenditure. Already the Central Bank looks increasingly powerless to investigate allegations of high-level corruption. When the Central Bank’s governor tried last month to do just that, he was sacked and his office surrounded by the Mukhabarat to prevent him entering it. “When the state is working against those who are working against corruption, and sending thugs to attack them, where are we going?” says Leila Sharaf, the governor’s mother and long-standing legislator, who tendered her resignation in protest.

And what of beleaguered King Abdullah? Over tea, one of the Hashemite family confides that should the security establishment continue to feel alienated by the King, some might act to swap him for one more attuned to their customs and interests.

—Tafila, November 10, 2011

Nude awakening

A crop of the nude photo Aliaa al-Mahdy posted on Twitter and her blog, setting off a firestorm of controversy

Angie Nassar
NOW Lebanon

With a crimson-colored ribbon in her hair, and wearing nothing but black, thigh-high pantyhose and ruby red flats, Aliaa al-Mahdy transformed her body into a site of radical cultural politics last week after posting a nude self-portrait on the Internet.

Some critics labeled the 20-year-old Egyptian an attention-seeking “sexual deviant;” the sick consequence of a generation accustomed to airing out its dirty laundry—and genitals—on Facebook. For many, Mahdy’s actions symbolize social decay and moral bankruptcy; for others, it is a sign of progress.

But it is not the image—which has been viewed over 4 million times online—that matters; it is what it represents. The very fact that people have a problem with the photo is what makes it important. In a single gesture, the self-described “secular-liberal-feminist-vegetarian-individualist” generated a conversation about the role of women in a society attempting to transition from the oppressive grip of a 30-year dictatorship under ousted President Hosni Mubarak, into a nation aspiring toward the ideals of democracy and the right to freedom of expression for all its citizens.

To be certain, access to meaningful political change can come only through participation in mass movements contesting the status quo. But even if Mahdy’s actions were misguided, even if this debate is the unintended consequence of a dramatic, thrill-seeking sensationalist, the bold move remains, at the very least, a foundation for protest built on democratic behavior.

The price of freedom is that we must accept not only what we love, but also what we hate. Freedom of speech is not defined by measures of taste or decency; it's not about what is “right” or “wrong.” It's about the right to choose for yourself what is “right” or “wrong.”

The fantasy that we can “save” the world be sanitizing it is a myth procured by self-righteous figures who want to control how people think, desire and behave. Individuals who value their own opinions and beliefs above others—while maintaining they, and they alone, have the authority to define the boundaries of decency and decide what is acceptable for society—are usually the same individuals who believe they can end a debate through force.

In Lebanon, we often confuse the media-fueled façade of sexual liberation (in the steady supply of mini-skirts and fake breasts) with solid, democratic advancement. Marital rape is legal, there is not a single female serving in the current government, and women cannot pass on citizenship to their children or husbands. They are constrained by laws, practices and restrictions that habitually confirm the notion that a woman’s body belongs to a man—whether it is her father, husband, cousin, uncle, brother or son. And this is true across the political divide. “Pro-West” forces pressure women to be sexual and seductive, a commodity for foreign consumption and tourism, while “traditionalists” dictate that a modest, conservative image is a religious imperative. Both perceive the female body as a dangerous, exclusively sexual object.

We can't all expect to agree on what is offensive. I find it obscene that Lebanese people respect the authority of their leaders while consistently being denied basic rights under a government that is no longer acting civilized and hypocritically touts the principles of “dialogue, consensus and unity,” while spewing hate-filled, divisive and inflammatory rhetoric.

Aliaa al-Mahdy glares into the camera lens with a daring expression, eyes taunting—if only slightly—with the insinuation that by presenting herself fully naked, she is disrupting expectations of what a woman’s body should mean and how it should be presented. Her message is imbued with a striking contradiction: She is claiming the sole right to represent her body and experience, while also reducing it to a piece of raw, passive flesh for others to see in what amounts to a form of subjugation. But to be naked is not just to expose the entirety of the “self,” it is to affirm oneself.

