The Arab Spring

The eclipse of the Shia crescent

2012-02-08T09:33:00.002-05:00

Days of Yore: (Left to right) Nasrallah, Hezbollah military leader Imad Mughniyah and Nsarallah's predecessor Abbas Al-Mussawi circa 1980 at the Baalbek Roman ruins.

Hussain Abdul-Hussain
NOW Lebanon

The power of the once-mighty Shia Crescent is on the decline, and its leaders in Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq have only themselves to blame. Instead of using their influence to correct injustice—as per the Shia ideology—and build better states, the Shia underdogs have become the oppressive tyrants they once vowed to topple.

The ever-defiant Iran, which has been commanding—and more importantly funding—this regional Shia enterprise, is now watching hyperinflation hit its national currency, which has lost more than half of its value since the United States and Europe slammed sanctions on vital financial facilities, such as the Iranian Central Bank.

An economically limping Iran has also quietly abandoned the big talk about its “right” to uranium enrichment; it has invited the International Atomic Energy Agency to inspect its nuclear facilities and announced its willingness to come back to the negotiation table. Needless to say, Iran is stalling on all counts. It turned down—among other IAEA demands—requests to interview scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, believed to be the engineer of Tehran’s nuclear weapons program.

Yes, Iran is in trouble. For the first time in years, Tehran is so nervous that it almost invited the United States into a war by threatening to close the Straits of Hormuz, tailing a couple of US navy ships, and warning the Gulf states not to raise their oil production to compensate for the Iranian shortfall.

A few years back, it was the United States—under the Bush administration—that was practically begging Iran to negotiate. At the time Washington felt nervous and threatened to strike Iran, while the world refused to agree to sanctions.

Then President Barack Obama got the idea of engaging Iran from former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel (who made a fortune after America opened up to China). Hagel reasoned that if Ronald Reagan’s America could put aside differences with Communist China for the sake of trade interests, why not Obama’s America with a much-less-important Iran. Obama duly dispatched envoys to meet with Iranian leader Ali Khaminei, but an arrogant Tehran turned down Washington’s offer.

Like Iran, Lebanon’s once seemingly invincible Hezbollah is now on the back foot. The party brags about its 40,000 missiles that are good for nothing. Hezbollah realizes that starting a war with Israel, like in 2006, would undermine its standing with Lebanon’s Shia. Then the party bounced back by channeling Shia rage against rival communities, mainly the Sunnis, who proved no match for Hezbollah, as we saw in the civil unrest of May 2008.

In 2010, Hezbollah beat its Sunni rivals politically, too, and took full control of the country. But it now owns the state’s failure, which has caused its popularity to dip. Hezbollah’s problems are further complicated with the drying up of Iranian petro-dollars and America’s tight monitoring of Shia donors among the Lebanese diaspora.

Hezbollah lost what was left of its fig leaf when it openly sided with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whose regime has brutally killed 6,000 Syrians in a bid to quell a year-old uprising. Having bet on the Syrian dictator, Hezbollah will find itself in trouble with any post-Assad Syrian government.

Looking back, Hezbollah might remember that in February 2005, it was George Bush who said that Washington was willing to talk to the Party of God should it abandon its arms and renounce violence. That overture was also domestically presented to the party, when MP and Druze chief Walid Jumblatt and former Prime Minister Saad Hariri made an alliance with Hezbollah in 2005, and again entered into a national unity government with it in 2009.

Hezbollah squandered many chances of compromise when it was in its zenith. Now, with all indicators showing decline in Syria, Iran and inside Lebanon, the party will not get other similar overtures.

And like Hezbollah and Iran, Assad has had numerous chances, both from the United States and Saudi Arabia, as well as from his own people who patiently expressed hope in the Damascus Spring in 2001, and again in 2005. Whenever weak, Assad makes promises to his opponents and the world, but when he is back to full strength he reneges, hunts down his enemies, and tortures and imprisons them.

Finally, Iraq’s Nouri al-Maliki is also a Shia Crescent leader who will regret his choices soon. Having won America’s trust and defeated his rivals in the 2010 elections, Maliki never offered compromise from a position of strength. Instead, he went after his opponents. He instructed the judiciary to persecute Sunni Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, while breaking his promises to the Kurds by not holding a referendum over Kirkuk and failing to agree to terms on a hydrocarbon law.

When the allies of the Shia Crescent look back, they will remember the days when Washington came begging for Tehran’s friendship, and the world urged Hezbollah to end its wars on a high and endorse peace. Assad will remember how the Syrians were willing to settle for little compromise, while Maliki will soon find out that America has more pressing business than helping him emerge as Iraq’s new dictator.

When the Shia look back, they will regret not making good on their promises of fixing the world and ending tyranny. Their rivals might beat them back, and they might find themselves again as the downtrodden, a cycle that looks vicious in this region.

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

Hezbollah's Nicholas Noe threatens Syrians and the world with doom, on behalf of Assad

2012-02-07T10:11:00.000-05:00

In this article in the New York Times, Hezbollah's Nicholas Noe put out the blueprint for what Hassan Nasrallah and Bashar Assad believe is the only way out of the Syrian crisis: Talk to Assad and entertain him, or face the wrath of the "axis of resistance" composed of Iran, Syria and Hezbollah. Nothing original or genuine, Noe only makes sure that his bosses' point makes it in print for US audience.

Below are the parts that highlight Hezbollah, Assad and Noe's threat to Syrians and the world.

...Washington should adopt a realistic, albeit distasteful, strategy that seeks to steadily defuse the conflict rather than watch it explode in everyone’s face. And that means dealing with Mr. Assad.

MR. ASSAD is a brutally repressive and dangerous leader who is responsible for most of the death and destruction that has plagued Syria in recent months, but the consequences of pushing Iran, Syria and Hezbollah beyond their red lines will most likely be far worse.

...But the realization that die-hard elements in Damascus, Beirut and Tehran could unleash great regional destruction should prompt a long overdue discussion about putting forward a credible and comprehensive bargain.

Negotiations now, rather than war later, could lead to a far better outcome for all parties — even if that means Syrians’ aspirations for freedom might be met much later than anyone would like.

New Kuwaiti Parliament, Same Old Politics

2012-02-04T16:39:00.004-05:00

Hussain Abdul-Hussain

The National

To the untrained eye, most candidates in last week's Kuwaiti elections walked the same, talked the same and offered little variation on identical platforms that promised economic development, governmental transparency and a better future.

And while some have argued that it was the Arab Spring that rushed the country into early elections, the fourth in six years, the evidence is to the contrary. True, the dissolution of the 2009 National Assembly, two years into its four-year term, came after a November protest that saw Kuwaitis storm parliament, an event that resembled protests elsewhere. But the collapse of the cabinet was because of a long-simmering political crisis inside parliament, rather than outside factors.

Change in Kuwait is political instead of fundamental, which in turn made last week's poll a repeat of other elections: a mix of politicking, electioneering and jockeying for power with little or no connection to the winds of change sweeping other countries in the region.

But political change did come to some degree. Only 22 incumbents in the 50-member National Assembly were re-elected, with the four female lawmakers losing the seats they had won in 2009.

Many suggest that the 28 new legislators will give an advantage to the anti-government, mainly Islamist bloc, which now controls more than half the seats. According to the Kuwaiti constitution, however, a 16-member cabinet will be appointed (at least one minister must be an elected MP). The other 15 members can also vote in parliament, giving the cabinet a decisive edge.

Also, beyond the Islamist versus non-Islamist dichotomy, the various campaigns suggested that there are many other layers of different divisions inside parliament and across Kuwait.

For a start, at least one of the new lawmakers is known for fiery rhetoric and distinguishing between "sedentary Kuwaitis" and Bedouins. The argument goes that parliament must restore urban values, as opposed to those held by rural groups (even if Bedouins have been residing in cities for generations).

Meanwhile, the Shia bloc, at times singled out on suspicion of harbouring non-Kuwaiti loyalties, has clearly shrunk in the Assembly. Talk about a "fifth column" that endorses a foreign agenda should recede.

Finally, as the number of opposition MPs - Islamist, Shia and liberal - increases, the new opposition will have to redefine itself after the departure of many old politicians, such as the former prime minister Sheikh Nasser Al Sabah, who has formed several cabinets over the past decade. The position of speaker is also up for grabs with the retirement of Jasem Al Kharafi.

With 28 new MPs, more Islamists, fewer Shiites, no women and a new speaker, the shape of the new government is anybody's guess, with most analysts predicting incumbent Prime Minister Sheikh Jaber Al Sabah to form the new cabinet.

Since Sheikh Jaber formed his first cabinet in December, political tension has noticeably receded. His cabinet has pushed economic growth by expanding the federal budget from $71 billion to $79 billion (Dh290 billion).

The cabinet also did an impressive job organising the elections. Foreign observers reported a free and fair electoral process, and the televised count of votes showed that it was transparent.

Whether that means Sheikh Jaber will win favour with the new parliament remains to be seen. And even if he does gain the approval of the opposition, there are few indications that Kuwait's political scene will shift away from the bickering it has witnessed over the past decade.

Troublemaking in parliament remains the trend. Even if cabinets demonstrate solid performance coupled with transparency and respect for the rule of law, we can still expect some lawmakers to show their tempers.

With Kuwait's GDP per capita among the highest in the world, and with a free press and stability, there seem to be few complaints for the opposition to fight for. Stability and prosperity will always narrow political differences, even if not eliminate them altogether.

"In Kuwait, we've been having the Arab Spring for many years now," a Kuwaiti friend told me. "Only it is not violent or brutal because when you can say what you want, there is no reason why we should stand in the streets and shout."

Hussain Abdul-Hussain is the Washington bureau chief of the Kuwaiti newspaper Alrai

Kudos to Iraqi Kurdistan

2012-01-21T12:12:00.006-05:00

Hussain Abdul-Hussain
NOW Lebanon

In a region consumed by violence, uncertainty and despair, Iraqi Kurdistan stands out as an oasis of stability, economic growth and a relatively acceptable level of political freedom.

Envious of their success, many Arabs have accused Iraqi Kurds of selling out to America. And while it is true that the Kurds enjoy excellent ties with Washington, Arabs should keep in mind that the Kurds had to break with their painful past in order to make themselves an indispensible ally for the United States in the region.

In Kurdish collective memory, America let them down in 1975 during their fight against Saddam Hussein. Saddam had reached out to Iran's Shah Reza Pahlavi. As relations between the two improved, the Shah, and eventually Washington, abandoned the Iraqi Kurds while Saddam shut down the operation of Iranian opposition leader Imam Ruhollah Khomeini in Najaf and sent him into exile in France.

Today's Kurdish leadership understands that in the game of nations, there is no place for grudges. As such, Iraq's Kurds have not only made friends with America, but have also reached out to historic enemies like Turkey, where they found a like-minded government in Ankara that has tailored its foreign policy to fit its economic interests. Annual trade between Iraqi Kurdistan and Turkey stands at $4 billion and is expected to grow.

Domestically, Iraqi Kurdish rulers succeeded in transforming their leadership from one based on patronage networks to one based on winning the hearts and minds of their constituents through economic growth and prosperity.

And because prosperity requires good governance, the Kurdish leadership tapped native talent. Kurdish graduates from the world's finest colleges were lured back home, their experience put to government use.

Some Kurdish officials still channel public funds into their personal accounts and use the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) bureaucracy to reward their loyalists. But these same leaders have also kept such corruption to a minimum. They also cut on red tape and made the Kurdish region's environment competitively attractive to the world's biggest investors.

Security, good governance and a percentage of the revenue of 170,000 oil barrels produced in the region every day have paid off. Government expenditure is set to jump from $10 billion this year to $13 billion in 2013. Back in 2002, the region’s embryonic government had a budget of only $100 million.

The economy of the landlocked region has been growing at a rate of 12 percent, year-on-year. According to the Financial Times, per capita income has risen from $375 in 2002 to $5,500 in 2011. Electricity runs 22 hours a day. In the rest of Iraq, especially in the similarly oil-rich south, shortages are so acute that most cities only receive four hours a day.

Kurdistan's Arbil and Sulaymaniyah have also opened airports with flights to cities such as Vienna and Frankfurt and daily services to Istanbul, Dubai and Amman. In Iraq's predominantly Shia south, airports have flights mainly to Iranian cities, and service mostly religious tourism.

While Iraqi Kurdistan is still not the perfect democracy everyone aspires for, it is certainly a rising star. In 2009, Nashirvan Mustafa, a longtime lieutenant of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, broke ranks with "Mam Jalal's" Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and created his own group, Goran, or “Change.” Mustafa's faction won considerable seats in the 2009 elections as his bloc emerged as the leading opposition group inside the Kurdish parliament. In the Iraqi elections in 2010, Goran also won seats, even though it still caucuses with the bigger Barzani-Talabani bloc.

Showing maturity, the ruling Kurdish duality of Barzani and Talabani did not try to kill Mustafa or Goran, even though his growing popularity came at the expense of the two, both regionally and nationally. Instead, the Kurdish establishment expressed its respect for diversity and free speech. In September, Iraqi Kurdistan's president, Massoud Barzani, visited Mustafa for the first time.

Unlike Arab politicians, Kurdish leaders are showing a sense of purpose, pragmatism and an understanding that times have changed.

If compared to retrograde and narcissistic leaders like Iran's Ali Khaminei, Iraq's Nouri Maliki and Lebanon’s Hassan Nasrallah—who are stuck in their old ways of killing opponents, employing populist anti-Western slogans and driving their countries into the political and economic abyss—Iraqi Kurdish politicians, despite their unwarranted long tenures, look like leaders worthy of their people's respect.

Perhaps that's why pillars of the Lebanese oligarchy have taken their business to Iraqi Kurdistan. After lawmaker Walid Jumblatt and former President Amin Gemayel, Samir Geagea made a show in Arbil. Unable to convince Lebanon's de facto ruler Hassan Nasrallah of the worthiness of dropping his outdated anti-Western ideological rhetoric in favor of a pragmatic one, these Lebanese leaders seem to pin their hopes on Kurdistan. After all, in politics, it's never personal. It is only business.

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

When the pro-Hezbollah Agenda makes it to Stanford and the New York Times

2012-01-18T15:18:00.003-05:00

The piece below by Elias Muhanna in The New YorkTimes' Latitude looks balanced. I'm not sure if Latitude pieces are fact-checkedby the newspaper or not, but judging by its style, I would say the piece wasnot copy-edited by the newspaper's staff.

Muhanna wants to come across as a non-sectarianLebanese academic who supports a proportional system for the coming elections.Fair enough. But why did he keep Hezbollah out of the sectarian titans thatwould lose on their turf if such a system is endorsed? Aren't there any minorShia figures who would threaten Hezbollah, in its districts, under aproportional representation laws?

While this might be a simple slip of the mind, I wouldargue that it can also be more than that. First, the Visiting Fellowship atStanford, which Muhanna currently occupies, is funded by Lebanese FinanceMinister Mohamed Safadi, a Sunni from northern Lebanon.

Safadi and Sunni Prime Minister Najib Mikati wereelected to parliament in 2009 on the ticket of former Prime Minister SaadHariri, whom because of Hezbollah's thugs occupying the streets of Beirut, wasforced to quit. Safadi and Mikati quickly turned coat and agreed to joinHezbollah's parliamentary coalition to make it a majority, and to become theSunni leading figures of the Hezbollah-controlled cabinet.

But joining Shia Hezbollah against Sunni Hariri underminedboth Mikati and Safadi among Lebanon's Sunnis, especially those in theirelectoral district of Tripoli. To hide their Hezbollah affiliation, Mikati andSafadi now pretend that they belong to a "center" coalition under theleadership of Maronite President Michel Suleiman, one of the weakest politicalfigures in the history of Lebanon.

Realizing that under the current electoral law, Harirican give both Mikati and Safadi the boot and keep them out of parliament in2013, they endorsed Suleiman's proporsal for proportional representation hopingthat it would give them a chance to keep their parliamentary seats even ifHariri, by far more popular than they are among Tripoli's Sunnis, decides topunish them in 2013.

But while trying to market the porportional system,the Safadi-Mikati-Suleiman team have to make sure not to offend their mastersin Hezbollah. So what do they do? They put out pieces written by Stanfordfellows in The New York Times advocating a proportional system, and arguingthat such a system hurts Hariri and the likes of Walid Jumblatt only.

So long for independent academic thinking and objectivityin respected US media.

Lebanon, by the Numbers

Elias Muhanna

Lebanon’s peculiar brand ofdemocracy, dysfunctional and widely unpopular, is a perennial source ofnational vexation, debated over Sunday lunches and in the press.

Sincethe Taif agreement of 1989, which helped end the civil war, half of Parliamenthas been reserved for Christians, the other half for Muslims, with each halfdistributed among 11 of Lebanon’s 18 officially recognized sects (Maronite,Greek Orthodox, Protestant, Sunni, Shiite, Druze, Alawite, etc). Each ofParliament’s (pdf) 128 seats is sect-specific: only membersof that sect can run for it. (Voters, however, can cast their ballot for everyseat in their district regardless of their own religious affiliation.) Thepresident must be a Maronite, the prime minister a Sunni and the speaker ofParliament a Shiite. Hundreds of bureaucratic appointments are also subject tosectarian apportionment under the Constitution.

Theimposition of religious representativeness in politics is a scourge. Inthe best of circumstances, it is vulnerable to the demagoguery of religious leaders; in theworst, it breeds civil violence and paralyzes the government. But others fear that a more open system would notprovide the guarantees of power-sharing among religious minorities that thecurrent model entails.

Inrecent months, the focus of these long-standing divergences has centered on theintricacies of Lebanon’s electoral law. The next parliamentary elections areless than a year and a half away, and a loose coalition of civil societygroups, independent politicians and Lebanon’s president – the former armygeneral Michel Suleiman — has recently proposed implementing a system ofproportional representation to replace the current majoritarian, or“winner-take-all,” model.

Underthe existing system, a fledgling party with a small but dedicated followingstands no chance of getting its candidates elected in a district where a moreestablished party holds sway. Under proportional representation — in whichseats are allocated in keeping with the share of votes collected — a smallparty could win some seats with a minority of votes. In addition to ensuringmultiparty representation in each district, proportional representation would empower lesser-known independentcandidates. Over time the newcomers could coalesce to form a bulwark againstthe traditional political mainstream and advance a more liberal agenda.

Predictably,most major parties have conspired to protect the status quo; they want tomaintain their primacy within it. The Future Movement, the main Sunni party,worries that the Sunni allies of its Shiite archrival, Hezbollah, mightencroach on its turf. Walid Jumblatt, the country’s main Druze leader, fearsthat he would lose votes to other Druze figures withsmall-time followings in his traditional stronghold, the Chouf mountains.

In arare show of unity, the leaders of Lebanon’s main Christian parties have cometogether to oppose the president’s draft law. The proposed law would combine Lebanon’ssmall electoral districts into fewer and larger ones, which is necessary forproportional representation to work effectively. (Imagine an election between10 different parties in a 10-seat district: if each party wins 10 percent ofthe overall vote, each one gets its own seat. In a two-seat district, only thetop two lists win seats.) But an electoral map with larger districts alsomeans larger constituencies, which in turn means that substantial numbersof Christian candidates could be voted in on the lists of non-Christian parties(like the Future Movement and Hezbollah). And that would erode the influence ofthe traditional Christian political elite.

And sothe Christian political establishment has offered a radical counter-proposal: alaw that would institute proportional representation but also require citizensto vote only for members of their own sect (Sunnis would elect Sunnis; GreekOrthodox, Greek Orthodox, etc.)

One ofthe many problems with this idea is that it would generate considerableinequalities of suffrage between Christians and Muslims. As is, Christiansalready have greater voting power than Muslims because they still occupy halfof Parliament even though they now represent less than half of Lebanon’spopulation. Under the new proposal, this disparity in representation would be further exacerbated.

Worseis the vision of Lebanon’s political future at the heart of the Christian plan.The president’s proposal envisages a country whose citizens vote for candidateson the basis of party affiliation and political platform, not sect. TheChristians’ counter-proposal imagines Lebanon as a collection of 18 insularreligious communities jealously nominating their own nobility and eyeing oneanother with suspicion. The first model is a bold step toward dismantlingpolitical sectarianism; the second is an enormous step backward, toward greaterdivisiveness.

Becauseof its inexpediency, a substantive revision of the electoral law in time forthe 2013 elections seems unlikely — despite the fact that asolid majority of Lebanese say they would prefer proportional representation to thecurrent system. Yet if Lebanon is ever to establish a new social contract — onebased on true citizenship rather than begrudging coexistence — it will need tochange its electoral arithmetic.

Elias Muhanna is a visiting fellow at Stanford University’sProgram on Arab Reform & Democracy. He writes about Lebanese politicalaffairs on the blogQifaNabki.

Anyone who thinks Iran can bail out Assad, think Again!

2012-01-17T17:00:00.003-05:00

AP: Iran bans foreign currency trading on the street

TEHRAN, Iran — Iran's central bank deputy governor said Monday that trading foreign currency outside of banks and licensed currency exchange operations was now banned, marking the government's latest attempt to stem an outflow of foreign currency amid worries over the state of the economy.
The latest U.S. sanctions targeting Iran's central bank have further stoked Iranians' concerns about an economy already grappling with double-digit inflation and the weight of earlier U.S., European and United Nations sanctions linked to a controversial nuclear program. The West says the program is aimed at developing weapons while Iran says it is for purely peaceful purposes.
Shortly after the new U.S. sanctions were announced earlier in January, the rial lost about 13 percent of its value relative to the dollar before rebounding slightly. The sanctions have not yet gone into effect.
Overall, the rial has shed about 40 percent of its value against the dollar since December 2010.
Deputy Central Bank Gov. Ebrahim Darvishi said authorities were monitoring street vendors and currency trading operations, in what was the government's latest effort to shore up the currency which was being traded on the open market at rates differing from those set by the government. He said that any foreign exchange trade must come with a receipt or the funds would be confiscated.
"Do not take it to the market," Darvish said on state radio, referring to foreign currency such as the U.S. dollar. "Any investment in the field of foreign currency and the dollar is forbidden."
The ban — officially announced Sunday — comes as Iran looks to stem the outflow of foreign currency. The central bank said the move was aimed at curbing money laundering, with officials complaining that the exchange brokers were offering rates far removed from those set by the government.
On Monday, the U.S. dollar sold at 16,950 rials while the central bank had set the rate at 14,000 rials to the dollar.
But it comes against a backdrop of economic woes as officials complain that there was too much liquidity in the market. Officials in Iran's chamber of commerce say there are more than $300 billion liquidity in the country.
Iranians, worried about the potential impact of the latest sanctions, have appeared focused on buying up dollars and gold coins instead of depositing money in the banks that are offering interest rates far lower than the inflation rate.
The sanctions have amplified those worries and also led to the government reducing from $2,000 to $1,000 the amount of dollars travelers can take with them as they leave the country.
The latest move appeared primarily aimed at curbing street trade of foreign currency, but it had a broader impact.
While money changing shops open, they were largely reluctant to do any business, and most currency traders on the street abandoned their corners.
"The market is full of security agents," said Hassan Rahamani, one of the dealers, adding that there has been little business since Sunday.
The official IRNA news agency said Monday that dealers are doing business secretly while the semiofficial Fars news agency reported that more agents were to hit the streets.

Foreign Currency Reserves depleted at Syrian Central Bank

2012-01-17T14:13:00.001-05:00

The Syrian Pound (SP) lost further ground to the dollar on Tuesdaywith reports from Syria that the greenback traded at 71 SP, while daily financialtransactions showed unwillingness or inability of the Syrian Central Bank topump dollars into the Syrian market to preserve the SP's value.

In mid march, before the outbreak of the Syrian Revolution againstthe regime of President Bashar Assad, the dollar stood at 45 SP.

Meanwhile, sources from the Iraq Central Bank (ICB) also reportedthat the Iraqi Dinar is under market pressure forcing the ICB to pump foreigncurrency into the Iraqi market to preserbe its value.

Iraqi sourcesreasoned that Syrians and Iranians are straining the Iraqi currency in theirquest for US dollars. Treaties between Iraq and Syria, on one hand, and Iraqand Iran, on the other, allow for the trade of local currencies. Syrians areswapping their free falling pounds, the Lira, with Iraqi dinars. They then swaptheir dinars with dollars that they take back home, where greenbacks are rareand are in high demand.

Iranians are doing the same by using the Iraqi dinar as anintermediary currency between their Riyal and the dollar. The end result is theaccumulation of Syrian Liras and Iranian Riyals at the vaults of Iraq's CentralBank, which has been losing major chunks of its Foreign Currency (FX) Reservesover the past few weeks.

The Iraqigovernment is in a better position to defend its Dinar thanks to foreigncurrency revenue from the daily sale of 2.2 million oil barrels. TheSyrian and Iranian governments, however, find it hard to put their hands onforeign currency. They come to Baghdad looking for dollar and in the meantimeput strain on the Iraqi Central Bank and its Dinar. Yet, such a measure willnot be enough to salvage the hyper inflation hitting Syria, in the short term,and Iran, in the medium and long terms.

Predictions haveit that the Syrian Pound will lose further ground to the dollar, which isexpected to stand at 90 SP in the coming few weeks. The 90 SP marks double theprice for the dollar before the outbreak of the revolution in mid-March. Thismeans that a Syrian employee whose salary is $1000 dollars a month (45,000 SP),will be taking home half the amount as his same salary becomesthe equivalent of $500 when the dollar hits the 90 SP mark.

During themid-80s, the Lebanese experienced similar hyperinflation. The dollar shot upfrom 3 Lebanese Liras in 1982 to 2,200 in 1992. The Lira never recovered andthe dollar trades at around 1,500 Lebanese Liras today, except that thesuccessive governments eventually managed to readjust to the new Lebanese Lira'svalue.

In Syria, theCentral Bank looks to have run out of FX reserves and is unable to defend its nationalcurrency. The value of the Syrian Lira is now up to market forces, and these –given Syria's unrest – are not expected to act in favor of keeping the Syrian Lirastrong.

For further information, click here.

Syria: beyond the wall of fear, a state in slow-motion collapse

2012-01-17T11:35:00.002-05:00

Ian Black
The Guardian

"Another sign of Syria's deepening crisis is that the state is no longer functioning properly. It is "collapsing in slow motion", in the words of one expert. Security chiefs are concerned about bribes being demanded to release detainees. Half the weapons acquired by rebels are estimated to have been sold by army personnel while customs agents look the other way as shipments come in from Lebanon. Rumours persist of different branches of the secret police shooting at each other on clandestine operations. And officials are said to have been destroying documents recording off-the-book payments authorised by a phone call from the president's palace."

"Many now have first-hand experience of the apparatus of state repression, and describe details of underground cells, beatings and torture. It is common knowledge that Iranian security advisers are on hand with their sinister expertise in communications monitoring and riot policing. Damascus feels, and looks, like Tehran in 2009 during protests over the rigging of the presidential election."

Great CNN Report from Zabadani

2012-01-17T10:57:00.003-05:00

In Syria, what does Russia want?

2012-01-05T18:37:00.001-05:00

Hussain Abdul-Hussain
Bitterlemons International

Russian policy on Syria might seem planned and coherent, but a closer look shows that Moscow has no imagined end-game for Syria's unrest, and is rather improvising its stances as events unfold.

Moscow has a clear interest in the survival of the regime of President Bashar Assad, who is a major importer of Russia's arms. Syria reportedly buys ten percent of Russia's annual arms exports at a cost of $1 billion. In Libya, Russian arms makers lost close to $4 billion in contracts with the downfall of Muammar Gaddafi. Moscow is keen to prevent a repeat in Syria.

But arms sales may not be the only motive behind Russia's support for Assad. Perhaps Moscow fears that international intervention in Syria could emerge as an accepted model for the future. If Russians take to the streets en masse demanding an end to the long rule of their president-turned-prime-minister Vladimir Putin, now running for a third presidential term, the Kremlin might want to make sure that it can strangle any such movement without fear of the United Nations jumping on its back to protect protesters.

A third reason behind Moscow's obstruction of the world effort to stop Assad's brutal force against his citizens could be Russia's self-perception as heir to the glorious Soviet empire. Since Putin's accession to power in 2000, Moscow has always tried to show foreign policy muscle.

This posture has helped Putin awaken national chauvinism by rallying Russians around his leadership against mostly imagined foreign threats. With the Assad family being a former Soviet ally, and with western capitals supporting Assad's opponents, Russia might have seen in Syria an opportunity to stand up to the "imperial" West by preventing the downfall of another one of Moscow's old Arab friends and arms clients.

The Russian government has so far thrown its lot behind Assad. On October 4, it exercised its veto power to kill a UN Security Council resolution that would have denounced the Syrian government.

Moscow's initial support of Assad was based on its understanding that his forces could swiftly bring the uprising to an end. But days turned into weeks and weeks into months, during which Moscow might have concluded that Assad could be the wrong horse to back and that, instead, it should reach out to his opponents and show itself as the sponsor of peace between the two sides.

The Russian position has therefore undergone a noticeable evolution since the outbreak of the Syrian revolution in mid-March. During the first weeks, Russia described the unrest as a domestic issue, calling on the world to respect Syrian sovereignty by staying away.

However, a surge in the number of deaths, standing at 5,000 by December meant that Russia could not make the Syrian crisis go away simply by claiming it a domestic issue.

Moscow realized that it should either come up with a solution to stop the bloodshed, or risk western capitals eventually imposing one. Russia therefore endorsed the Arab League initiative, which calls for the immediate cessation of hostilities, the withdrawal of the Syrian army from cities, the release of detained anti-regime activists, and the admittance of Arab observers and foreign media to verify Assad's compliance.

Damascus said on November 2 that it would accept the initiative, but failed to sign on the protocol for its implementation, forcing the league to suspend Syria's membership nine days later. Seeing that its allies in Damascus were squandering a golden opportunity that could circumvent western intervention, Moscow circulated in mid-December a Security Council draft resolution that endorsed the initiative. By doing so, Russia moved from categorically ruling out any international intervention in Syria to attempting to shape such an effort in its favor.

The Syrian government signed on the initiative on November 19 but still obstructed the admittance of Arab observers. News reports from Syria said that the regime's forces were committing massacres against army defectors and civilians in the north.

In a sign that Moscow had grown impatient with Assad, Russia circulated on December 24 another Security Council draft resolution, this one employing stronger language against Assad. Feeling the Russian heat, the Syrian president reluctantly admitted the Arab Monitoring Commission, which is expected to disclose its findings by January 20.

Should the Arab mission be deemed a failure, world opinion would certainly tilt in favor of UN intervention, in which case Russia would find itself alone at the UN fending off another western diplomatic offensive against Assad. Meanwhile, indicators show that Assad's grip on power is weakening and his finances--needed to keep his military machine going--deteriorating.

In the second diplomatic showdown at the UN, expected in February, Russia might not rush to the defense of Assad and could instead come to a compromise with other world powers over his removal.

Perhaps sensing that Moscow's pro-Assad stance could change, chief of the opposition Syrian National Council Burhan Ghalioun told Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov during a meeting in Moscow in mid-November that should Assad fall, Russian interests in Syria would be "guaranteed."

- Published 5/1/2012 © bitterlemons-international.org

Hussain Abdul-Hussain is the Washington bureau chief of the Kuwaiti newspaper, Alrai.

Obama administration secretly preparing options for aiding the Syrian opposition

2012-01-03T15:00:00.004-05:00

Josh Rogin

Foreign Policy

As the violence in Syria spirals out of control, top officials in President Barack Obama's administration are quietly preparing options for how to assist the Syrian opposition, including gaming out the unlikely option of setting up a no-fly zone in Syria and preparing for another major diplomatic initiative.

Critics on Capitol Hill accuse the Obama administration of being slow to react to the quickening deterioration of the security situation in Syria, where over 5,000 have died, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights. Many lawmakers say the White House is once again "leading from behind," while the Turks, the French, and the Arab League -- which sent anobserver mission to Syria this week - take the initiative to pursue more aggressive strategies for pressuring the Assad regime. But U.S. officials said that they are moving cautiously in order to avoid destabilizing Syria further, and to make sure they know as much as possible about the country's complex dynamics before getting more involved.

But the administration does see the status quo in Syria as unsustainable. The Bashar al Assadregime is a "dead man walking," State Department official Fred Hof said this month. So the administration is now ramping up its policymaking machinery on the issue. After several weeks of having no top-level administration meetings to discuss the Syria crisis, the National Security Council (NSC) has begun an informal, quiet interagency process to create and collect options for aiding the Syrian opposition, two administration officials confirmed to The Cable.

The process, led by NSC Senior Director Steve Simon, involves only a few select officials from State, Defense, Treasury, and other relevant agencies. The group is unusually small, presumably to prevent media leaks, and the administration is not using the normal process of Interagency Policy Committee (IPC), Deputies Committee (DC), or Principals Committee (PC) meetings, the officials said. Another key official inside the discussions is Hof, who is leading the interactions with Syrian opposition leaders and U.S. allies.

The options that are under consideration include establishing a humanitarian corridor or safe zone for civilians in Syria along the Turkish border, extending humanitarian aid to the Syrian rebels, providing medical aid to Syrian clinics, engaging more with the external and internal opposition, forming an international contact group, or appointing a special coordinator for working with the Syrian opposition (as was done in Libya), according to the two officials, both of whom are familiar with the discussions but not in attendance at the meetings.

"The interagency is now looking at options for Syria, but it's still at the preliminary stage," one official said. "There are many people in the administration that realize the status quo is unsustainable and there is an internal recognition that existing financial sanctions are not going to bring down the Syrian regime in the near future."

After imposing several rounds of financial sanctions on Syrian regime leaders, the focus is now shifting to assisting the opposition directly. The interagency process is still ongoing and the NSC has tasked State and DOD to present options in the near future, but nothing has been decided, said the officials - one of whom told The Cable that the administration was being intentionally cautious out of concern about what comes next in Syria.

"Due to the incredible and far-reaching ramifications of the Syrian problem set, people are being very cautious," the official said. "The criticism could be we're not doing enough to change the status quo because we're leading from behind. But the reason we are being so cautious is because when you look at the possible ramifications, it's mindboggling."

A power vacuum in the country, loose weapons of mass destruction, a refugee crisis, and unrest across the region are just a few of the problems that could attend the collapse of the Assad regime, the official said.

"This isn't Libya. What happens in Libya stays in Libya, but that is not going to happen in Syria. The stakes are higher," the official said. "Right now, we see the risks of moving too fast as higher than the risks of moving too slow."

The option of establishing a humanitarian corridor is seen as extremely unlikely because it would require establishing a no-fly zone over parts of Syria, which would likely involve large-scale attacks on the Syrian air defense and military command-and-control systems.

"That's theoretically one of the options, but it's so far out of the realm that no one is thinking about that seriously at the moment," another administration official said.

Although the opposition is decidedly split on the issue, Burhan Ghalioun, the president of the Syrian National Council, earlier this month called on the international community to enforce a no-fly zone in Syria.

"Our main objective is finding mechanisms to protect civilians and stop the killing machine," said Ghalioun. "We say it is imperative to use forceful measures to force the regime to respect human rights."

Assad massacre in Homs, Syria

2011-12-20T13:34:00.004-05:00

Warning Sensitive Viewers: Al-Jazeera Arabic live broadcast form Bab Amr, Homs, Syria, where random shelling by the Assad army of civilian houses has killed a family of a few children while having dinner. Still Russia blocks significant measures inside Security Council and calls for "dialogue" between Assad and his victims.

Spring in Arab countries, winter in Europe

2011-12-13T16:45:00.001-05:00

Democracy is taking backseat in several European countries

Paul Krugman
The New York Times

It’s time to start calling the current situation what it is: a depression. True, it’s not a full replay of the Great Depression, but that’s cold comfort. Unemployment in both America and Europe remains disastrously high. Leaders and institutions are increasingly discredited. And democratic values are under siege.

On that last point, I am not being alarmist. On the political as on the economic front it’s important not to fall into the “not as bad as” trap. High unemployment isn’t O.K. just because it hasn’t hit 1933 levels; ominous political trends shouldn’t be dismissed just because there’s no Hitler in sight.

Let’s talk, in particular, about what’s happening in Europe — not because all is well with America, but because the gravity of European political developments isn’t widely understood.

First of all, the crisis of the euro is killing the European dream. The shared currency, which was supposed to bind nations together, has instead created an atmosphere of bitter acrimony.

Specifically, demands for ever-harsher austerity, with no offsetting effort to foster growth, have done double damage. They have failed as economic policy, worsening unemployment without restoring confidence; a Europe-wide recession now looks likely even if the immediate threat of financial crisis is contained. And they have created immense anger, with many Europeans furious at what is perceived, fairly or unfairly (or actually a bit of both), as a heavy-handed exercise of German power.

Nobody familiar with Europe’s history can look at this resurgence of hostility without feeling a shiver. Yet there may be worse things happening.

Right-wing populists are on the rise from Austria, where the Freedom Party (whose leader used to have neo-Nazi connections) runs neck-and-neck in the polls with established parties, to Finland, where the anti-immigrant True Finns party had a strong electoral showing last April. And these are rich countries whose economies have held up fairly well. Matters look even more ominous in the poorer nations of Central and Eastern Europe.

Last month the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development documented a sharp drop in public support for democracy in the “new E.U.” countries, the nations that joined the European Union after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Not surprisingly, the loss of faith in democracy has been greatest in the countries that suffered the deepest economic slumps.

And in at least one nation, Hungary, democratic institutions are being undermined as we speak.

One of Hungary’s major parties, Jobbik, is a nightmare out of the 1930s: it’s anti-Roma (Gypsy), it’s anti-Semitic, and it even had a paramilitary arm. But the immediate threat comes from Fidesz, the governing center-right party.

Fidesz won an overwhelming Parliamentary majority last year, at least partly for economic reasons; Hungary isn’t on the euro, but it suffered severely because of large-scale borrowing in foreign currencies and also, to be frank, thanks to mismanagement and corruption on the part of the then-governing left-liberal parties. Now Fidesz, which rammed through a new Constitution last spring on a party-line vote, seems bent on establishing a permanent hold on power.

The details are complex. Kim Lane Scheppele, who is the director of Princeton’s Law and Public Affairs program — and has been following the Hungarian situation closely — tells me that Fidesz is relying on overlapping measures to suppress opposition. A proposed election law creates gerrymandered districts designed to make it almost impossible for other parties to form a government; judicial independence has been compromised, and the courts packed with party loyalists; state-run media have been converted into party organs, and there’s a crackdown on independent media; and a proposed constitutional addendum would effectively criminalize the leading leftist party.

Taken together, all this amounts to the re-establishment of authoritarian rule, under a paper-thin veneer of democracy, in the heart of Europe. And it’s a sample of what may happen much more widely if this depression continues.

It’s not clear what can be done about Hungary’s authoritarian slide. The U.S. State Department, to its credit, has been very much on the case, but this is essentially a European matter. The European Union missed the chance to head off the power grab at the start — in part because the new Constitution was rammed through while Hungary held the Union’s rotating presidency. It will be much harder to reverse the slide now. Yet Europe’s leaders had better try, or risk losing everything they stand for.

And they also need to rethink their failing economic policies. If they don’t, there will be more backsliding on democracy — and the breakup of the euro may be the least of their worries.

Abdul-Hussain: If there are terrorists in Syria, how come they never attack pro-Assad rallies?

2011-12-09T16:31:00.001-05:00

Monzeur Sleiman, Tamer Mallat and Hussain Abdul-Hussain debating the Syrian Revolution on Crosstalk on Russia Today.

Is the U.S. on the wrong side of history in Bahrain?

2011-12-07T17:38:00.001-05:00

The Josh Rogin Blog

President Barack Obama's administration has sided with Bahrain's ruling regime over its domestic protest movement more clearly than in any other country affected by the Arab Spring. But that position is unwise and unsustainable, according to one of Bahrain's leading human rights activists, who visited Washington last week.

Nabeel Rajab, president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, came to Washington to receive the Woodrow Wilson Center's 2011 Ion Ratiu Democracy Award for his work documenting human rights abuses conducted by the Bahraini ruling family's security forces since protesters took to the streets in the capital of Manama in February. He was not invited to the State Department for any meetings whatsoever. He did visit the National Security Council, and met with senior director for democracy Gayle Smith, but wasn't given time by any official who works directly on Bahrain.