Call it what you want: shameful, pornography, an exercise in sexual liberation, a cheap political stunt, but Mahdy succeeded in making a statement about the necessity of addressing the pressing need for freedom of the mind and body from repression. Women can and should choose their own sexuality and representation.

The majority of ordinary people make the perilous mistake of assuming someone else will accomplish their demands for them. Not Mahdy. A person with the strength of conviction and courage to defy the rigid mores of the social order is a rare and special individual, worthy of recognition.

CIA forced to curb spying in Lebanon

By Ken Dilanian
Los Angeles Times


The CIA was forced to curtail its spying in Lebanon, where U.S. operatives and their agents collect crucial intelligence on Syria, terrorist groups and other targets, after the arrests of several CIA informants in Beirut this year, according to U.S. officials and other sources.

"Beirut station is out of business," a source said, using the CIA term for its post there. The same source, who declined to be identified while speaking about a classified matter, alleged that up to a dozen CIA informants have been compromised, but U.S. officials disputed that figure.

U.S. officials acknowledged that some CIA operations were suspended in Beirut last summer. It's unclear whether full operations have resumed. Beirut is considered a key watching post for turmoil in the Middle East.

Senior CIA officials have briefed congressional staffers about the breach, and Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, visited Beirut recently to interview CIA officers. Committee staff members want to determine whether CIA operatives used sloppy practices that revealed sensitive sources and methods.

Much in the case remains unclear, including the extent of the damage and whether negligence by CIA managers led to the loss of the Lebanese agents.

According to the source, CIA case officers met a series of Lebanese informants at a local Pizza Hut, allowing Hezbollah and Lebanese authorities to identify who was helping the CIA. U.S. officials strongly disputed that agents were compromised at a Pizza Hut.

U.S. officials also denied the source's allegation that the former CIA station chief dismissed an email warning that some of his Lebanese agents could be identified because they used cellphones to call only their CIA handlers and no one else.

Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed militant group that the U.S. considers a terrorist organization, and Lebanon's internal security service have used software to analyze cellphone calling and location records to help them identify a network of alleged Israeli spies since 2007, according to several people familiar with the case. Dozens of people were arrested.

In 2010, U.S. counterintelligence officials determined that the CIA's Lebanese agents could be traced the same way, the source said. But the station chief allegedly ignored the warning. "He said, 'The Lebanese are our friends. They wouldn't do that to us,' " the source said.

The Times is withholding the former station's chief's name because he remains undercover. He now has a supervisory role at CIA headquarters in operations targeting Hezbollah. The CIA declined to make him available for comment.

"Espionage has always been a complex business," said a U.S. official, who declined to be identified in discussing the Lebanon case. "Collecting sensitive information on adversaries — who are aggressively trying to uncover spies in their midst — will always be fraught with risk."

Hezbollah is "an extremely complicated enemy," the official added. "It's a determined terrorist group, a power political player, a mighty military and an accomplished intelligence organization — formidable and ruthless. No one underestimates its capabilities."

In June, Hezbollah's leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, announced the arrest of three of its members. He said two were "affiliated with the CIA, and one more might be affiliated with either the CIA, European intelligence or Mossad," Israel's foreign intelligence service.

Nasrallah did not disclose their names, explaining that he wanted to protect their families, "whom I know personally." He said that CIA officers, working under diplomatic cover at the U.S. Embassy, had recruited them in early 2011.

The U.S. Embassy dismissed the charge. "These are the same kind of empty allegations that we have heard repeatedly from Hezbollah," it said in a statement.

Lebanon's security service was able to isolate the CIA informants by analyzing cellphone company records that showed the numbers called, duration of each call and location of the phone at the time of the call, the source said.

Using billing and cell tower records for hundreds of thousands of phone numbers, software can isolate cellphones used near an embassy, or used only once, or only on quick calls. The process quickly narrows down a small group of phones that a security service can monitor.