Rajab sat down on Dec. 4 for an exclusive interview with The Cable. His main message was that the Obama administration's defense of the Bahraini government, including a new push to sell it more weapons, is sowing seeds of distrust and resentment of the United States among the Bahraini people. He urged the Obama administration to use its influence in Bahrain to press the regime for improvements on human rights.

Rajab said that the United States was repeating the mistakes of the past by siding with a minority regime that has brutalized its Shiite majority population. Here are some excerpts:

JR: What is your main message to the Washington foreign policy community?

NR: What I have realized is that there's a difference between the way the American government and the American people look at the Arab uprisings or the Arab revolution. I have received great support from American civil society, human rights groups, etc., in support of the Bahraini revolution. But that is totally different than the position of the United States government, which has disappointed many people in the Gulf region. And they have seen how the U.S. has acted differently and has different responses for different countries. There is full support for revolutions in countries where [the U.S. government] has a problem with their leadership, but when it comes to allied dictators in the Gulf countries, they have a much softer position and that was very upsetting to many people in Bahrain and the Gulf region. This will not serve your long strategic interest, to strengthen and continue your relations with dictators and repressive regimes.... You should have taken a lesson from Tunisia and Egypt, but now you are repeating the same thing by ignoring all those people struggling for democracy and human rights.... Those dictators will not be there forever. Relationships should be maintained with people, not families.

JR: The Obama administration says they are encouraging both sides to work together toward reform. Do you not see that as helpful?

NR: The U.S. is more influential in Bahrain than the United Nations. If they are serious about something, they could do it. They have lots of means to pressure the Bahraini government but so far they are soft. They act as if both sides are equal. You have people fighting for democracy and human rights and struggling for social justice. Then you have a repressive government with an army. You can't speak as if they can be treated in an equal manner. It's the government that is killing people. It's the government that is committing the crimes. The pressure should be put on the government. All of the statements by [Secretary of State] Hillary Clinton and [President] Barack Obama have no impact on the ground because the government was not really being forced to listen to it.... This government has to be told that their relationship with the United States is not a green light to commit crimes, because that's how it is understood by the government. And no one in the United States has told them, no, it's not like that.

JR: What do you say to those who argue that revolution in Bahrain risks instability and the rise of anti-Americanism?

NR: This is the image of the United States in our country: that this superpower supports dictators and doesn't want democracy in our region, because they [are] told that democracy would not serve their interests. They were misled by governments in our region that democracy will bring extremists to power who will fight against U.S. interests. Democracy is not against anybody's interests. Democracy is about living together, sharing together, tolerance, working together, and that's what we are fighting for.

JR: What's the significance of the report of the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry, which was released last week?

NR: It was not perfect, it was not an independent group, it was a group made by the government. But a big part of the report is good and talks about the abuses we have been talking about... It needs to be implemented and I don't see so far any positive reaction from the government. They appointed a commission to implement the report, a big part of which is made up of people who were part of the problem. Here is where the United States needs to speak, to tell them not to waste this opportunity to create real reform.

JR: What does the U.S. sale of $53 million worth of new weapons say to you and your fellow activists?

NR: This is the hypocrisy, this is the double standard. You can't ask Russia to stop selling arms to Syria at the same time you are selling arms to Bahrain while they are killing their own people. How do you convince the Bahraini people this is for their own benefit? What message are you trying to send to the Bahraini people when you try to sell arms? Even now, there are people in the State Department who want to push this sale. Rather than this, there should be more sanctions on the Bahraini government.

JR: The Bahraini foreign minister told us in an interview that the police, not the military, have been dealing with the protests. Is it true?

NR: The military has taken part in suppressing the protests. They have killed people, they have tortured people, they have arrested people, they have detained people. They have established checkpoints and humiliated people at checkpoints, raided houses, robbed houses, demolished mosques. They have taken part in every crime committed in the past months.

JR: You are not seeking total regime change, so what is the end state you want to see in Bahrain?

NR: When the people of Bahrain came out on Feb. 14, they didn't want to overthrow the government, they wanted to reform the government. They want elected government. We've had a corrupt prime minister for over 40 years. We want to separate the government from the royal family. We want a parliament that has power... We want to have an end to the corruption, we want human rights violations to stop, we want sectarian discrimination to be stopped. But the resistance of the government has created a movement to overthrow the government. And if they will continue to resist reforms, that movement to overthrow the government will increase.

JR: What has the government done to you to try to silence you?

NR: They have attacked my house on a weekly basis, you can see it on YouTube. They attacked me, 25 masked men kidnapped me from my home last March. They blindfolded me, handcuffed me, beat me, then took me back home. This has happened a few times. My house is targeted, my mother's house is targeted, all because of my work. But I am better off than the others, because I am free and not dead, because there are people who have been killed and who are behind bars now.

Assad terrorism reaches Beirut

2011-12-07T10:49:00.001-05:00

By Hanin Ghaddar

Latitude / New York Times Blogs

BEIRUT — The crisis in Syria is crossing the border into Lebanon. Beirut has regularly witnessed bloody clashes between pro- and anti-Syrian groups since the Syrian Army withdrew from Lebanon in 2005. But with the Syrian revolution intensifying, pro-Syrian groups in Lebanon have dispatched their thugs, known as the “shabiha,’’ to keep an eye on Beirut’s main streets.

The Hamra neighborhood of West Beirut, with its narrow streets and busy nightlife, has long been a tourist destination, as well as a cosmopolitan hub for free expression, diversity and a good time. It is home to the American University of Beirut and international institutions, such as Amnesty International and Greenpeace. It’s the reason Beirut was once called the “Paris of the East.”

In May 2008, when Hezbollah ordered its militias to invade Beirut in an attempt to force the formation of a national unity government, it sent the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (S.S.N.P.), a pro-Syrian-regime party that wants to annex Lebanon, to Hamra and many other parts of the Middle East. They were assigned to intimidate residents in Hamra. Today, Hamra is dominated by the Syrian Embassy, which is protected by Baath party members and shabiha from the S.S.N.P. The neighborhood is still a hub for wild nightlife, but the S.S.N.P. has made sure to wipe away political diversity and freedom of speech, especially any expression of criticism against President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.

As if marking their territory, the shabiha have recently planted their flags — black with a red star that many people believe resembles a swastika — as well as posters of Assad, all the way from the party’s headquarters on Makdissi Street to the Syrian Embassy, in the middle of Hamra, and up to the west end of the neighborhood’s main street. If you walk down that half-mile stretch you can spot groups of shabiha at most of the main corners.

Since the Syrian revolution kicked off nine months ago, their presence around the embassy has intensified. Residents say that a group of young thugs in civilian clothes march up and down Makdissi Street regularly. They attack anti-Assad activists, help organize pro-Assad rallies and harass women. One resident (who prefers to remain unnamed) says that they became “more aggressive and shameless” since October, when the Lebanese Internal Security Forces produced a report implicating the Syrian Embassy and its personnel in the kidnappings of Syrian opposition figures, including the former Syrian vice president and Baath party cofounder, Shibli al-Aysami.

The shabiha’s main task today is to target supporters of the Syrian revolution and disperse rallies held in solidarity with the Syrian people — much like the Syrian government does against protesters in Syria. They have repeatedly beaten up and injured protestors outside the Syrian Embassy and chased them around Hamra with the help of the embassy’s security forces. They also monitor the neighborhood partly through some kiosks that sell sandwiches. One business owner complained to me just last week that “they force shop and bar owners to hire their members in order to have spies everywhere.”

Early last month, an S.S.N.P. member called a friend of mine who lives in Hamra to complain about his anti-Assad posts on Facebook, which accused the Syrian president of crimes against humanity and supported the Syrian people in their revolution against the regime. My friend was asked to leave his apartment or else he would be kicked out by force. He complained to the authorities, but no one did anything. My friend moved out two weeks later.

With Beirutis not allowed to express solidarity with the Syrian protesters, Hamra, once a bastion of liberalism, feels unfree — and this, once again, makes all of Lebanon seem like a Syrian protectorate. Violence in Syria begets violence in Lebanon, and oppression there begets oppression here.

Hanin Ghaddar, a journalist and commentator based in Beirut, is the managing editor of NOW Lebanon.

Come Home to Israel

2011-12-06T16:34:00.001-05:00

By ROGER COHEN

The New York Times

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — When Israeli actions seem arrogant or insulting, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is capable of rapid action to repair the damage — provided those offended are American Jews.

That is the lesson of the brouhaha over a now-aborted Israeli advertising campaign intended to shame Israeli expatriates in the United States into returning home by suggesting that America is no place for real Jews and that Diaspora life leads to loss of Jewish identity. The Jewish Federations of North America called the ads “outrageous and insulting.”

Cheesy would be a better word. A typical video was a cloying play on how the Hebrew “Abba” can morph to “Daddy” for an Israeli kid overdosing on the U.S.A. The campaign, unsurprisingly, was hatched in a ministry headed by an ultranationalist from Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s party. Equally unsurprisingly, Netanyahu nixed it as soon as he heard of the outcry. “We are very attentive to the sensitivities of the American Jewish community,” explained his spokesman, Mark Regev.

That’s right: The one true existential threat to Israel is loss of U.S. support — which will never happen, but still.

I have several reactions to this little saga. The first is that I know several Israeli expatriates or would-be expatriates and their feelings are consistent. They are troubled by the illiberal drift of Israeli politics, the growth of a harsh nationalism, the increasing influence of the ultrareligious, the endlessness of the “situation,” and the tension inherent in a status quo that will one day threaten either Israel’s Jewishness or its democracy.

They have left or seek to leave because they don’t want all that and no longer believe there is going to be significant change. The ads play to Israeli patriotism, but it’s not patriotism that expatriates lack. It’s hope that their Israel can be salvaged and a two-state peace achieved.

My second reaction is that if Netanyahu could show a fraction of the nimbleness evident when American Jews are offended in instances where Turks are offended (by the killing of their citizens in international waters), or where President Barack Obama is offended (by ongoing settlement expansion in the West Bank against his express request), or where Egyptians are offended (by Israel’s dismissal of their democratic aspirations), then Israel would be in a better, less isolated place today.

That’s what Defense Secretary Leon Panetta means when he tells Israel to “reach out and mend fences” with Turkey and Egypt and engage in “strong diplomacy” rather than pursue policies that have “seen Israel’s isolation from its traditional security partners in the region grow.” As Panetta said, Israel needs to “get to the damn table” with the Palestinians. That, of course, does not depend entirely on Israel but equally will not be achieved through Israeli high-handedness, a trademark of Netanyahu’s administration.

The old Middle East of Israel’s cozy military-to-military relationships with the likes of Turkey and Egypt is gone. A new Middle East where Israel must deal people-to-people is being born. For a democracy this should ultimately be encouraging: People, including Arabs, with control of their lives tend to be focused on improving those lives rather than seeking conflict. The rise of Islamic parties opposed to despotism and adjusting painfully to modernity is cause for caution, yes, but not for manipulative Israeli dismissiveness.

My third reaction is that it’s all very well for the Jewish Federations of North America to find the ads insulting, but I’d be pleased if they could reserve a little of their outrage for times when Israeli insensitivity or arrogance takes more violent form — as is frequently the case with Palestinians in the West Bank.

Jonathan Freedland, a Guardian columnist, visited Hebron recently and published a piece called “This Is Israel? Not the One I Love” in London’s Jewish Chronicle. He wrote of Hebron:

“A map shows purple roads where no Palestinian cars are permitted, yellow roads where no Palestinian shops are allowed to open and red roads where no Palestinians are even allowed to walk.”

He added, “I watched an old man, a bag of cement on his shoulder, ascend a steep bypass staircase because his feet were forbidden from going any farther along the road. Those unlucky enough to live on a red road have had their front doors sealed: They have to leave their own houses by a back door and climb out via a ladder. All this has made life so impossible that an estimated 42 percent of the families who once lived in this central part of town have now moved out.”

Israelis walk on streets full of vile anti-Arab graffiti and shuttered Arab stores daubed with Stars of David. “To see that cherished symbol used to spit in the eye of a population hounded out of their homes is chilling,” Freedland writes.

This is happening behind the wall-barrier-fence. It is the result of an untenable status quo involving the corrosive dominion of one people over another.

Here’s a suggestion for an ad campaign that might fly: A smiling Netanyahu shaking hands with the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, beside the slogan: Come home to peace.

Forgive me for dreaming.

You can follow Roger Cohen on Twitter at twitter.com/nytimescohen.

Widening economic sanctions against Assad are beginning to bite

2011-12-06T14:11:00.001-05:00

Syrians in line for butane gas

The Economist

COULD economic collapse bring down Bashar Assad’s regime even when mass protests have not? Pressure on the economy is mounting from every direction. On November 27th the 22-country Arab League took an unprecedented decision to impose economic sanctions on a fellow member. It voted to stop trading with the Syrian state in all but essential goods, to ban Arab investments in Syria, to freeze assets held by senior members of the regime abroad, and to end dealings with Syria’s central bank. Three days later Turkey, one of Syria’s biggest trading partners, said it would follow suit.

Meanwhile, American and European Union (EU) sanctions are starting to bite. A ban on oil imports, applied by America in August and the EU in September, is costing Syria $400m a month. The shrinking of foreign-currency reserves, estimated at some $18 billion when the crisis began in March, is making trade increasingly tricky. The Banque Saudi Fransi, a Saudi bank, has announced it is selling its 27% interest in one of Syria’s private banks. Foreign investment has halted. International credit cards no longer work. The Syrian pound has fallen on the black market to its lowest point yet. To prevent even more unrest, the government has brought back some subsidies on staples. Tourism, which accounted for over 10% of GDP in 2010, has virtually disappeared.

Officials sound less confident that Syria can weather the sanctions. In recent years, thanks to a tentative liberalisation policy, the country has come to depend more on the global economy than before. “If you’ve always been North Korea, you may be able to stay closed,” says a Damascus businessman. “But you can’t open up and shut the doors again.” Syria’s foreign minister, Walid Muallem, reacting angrily to the league’s decision, threatened to close transit routes between Arab states.

No one knows how long Syria can continue to pay its bills. In September the government sought to shore up foreign reserves by banning imports. Prices of various goods immediately rocketed. Ten days later, facing outrage among business people, the government did a volte face. In any case, not all of Syria’s neighbours will ban trade. Iraq, its second-largest trade partner after the EU, says it will not apply sanctions. Some of Lebanon’s banks are likely to act as a haven for Syrian money. The Assad regime and its business friends say they will look to other countries, such as China and Russia.

But that may not be easy. “Until two weeks ago we didn’t have any contacts with a bank in either country,” says a financier. Early in the uprising, the IMF predicted that Syria’s economy would shrink by 2% this year. But local analysts think sanctions may push that figure into double digits. Inflation is steadily rising. Insurance companies are loth to cover business.

Ordinary Syrians will suffer first as the cost of food soars and queues for fuel for heating and cars snake round buildings. But dissidents welcome the sanctions. The hardship they inflict is a lot less severe than the regime’s bullets and batons—and may in the long run be more powerful.

Egypt's 'Naked Blogger' Calls On Men To Wear Hijab

2011-12-01T10:32:00.001-05:00

Aliaa Elmahdy (http://arebelsdiary.blogspot.com)

Kristin Deasy
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

An Egyptian blogger who sparked controversy last week by posting a photo of herself naked online has also launched a campaign calling on men to don the Islamic headscarf.

However, the Facebook campaign, launched by Aliaa Elmahdy in support of women's rights, was shut down after it was hit by thousands of complaints last week. Elmahdy plans to relaunch it within days.

Elmahdy sent shockwaves through Egypt's highly traditional society when one of her friends shared a photo of her wearing nothing but a pair of shoes and stockings on Twitter with the hashtag#nudephotorevolutionary.

Elmahdy's boyfriend, Kareem Amer, says his girlfriend's reasons for originally posting the photo on her blog were not political. He said she wanted "to send a message" to conservative Egyptian society that a woman's body should not be associated with "shame."

Her reasons for launching the Facebook project, "Wearing Hijab in Solidarity with Women," which kicked off on November 1, are similar. She says she started the project because "many people deny that the hijab discriminates between women and men."

A statement posted on the group's Arabic-language Facebook page before the page was removed said that "Those who call on women to wear hijab should not attack men if they chose to wear the hijab" and calls on men to upload their photos.

Such a move is almost guaranteed to stigmatize them in Egyptian society, which remains highly traditional. Violations against women are also hugely underreported in the country -- a report by Egypt's National Council for Women from 2003 found as many as 98 percent of rape and sexual assault cases are not reported to authorities.

Echoes Of The Uprising

As demonstrations enter their sixth day in Cairo's Tahrir Square, the tone of the hijab campaign echoes that of the famous video blog posted by 26-year-old Egyptian activist Asmaa Mahfouz in the days leading up to the overthrow of the country's long-time ruler Hosni Mubarak.

"Anyone who consider themselves men, come with us," Mahfouz said in the video. "Whoever says women shouldn't take part in protests because they could get beaten, humiliated, harassed, show me your honor and come with us on January 25."

The video is now seen as a turning point for the Egyptian uprising, with Mahfouz awarded the prestigious Sakharov Prize for her role in the movement.

Even though protest activity is on the rise again in Egypt, it's unlikely that the male protesters hitting the streets will be sporting headscarves. The lone male Egyptian citizen to have responded to Elmahdy's initiative is Magdy Abdelraheem, but he doesn't live in Egypt.

"I like the idea that men should be supporting women in putting this thing on their heads," says the 27-year-old trader, whose home is in the United Arab Emirates but who frequently visits Egypt. "I posted my picture there, but I don't think many Middle Eastern men would dare to do such a thing, because they'll all be ashamed to act like women, or be like women."

Codified Gender Discrimination

Apparently, several hundred Iranian men had no such qualms. In 2009, Iranian men posted photos of themselves wearing hijab as part of the online "We are all Majid" campaign launched in support of leading student protester Majid Tavakoli, who was jailed in the mass protests that broke out after the country's disputed 2009 presidential election.

The "We are all Majid" initiative also served to raise awareness about women's rights in Iran, where discrimination is written into the country's legal code. For example, if a woman is killed, the "blood money," or compensation paid to her family, is 50 percent less than if the deceased is a man.

Many of the "We are all Majid" photos were featured on Egypt's "Wearing Hijab in Solidarity with Women" page before it was taken down, presumably in an effort to drum up support.

Iranian women's rights leader Mehrangiz Kar, speaking on the sidelines of an "Inside Iran" conference in Berlin on November 12, says she's not surprised to see such similar initiatives arise independently in two predominantly Muslim countries.

"This is a kind of struggle and a kind of showing their unhappiness," she says. "You know, there is a logic: if we have to wear veil and hijab, my brother should do that, and the others."

Restive Younger Women

Iran and Egypt do not share a common language and have a troubled political history. But they do share a large, restive young generation of women frustrated with the societal status quo.

It's just one example of a swath of new campaigns being launched in a region with shared problems and similar aspirations. Both the Iranian-led educational campaign "Can You Solve This?" and Egypt's "Let Me Think" project, for example, are new educational campaigns focused on strengthening civil society.

For her part, Elmahdy says she's not surprised by the failure of her own initiative, telling RFE/RL that Egyptian men are "afraid of things" and fear public "reaction."

Mohamed Abdelfattah disagrees. "I don't think that's how I would like to show my support for women," he says. "Both of us respect our differences, but that's not something I would do ... I think that it's a funny tactic, it's not serious stuff."

Abdelfattah, a journalist, helped expose the killing of Khaled Said, which became a rallying cry for the Egyptian opposition.

"You know, we can mobilize for women's rights in a more serious manner that can achieve real things on the ground," he says, "not just some superficial type of tactics that would make the already conservative population [of Egypt more] alienated ... to the idea of women's rights."

Tightening the noose on Syria

2011-12-01T09:16:00.001-05:00

Syrian FM Walid Moallem said sanctions will not affect Syria

Hussain Abdul-Hussain
Tony Badran
NOW Lebanon

Following the Turkish government’s announcement that it was imposing sanctions on the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the White House issued a statement praising Turkey’s “leadership.” Although allowing for nine months, and 4,000 dead Syrians, to pass before finally taking concrete punitive action does not exactly qualify as leadership, Ankara’s decision is still better late than never.

The Syrian regime has dismissed the impact of the economic measures taken against it, most recently by the Arab League, with Turkey’s participation. “Warnings and sanctions will not work with us,” Foreign Minister Walid Mouallem defiantly declared on Monday. Regime officials have openly stated that as long as Syria continues to have the support of Iran, Iraq and Lebanon, it will continue to have enough breathing room to get by.

The Assad regime’s bluster, however, is misleading. The unrest in Syria has already brought tourism and the broader services sector, which forms 55 percent of the economy, to a halt, dealing it its biggest blow. Sanctions by the European Union targeting the energy sector, which accounts for around 40 percent of all of Syria’s exports and one third of governmental revenue, followed. The sanctions of the Arab League and Turkey will significantly weaken Damascus, even if Syrian trade continues with Iraq and Lebanon.

The significance of Turkish sanctions varies. Turkey’s trade relation with Syria was already lopsided in favor of Turkish exports, which had steadily risen since 2003 to reach around $1.6 billion last year. However, all this changed after the outbreak of the uprising, with trade decreasing dramatically. The drop in Turkish exports, then, will ironically tilt the balance of trade and save Damascus desperately needed hard currency, which would have otherwise gone to Ankara.

Unsurprisingly, Turkish merchants and businessmen in border towns and provinces feel that it is they who are getting the rougher deal. Similarly, the Turkish transport sector, which carried goods to Syria and, through it, to the Arab world, has also been hit hard, forcing Turkey to look for alternative routes, especially via Iraq. It is partially for these kinds of reasons that Ankara had long hesitated before finally adopting sanctions. By the time it did, the Syrian market had become effectively moribund anyway, Turkish investments were practically frozen, and Turkish banks had stopped issuing letters of credit.

However, the importance of Turkey's sanctions lies in cutting Assad’s ability to connect to the world’s financial network through a third party. Ankara is suspending all ties to the Central Bank of Syria, freezing any Syrian government assets in Turkey and suspending any credit deals as well as all new dealings with the Commercial Bank of Syria. With Arab countries also closing their doors in the face of Assad, he must rely on Iran, Iraq and Lebanon.

But Iran is in a similar position, due to international sanctions. Disconnected from world financial networks, Tehran is desperate for hard currency and often offers countries like China barter deals for its oil.

For its part, Iraq, although awash with petro-dollars, lacks a sophisticated banking sector behind which Syria can hide. If Iraq plans to come to Syria's rescue with foreign currency, it will have to do so using suitcases. This might be good enough for Assad and his immediate circle, but it would not be able to keep the Syrian economy afloat.

As for Lebanon, its vibrant banking sector is already under international scrutiny for fear that Iran could use it to circumvent its sanctions. Syria too will find it hard to use the closely monitored Lebanese banks as a third party for its financial operations.

What remains for Syria are its exports to Iraq and Lebanon, which account for around 40 percent of Syria's $13 billion annual exports. While too little to keep the Syrian economy going, these exports are not exclusively Syrian manufacture and include transit trade. As Syrian transit trade drops to a minimum, the Syrians will be left with exporting food, textiles and other staple products as their only source of income.

A key element of the Arab League sanctions of the regime will be the compliance of the United Arab Emirates, where Assad and his entourage presumably keep their money, and where his family has reportedly recently purchased $60 million worth of property. The UAE have yet to freeze Syrian assets. They possibly are either holding out hope for a last-minute compromise, or they are giving the Assads time to move out their money to another, as of yet unknown destination.

The reluctance of Turkey and the UAE, to say nothing of Iraq and Jordan, puts in perspective the White House’s praise of these regional actors’ supposed leadership.

The Obama administration’s continued desire to look for others to lead on Syria will run against the vulnerabilities and hesitance of these states. The US will need to press these allies hard to ensure the noose is tight around Assad’s neck. There is no substitute to Washington’s leadership.

Hussain Abdul-Hussain is the Washington Bureau Chief of Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Rai. Tony Badran is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He tweets @AcrossTheBay.

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

2011-11-30T09:01:00.001-05:00

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

2011-11-29T14:48:00.001-05:00

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

2011-11-28T14:23:00.001-05:00

1. We, the leaders of the United States and theEuropean Union, met today at the White House to affirm our closepartnership. Drawing upon our shared values and experience, andrecognizing our deep interdependence, we are committed to ensuring that ourpartnership 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 arecommitted to working together to reinvigorate economic growth, create jobs, andensure financial stability. We will do so by taking actions that addressnear-term growth concerns, as well as fiscal and financial vulnerabilities, andthat strengthen the foundations of long-lasting and balanced growth. In thatregard, the UnitedStates welcomes the EU’s actions and determination to take all necessary stepsto ensure the euro area’s financial stability and resolve the crisis. The EU looks forward to U.S. action on mediumterm fiscal consolidation. We agree on the importance of working together withemerging economies to foster policies supporting sustained and balanced globalgrowth. We recall our commitment toimplement fully the outcome of the G20 Cannes Summit.

3. We recall our G20 commitment to support themultilateral trading system and resist protectionism. We stand by theDoha Development Agenda mandate and recognize the progress achieved so far, butnote that in order to contribute to confidence we must pursue fresh, credibleapproaches in 2012 to advance the negotiations and pursue new opportunities andchallenges. We look forward to the upcoming Ministerial meeting inGeneva, which provides an important opportunity to work on suchapproaches.

4. We applaud the success of the TransatlanticEconomic Council (TEC) on a wide range of issues andwelcome the progress achieved in secure trade and supply chain security, electric vehicles and related infrastructure,regulatory practices, small and medium-sized enterprises, and in theInformation Communications Technology (ICT) sector. We encourage theTEC’s continued leadership in helping us avoid unnecessary divergence inregulations and standards that adversely affects trade. We urge the TEC,together with our regulators and standard-setters to step up cooperation in keysectors such as nanotechnology and raw materials to develop compatibleapproaches to emerging technologies. Wealso instruct the TEC to pursue its work on strategic economic questions, notleast in the field of investment, innovation policy, and the protection ofintellectual property rights to level theplaying field for our companies in third countries, in particularemerging economies.

5. We must intensifyour efforts to realize the untapped potential of transatlantic economiccooperation to generate new opportunities for jobs and growth, particularly inemerging sectors. We are committed tomaking the U.S.-EU trade and investment relationship – already the largest andmost integrated in the world – stronger. To that end, we have directedthe 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 forTrade. We ask the Working Group to identify and assess options forstrengthening the U.S.-EU economic relationship, especially those that have thehighest potential to support jobs and growth. The Working Group is toreport its recommendations and conclusions to Leaders by the end of 2012, withan interim report in June 2012 on the status of this work.

6. We recognize the vital role of the U.S.-EUEnergy Council in fostering cooperation on energy security, renewables andother clean energy technologies, energy efficiency, and effective policies forfacilitating trade and bringing clean energy technologies to market. Weaffirm the value of common approaches toward safe and sustainable developmentof energy resources and the diversification of supplies. We also call forreinforced bilateral and multilateral cooperation with a special focus oncritical materials, smart grid technologies, hydrogen and fuel celltechnologies, and nuclear fusion.

7. On climate change, we affirm our intent to work closely together toensure a positive, balanced outcome in Durban, including mitigation,transparency and financing. We stand fully behind the commitments we madelast year in Cancun. We affirm that Durban should deliver onoperationalizing the Cancun agreements and helping the international communitymove a step further towards a comprehensive, global framework with theparticipation of all, including robust and transparent greenhouse gas emissionsreduction commitments by all major economies, recalling the 2°C objectiveagreed upon in Cancun. With this in mind, we will cooperate closely inother relevant fora, notably the Major Economies Forum. We also intend towork together to address other global sources of emissions, including from theaviation and maritime sectors, in the appropriate multilateral forums andconsistent with applicable agreements.

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

9. The events in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya over the pastyear offer an historic opportunity for successful democratic reform in the Arabworld, inclusive economic and social development, and regionalintegration. The unfolding democratic process in Tunisia is anencouraging example of the potential for democratic transition. Egypt today hasjust begun a complex election process as the Supreme Command of the ArmedForces begins to transfer authority over civilian functions to a newgovernment. Still, considerable challenges lie ahead. As the two largestproviders of foreign assistance to the region who share coreprinciples and values that have helped our own societies and economies tointegrate, we pledge to support the democratic transitionsunderway, as well as broader political and economic reform in the region,including the constitutional reforms in Jordan and Morocco. In Libya weare working together on short term assistance and needs assessments, and willcontinue to seek new opportunities for greater cooperation, in coordinationwith the Transitional National Council and the UN, to meet the needs of theLibyan people.

10. Jointly, andthrough the Deauville Partnership effort, we intend to promote democracy, peace, and prosperity, and to increase economicgrowth and integration in the Middle East andNorth Africa. We are committed to collaborate closely in areas suchas support for democratic transitions, strengthening the positive role of civilsociety, and health and education programming. We also extend oursupport to making women’s rights a legal and practical reality in the region. We share a strong interest in economic reformand will also jointly promote best practices that support trade, investment,and job creation and deepen intra-regional trade and integration. We areboth eager to increase our trade and investment links with the region. We plan to work inpartnership with international financial institutions to ensure robust donorcoordination and in particular to ratify quickly necessary changes to theagreement establishing the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development toallow lending in the region.

11. We call on the Syrian government to end violenceimmediately, permit the immediate entry of human rights observers and internationaljournalists, and allow for a peaceful and democratic transition. We alsowelcome the agreement for political transition in Yemen and call onall political actors to help implement it in good faith, and in accordance withUNSCR 2014.

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

13. On Iran, we sharedeep concern about activities relating to the possible military dimensions ofIran’s nuclear program, as highlighted in the latest International AtomicEnergy Agency (IAEA) Director General’s report and the November 18 Board ofGovernors’ resolution. We stress our determination to ensure that Irancomplies with its obligations, including abiding by United Nations SecurityCouncil resolutions, and to cooperate fully with the IAEA to address theinternational community’s serious concerns over the nature of its nuclearprogram. We reaffirm our commitment to work toward a diplomatic solution,implement UN Security Council Resolution 1929 (2010) and other relevantSecurity Council Resolutions, and consider additional measures given Iran’scontinued failure to abide by its international obligations. We also notethe recent plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to the United States, the sanctions wehave imposed thereafter on five individuals including the head of the QodsForce, and our determination to ensure the perpetrators andtheir accomplices are held to account.

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

15. We pledge to continue ourclose cooperation in the western Balkans and reaffirm our commitment topreserve stability and to support the reforms needed to move the region forwardon its path to Euro-Atlantic integration.

16. The United Statesand the EU have a strategic interest in enhancing co-operation on political,economic, security, and human rights issues in the Asia-Pacific region toadvance peace, stability and prosperity. We intend to increase ourdialogue on Asia-Pacific issues and coordinate activities to demonstrate anenduring, high-level commitment to the region and encourage regionalintegration, including through the region’s multilateral organizations.

17. We note our continued efforts in Afghanistan andPakistan, with particular attention to plans for the December 5 Bonn Conferenceon Afghanistan and the international community’s long-term commitment tosupport sustainable securityand economic development in Afghanistan, based on effective and accountableinstitutions of governance and sustainable assistance levels, after the planneddrawdown of international military forces. We support economicdevelopment and wider reforms in Pakistan and note Pakistan’s important roleand ongoing commitment to combating terrorism and achieving peace and stabilityin Afghanistan and South Asia.

18. We note the considerable progress made since our lastmeeting in Lisbon on our commitments on a wide range of transnational securityissues that affect our citizens. We welcome the successful completion ofnegotiations on a new Passenger Name Record agreement, and look forward to itsearly adoption and ratification. We are determined to finalize negotiationson a comprehensive U.S.-EU data privacy and protection agreement that providesa high level of privacy protection for all individuals and thereby facilitatesthe exchange of data needed to fight crime and terrorism. We reaffirm our desire to complete secure visa-freetravel arrangements between the US and all Member States of the EU as soon aspossible and consistent with applicable, domestic legislation. We lookforward to a positive outcome for Administration-supported legislation thatwould refine the criteria for the Visa Waiver Program.

19. We encourage continued efforts to extend our partnership oncounter-terrorism cooperation, both bilaterally and multilaterally, includingthrough the UN. We applaud the establishment of the GlobalCounter-Terrorism Forum, and our cooperation to combat terroristfinancing. Westrongly support continuation of our joint efforts to empower diasporacommunities to counter violent extremism.

20. To strengthen our collaboration on conflictprevention and crisis response, already ongoing in many theaters, the U.S. and EU signed a framework agreement in May2011 that facilitates U.S. civilian participation in EU crisis managementmissions. Asthe trans-Atlantic community faces the challenges of crisis management in an era of fiscal austerity, we encouragefurther work to strengthen the EU-NATOstrategic partnership in crisis management, including on capabilitiesdevelopment, 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 onnon-proliferation and disarmament we adopted in 2009 and the joint statement onUNSCR 1540 in 2011. We support the conclusions and recommendations of theMay 2010 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, including the Action Planand proposed 2012 Middle East conference. We are determined to promotethe IAEA’s safeguards, Additional Protocol, and the highest standards of safetyand security for peaceful uses of nuclear energy, the Nuclear Security Summitobjectives, a successful Biological Weapons Convention Review Conference, andthe convening of a Diplomatic Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty in 2012.

22. We share a commitment to a single, globalInternet, and will resist unilateral efforts to weaken the security,reliability, or independence of its operations— recognizing that respect forfundamental freedoms online, and joint efforts to strengthen security, aremutually reinforcing. We welcome the progress made by the U.S.-EU WorkingGroup on Cybersecurity and Cybercrime, notably the successful Cyber Atlantic2011 exercise. We endorse its ambitious goals for 2012, includingcombating online sexual abuse of children; enhancing the security of domainnames and Internet Protocol addresses; promotion of international ratification,including by all EU Member States, of the Budapest Convention on Cybercrimeideally by year’s end; establishing appropriate information exchange mechanisms tojointly engage with the private sector; and confronting the unfair market access barriers that U.S. and Europeantechnology companies face abroad.

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

Jordan Starts to Shake

2011-11-25T18:17:00.001-05:00

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

2011-11-23T16:07:00.001-05:00

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

2011-11-21T12:01:00.001-05:00

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

2011-11-20T12:17:00.001-05:00

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

2011-11-14T15:13:00.001-05:00

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

2011-11-13T11:47:00.001-05:00

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

2011-11-12T12:50:00.001-05:00

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

2011-11-10T11:12:00.003-05:00

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

2011-11-06T16:49:00.000-05:00

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

2011-11-02T16:04:00.000-04:00

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

Syrian leaders foresee victory

2011-10-29T13:36:00.002-04:00

Blogger's Note: Few Western journalists get access to Syria through the government and still write an objective account. Many end up authoring reports apologetic to Assad. Bravo Liz Sly for a great story.

Liz Sly

The Washington Post

DAMASCUS, SYRIA — President Bashar al-Assad’s government is confident that it has weathered the worst of the turmoil sweeping Syria and will soon be able to overcome any remaining challenges to its survival.

Whether that confidence is justified — and how broadly it is shared — is in question. Even as the government boasts that it is prevailing over the eight-month-old uprising, the economy is imploding, protests persist in many parts of the country and an armed rebellion is stirring.

On the streets of Damascus, the capital, where the revolt has never managed to gain traction and Assad can count on significant support, the outward appearance of normalcy, the bustling streets and the packed cafes mask an undertow of mistrust and fear about where the country is heading.

But during a rare, authorized visit to Syria by a Western journalist, conducted under close government supervision, it became clear that not only do Assad and his allies appear to be in no imminent danger of falling but that they also feel no pressure to offer concessions to those who have been taking to the streets for months to call for radical change.

Rather, the government is touting a package of limited changes that would leave the existing power of the state intact while focusing on crushing the remainder of the protest movement by force. That “security first” approach has failed to prevent demonstrations from erupting repeatedly in many parts of the country, but it does appear to have diminished their size and scope.

“The Syrian leadership is quite confident and very strong, and we feel sure that despite all the international campaigns against Syria, we will survive,” said Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal al-Miqdad. “Syria is secure . . . and will be stronger after this crisis. It will be a new Syria. Give us time, and it will be reborn.”

Western diplomats scoff at the government’s plan for changes and its proposals for dialogue with a handpicked selection of mildly critical opposition figures who command little support on the streets. But the government’s confidence is rooted in more than mere bravado, they say.

Silence from the majority

Nearly eight months of protests have failed to dent the Assad family’s grip on power. There have been no significant defections from the army or the government. Though the United States and the European Union have called for Assad to step aside, vetoes at the United Nations by China and Russia have prevented the kind of united front against Syria that helped bring down Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi.

Because Syria lies at the nexus of a web of overlapping regional, sectarian and ethnic conflicts among Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, Arabs and Israelis, the government is convinced that the West will not dare intervene militarily, as it did in Libya, despite increasingly desperate pleas from the protest movement for it to do so.

“Syria has a strong army, and Syria is not alone,” said Bassem Abu Abdullah, a professor of international affairs at Damascus University and a member of the dominant Baath Party. “Attacking Syria means regional war, because we will attack Israel directly. Hezbollah will participate. Iran will participate. This is not in the interests of Europe and America.”

As the months have dragged on, the mood in the capital has shifted palpably, said Waddah Abd Rabbo, editor in chief of the state-run al-Watan newspaper.

“When this started, there was a panic,” he said. “Damascus was empty, and people were afraid. Now the government is two steps ahead of the demonstrations, so you can feel they are much more confident.”

For example, the government has unleashed huge crowds of its supporters onto the streets twice in the past 10 days to stage mass rallies that have far eclipsed any the opposition has mustered in the capital.

And although opposition activists decry the demonstrations as coerced, it appears that Assad enjoys a considerable degree of genuine support from the city’s middle- and upper-class elites, who perceive the uprising as a revolt of the provinces and the poor.

As he shopped for suits on upscale Shaalan Street, real estate agent Alaa Raji, 37, said he initially supported the demands for reform but changed his mind after demonstrators started calling for the overthrow of the president. Now he derides the protesters as tools of foreign agents and Islamic extremists.

“I don’t see them as brave, and neither do I respect them, and I don’t care if they are killed,” he said, proudly displaying on his iPhone photos of himself, wrapped in an Assad flag, attending a recent pro-government rally. “Those people want change, but they don’t know what it means, and if we follow them, maybe Syria will go down an even worse path, with chaos and foreign intervention like in Libya and Iraq.”

The ascendancy of Islamists in Tunisia and Egypt, whose revolts inspired the Syrian uprising, along with the scenes of bloodshed and destruction in Libya and the specter of Christians being killed on the streets of Cairo, have all helped reinforce the government’s argument. Assad loyalists say the demonstrations in Syria are led by Sunni extremists who would trample the secularism enforced by the Assad regime and threaten the country’s minority Christian and Alawite sects.

The failure of the Syrian opposition to present a united front and articulate a clear vision of what a post-Assad future would look like is also keeping silent the majority of Syrians, who have neither joined the protests nor support the government, Western diplomats say.

“The regime has got a plan, and this could be good enough for a lot of people who just want stability,” said one diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “What the opposition needs to do is convince them that the status quo under the regime is worse than the transition.”

Yet there are many who question whether the government’s plan will be enough to stabilize the country, even if the security forces do succeed in crushing the revolt. Thousands of people have been detained, including many key protest organizers, and dozens of activists have been forced to flee. But outside Damascus, the protests have proved irrepressible, and the death toll — already estimated by the United Nations to exceed 3,000 — rises daily, creating new resentments and new reasons to take to the streets.

‘A big hate in the country’

On Friday, 40 people died in protests calling for the imposition of a no-fly zone in Syria. Over half of those killed died in the troubled city of Homs, according to the Local Coordination Committees, a group that organizes and monitors protests.

The result of the bloodshed is a country increasingly polarized by sect, class and political conviction.

“The government is winning, but not in a big way,” said a Damascene journalist who asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the subject. “We’re standing still, and the problem is, there’s a big hate in the country now.”

Though the majority has not decided where its loyalties lie, “I don’t call it a silent majority. It’s a fearful majority,” the journalist said. “They are afraid of everything, afraid of now and afraid for the future they don’t know.

“The protests are smaller now, because the army is there, but what happens when you remove the army?”