In 2005, an Italian prosecutor used cellphone calling and location records to help identify 26 Americans who he said took part in a 2003 abduction of a Muslim cleric on a street in Milan. A judge later convicted 23 Americans, including the CIA's former Milan base chief, in absentia for their role in the "extraordinary rendition" case.

Washington has given Lebanon's government more than $1 billion in various forms of aid since 2006 and has proposed an additional $236 million in aid this fiscal year.

The Obama administration has struggled with the relationship since 2008, when Hezbollah fighters seized control of parts of Beirut. That resulted in an Arab-brokered peace deal that gave Hezbollah a major role in Lebanon's government.

The group's political arm now has 16 of the 30 seats in the Cabinet of Lebanon's prime minister, Najib Mikati. Hezbollah is also active in Lebanon's security and intelligence services.

Saudi Arabia expands its power as US influence diminishes

David Ignatius
The Washington Post

RIYADH

Over this year of Arab Spring revolt, Saudi Arabia has increasingly replaced the United States as the key status-quo power in the Middle East — a role that seems likely to expand even more in coming years as the Saudis boost their military and economic spending.

Saudis describe the kingdom’s growing role as a reaction, in part, to the diminished clout of the United States. They still regard the U.S.- Saudi relationship as valuable, but it’s no longer seen as a guarantor of their security. For that, the Saudis have decided they must rely more on themselves — and, down the road, on a wider set of friends that includes their military partner, Pakistan, and their largest oil customer, China.

For Saudi watchers, this change is striking. The kingdom’s old practice was to keep its head down, spread money to radical groups to try to buy peace, and rely on a U.S. military umbrella. Now, Riyadh is more open and vocal in pressing its interests — especially in challenging Iran.

The more-assertive Saudi role has been clear in its open support for the ouster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who is Iran’s crucial Arab ally. The Saudis were decisive backers of last weekend’s Arab League decision to suspend Syria’s membership (though they also supported the organization’s waffling decision Wednesday to send another mediation team to Damascus).

Money is always the Saudis’ biggest resource, and they are planning to spend it more aggressively as a regional power broker — by roughly doubling their armed forces over the next 10 years and spending at least $15 billion annually to support countries weakened economically by this year’s turmoil.

The enormous military expansion was signaled this past week by Gen. Hussein al-Qubail, the chief of staff. Because of “surrounding circumstances,” he said, the Saudis would spend more to achieve “the highest degree of combat readiness.”

Overseeing the arms buildup will be a new defense minister, Prince Salman bin Abdul-Aziz, described by Saudis as a strong manager during his many years as governor of Riyadh. This contrasts with what foreign analysts say was the loose discipline (and occasional corruption scandals) under his predecessor, Prince Sultan, who died in October after 48 years as defense minister.

Saudi sources provided an unofficial summary of the defense buildup. The army will add 125,000 to its estimated current force of 150,000; the national guard will grow by 125,000 from an estimated 100,000; the navy will spend more than $30 billion buying new ships and sea-skimming missiles; the air force will add 450 to 500 planes; and the Ministry of Interior is boosting its police and special forces by about 60,000. The Saudis are also developing their own version of the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command.

The doubling of ground forces is partly a domestic employment project, but it’s also a signal of Saudi confidence.

The Saudi shopping list is a bonanza for U.S. and European arms merchants. That’s especially true of the air force procurement, with the Saudis planning to buy 72 “Eurofighters” from EADS and 84 new F-15s from Boeing. The rationale is containing Iran, whose nuclear ambitions the Saudis strongly oppose. But Riyadh has an instant deterrent ready, too, in the form of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal that the Saudis are widely believed to have helped finance.

Big weapons purchases have been a Saudi penchant for decades. More interesting, in some ways, is their quiet effort to provide support to friendly regimes to keep the region from blowing itself up in this period of instability. The Saudis have budgeted $4 billion this year to help Egypt, $1.4 billion for Jordan, and $500 million annually over the next decade for Bahrain and Oman. They will doubtless pump money, as well, to Syria, Yemen and Lebanon once the smoke clears in those volatile countries.