And protests erupt on a regular basis, even in Damascus. On a government-escorted visit to the working-class and deeply conservative Midan neighborhood, the calm of one recent afternoon was suddenly shattered by the sound of merchants pulling down their shutters as a roar began to swell. A “martyr” to the cause of the opposition — a soldier who had defected in Homs — was being buried, and his funeral procession was accompanied by a noisy anti-government demonstration.

“God is great!” shouted those in the crowd of several hundred young men, as they marched up the narrow street toward a cemetery. And then, with greater force, arose the chant of what has become the chief rallying cry of the protest movement around the country: “The people want the execution of the president!”

The rage, energy and determination were palpable, suggesting that these young men, who have been taking to the streets on a regular basis since March, will not soon tire of their efforts to topple the regime.

A short distance and a world away, a group of students from privileged families debated politics over lattes and cigarettes in a cafe at the glitzy Cham City mall. Four of them supported the government to varying degrees. A fifth, who gave his name as Bassam, remained silent until asked for his views.

“I support the protesters, and I want total change. Including the president,” he said, adding that he had taken part in protests.

The tone of the discussion shifted abruptly.

“My president is untouchable, and I will kill people for him, just as they are killing against him,” screamed one of the students, Mariam, as she kicked Bassam under the table.

Bassam responded quietly that he was prepared to die for the sake of change. “My life is not more precious than the lives of those who have gone before,” he said.

The friends checked their watches and said it was time to go. Taking their farewells, they headed into the darkening streets and went their separate ways.

Syrian Government Targets Wounded And Health Workers

2011-10-24T17:13:00.005-04:00

Amnesty International

A few weeks ago we reported how Syrian authorities went global with their repression by targeting Syrian activists abroad.

In a sign of further escalation,Syrian authorities have turned hospitals and medical staff into instruments of repression in their efforts to crush the unprecedented mass protests and demonstrations.

People wounded in protests or other incidents related to the uprising have been verbally abused and physically assaulted in state-run hospitals, including by medical staff, and in some cases denied medical care, in gross breach of medical ethics, and many of those taken to hospital have been detained.

A 28-year old patient who was shot in the foot in May 2011 reported to us what a doctor at Homs military hospital was saying:

I’m not going to clean your wound… I’m waiting for your foot to rot so that we can cut it off.

Afraid of the consequences of going to a government hospital, many people have chosen to seek treatment either at private hospitals or at poorly equipped makeshift field hospitals.

But blood supplies in Syria can only be obtained from the Central Blood Bank, which is controlled by the Defense Ministry, leaving private hospitals with a terrible dilemma. One medic who had worked a private hospital in Homs told us:

We faced a dilemma every time we received a patient with a firearm injury and an urgent need of blood: if we send a request to the Central Blood Bank, the security would know about him and we would be putting him at risk or arrest and torture, and possibly death in custody.

Medical workers have themselves been targeted by security forces, some for treating injured people, others on suspicion of attending demonstrations or filming protesters.

Ambulance under fire

On September 7th, 2011 at 10:13pm, the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) was called to pick up a wounded man in al-Warshe area of Homs. The driver and four SARC paramedics and volunteers wearing their SARC uniforms headed there in an ambulance flashing its red and blue lights.

They stopped at a checkpoint in al-Hameediye neighborhood. Unusually, the security officer in charge there said that if the person’s injuries were serious, the ambulance could take a shorter route to the hospital avoiding the security checkpoint on the way back. According to a SARC officer, there was no sound of gun fire at the time and the situation in the area was calm.

However, when the ambulance had picked up the wounded person at about 10:35pm, it came under fire, apparently from the security forces as it took the alternative route from Haret al-Hameediye to Abu al-Hol Street. Three SARC volunteers were injured, including Mohamed Hakam Durraq al-Siba’i who died eight days later.

Video footage and photos taken after the attack shows at least 12 bullet holes in the ambulance and blood stains on the floor and on a bench inside the vehicle.

Join us in taking action by asking the Syrian government to stop targeting wounded and health workers in Syria

To learn more about the human rights situation in Syria, I encourage you to explore the interactive Eyes on Syria website. For regular updates on the crisis in Syria, please follow me on Twitter.

PS: Special thanks to Digital Globe and Tomnod for providing current satellite imagery from Syria

Happening Now in Syria: Edlib Mass Rally with Banner 'Congratulations Libya, Soon in Syria'

2011-10-21T10:47:00.002-04:00

Rallies took place across Syrian cities, town and villages today Friday October 21, 2011 in which Syrians demanded an end to the autocratic rule of their dictator Bashar Assad. Syrians have been rallying massively every Friday since March 15, giving each one of these Fridays a theme, and a name. Today was the "Friday of the Martyrs of the Arab Chance."

Syrians who took to the streets this Friday, expressed their frustration with the many chances that the Arab League has given Assad so far to stop his violence against peaceful civilian demonstrators. The Arab League gave Assad 15 days to resolve the problem without using violence. Assad ignored the plea.

After the arrest and murder of Libya's Moammar Qadhafi at the hands of rebels, yesterday,Assad agreed to receive the Arab League delegation in Damascus on Wednesday. The Syrians, unsatisfied and still rallying en masse, put up the pre-Assad Syrian flag (in the picture above in Edlib today), with four words in Arabic that read: "Congratulations Libya, Soon (in) Syria."

#OccupyWallStreet: Happening NOW- Anti-corporate rally in DC, messages from SEIU and MoveOn

2011-10-06T15:31:00.001-04:00

Pictures above were taken today at Freedom Plaza on Penn Ave, Washington, DC, a few blocks form the White House and the US Capitol. Below are two messages. The first is from Mary Kay Henry, President of Service Employees International Union. the Second from Daniel Mitz, of MoveOn.org

Message from Mary Kay Henry:

By now you've seen thethousands of brave students, workers and the unemployed occupying Wall Street.

But did you know that as of yesterday, there are over 300 solidarity"occupy events" happening across the country and around the clock?

In Philadelphia, 1,000+ individuals took to City Hall on Tuesday night.

In Washington, D.C., people have camped out in McPherson Square, symbolicallylocated on K Street, since last week.

In L.A., citizens have spent six straight days and nights outside City Hallprotesting against income inequality and joblessness.

The crowds and peaceful demonstrations will only get larger and louder as moreAmericans find the courage to stand up and demand Wall Street, CEOs andmillionaires pay their fair share to create good jobs now.

This is the moment that determines whether this movement succeeds or fallsflat. Will you pledge to help the movement spread by visiting an Occupy eventin Washington? You can sign up and find a comprehensive list of events here:

http://action.seiu.org/occupy-wall-street

Over the last few weekswe've seen crowds of "Occupy Wall Street" protestors capture thenation's attention as they stood their ground despite aggressive policebehavior and hundreds of arrests.

These courageous young activists have given us all a shot of inspiration andhope that we can indeed turn this country around.

We are proud of the actions taken by 1199 United Healthcare Workers East, SEIU32BJ and other SEIU local unions to support the Wall Street protests.

But as we talk to other "Occupy" participants across the country,they tell us their first need is people.

So we're working with our friends at Daily Kos to see if we can help.

Find an Occupy event happening in your city and pledge to sign up to getinvolved. You can do that here:

http://action.seiu.org/occupy-wall-street

As part of a peaceful, united movement we can do so much more to demonstratethe increasing urgency of the crisis our country faces and shine a light onthose responsible.

Let's go for it!

In solidarity,

Mary Kay Henry
President, SEIU

And from Mitz:

Dear MoveOnmember,
Are youwatching what's happening in New York? What started as an occupation of WallStreet—the heart of everything that's wrong with our economy—with a small,brave group of young people is growing and spreading to every state.
And themedia is finally starting to pay attention to the tens of thousands of peopleshouting that if we make Wall Street pay, we can have jobs instead of cuts. Ifwe can keep the spotlight on these issues, we have a chance to force action onpolicies that work for the 99% of us who can't afford lobbyists.
That's whywe're joining with the American Dream movement to hold actions for Jobs NotCuts nationwide during the week of October 10-16. From protesting banks notpaying their fair share, to memorials for the American Dream, to local ralliesagainst layoffs, we'll escalate our demand for Jobs Not Cuts, which we canafford as long as Wall Street pays its fair share.
Can you helpmake this too big to ignore by coming to a Jobs Not Cuts event in Washington onSaturday, Oct. 15, 2011, at 11:00 AM?

Yes,I'll be there.

When yousign up, you can indicate if you're currently unemployed, underemployed, orhave lost your home, and are willing to share your story. The human faces ofthe protesters occupying Wall Street, talking about how this economy has leftthem behind, are what's made their protests so powerful.
Now we haveto stand in solidarity with them and raise our voices to demand thateveryone—even the billionaires on Wall Street—pay their fair share towardrebuilding the American Dream.
Can you joina Jobs Not Cuts event in Washington on Saturday, Oct. 15, 2011, at 11:00 AM?

Yes,I'll be there.

Thanks forall you do.
–Daniel,Carrie, Laura, Joan, and the rest of the team

Assad is growing weaker

2011-10-03T13:56:00.001-04:00

An image grab from a YouTube video shows defected Syrian soldiers standing on tanks amid demonstrators in Hama. Defecting soldiers are a major threat to the Assad regime. (AFP photo/YouTube)

Hussain Abdul-Hussain

NOW Lebanon

A ferocious battle was taking place in Rastan between army defectors and loyalists to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Witnesses said the ranks of the rebels swelled when more soldiers defected from the attacking pro-Assad forces. Benefitting from the support of the local population, the defectors unexpectedly held their ground and inflicted heavy casualties on the attackers, forcing the army to use air power to bombard the town randomly and teach both defectors and civilians a lesson.

But six months after the outbreak of the uprising, it seems that Assad is the one who needs to learn some lessons. Brutality has succeeded in subduing dozens of the flashpoint Syrian cities and towns only as long as Assad keeps his tanks in the squares and his snipers on rooftops. When these are redeployed to quell the uprising elsewhere, protesters take to the streets again to demand Assad step down.

Syria has seemingly reached a stalemate between Assad's loyalists and those calling for his ouster. But the rebels have time on their side, especially given their tested determination and resilience.

Assad, for his part, has employed a two-pronged strategy: the unlimited use of violence coupled with a propaganda campaign aimed at scaring Syria's minorities and foreign powers of the consequences of his possible downfall.

With the decline of America's power in the region and with the potential for a power vacuum to prevail, many fear the future if Assad were to fall. The scenarios have varied between a civil war that might spill into Iraq and Lebanon, and a radical Islamist takeover. News reports are also buzzing with unverifiable stories that army defectors and civilian activists have been arming.

Syrian rebels fall into four general categories. One is composed of dissidents in exile who have no influence over the course of events but can help lobby world powers in favor of the uprising. The other three types of activist are inside Syria, and two of them have been instrumental in stirring the uprising.

Peaceful activists, organized into loosely connected Coordination Committees, have been the main engine of the uprising.

They organize protests and tape them, and run a sophisticated social media campaign. The probability of these people turning violent is slim.

Another group influencing events inside Syria is the army defectors, who have so far organized themselves into the Free Officers, the Free Syrian Army, and the Khaled Bin al-Walid Battalion in Homs and the Omar Ibn al-Khattab Battalion in Deir al-Zour. Estimated at more than 10,000, these soldiers have ambushed Assad's loyalists and engaged them in battles, though they often run out of ammunition and get decimated.

The last group is formed of intellectuals and opposition figures living in Syria who were active before the uprising began.

They have no influence with either the peaceful activists or the army defectors. A few of them have been co-opted by Assad and have been arguing that a civil war is inevitable, thus aggravating the fear of a post-Assad Syria. Many of them call for dialogue with Assad as the only way to end the strife.

More soldiers will probably defect, and some may join forces with tribal fighters and procure arms off the black market, but they will by no means be able to get their hands on enough firepower to make a dent in the official armed forces. If the Libya war tells us anything, it is that ragtag militias without foreign intervention cannot stop, let alone defeat, an organized army like the units still loyal to Assad.

Still, despite Assad's brutal upper hand, time is on the rebels’ side.

Last week, the government banned the import of any commodity with a tax that is higher than five percent to prevent the flow of hard currency out of Syria, leading experts to conclude that the volume of Syria's reserves is much smaller than the $18 billion Syria's Central Bank governor, Adib Mayyaleh, previously announced.

The minute Assad runs out of foreign currency, the Syrian pound will stop being worth the paper it is printed on. Hyperinflation will hit, and Assad will not be able to pay his fighters.

Unlike Libya's Moammar Qaddafi, who had an estimated $15 billion in cash in the vaults of his Central Bank during the fight for Tripoli, Assad's resources are meager, especially after Europe slapped sanctions on the country’s oil sector last week.

Assad is growing weaker by the hour. If Syrians continue protesting, there is no way he can keep his terror campaign going. There is no worldwide radical Alawite network to bolster the regime or protect the sect’s interests if Assad is ousted. There are no foreign troops to rally Syrians against. Assad is running out of cash and excuses. Sometime soon, he will be the commander of a minority that fears that a continuation of the battle will spell its end, and it will either force Assad to give up or it will give up on him

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

Happening Now: Yemeni-Syrian protest in front of the UN demanding resignation of Saleh, Assad

2011-09-30T18:15:00.000-04:00

In Senate vote, a win for the middle class and a rebuke to China

2011-09-30T12:16:00.004-04:00

By Harold Meyerson

The Washington Post

The news that our trade with China has been bad for the American middle class has finally reached the U.S. Senate. On Monday, the Senate will take up legislation that would impose tariffs on Chinese goods so long as China depresses the value of its currency. Despite the partisan polarization that grinds lawmaking to a halt these days, the bill’s support is thoroughly bipartisan, with sponsors ranging from such conservative Republicans as South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham to liberal Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown. The legislation is expected to clear the Senate’s 60-vote hurdle for a floor vote and move on to the House.

For students of America’s deranged romance with free trade, the fact that the Senate is willing to take on China is little short of amazing. Since the 1980s, the House has been the legislative body where epic battles have been waged over the free-trade agreements that have decimated American manufacturing. The impact of factory closures on congressional districts is generally too big for representatives to ignore. Local manufacturers and bankers, no less than local union members, complain to their House members; when the town’s biggest employer leaves, grief knows no party. Senators, on the other hand, move in a larger world, one where Wall Street contributors and Washington pundits assure them that free trade is invariably good. So while the House has been home to furious fights over NAFTA, CAFTA and extending permanent normalized trade relations to China, the Senate has long passed such measures with much less fuss and sublime indifference to the consequences.

But the consequences can no longer be denied. Between 2001 and 2010, the U.S. trade deficit with China cost Americans 2.8 million jobs, according to a report by economist Robert Scott, issued last week by the liberal Economic Policy Institute. Most of those jobs — 1.9 million — were in manufacturing, and of those, almost half were in computers and electronics.

This wasn’t simply the consequence of China’s cheaper labor or more generous corporate subsidies. As China’s productivity soared during the past decade, the value of its currency should have risen correspondingly. Instead, China purchased dollars, which had the effect of depressing the yuan and making Chinese exports about 28 percent cheaper than they would be if the yuan had been allowed to appreciate, William Cline and John Williamson found in a study for the centrist Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Data like these have been floating around for years, of course. Until now, however, the Senate has remained largely impervious to the evidence of Chinese cheating and American decay. But elite opinion, which the Senate does heed, is finally catching up with mass opinion on whether losing our manufacturing base is a bad thing. An influential July 2009 article in the Harvard Business Review by economists Gary Pisano and Willy Shih argued that losing manufacturing meant losing our edge in innovation, that the relationship between research and production was reciprocal. This would not have come as news to Thomas Edison, but few on Wall Street or in corporate boardrooms the past two decades believed that America’s prosperity and dynamism required the retention and renewal of manufacturing.

Even now, it’s hard to find many there who believe that. Finance has fattened on manufacturing’s decline, as consumer debt replaced producer wages as the fuel that makes America run (and crash). And finance still has friends in Washington. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which represents many American corporations that make their products in China, opposes the Senate legislation. Ironically, now that the Senate is on the verge of passing the bill, Politico reports that House Republican leaders have no intention of bringing the bill to a vote. House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor don’t want to jeopardize their assiduously cultivated Wall Street funding — even though polls show rank-and-file Republicans want a more assertive economic posture toward China. That’s doubtless one reason why Mitt Romney has vowed to impose tariffs on China the day he becomes president.

Our current president, meanwhile, has maintained a discreet silence on the Senate bill. Barack Obama has said that he wants the United States to double its exports over the next five years, but expanding American manufacturing on that scale can’t be done if China continues to eat our lunch. No issue divides Wall Street from Main Street more than trade, and winning Main Street’s support in next year’s election will require Obama to stand up more than he has for America’s industrial interests. Hell, even the Senate has figured that one out.

Syria Today: Massive rallies everywhere on "Syria and Yemen Friday"

2011-09-30T12:00:00.001-04:00

Former Lebanese Prime Minister and Bashar Assad crony Salim Hoss visited Damascus two days ago. In a press release, he quoted Assad as saying that the Syrian revolution "was over" and that "the situation in Syria was back under control." The picture above, in Deraa today Friday Sep 30, 2011, says otherwise. While Assad insists that he has succeeded in killing the revolution, scores of the Syrians in the streets think otherwise.

The China Scare

2011-09-29T18:23:00.001-04:00

Hussain Abdul-Hussain
The Huffington Post

China's economic growth has left the West in awe. Some, like The Economist, believe that the East's rise and the West's decline are inevitable. Others, like Coca-Cola chief Muhtar Kent, argue that the developing world has been "learning very fast" while the developed one has forgotten "what really worked 20 years ago."

The Industrial Revolution gave the West the chance for "economic divergence," and subsequent military and political supremacy, as it amassed wealth that was not proportional to the size of its population, according to The Economist. But that was an "anomaly." Over the past decade, the emerging world (China, India and Brazil) has been closing the gap. Now is the time for "economic convergence," which will see the weight of the world economy shift from the West to the East. From now on, like before the Industrial Revolution, the size of the population will decide the wealth of the nation.

If such hypothesis stands, together with the Malthusian theory of finite earth resources, the world will go to war as the East tries to adjust the status quo in its favor, unless China gets caught in the so-called "middle-income" trap. This happens because the mercantile Chinese model is based on export. With sinking American and European demand, China will need replacement markets and will have to let is currency appreciate and urge its citizens to spend in order to keep its factories working.

But when the Chinese become rich, their pool of cheap labor -- which has given the nation much of its current growth -- will shrink and jobs will start fleeing to countries with cheaper labor. Cambodia and Vietnam are already "steeling" minion Chinese jobs.

Consumption might also turn China into another America as non-tradable jobs (services) replace tradable ones (industrial). National debt will rise and growth will slow down.

For China to overtake the West in ways other than being the world's biggest sweatshop or its largest mall, there must be alternative routes, and these seem out of reach given Beijing's current political system.

Like China, the West owes much of its world supremacy to prosperity. Yet unlike China, the rise of the West was not only economic. Democracy, freedom, equality and the rule of law have all contributed to Western advances. If the weight of the world economy shifts East, in the absence of such governance concepts, then our assumptions about the influence of the European Renaissance on Western ascendency are wrong, and economic power becomes a mere function of cheap labor wherever it is tapped.

China has not dominated the world yet, and it might not be able to do so through the creation of a business friendly environment alone. Kent's argument that countries like China are more inviting for businesses should be examined, especially given that China ranks 78 on the index of corruption, compared to say the United States, which ranks 22. It is hard to believe that corporations prefer more corrupt governments, even if those offer better tax brackets.

Lower taxes certainly attract some corporations. Washington should lower taxes for say Caterpillar to keep its factories open in America. But companies like telecom giant ATT have nowhere else to go if it wants to tap the huge American market. For Coca-Cola too, production offshore then importing into America is less profitable than keeping its American operation going, even at taxes higher than elsewhere.

In fact, despite its impressive economic growth, China is not easily accessible to all companies. According to Clyde Prestowitz, General Electric (GE) said it will transfer "its Synthetic Vision system (enables aircraft landings in extremely low visibility situations) and other leading edge technologies (often developed in part with U.S. government funding) to its joint venture with China's state-owned AVIC for production and sale to the state-owned aircraft maker now developing the new Chinese commercial airliner that will compete with Boeing in international markets in the future."

GE is clearly going after China's big market, no matter the tax bracket, and apparently regardless of long-term losses from transferring its exclusive technology. China is not growing because of its tax cuts, but because its government is luring multinational companies to develop its market, meanwhile forcing technology transfer that helps its companies to replicate products and then knock out the multinationals. This can go only as long as China has cheap labor. If China wants to become an economic powerhouse, however, it needs Research and Development (R&D), which in turn depends on free societies than can host peer-reviewed research.

No matter how much money China throws on R&D, its creativity will remain low with Communist Party shenanigans controlling universities. If universities become free, they might give the Chinese regime a hard time. If the press follows, it might challenge China's current economic policies and demand more transparency. Any alterations in China's economic system might change some fundamentals on which the Chinese miracle stands today in unpredictable ways. China's rise is all but guaranteed.

The West might still have a couple of assets up its sleeve. While it needs to replace its bubble-creating economic policies with ones that revive industrial production, its ongoing recession since 2008 does not tell of an inevitable decline and displacement from world leadership.

Reuters gives Assad's propaganda a hand

2011-09-28T17:39:00.001-04:00

Syria's Bashar Assad and his propaganda machine have been threatening with doom and gloom should his regime crumble. They threaten with civil wars in Iraq and Lebanon in case Assad is deposed.

Reuters, the all respectable news wire, has either run out of story ideas or is trying to give Assad's propaganda machine a hand. In a feature analysis that is way too far fetched and makes no sense, Reuters posted this piece:
Analysis: Iraqi Shi'ites fear fallout of Syria turbulence

Without quoting anyone, the author Rania El Gamal (most probably Egyptian), presented this statement as a fact: "The anti-Assad movement has sought to shun any sectarian agenda, but Sunni Islamists may emerge as a significant force if the president is deposed."

It was Assad's propaganda that first accused protesters of being radical Islamists from day one, in a bid to keep Syrian non-Alawite minorities, such as the Kurds and Christians, away from the revolution. Also, when the author wrote that Sunni Islamists may emerge as a force after Assad, did she mean radical Islamists? Or mere Sunnis?

The article argued that pro-Iran Shiites control Iraq, even though Iraqi PM Nouri Maliki ran on a ticket that confronted, and mostly defeated, Iran allies in parliamentary elections.

The piece then quoted a certain Iraqi "analyst," Ibrahim Sumaidaie, who said this: "To protect their interests, Syria, Hezbollah and Iran would try to unsettle the security situation in Iraq through their relationships with Shi'ites and Sunnis."

The question is, if Iran controls Iraq like the article argued, why would Tehran want to unsettle its neighbor? If anything, Iran would want to consolidate Shiite power in Iraq to compensate for losing Syria to the Sunnis after Assad crumbles.

The article also quoted the Iraqi analyst as saying: "Saudi Arabia and the Sunni Arab powers will try to redraw the political map in Iraq to increase Sunni influence in decision-making because until now they have not made peace with Shi'ite rule here."

The question here: Why would Saudi Arabia and the Sunni want to wait before unsettling Iraq and reshaping it in their favor? And why are the events in Syria a factor for the Sunni decision? Perhaps if Assad is deposed and Syria becomes Sunni-ruled, Saudis and the Sunnis will feel compensated for losing Iraq and will consolidate their power there instead of waging a war with no guaranteed results against the Shiite majority in Iraq.

It is unfortunate that such a badly argued piece that only spews Assad propaganda came from Reuters.

Some fact checking on the Arabs would not hurt The Washington Post

2011-09-28T11:54:00.001-04:00

The Washington Post today ran this miserable piece "Why do human rights groups ignore Palestinians’ war of words?" by the founder of Human Rights Watch Robert Bernstein. It is nearly impossible to get a rebuttal published in the Post. A brief response below.

"Two dominant forces have defined Arab nations in modern times: autocratic leadership that has denied basic freedoms to its own people, and a deeply ingrained and institutionalized anti-Semitism, centered on a hatred of Israel," Bernstein wrote. "This is particularly true in Gaza, the West Bank, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran," he added.

Judging by his poorly argued article full of stereotypes, Bernstein could be excused for his mistake. He is not aware that neither Pakistan nor Iran are Arab. But were where the Post's fact-checking editors to let such a grave mistake find its way to their pages?

After talking about "Arab nations" in a sweeping manner, accusing all of them of cultivating of a culture centered around "the hatred of Israel," Bernstein tries to lump Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas with the radical Arab elements like Hamas and Hezbollah, even though Abbas and these two groups are archenemies. Bernstein wants to undermine Abbas's application to the UN for Palestinian statehood. He writes: "[W]hile portraying himself to the West as a man of compromise, Abbas said flatly last October that 'we refuse to recognize a Jewish state."

In the website version of the article, Abbas's quote is linked to a youtube video, posted by MEMRI, of a sound bite from Abbas in which he actually utters these words. But Bernstein takes Abbas's words out of context. In the video, right before saying "we refuse to recognize a Jewish state," Abbas said "we are not the party to address" on this matter. This makes more sense. What Abbas was trying to say was that he and the Palestinian Authority had no capacity to say whether Israel qualifies as a Jewish state or not. Let them go to the UN and get such recognition, he told his interviewer.

Abbas did not mean that he was opposed to the creation of the state of Israel or that he had abandoned the two-state solution, which he was fighting for – against Israel's objections – last week at the UN. Abbas simply said that he was in no position to say whether Israel is Jewish or not. That would be Israel's business. But Bernstein does not care. He wants to implicate Abbas with the terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah in order to undermine his quest for Palestinian statehood.

At any rate, the article is poor. It takes minor incidents and blows them out of proportion to show that every Arab hates Israel. In the Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria and Yemen, there has been no expression of any hatred of Israel (such as flag burning) in any one of the thousands of still ongoing protests. The only such incidents happened in Egypt when soccer hooligans assaulted the Israeli embassy, twice, and even those shameful Egyptian acts came in the aftermath of the killing of Egyptian troops on the border with Israel. The Egyptian assaults on the Israeli Embassy in Cairo were denounced by scores of Arab officials and intelligentsia, a stance that clearly did not find its way to Bernstein's article, MEMRI videos, or the Post's pages.

Bill Clinton: Netanyahu killed the peace process

2011-09-23T17:21:00.003-04:00

Josh Rogin

Foreign Policy

Who's to blame for the continued failure of the Middle East peace process? Former President Bill Clinton said today that it is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu -- whose government moved the goalposts upon taking power, and whose rise represents a key reason there has been no Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.

Clinton, in a roundtable with bloggers today on the sidelines of the Clinton Global Initiative in New York, gave an extensive recounting of the deterioration in the Middle East peace process since he pressed both parties to agree to a final settlement at Camp David in 2000. He said there are two main reasons for the lack of a comprehensive peace today: the reluctance of the Netanyahu administration to accept the terms of the Camp David deal and a demographic shift in Israel that is making the Israeli public less amenable to peace.

"The two great tragedies in modern Middle Eastern politics, which make you wonder if God wants Middle East peace or not, were [Yitzhak] Rabin's assassination and [Ariel] Sharon's stroke," Clinton said.

Sharon had decided he needed to build a new centrist coalition, so he created the Kadima party and gained the support of leaders like Tzipi Livni and Ehud Olmert. He was working toward a consensus for a peace deal before he fell ill, Clinton said. But that effort was scuttled when the Likud party returned to power.

"The Israelis always wanted two things that once it turned out they had, it didn't seem so appealing to Mr. Netanyahu. They wanted to believe they had a partner for peace in a Palestinian government, and there's no question -- and the Netanyahu government has said -- that this is the finest Palestinian government they've ever had in the West Bank," Clinton said.

"[Palestinian leaders] have explicitly said on more than one occasion that if [Netanyahu] put up the deal that was offered to them before -- my deal -- that they would take it," Clinton said, referring to the 2000 Camp David deal that Yasser Arafat rejected.

But the Israeli government has drifted a long way from the Ehud Barak-led government that came so close to peace in 2000, Clinton said, and any new negotiations with the Netanyahu government are now on starkly different terms -- terms that the Palestinians are unlikely to accept.

"For reasons that even after all these years I still don't know for sure, Arafat turned down the deal I put together that Barak accepted," he said. "But they also had an Israeli government that was willing to give them East Jerusalem as the capital of the new state of Palestine."

Israel also wants a normalization of relations with its Arab neighbors to accompany a peace deal. Clinton said that the Saudi-inspired Arab Peace Initiative put forth in 2002 represented an answer to that Israeli demand.

"The King of Saudi Arabia started lining up all the Arab countries to say to the Israelis, ‘if you work it out with the Palestinians ... we will give you immediately not only recognition but a political, economic, and security partnership,'" Clinton said. "This is huge.... It's a heck of a deal."

The Netanyahu government has received all of the assurances previous Israeli governments said they wanted but now won't accept those terms to make peace, Clinton said.

"Now that they have those things, they don't seem so important to this current Israeli government, partly because it's a different country," said Clinton. "In the interim, you've had all these immigrants coming in from the former Soviet Union, and they have no history in Israel proper, so the traditional claims of the Palestinians have less weight with them."

Clinton then repeated his assertions made at last year's conference that Israeli society can be divided into demographic groups that have various levels of enthusiasm for making peace.

"The most pro-peace Israelis are the Arabs; second the Sabras, the Jewish Israelis that were born there; third, the Ashkenazi of long-standing, the European Jews who came there around the time of Israel's founding," Clinton said. "The most anti-peace are the ultra-religious, who believe they're supposed to keep Judea and Samaria, and the settler groups, and what you might call the territorialists, the people who just showed up lately and they're not encumbered by the historical record."

Clinton affirmed that the United States should veto the Palestinian resolution at the U.N. Security Council for member-state status, because the Israelis need security guarantees before agreeing to the creation of a Palestinian state. But the Netanyahu government has moved away from the consensus for peace, making a final status agreement more difficult, Clinton said.

"That's what happened. Every American needs to know this. That's how we got to where we are," Clinton said. "The real cynics believe that the Netanyahu's government's continued call for negotiations over borders and such means that he's just not going to give up the West Bank."

Interviewing Hussain Abdul-Hussain

2011-09-23T15:00:00.002-04:00

The Gatekeeper Post

Hussain Abdul-Hussain is an Amazon reviewer. Hussain is an avid reader and always on the look for good books to read.

What motivated you to become so active as a Amazon reviewer?

As an avid book reader, I am always hunting for good books, and these are like other market commodities, come in all shapes and colors. Some are excellent, others do not live up to their advertisement. When buying a book, I go through reader reviews to determine whether I will buy it or not. To me, there is nothing worse than buying a book and getting disappointed after the first few pages. Book readers like me have limited resources that we cannot squander on books that will not give us the reading fix that we need. Along these lines, I decided to be helpful to other readers and started, in 2004, writing my reviews and posting them. It helped that being a journalist made it easier for me to write quickly and post.

What are some of the best books you’ve read this year?

Robert Lacey’s Inside the Kingdom (ofSaudi Arabia) was refreshing. I enjoyed very much reading it. I recommend it to those interested in Middle Eastern affairs. Clyde Prestowitz’s The Betrayal of American Prosperity is one of the best and most interesting books on American economic decline. It is an entertaining read too. I read a few other good Arabic books I wish I could recommend them to English readers.

Over all, it is hard to find books that make smart arguments and are entertaining at the same time. Publishers seek higher sales and — judging by the quality of books topping the charts — the majority of readers seem to have become more interested in biographies of celebrities or how dogs see the world or how to get fit in 10 days.

What kind of books are you looking to review?

Sarah Shield’s Fezzes in the River, a history account about howTurkeysucceeded in 1939 in annexing a piece of land whose residents had been predominantly Syrian, recently captured me. I am planning to write a good review about her book and recommend it to readers. I also read Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s book In My Time. However, I am reluctant to write a review. My experience after reviewing the books of his boss George Bush and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is that, no matter what I write, my post turns into a partisan battlefield. Those who support Bush and the Republicans expect praise, no matter what is in the book. Those who oppose Bush and the Democrats want a bad review. I guess these books do not need reviews for potential buyers/readers like me. These books have their fans and foes already lined up with or without reviews.

What’s the best way for authors & publishers to submit to you?

They can email me at hussainabdulhussain@ymail.com and I can then give them my mailing address. My areas of expertise are theMiddle East, US Foreign Policy and US Economics.

Happening Now: Protest at UN against Assad and Ahmedinejad

2011-09-22T11:30:00.000-04:00

In Syria, Meet the Terrorist: The Story of Ghayyath Tayseer Matar

2011-09-11T11:42:00.002-04:00

This is the picture of Ghayyath Tayseer Matar, 26, who was married and expecting his first baby. Ghayyath was arrested on March 25, 2011 in one of the first demonstrations in Damascus calling for an end to the 42-year old Assad dictatorship. His ID card, cell phone and camera were confiscated but he managed to slip away of the hands of security agents and had been on the run since then, during which he organized hundreds of protests, most of which he led while shouting slogans for people to repeat after him.

Activists say he was on the "Wanted List" of General Jamil Hassan, Chief of the Air Force Intelligence, whose men set up a trap for Ghayyath by forcing his brother Mohamed to call him, tell him he was in danger and force him to meet. On September 6, 2011, perhaps as part of Bashar Assad's reform efforts, General Hassan called Ghayyath's father, Tayseer, and told him that he had his son, and that the son's throat that shouted slogans against Assad would be slashed. On September 10, 2011, the general called again on the family to "receive" their son's body, tortured and deformed in the throat area.

Matar is the latest in the series of Syrian heroes whom Assad claim to be terrorist. He will certainly not be the last, unless the world stands up and says to Assad: Enough is enough.

There Will Be No Civil War in Syria

2011-09-08T14:18:00.003-04:00

Syria's Freedom of Expression by Ali Farzat

Hussain Abdul-Hussain
The Huffington Post

Despite all the doom and gloom by analysts, many of them my friends like Hussein Ibish, David Igantiusand Nicholas Blanford, who argue that civil war in Syria looks inevitable, I disagree. I rather believe that until this minute, there are no signs that Syria is heading to war. On the contrary, all indicators show that the main players in Syria are trying to keep war at bay, each party for its own reasons.

President Bashar Assad, who belongs to the minority Alawite group that forms 10 percent of Syria's 22 million people, has not abandoned the idea of his control of Syria, all of Syria. Civil war means that Assad's undisputed control will be checked by smaller militias.

Even though Assad's propaganda outlets, such as state-run Syria TV and his cousin-owned Dunya TV, have so far peddled the idea that the regime has been fighting Sunni extremist groups, they have done so only to justify Assad's usage of excessive brutality to quell peaceful protesters.

Assad wants demonstrators out of the streets. He realizes that the usage of mass scale killings will bring an even bigger international uproar against his actions. Therefore, with a few exceptions, the death toll in Syria has teetered on the verge of 15 daily. Despite the unmatched power of Assad's mechanized army, the Syrian president realizes that he cannot kill the revolution against his rule. He plans to slowly bruise it until it drops dead.

Syria's revolutionaries, for their part, realize that no matter how many Sunni officers and soldiers defect from army units, and even if these receive funds and arms from foreign powers, it will take a long time for them to train and form a militia that can stand on par with Assad's forces. The Libyan experience shows that a ragtag army is as good as foreign fighter jets pounding enemy targets, a lesson not lost on the Syrians.

Weakness of the revolutionaries has forced them to stick with their peaceful protests and there is no reason to believe that they will change course and abandon a tactic that has shaken Assad and his regime in favor of a military one that gives Assad the advantage.

But since six months have passed and international pressure has not caused any dent in Assad's brutal behavior, many revolutionaries -- and analysts -- now believe that it is time for armed action against Assad. Analysts argue that it is at this point that the Sunni extremist Salafi or Salafi-Jihadist elements will jump on board and turn the confrontation into a bloody civil war with suicide bombings hitting mosques and churches.

Civil war experience in neighboring countries such as Lebanon (1975-1990) and Iraq (2006-2008), however, suggest that civil war in Syria is least probable. For such a conflict to break out, central authority has to break down first. That is not the case with Assad yet.

Yet Assad cannot stand resilient forever. If the protests continue for a few more months, the economy might crumble and hyperinflation might hit the Syrian pound, which means that Assad will not be able pay his army and his growing band of thugs.

If Assad's power starts failing him in terrorizing big cities, occupying their squares and placing snipers on their high rises, towns might start slipping out of his control. Revolutionaries will start organizing in these territories to escalate their protest movement, in which case Assad and his lieutenants might fall back to the mountainous land of their ancestors in the North West. Assad might be able to hold his grounds in the Alawite Mountain for a while, but -- isolated and outnumbered -- his battle will certainly be a losing one, which might in turn invite the elderly Alawites to counsel him to give up and go into exile before dooming the community to an endless revenge cycle with Syria's other groups.

But what happens if Assad crumbles, yet decides to fight to the end? He will most probably go on the run, like Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Libya's Moammar Gaddafi before him. He will send out recordings instigating his loyalists to continue the fight.

Post-Assad Alawite behavior will then decide whether Syria goes to civil war or not. Better armed and funded, the Alawites might desperately fight to retain power. But they might also decide that, being outnumbered at 10 to 1, they better jockey politically for a better share in post-Assad Syria, just like Sunnis ended up doing in post-Saddam Iraq.

Civil wars don't just happen. In the more diversified Lebanon, civil war only broke out in 1975 when Yasser Arafat's Palestinian militias relocated from Jordan in 1970 and succeeded in undermining central authority. Syria then sent in its army and contributed to a stalemate and to rounds of fighting for another 15 years.

In Iraq, after Saddam's feared central authority collapsed in March 2003, it was an Al-Qaeda franchise -- joining forces with now outcast former Sunni regime elements -- that waged war first on American troops, then on Shiite Iraqis, and only managed to provoke the latter into war three years later. Intelligence networks of neighboring countries helped train, fund and plan Iraq's civil war, until America hit with force, wiping out the singled out Al-Qaeda and leaving Iraqis to live in a political stalemate and civil peace.

In Syria, there are no symptoms of civil war, only state brutality against peaceful protesters. Suggesting otherwise only helps justify such brutality and doubt the intentions of the protesters, even before these get a day in the sun without fear from Assad's repression.

Turkey’s foreign policy shift

2011-09-08T10:06:00.001-04:00

Erdogan (L) meets with Assad in January of this year. (AFP photo/HO/SANA)

Tony Badran
NOW Lebanon

If there’s been an immutable rule in Middle Eastern power politics, it’s that whenever the region’s populist leaders, nationalist or Islamist, wish to make a bid for regional leadership, they reliably use Israel as a proxy theater.

On a certain level, this rule helps explain Turkey’s latest row with Israel. However, in the Turkish case, there is another element at play: a series of failures in Ankara’s foreign policy, especially in Syria, which has struck at the heart of the ruling Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) doctrine of “zero problems with neighbors.” The escalation with Israel, therefore, can be read as an attempt to compensate for this failure. With continued US passivity and retrenchment, Turkey’s game could quickly become a dangerous affair.

From the outset, the uprising in Syria presented Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan with a critical challenge, as it risked unraveling the Turkish premier’s signature policy.

Until Washington’s recent shift toward a policy of regime change in Syria, the US and Europe had both deferred to Turkey when dealing with Damascus. Behind this decision to give Ankara the lead was the popular conviction that it possessed strong influence over the Syrian regime as a result of the policy of engagement that Erdogan had pursued with Syria’s Bashar al-Assad.

Early on in the Syrian crisis, however, it became apparent to Turkish analysts that there was a fundamental flaw at the core of the AKP’s doctrine. The hype behind Turkish influence was built around its vaunted “soft power” and the appeal of the so-called “Turkish model.”

Turkish academic Soli Ozel took exception and told TIME in April that “It has become apparent that [Turkey] has little influence… This is the point where Turkish foreign policy hits the wall.”

Undeterred, Erdogan’s foreign policy adviser, Ibrahim Kalin, contested critics, arguing that, far from proving a failure, the AKP’s policy “has… deepened Turkey’s soft power capacity in the Arab world.” Other defenders of the policy similarly argued that it was precisely this policy that now enabled Ankara to consult with Damascus and to advise Assad to carry out reforms.