“In outlays, we’ve budgeted $15 billion a year just to keep the peace,” says one Saudi source, adding up the economic assistance to Arab neighbors. But that’s hardly a stretch for a country that, by year-end, will have about $650 billion in foreign reserves.

The Saudis speak more charitably of the United States than they did a few months ago, after reassuring visits by Vice President Biden and national security adviser Tom Donilon, and close military and intelligence cooperation continues. But President Obama is seen as a relatively weak leader who abandoned his own call for a Palestinian state under Israeli pressure. The United States isn’t exactly the god that failed, but its divine powers are certainly suspect in Riyadh.

By suspending Syria, Arab League finally breaks from its past

David Ignatius

The Washington Post

ABU DHABI — There’s a poetic justice to theArab League’s decision to suspend the membership of Syria, a country that worked hard for so many years to make the Arab League a house of lies and a dictators’ protection society.

Modern Syria has been a champion of the sloganeering “Arabism” at which the Arab League was so adept. This was the Arabism that backed the military dictatorships that bludgeoned unwieldy nations into place and denounced Israel’s failure to resolve the Palestinian issue, even as the Arab League states themselves gave miserable, second-class status to the Palestinian refugees within their borders.

It’s not that the Israeli policies were justified but that the Arab League members were hypocrites.

The Assad regime in Syria has lived by this code of Arab nationalism — or, at least, by the cover that it provided for maintaining power by a corrupt and feeble Baath Party. An air force general named Hafez al-Assad had gained power in a coup in 1970 by brandishing his Arab credentials; they helped shield the fact that he, like many military officers, was from the Alawite minority that was strong in the armed forces and disliked by the Sunni majority.

President Hafez Assad marched his troops into Lebanon in 1976 to defuse the Lebanese civil war, in what was called the “Arab Deterrent Force” and sanctioned by the Arab League. It’s useful, in understanding the minority politics of the region, to remember that the practical effect of this Syrian intervention was to rescue the Maronite Christians, who were fighting the Palestinians and an alliance of Sunni Muslims and Druze.

Once the Syrians arrived in Lebanon, they stayed to feast on its spoils — until they were driven out by popular demand after theassassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri in 2005, a crime for which the Syrians were initially blamed but that a U.N. investigator now says was the work of Hezbollah. Looking back, you could argue that the “March 14 movement” that expelled the Syrians six years ago was the start of what we now call the Arab Spring.

How ironic that the Syrians, who for decades refused to demarcate their border with Lebanon (arguing that it was really part of “Greater Syria”) are now mining that same border. To quote the un-Arab but still apposite Sir Walter Scott, “What a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.”

Bashar al-Assad has never been as adept at operating in the Arab League’s hall of mirrors as was his father. Perhaps he lacks the talent for giving the big, empty speeches that were a specialty of such gatherings. He has also proved to be a man who starts things he can’t finish — reform of the Baath Party, constitutional change — which is a mistake his father never would have committed. Hafez was secretly admired by former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, and even by the Israelis — because if he made a promise, he kept it.

Bashar has been the opposite. He promised reform to an Arab League mediation committee that was dispatched last month — in what could have been a lifeline for his regime. But despite the pledges (similar to the ones he has been making since February), his troops kept on killing Syrian protesters—showing either that Bashar was lying or that he can’t control the army. Not good for Bashar either way.

Over the weekend, the Arab League suspended the Syrian regime’s membership and called for meetings with the Syrian opposition to plan “a unified view of the coming transition.” True to form, the Syrian president responded by calling for an emergency meeting of the Arab League — and suggested, bizarrely, that the effort was all part of a foreign plot to invade Syria.

It was a classic Arab League move: Hide from your people and blame your troubles on sinister outside forces allied with the West.