Six months into the uprising, and countless Turkish “ultimatums” later, it became rather obvious that Turkey’s supposed “soft power capacity” had been an abject flop. Not only were Erdogan and his Foreign Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu—the architect of the “zero problems” policy—repeatedly snubbed and embarrassed, but also, Syria and its Iranian ally had gone on the offensive—and for that they found an opening in Turkey’s Kurdish problem.

As Ankara’s troubles with the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) escalated, especially following Erdogan’s reelection, a National Intelligence Organization report was made available to the Turkish press noting that Syria had begun to support the PKK, as it had done in the 1990s, even offering safe haven to some of the group’s most important leaders. Similarly, the report noted, Iran had suspended its intelligence cooperation with Turkey in the fight against the Kurdish group.

Turkish commentators quickly understood that Iran was playing hardball with the Turks through the PKK issue. As one columnist put it, Iran was sending Turkey a message: “It is willing to take action against the PKK in return for concessions by Turkey regarding the Syrian issue. … [O]therwise, we will become allies with the PKK.”

An argument could be made that, for all intents and purposes, Iran’s strategy has worked. Turkey has yet to take a single concrete, punitive measure against Assad, even as he has humiliated Turkish leaders at every turn.

The failure of Turkey’s “zero problems with neighbors” policy is hardly confined to Syria. For one, Ankara has been up in arms at Greek Cyprus’ decision to proceed with exploring and developing its offshore oil and gas fields—in close cooperation with Israel, no less. Moreover, Erdogan was certain the United Nations report on the 2010 Gaza flotilla incident would vindicate Turkey’s position and force Israel to make a humiliating public apology. Instead, the report supported Israel’s claim to the legality of its blockade on Hamas-controlled Gaza.

The cumulative result of these setbacks was seen in Erdogan’s public rant, as well as in an announcement of an aggressive Turkish posture in the eastern Mediterranean—including threatening to deploy the Turkish navy to prevent Cyprus from proceeding with its maritime exploration.

Erdogan was seemingly deterred by the Iranians on Syria. But to adopt a hostile posture toward Tehran (and Damascus) would signal the official end of Ankara’s central doctrine of “zero problems” while also highlighting Turkey’s weakness. Lashing out at Israel, therefore, hits two birds with one stone: covering up the failure with Syria and Iran while still advancing the cause of Turkish regional primacy by flexing its muscles at Israel.

As such, we may now be witnessing a shift in Turkey’s posture away from its earlier, failed “mediatory” act to one of provocation. As one Turkish expert explained back in April, “One of the most important tools of foreign policy in the Middle East… is an operational and ‘provocative’ strength.” He added that Turkey is “unable to move forward sufficiently in this respect” as it “does not have powerful theo-political or geopolitical tools.”

In contrast, Iran’s reach has been based precisely on such tools. Ankara’s current aggressive statements indicate that it will now be forcefully seeking to accumulate these tools. Previous such attempts with Hamas had not fared well, and Erdogan’s endeavor this time around to make a grand entrance into Gaza also has seemingly been shot down by Egypt. Therefore, whether this push plays out in the Cypriot arena remains to be seen.

The politics of the eastern Mediterranean are in the throes of a major flux. The absence of clear and assertive US leadership means that all the middle-range powers will feverishly vie for position—which bodes ill for regional stability.

Tony Badran is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He tweets @AcrossTheBay

To those who believe moving US economy to services was better than manufacturing

2011-09-05T19:54:00.002-04:00

The fallacy of post-industrial prosperity

By Harold Meyerson

The Washington Post

Of all the lies that the American people have been told the past four decades, the biggest one may be this: We’ll all come out ahead in the shift from an industrial to a post-industrial society. Yes, we were counseled, there will be major dislocations, as there were during the transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy, but the America that will emerge from this transformation, like the America that emerged 100 years ago, will be one whose citizens are ultimately more prosperous and secure than their industrial-era forebears.
What a crock.
On Labor Day 2011, the America that’s replaced the vibrant industrial giant of the mid-20th century is a basket case. We’ve lost the jobs that created the broadly shared prosperity that made us the envy of the world. In their place, when we’ve created jobs at all, they’ve generated neither prosperity nor security.
The most prescient writer on post-industrial America offered a sobering perspective. In his 1972 book “The Coming of Post-Industrial Society,” sociologist Daniel Bell predicted a future of service jobs, rising consumption, compensatory entitlements and wars over taxes.
Even as Bell’s prophecies began to be borne out, though, the champions of the new economic order — from General Electric’s Jack Welch to every New Democrat and any old Republican — assured us that America would flourish as a post-industrial innovator in the new global economy, crafting the cutting-edge technologies whose actual assembly we could relegate to less-skilled workforces on distant shores. Thirty years ago, when defenders of American manufacturing first suggested that the nation commit to a “domestic content” standard in the goods we bought, they were howled down by nearly every economist and editorial writer in the land. (A friend counted 98 newspapers that editorialized against it, and none that wrote in favor.)
Today, the economy that arose on manufacturing’s ashes has turned to ashes itself. The Wall Street-Wal-Mart economy of the past several decades off-shored millions of factory jobs, which it offset by creating low-paying jobs in the service and retail sectors; extending credit to consumers so they could keep consuming despite their stagnating incomes; and fueling, until it collapsed, a boom in construction.
We are only now beginning to understand the toll this economy has taken on America’s workers — and on our working men in particular. A stunning study from Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney of the Hamilton Project, published in the Milken Institute Review, reveals that the median earnings of men ages 25 to 64 declined 28 percent between 1969 and 2009. Within this age group, the median earnings of men who completed high school but didn’t go on to college fell 47 percent, while the median earnings of male college graduates also declined, if only 12 percent.
Part of this decline stems from the shrinking share of working-age men with full-time jobs, which fell from 83 to 66 percent between 1960 and 2009. The other part stems from the fall in inflation-adjusted median yearly earnings of working-age men who have full-time jobs, which have shrunk by about $5,000 since the mid-’70s. Combined, write Greenstone and Looney, these two declines explain why the earnings of American men “haven’t been this low since Ike was president and Marshal Dillon was keeping the peace in Dodge City.”
Anyone seeking to understand the pessimism, frustration and rage of working-class men needs to begin here, with Greenstone and Looney’s two-by-four-to-the-head tale of decline. White working-class men in particular have become a disproportionately receptive audience for those who scapegoat immigrants and minorities for the damage that has actually been caused by economic and political elites blissfully blind to the devastation ushered in by their vaunted new economy.
Since that new economy blew up three years ago, many of those elites have been disabused of the financial fantasies that ordinary Americans long ago ceased to entertain. The fact that Greenstone and Looney’s study emerged from the Hamilton Project — a pillar of new-economy thinking, founded by Clinton Treasury secretary Robert Rubin — is evidence of a paradigm shift in economic vision. From centrist Democratic groups such as the Progressive Policy Institute and Third Way, to economists such as Hoover Institution Nobel laureate Michael Spence, to chief executives and former chief executives such as Dow Chemical’s Andrew Liveris and Intel’s Andy Grove, the new watchword for America’s future — however challenging it may be to get there — is manufacturing.
Post-industrial America turned out to be a bust. The time for neo-industrial America has arrived.

No Excuses for the Syrian Opposition

2011-09-04T12:46:00.003-04:00

Syria’s disparate opposition must unite if it is to topple the regime

The Economist

ANGER on the Syrian street is not just directed at President Bashar Assad and his regime. It is also being aimed at the opposition. Six months into the uprising and with over 2,200 dead, Mr Assad is still failing to quell the protests. In addition, he faces rising international pressure to step down. But one thing has so far helped him: the inability of the opposition to unite.

Whereas the street movement has become tactically adept, better organised and cohesive, political opposition groups inside and outside Syria are still fragmented. They are divided not just between exiles and those within. Individuals have been jockeying for position. “There have been a dozen conferences and statements in several cities but nothing to show for it,” says a protester. “Meanwhile we continue to go out and take the bullets.”

Proposals to create an all-encompassing opposition have come thick and fast. A National Initiative for Change was promoted in April by dissidents based in America. This was followed by a Conference for Change held in the Turkish resort of Antalya. Then came a gathering of dissidents in Istanbul under the aegis of a National Salvation Council, spearheaded by a lawyer, Haytham al-Maleh. At this meeting the Kurds walked out when others wanted to keep the word “Arab” in the name of the Syrian Republic. Then on August 23rd another national council was mooted but has yet to take shape.

Dissidents within Syria often accuse exiles of being too keen to spend time grandstanding in Western capitals. Protesters on Syria’s streets say that the better-known internal dissidents spend too much time currying favour with diplomats in Damascus. Many of Mr Assad’s foes in Syria, most of whom are secular-minded, are edgy about the role of Turkey, with its Islamist government, in hosting most of the opposition meetings. Even the two main activist groupings, the Local Co-ordination Committees and the Syrian Revolution Co-ordinators’ Union, have niggling differences.

On August 29th a new national council, apparently unrelated to the meeting six days before, put out a list (published in Ankara) of 94 members. Many of those on it immediately dissociated themselves, but most of them are now agreeing cautiously to be included. They are waiting to see how people in the streets respond to particular signs and chants, a rough yet innovative way of testing popular feeling.

The new council’s diversity is striking. Syrians of all hues are represented. Roughly half are in Syria, including Riad Seif, a veteran dissident, and younger activists, such as Razan Zeitouneh, a lawyer. It illustrates Syria’s changed political landscape. Heading the list is Burhan Ghalioun, an exiled Sorbonne professor in his 60s. A secular Alawite who has often appeared on foreign television channels during the uprising, he has managed to win a surprisingly large following inside Syria.

It is not surprising that Syria’s opposition lacks cohesion. The country embraces an array of religions, sects, tribes and ethnicities. Baathist repression over four decades has taken its toll. Many prominent figures in the opposition, including the Muslim Brotherhood, are still abroad. Veterans inside have made great sacrifices over the years, but they have been overtaken by the savvy young campaigners of the current uprising. It is too soon to say whether the latest council will gain momentum. But if a broad-based opposition front were able to establish itself as a clear alternative to Mr Assad and his ruling Baath party, he would go a lot sooner.

Syrian diaspora helps fight regime

2011-09-04T12:35:00.001-04:00

Radwan Ziadeh after Syrian opposition meeting with Canadian FM in DC

By Alice Fordham

The Washington Post

It is Friday morning, and in a 14th-floor apartment in Falls Church, 3-year-old Omar is tearing around the living room, drawing on the walls, while his father, Radwan Ziadeh, is bent over his laptop, calling Syria.

The apartment overlooks the wide highway to Washington, and suburban America — McDonald’s, a church, a pool — is spread out below, but Ziadeh is oblivious to it as he takes calls and reads tweets and instant messages from his far-off homeland to piece together the day’s events.

“There are 15 people killed already today,” he says, “and we have heard nothing from Hama [Syria’s fourth-largest city] because all the electricity, telephones and Internet have been cut off.” After putting the numbers he considers reliable into his database of the death toll, he updates journalists and human rights groups.

Since the uprising in Syria began five months ago, and the regime of President Bashar al-Assad cracked down on communications as well as public protests, Ziadeh has gone from an obscure rights activist and academic to a full-time and prominent advocate for a vociferous opposition-in-exile. As part of a group in Washington that could play a key role in Syria’s future, Ziadeh dreams of returning to his homeland and forming a democratic political party. But he fiercely rejects comparisons with American-backed exiles such as Ahmed Chalabi, who returned to a political role in Iraq, the country he once fled.

Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr. (D-Pa.), who presides over Near Eastern affairs on the Foreign Relations Committee, has met several times with groups of dissidents, including Ziadeh. Like State Department officials, Casey is keen to see the exiles form a coherent opposition group that can function as an alternative government — not easy in a country where political activity has been effectively banned for more than four decades.

“We have got to provide them with as much support as possible,” the senator says. “There’s much work to do in preparing for the next phase.”

Assuming that phase is reached, Syrian activists in Washington could have a more direct impact on the course of Syrian events. They include Ammar Abdulhamid, who was a fiery Muslim religious leader in Los Angeles in the 1980s before becoming a secular, ponytailed rights campaigner today. Ahed al-Hindi, a confident student in his early 20s, says he was far closer to his American friends than the Syrian community until the uprisings began and he joined the campaign. Mohammad Abdullah works in technology, and his background as the son of a famous and often jailed political activist in Syria lends him credibility with the activists back home.

For now, they protest, campaign and brief lawmakers about the uprising that has left at least 2,200 dead. But in terms of political influence, it may be Ziadeh who has the most leverage. “He is not so much a person as an institution,” Abdulhamid says.

Ziadeh counts the dead, helps smuggle satellite phones into his homeland, publishes videos of protests and — because it is hard to reach people in the country — puts himself forward to explain Syria to everyone from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to members of the U.N. Human Rights Council and politicians in Russia, Brazil and India.

“I spend every morning for three or four hours speaking to 30 to 35 people on the ground,” he says. “I never feel that I am out of Syria.”

As he speaks, Ziadeh receives an e-mail from someone who has escaped Hama, which has been retaken by government forces from protesters. The message says the electricity has been cut off for three days, the food is rotten and a man who left his house to buy bread for his children was shot dead in the street.

He talks to a Western journalist working undercover in Damascus to compare notes of reports, then puts on a tie and tears himself away from the computer. He has a meeting to get to at State, followed by one with the Canadian foreign minister and a television interview.

As he leaves, he murmurs an apology about the energetic Omar. “His father is sometimes not a good father,” he says. “I should have more time to play with him.”

* * *

Born in the Syrian capital of Damascus, Ziadeh began writing about human rights in the 1990s, when the country was under the authoritarian rule of Hafez al-Assad, the current president’s father.

He set up the Damascus Center for Human Rights and remembers fondly the short period of openness called the Damascus Spring after Hafez’s son Bashar inherited power in 2000. Hundreds would gather to discuss freedom and democracy. But the new permissiveness disappeared fast, many were arrested and the debates went underground.

Ziadeh and his friends would go out of town, where they would be difficult to track down, and take the batteries out of their phones to avoid being bugged. “They were lovely gatherings, and we felt inspired to do something despite the danger,” he says.

But in 2007, threatened with arrest for his work, he fled to the United States, where he was a visiting scholar at Harvard and then George Washington University, from where he wrote books and articles calling for democracy in the Middle East. His voice, though passionate and scholarly, went largely unheard until he, like others, gained new relevance when the wave of revolutions known as the Arab Spring swept through the region.

He shows photographs of himself with Tawakul Karman, now a fierce female leader of uprisings in Yemen; Kamal Jendoubi, then an exile, who became the head of the Tunisian elections commission; and Bahi Hassan, a rights campaigner who recently declined a job in Egypt’s new post-Mubarak government.

Ziadeh, too, hopes to return home and participate in a real democracy in a free Syria although he doesn’t imagine himself as Syria’s next leader and is careful to stress the heroism of the protesters on the ground. “I do believe, I and my wife believe, that we’ll go back to Syria,” he says. “We never had a dream to stay out of Syria.”

* * *

As he hastens between meetings, a diminutive figure perspiring in a suit on a sweltering day, he checks hundreds of messages on Facebook. Some are full of praise (one woman hopes to become his mother-in-law), but others are angry, suspicious of his ambitions. “Do you want to ride into the country on a French or Italian tank?” asks one. On a Web site called Ikhras — “shut up” in Arabic — he is described as an American-approved “democracy and human rights advocate” who does not represent the Syrian people or their aspirations. The writers rail at him for addressing the American Jewish Committee and mock his reedy voice and uninspiring speeches.

Such criticism is common. Some protesters in Syria express anger that the people representing their interests to the Obama administration, other governments and the United Nations are English speakers who live in the West and are not risking their lives at demonstrations.

“They say I am like Ahmed Chalabi,” says Ziadeh, referring to the Iraqi dissident whose political party received funding from the U.S. government and who lobbied hard for the removal of Saddam Hussein. “This is nonsense. I am not calling for military intervention . . . but, of course, people, when they want to discredit us, say this.” He says he receives no money from the government and instead relies on income from his writing and funds his travel with donations from the Syrian business community.

Even the State Department recognizes how counterproductive obvious American backing can be. P.J. Crowley, who until recently was Clinton’s spokesman, said State is keen to engage — with caution — with the diaspora, which has an influence on decision making.

“There’s the abject horror of what’s happening on the ground in Syria . . . but we’ve got to be very careful about choosing which people we support,” he says. Politics is about relationships, and it is difficult to build bonds when one group is on the streets in Syria and the other is in meetings in Washington, he says, so the opposition is an incoherent bunch at the moment.

At a recent gathering of the Syrian opposition in Turkey, the difficulty of unifying a group divided by distance, faith and ideology was clear as the group argued bitterly.

* * *

At the end of the day, Ziadeh goes back to his place in Falls Church.

He lays out plates of traditional food — fried meat dumplings, little pastries called fatayeh.

The sky outside darkens. Ziadeh talks a little about his family, growing up in Damascus, the way it smells of jasmine ’round the ornate Azm palace in the old city. His mother is in hiding in Syria. The authorities will lift her travel ban only if she signs a paper condemning her son’s work, which she refuses to do. He would like to go back to visit her and see his two brothers — one of whom was arrested this week.

He speaks of the next step — testifying before the U.N. Human Rights Council — and more international travel to lobby countries such as Russia and Brazil to condemn Assad. Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, Syrian families bury the day’s dead.

Although he worked for this change for his whole adult life, it still seems unbelievable that a country in which dissent was crushed for so long has risen up.

“I never expected this day would come,” he says.

Syrians ask for foreign intervention

2011-09-03T13:06:00.000-04:00

While many argue against foreign intervention in countries like Iraq and Libya on the basis that it breaches the principle of national sovereignty, one cannot but wonder what would be the reaction of these pundits when the people of these countries invite foreign intervention.

Joshua Landis: The professor of Syrian propaganda

2011-09-03T11:58:00.005-04:00

Why is the world’s most-quoted Syria expert a flack for Bashar al-Assad?

Joshua Landis and family at the residence of Syria's Amb Imad Mustafa

James Kirchick

NOW Lebanon

In February, Vogue magazine published one of the most notorious profiles in the history of recent American journalism. In six, full-color pages, the world-famous fashion title featured Asma al-Assad, the “glamorous, young, and very chic,” wife of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, who, over the past six months, has killed upwards of 2,000 fellow Syrians protesting his authoritarian rule. Media critics and Vogue readers alike pilloried the magazine, and its editors eventually took the article down from their website and erased it from their online archives.

But if Vogue was too embarrassed to stand by the piece, there was one figure willing to defend it: Professor Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Writing on his blog, “Syria Comment,” Landis tore into the Atlantic’s Max Fisher and Jeffrey Goldberg, both of whom had criticized the profile, labeling them “big supporters of Israel.” “Doubtlessly,” Landis asserted, “they would be gratified to see a positive report of Israel’s first lady even though Israel has killed, wounded, and imprisoned without trial many more of its subjects in the last 10 years than Syria has.”

As with nearly everything he writes, Landis was parroting the Syrian regime, in this case, its attempts to rouse populist anger against Israel as a means of distracting attention from its own failings. Landis’ attempts at whitewashing the Assad dictatorship would be inconsequential were he some obscure figure in the world of Middle East studies. But Landis is perhaps the most oft-cited expert on Syrian politics, who, largely through his blog, has created a perch for himself in the minds of many as a dispassionate observer of events on the ground.

To read Landis’ commentary about Syria over the past half year is to track the development of Baath propaganda. When protests broke out in March, he was quick to predict that they would never reach the scale of those in other Arab countries. “Western accounts of the protest movement in Syria have been exaggerated,” he wrote for Foreign Policy magazine on April 5. As the demonstrations grew in size and intensity across the country, however, Landis shifted the focus of his analysis to a defense of the regime and an attack on its opponents.

When evidence of Syrian atrocities became impossible to deny, Landis asserted that Assad could not be held responsible for the actions of his military. In an article for Time published March 25, Landis wrote, “Even President Bashar al-Assad himself seems to have been shocked by the level of violence used by Syria’s security forces to suppress demonstrations that began a week ago,” implying that the leader of the Syrian police state was unaware of what his security forces, headed by his own brother, were doing.