But this chapter of Arab history seems mercifully to be passing — with even the Arab League becoming a force that takes action to protect oppressed Arab citizens and restrain autocratic rulers. This is a snapshot of what’s changing in the Middle East, and why it’s worth celebrating.

Syria Revolution takes aim at Palestinian Hamas

The forces of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad decimated Baba Amr, a neighborhood in the northern city of Homs, last week. The injured were rushed to a hospital inside a nearby Palestinian refugee camp, but were turned down by the camp's autonomous authority, dominated by Hamas. On Saturday November 12, 2011, Syrian rebels held a rally in the Bayyada neighborhood in Homs and raised the banner shown in the picture above. The banner reads: "Hamas, shame on you for refusing to admit the injured from Baba Amr. These injured were later executed by the thugs (of the regime) at the camp's entrance. Shame!"

Syria’s continuing slaughter pushes the US to act

The Washington Post Editorial

THE ARAB LEAGUE has become the latest international actor to be humiliated by Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. On Nov. 2 the organization of 22 states announced that it had obtained Mr. Assad’s commitment to a series of steps to end the violence in his country, including withdrawing tanks and troops from cities, releasing political prisoners, admitting Arab observers and foreign journalists, and opening a dialogue with the opposition. As we, among others, predicted, none of this has happened.

In fact Mr. Assad has once again escalated attacks on the civilian population. On Thursday, 30 people were reported killed across the country, including an infant and five other children. On Friday. 20 more people died, according to news reports. Human Rights Watch reported Friday that since the Arab League deal, at least 104 people had been killed in the city of Homs alone, including a dozen who were tortured to death. No tanks or troops have been withdrawn; no journalists have been admitted to Syria; no prisoners have been released.

At an emergency meeting Saturday in Cairo, the Arab League will consider its response. Human rights groups and Western governments are pushing it to take steps, such as suspending Syria’s membership or referring Damascus to the United Nations Security Council for sanctions. But even such modest steps will be opposed by countries such as Lebanon, Yemen, Sudan and Algeria. It’s hard to bet against the league’s well-earned reputation for fecklessness.

Even if there is a pleasant surprise from Cairo, the question will remain: What can be done to stop the slaughter? According to the United Nations, more than 3,500 people have now died in Syria; the country is sliding toward a civil war that could kill many thousands, and destabilize the region around it — which includes Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Turkey and Israel.

The United States and its allies, no less than the Arab League, have yet to formulate a convincing answer. But we were encouraged by the congressional testimony Wednesday of Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey D. Feltman. Mr. Feltman started by correctly describing “the mafia-like Assad clique that has hijacked the Syrian state.” He, also correctly, observed that Mr. Assad’s “deliberate and bloody strategy” is “channelling peaceful protest into armed insurrection,” and urged the opposition to remain peaceful.

While saying that “Syria is not Libya,” Mr. Feltman laid out a U.S. policy aimed at protecting Syrian civilians, removing Mr. Assad from power and promoting a transition to democracy. To accomplish this, he said the United States would push for international observers, who could deter violence; seek more economic sanctions, with the aim of “financially strangling” the regime; and support the opposition in its efforts to develop a platform attractive across Syrian society.

This was, at least, a clear and forceful U.S. statement, which included the following words: “We will work with the Syrian people and our international partners to do what we must to ensure that Assad and his regime are prevented from murdering Syrian citizens and tearing the Syrian state apart.” If promoting sanctions and international observers isn’t sufficient to fulfill that pledge, the Obama administration will be obliged to undertake stronger measures.

The Life of a Dictator

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been isolated from his people his whole life, thwarting his ability to relate to them and read the political upheavals happening in his country. (AFP photo)

Hussain Abdul-Hussain
NOW Lebanon

Progressive Socialist Party leader Walid Jumblatt once gave Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah a tip: Step outside your bunker, or risk losing touch with reality. Hiding in an undisclosed location since the 2006 July War, Nasrallah has yet to heed the advice, and he has grown dependent on his confidantes for his news of the outside world. Nasrallah, however, is not unique. Before him, Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Libya's Moammar Qaddafi also shielded themselves from the world, and today, Syria's Bashar al-Assad has become yet another secluded autocrat who shows an inability to comprehend or deal with the real world.

Saddam led a reign of terror that ended up cloistering him. The more Iraqis he killed, the more revenge he feared, forcing him to tighten his security and depend on his cronies to keep him in touch with life outside his bubble. Fearing for their lives, Saddam's men always told him what he wanted to hear.

Saddam's misunderstanding of world affairs proved fatal for his rule. His meddling in military affairs cost the Iraqi army unnecessary losses in their endless wars that Saddam, a self-ordained soldier who never went to military school, started. In addition, his misunderstanding of economics led to financial problems for the nation.

Libya's Moammar Qaddafi led a similar life. Whereas Saddam saw himself as the successor of Iraq's ancient king, Hammurabi, and strived to emulate Iraq’s old glory by erecting edifices honoring his demi-god status, Qaddafi's perception of his grandiose stature rested on his presumed intellectual prowess.

But did Saddam and Qaddafi believe the lies they created?

George Piro, Saddam's Lebanese-American FBI interrogator, wrote that Saddam requested sponges to tape to the arms of his plastic chair in prison to make it worthy of his status as president. Saddam also ordered wet wipes for his hands. Saddam's lawyer, Khalil Duleimi, unintentionally confirmed Piro's reports. Duleimi said that while in prison, Saddam insisted on being addressed as "Mr. President," and that he was expecting Washington to offer him his position back in order to "stabilize" Iraq.

Meanwhile, Qaddafi's many long, confused speeches betray a deeply troubled mind. The Libyan autocrat said the rebels who rose up against his rule were drugged by "pills in their Nescafe" and accused NATO of coming after Libya's "roads and air conditions.”

In the words of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on her meeting with the former Libyan leader, "I came away from the visit realizing how much Qaddafi lives inside his own head."

While not as brutal, Nasrallah also lives in his own head. Perhaps because his supporters have elevated him to sainthood, he seems to believe that he has the authority to give the final word on all of Lebanon's issues, and everything else.

But who died and made Nasrallah king?

Nasrallah became a "resistance" guerilla fighter at an early age and rose quickly through the ranks. He never graduated from school, entered college or held a job. He has been in hiding for so many years, one must question his ability to read real-world situations.

Finally, Assad might be the most detached of the delusional leaders. Unlike Saddam, Qaddafi and Nasrallah, Assad was born pampered, sheltered and spoiled. He was never forced to ascend party or military ranks. On the contrary, Assad was quickly promoted to succeed his ailing father Hafez.

In his interviews, Assad gives the impression that he is knowledgeable and informed, except that what he says rarely makes sense. Since the outbreak of the Syrian uprising in March, he has often ranted against his citizens and threatened the world with doom should his regime fall. But Assad has no plan and is using violence indiscriminately.

Saddam and Qaddafi ruled for 24 and 42 years respectively, grew delusional, were ejected by force and ultimately killed.

Nasrallah and Assad have been in power for 19 and 11 years respectively. Each now lives in a bubble. Their exits might be as violent as their reigns. If only they had some sense of reality, things would have been better for everyone.

Hussain Abdul-Hussain is the Washington Bureau Chief of Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Rai

Happening NOW: Anti-Keystone Pipeline rally in Washington DC

Rally against Keystone pipeline on Massachusetts Avenue, Sunday Nov. 6, 2011, Washington DC.

Abdul-Hussain: Libya's transformation to democracy will be bumpy, eventually only practice makes perfect

During the talk show Political Agenda on KSA 2, Hussain Abdul-Hussain said he was optimistic about the future of Libya, that the trip of democracy will be fairly bumpy and we will see set backs until the Libyans practice it well because only practice makes perfect. Nov. 2, 2011