Landis has persisted in his denial of the claim, in the face of mounting evidence compiled over a series of months, that the Syrian regime has carried out a policy of killing soldiers who refuse to fire on unarmed civilians. In July, a series of defectors from the Syrian military confirmed to international media outlets and independent human rights organizations what others had been saying for months: They had been ordered to kill fellow soldiers who refused to fire on unarmed protestors. Human Rights Watchinterviewed a group of defectors who, rather than carry out illegal orders, fled the country. Yet Landis continues to deny the overwhelming proof. “So far, no evidence has surfaced to demonstrate that Syrian military have shot their fellow soldiers for refusing to carry out orders,” he wrote as late as August 3. “Most evidence supports government statements that armed opposition elements have been shooting security personnel.”

And then there’s the case of Hamza al-Khateeb, whose fate, recorded in a grisly video broadcast on the Internet, inspired massive outpourings into the streets. The regime is reported to have apprehended the 13-year-old boy, castrated him, burned him alive while torturing him to death, and then dumped his mutilated corpse on his family’s doorstep. But while posting voluminous defenses of the Syrian regime, Landis saw fit to mention this catalytic incident only twice. The first time was to cite an item from Syrian state television reporting that the dead boy’s family, after meeting with Assad, said that the president “engulfed us with his kindness and graciousness” and that “the president considered Hamza his own son and was deeply affected.” The second was a mere paragraph arguing that the Syrian regime would resist calls for an international inquiry into the murder because to do so would bring “the country down the slippery slope of foreign investigative teams for every conflagration.”

As for what the outside world should do about Syria, Landis’ mantra has always been precisely that of the regime: Don’t put pressure on Damascus. Last month, as pressure for European Union oil sanctions began to build, Landis cited highly misleading information about the effect of United Nations sanctions on Iraq to make the case that “Syria’s poorest and most vulnerable will likely be the first to feel privation as the wealthy and powerful kick down the pain,” as if the negative effects of sanctions are the fault of the international community, and not Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad or the other tyrants whose brutality stirs the world to action. Landis considers mere symbolic gestures of support with peaceful demonstrators being mowed down by machine gun fire too provocative. In July, after US Ambassador Robert Ford visited Hama and was greeted by cheering crowds bearing olive branches, Landis derided the ambassador’s “antics.”

Landis is too sophisticated to serve as an uncritical mouthpiece of the regime. He posts occasionally messages from the Syrian opposition on his blog, and he readily acknowledges that Syria needs to “reform.” But an incident from 2007 demonstrates how Landis, while speaking obliquely about the need for more democracy in Syria, has ulterior motives. That year, in an article in the Washington Quarterly about the Syrian opposition, he claimed that prominent opposition figure Michel Kilo had made “a clandestine trip to Morocco” in 2005 to meet with an exiled former leader of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. The allegation, incredibly dangerous given the Brotherhood’s illegal status in Syria, was footnoted to a report, however, that made no such claim. At the time that Landis’s article appeared, Kilo was already in custody for his opposition activities. Several months later he was sentenced to three years in jail.

The crux of Landis’ defense of the Syrian status quo is that the country is highly “sectarian” and, thus, most Syrians prefer the “order” provided by Assad to the “democracy” they see in Lebanon and Iraq. “There isn’t self-confidence on the part of the Syrian people, if you will, that they can manage their affairs,” he said recently on France 24. “And this is when the government steps forward and says I’m not going to bring you democracy, but I’m going to bring you order, and there are still many people who cling to that because of the fear.” But the real purpose of the four-decade-long Assad rule has been to maintain the privileged power of an Alawite clique that rules over a country that is 74 percent Sunni. If there are fears of sectarian violence, it is mostly because Assad, on the ropes, is attempting to foment it.
Syria is a closed society, and the Assad regime has little interaction with the West. Landis has been able to broker his rare access (the extent to which is unknown, though he is married to the daughter of a retired admiral in Assad’s navy) into a position of authority in the broader debate over American foreign policy toward Syria.

Newspapers need quotes, and cable news needs talking heads. However, as the Syrian regime murders more of its own citizens with each passing day, Landis’s message that it is Assad—and only Assad—who can manage a transition to democracy has gone from analytically inaccurate to morally perverse. In 2006, Landis dismissed the idea that the United States should “tighten the screws on Damascus to the point that the regime collapses or internal rebellion is sparked,” as “We have learned that using violence as a policy tool can backfire.” He should tell that to the Syrian regime.

James Kirchick is a contributing editor of The New Republic

Salibi is dead and AbuKhalil should shut up

2011-09-01T11:34:00.000-04:00

Kamal Salibi (1929-2011), the great Lebanese historian, isdead. I have a couple of articles in Arabic and English about him soon. Butuntil they are published, I had to write this post to express outrage at thisAssad AbuKhalil for his twisted understanding of the world. I never knew hetook a class with Salibi, but now that I know, I have to say some students justdon't get it.

AbuKhalil sees the world from the prism of Palestine, and hejudges Salibi accordingly. He wrote on his blog that Salibi started as thementor of the Phalangist student organization at AUB, then saw the light andswitched to the side of AbuKhalil, his comrade the Provost of AUB Ahmad Dallaland the Palestine cause.

The problem with such understanding of Salibi is that AbuKhalilmisses the point. Salibi's rule was that history should always be written forits own sake. AbuKhalil claims that Bernard Lewis, Salibi's advisor at SOAS,University of London, had instigated him to write about the Maronites. Salibidid. But his account on Maronite history provoked the Maronite Church againsthim, regardless of his political stance. This said, it is good to add that fromSalibi's perspective, however, the state and its institutions should be respectedat all times. This coincided with the Christian position of protecting thestate against Palestinian militias, which in retrospect sounds right.

But this does not mean that Salibi, at any point, supportedthe ideas of the Phoenician roots of the Lebanese or the Maronites. Salibi, aprotestant, often called himself a Druze for having been born and partiallyraised in Bhamdoun (which suggests Salibi was religion and race blind, unlike how AbuKhalil puts it). His book The Bible Came from Arabia not only angered the Saudigovernment, like AbuKhalil claimed, but also angered the Zionist movement andits supporters. Human science often wins its author animosities form opposite sides, like in the case of Salibi . Thefact that AbuKhalil understands intellect and humanities as a tool for a causemakes me sick. Applying his sick understanding of intellect to Salibi makes me,and many of Salibi's students, angry.

AbuKhalil, like always, is silly and writes confidentiallyabout things he knows little about, always viewing them only from the prism ofPalestine and militant positions. Even after what AbuKhalil callspolitical transformation, Salibi was still a staunch supporter of the Lebanese stateagainst militia control, meaning he was a supporter of March 14 against March 8over the past few years. This does not mean he, or other March 14ers, wereanti-Palestinian. It only means that his position, and that of many like him, might be too complicated for the simple minded AbuKhalil and his comrades tocomprehend.

Syria Update: Can Assad survive?

2011-08-28T11:57:00.004-04:00

With or without world attention, day or night, hot or cold, the Syrians are flooding the streets in bigger numbers to demand that Bashar Assad step down.

It increasingly looks impossible that Assad can survive this revolution without being deposed.

The picture is of a rally in the Homs area of Bab Al Sebaa that took place earlier today Sunday August 28, 2011.

On Saturday, Syrian Forces Crack Down on Protesters

2011-08-27T13:25:00.003-04:00

Iranian Foreign Minister described Syrian protests as "legitimate popular demands," a stance that marks a departure from earlier Iranian stances in support of Assad.

In other news, (Voice of America), Syrian activists say forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad have clashed with anti-government protesters in Damascus and several other cities.

Activists said Saturday that pro-government forces had attacked demonstrators leaving a mosque in the capital. They also say security forces killed one person at an opposition rally in the northern Idlib province.

However, the Syrian government has denied reports of protests in the capital. The state-run SANA news agency says foreign news organizations "fabricated" the stories.

In a separate development, the Arab League is discussing Syria's crisis at a meeting in Cairo Saturday.

The United Nations says more than 2,000 people have died in the country during the government's crackdown on dissent. President Assad has blamed much of the violence on what he calls armed "gangs" and "terrorists."

On Friday, rights groups and activists said security forces shot at protesters in areas that included the Damascus suburb of Douma, Dara'a province in the south and the eastern town of Deir Ezzor. They said at least three people were killed.

The Arab Oil Myth

2011-08-26T15:03:00.005-04:00

Contrary to popular belief, American oil companies have not benefitted greatly from US presence in Iraq. (AFP photo/Essam al-Sudani)

Hussain Abdul-Hussain

NOW Lebanon

While the abundance of oil in the Middle East has undoubtedly shaped the region’s history, with oil becoming a market commodity the importance of this resource in deciding the policies of Western governments has declined. The myth that oil dictates Western behavior in the region, however, lives on.

While many Arabs believe that controlling oil fields was the "actual" reason behind America's war in Iraq, nothing indicates that the US has had any say over oil resources in the country since the start of the occupation in 2003. America and its oil companies have not received any preferential treatment from the elected Iraqi government either, at least judging by the results of the several rounds of bidding for oil development and production.

Iraq is the home of the world's third-largest oil reservoir, with 115 billion barrels. Since the downfall of Saddam Hussein, Iraqi oil production has sat at around two million barrels per day. From day one, production was metered by the UN. Its crude is classified as “light sweet,” and can be easily transformed into gasoline. Extracting oil in Iraq is also relatively inexpensive.

Baghdad has held three rounds of bidding and is now gearing up for a fourth. During auction, Iraqi negotiators not only proved to be stalwarts, but were so strict in their contracts that many oil companies, including US giants like Exxon, saw little or no profit in certain auctions and withdrew their bids.

If the US occupation led to control of the Iraqi oil fields, either for free or at discounted prices, US companies would certainly have fared much better in winning contracts.

Iraq auctioned 20-year service contracts for its oilfields. British Shell and Malaysian Petronas won control of the huge field of Majnoon, beating a rival joint bid by French Total and Chinese CNPC after Shell-Petronas lowered their fee per barrel to $1.39.

But CNPC, together with Total and Petronas, won the smaller Halfaya field. America's Exxon Mobil, for its part, won a bid for West Qurna 1, charging a $1.90 fee per barrel produced, while Russia's Lukoil – together with Norway's Statoil – won West Qurna 2 for $1.15 per barrel.

Other national companies such as Italy's Eni and Angola's Sonangol were also in the game, showing that in Iraq, oil contracts went to the best bidders, American or not, and that oil prices are decided by the market.

Iraq is now preparing for a fourth round of licensing, this time for oil exploration. Although international companies prefer production-sharing contracts for exploration blocks, Iraqi oil officials said the deals would be based on service contracts, like in development and production, which means flat fees rather than shares in the resources.

Libya's Moammar Qaddafi, however, offered production-sharing deals instead of flat fees. His deals proved to be more tempting than Iraq's.

Libya also has light sweet crude, with 50 billion barrels in reserves. After making up with Washington, London and other Western capitals in 2004, sanctions were removed, and Tripoli offered its oil fields for development in order to increase production capacity.

Like in Iraq, the market decided oil prices in Libya, and companies had to bid for contracts. Perhaps feeling in the mood to make nice with Washington, Qaddafi allowed the awarding of contracts to tilt in America's favor.

In 2005 Libya auctioned 15 exploration permits. Three US companies—Occidental Petroleum, Chevron Texaco and Amerada Hess—won 11.

In Libya, Qaddafi had already opened his doors to Western oil companies. From a realpolitik perspective, NATO should have ensured Qaddafi's survival in order to guarantee its shares in the Libyan bids. If NATO's helping depose Qaddafi had motivations, oil was certainly not one of them.

In the Arab world, the myth that oil dictates Western behavior has further warped the already flawed Arab understanding of the world and its politics.

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

The Lebanon Exception

2011-08-06T10:45:00.004-04:00

A Zogby poll finds Lebanon in favor of Iran, but his methodology casts doubts over his agenda

A poll by Zogby International claims to portray what Lebanese people believe on international affairs, but his numbers are skewed. (Haitham Mussawi/AFP)

Hussain Abdul-Hussain
NOW Lebanon

The majority of Arabs in five countries believe that Iran is playing a negative role in the region, according to the results of a recent survey by Zogby International, run by John Zogby, whose brother James is a consultant at the company. Only Lebanon, the survey found, has a majority that views Iran positively.

A closer look at the Zogby poll's methodology, however, shows that its numbers are flawed.

Zogby's Lebanese sample shows that Lebanon is 37 percent Shia, 26 percent Sunni and 37 percent Christian. Lebanon's demographic makeup, however, according to the US Department of State and Statistics Lebanon, is 27 percent Shia, 27 percent Sunni and 41 percent Christian. Population percentages are taken from the voter lists during parliamentary elections every four years. (There has not been a census since 1932, since the topic is too charged for another tally to be taken.)

Given Lebanon's sharp political divisions along sectarian lines, over-representing the Shia and under-representing the Sunnis, if not weighted in line with actual population parameters, produces skewed results.

Also in the poll, in response to a question on their views on Iran, 55 percent of Lebanon's Sunnis were favorable toward Tehran. In the question that followed, though, only 42 percent of those Sunnis who were favorable toward Tehran answered yes to the statement "Iran contributes to peace and stability" in the Arab world.

Why do Lebanon's Sunnis favor a country that they think contributes to instability? Either there was an innocent mix up in numbers, or some political agenda dictates Zogby's poll.

A third mistake in the Zogby poll was its overreliance on urban populations, as opposed to rural ones. Those familiar with Lebanon's Christian demographic know that rural Christians tend to endorse a tougher line against Iran than their urban coreligionists. With those left out, the poll showed Lebanon further tilted in favor of Tehran.

The errors in their poll did not deter the Zogbys from trying to market their findings as a God-given truth in Washington. Over the past three decades, James Zogby in particular grew accustomed to presenting whatever findings and political arguments he pleased without being challenged—until recently.

Zogby told the Washington Post in October that when he "came to Washington 30 years ago, there were four of us [in the country] doing this work." But not anymore. Today, Zogby seems unsettled with the growing competition that is breaking his monopoly on speaking on behalf of Arabs and Muslims. "[N]ow, on any one day, there are a couple hundred people doing this work," he said.

Zogby thinks he is the only bridge between America and the Arab world. In December, he organized a meeting between a group of self-styled Arab-American leaders and White House officials to discuss the indictment, impending at the time, by the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL), the court investigating the 2005 murder of former Lebanese PM Rafik Hariri and others. It just so happened that all of the participants Zogby had chosen were loyalists to the Syrian regime who have bashed the STL.

When news of the meeting broke out, Lebanese-American backers of the STL turned the heat up on Zogby. He ranted in an online Op-Ed against what he called the "exile political groupings" who represent a "fragmented Lebanon." The groups "claiming to represent the March 14 coalition," according to Zogby, issued a statement against the meeting. In retrospect, Zogby wrote that these groups misrepresented his "desire to convene a meeting to support Lebanon," which made him believe that he was "right to exclude them in the first place."

When it comes to representing Lebanon, Arabs or Muslims in Washington, Zogby gets to cherry pick his people. Even representing March 14 is a mere "claim" on the part of the "exile groupings," which Zogby depicted as fragmented, loud and rude, perhaps unworthy of an audience with US officials.

Zogby should realize that times have changed. Arab-Americans, whether naturalized or first generation, are well versed in the ways of Washington and its political system. Many of them even have the advantage of being bilingual and having lived in the Arab world, which gives them a deeper understanding of its society.

Arabs too are not as disconnected from the world as they were when Zogby's father Joseph first immigrated to the US. The Syrians who are disseminating news of the uprising there to the world, despite the regime's ban on foreign media, prove that exclusive inter-civilization bridges are things of the past.

When Zogby first started his lucrative business, he was a big fish in a small pond. Many Arab governments hired him to lobby on their behalf and showcase their perspectives. Now that many Arab rulers are either being challenged or have been deposed, there is no reason why Zogby and his gimmicks should remain on the scene in Washington.

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

The Book of Claims: Faith Misplaced by Ussama Makdisi

2011-08-05T13:38:00.002-04:00

Hussain Abdul-Hussain
The Huffington Post

In Beirut cafes, middle-aged men debate politics. They blame the Sykes Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration for all the Arab ills. They rant against colonial powers, Europe and later America. In Arab circles today, this has come to be known as the "Wooden Rhetoric."

Ussama Makdisi takes this Wooden Rhetoric and makes it into a book. He blames the West for its "Oriental" view of the Middle East, and America for taking Israel's side against the Palestinians. He introduces himself as a "bridge to cultural understanding" between America and the Arabs. He writes, "I am also entangled in [this] history."

For a starter, Makdisi's understanding of history sounds troubling. "The value of history stems from the lessons we draw from it," he writes (p. 16). History, however, is important for its own sake. When used as a "lesson," it becomes a tool for political legitimacy and thus invites the victor to dictate it.

Makdisi's claim to be the bridge between Arabs and America seems of little credence. There is no indication that he ever stepped out of his Beirut elite bubble, a problem that also tainted the views of his maternal uncle, the author of Orientalism, Edward Said.

Because Makdisi feels compelled to denounce colonialism, he expresses dismay over the British bombardment of the Iraqi revolution in 1920. Makdisi fails to notice that the Brits attacked Iraqis on behalf of King Faysal, the man Makdisi's grandfather met in Beirut and vowed to support. In fact, Makdisi dedicates a chapter to European betrayal of the Arabs, especially the British duplicity with Faysal.

"Iraqi nationalists, reacting to the British conquest of their land, also seized upon Wilsonian ideas and urged the United States government to help push for their immediate application in their country," Makdisi argues (p. 126-127). But who were these Iraqi nationalists? Were they the British-sponsored Faysal and his Sunni officers, or the rebels?

Makdisi conveniently, or unwittingly, leaves out the details of the Iraqi 1920 revolution, which was in fact a revolution of the Shiite tribes of the Middle Euphrates against the new Sunni rulers, with Iraqis who were former Ottoman army officers joining the Faisal monarchy under the wing of the British Empire.

But even if we assume that the Iraqis revolted against the British colonial rule in 1920, a few decades before the Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine was making the headlines, the so-called revolution would prove that the Palestinian problem is not as central for Arab anti-colonial sentiment as Makdisi wants it to be.

While citing Egyptian, Syrian and Iraqi national aspirations, Makdisi dismisses Lebanese nationalists and call them pro-French, without qualifying his accusation: "Faysal and his followers knew that Maronite Christians from Lebanon advocated a pro-French nationalism that opposed their Arab project" (p. 148).

With no evidence to substantiate his pan-Arab claims other than the findings of the American King-Crane Commission, and some elite literature, Makdisi speaks on behalf of all the Arabs: "For Arabs, Sykes-Picot was a metaphor for Western imperialism" (p.177). Makdisi fails to realize that without Sykes-Picot, Palestine would have never come into existence. It would have either remained divided into marginal Ottoman states, or become part of a grand Arab autocracy under Faysal and the Hashemites.

Thankfully, however, Makdisi realizes that "[p]arts of the Arab world, such as Morocco and Algeria, were far more preoccupied with the struggle against French colonialism than with Israel ... for reasons of geography, history, and political context, [they were] more insulated from the fallout of the Arab-Israeli conflict than were Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt" (p. 208).

In another fair observation alien to most of his tract, Makdisi added, "The degree and expression of the disillusionment with the United States varied across the diverse Arab world. Most Arabs understood that their relationship with the United States hinged on more than simply Palestine" (p. 208).

Despite admitting the priority of national issues over that of Palestine, Makdisi still points fingers at the Saudis: "As with his father in 1948, Faysal's relationship to the United Sates was ultimately more important to him than were the Palestinians" (p. 304).

Then yet another contradiction: "Americans never seemed to appreciate, moreover, that Arabs saw Palestine as a quintessentially internal problem and that Arabs in any case had already immersed themselves in intense self-criticism" (p.241).

Even though there is no evidence whatsoever in this book that the Arabs were "immersed" in "intense self-criticism," Makdisi uses this characterization to attack authors he disagrees with, such as Lebanese-American Fouad Ajami, known for his Arab self-criticism. The mildly critical words Makdisi employs for Gamal Abdel Nasser include accusing Nasser's republic of having some "flaws." Makdisi stays away completely from assessing the reasons behind the failure in experimenting with Arab unity between Egypt and Syria (1958-61), under Nasser.

Makdisi also leaves out the 19 years during which the West Bank and Gaza were under Jordanian and Egyptian rules, respectively. Why didn't the Arabs create Palestine over that part of the land until they could "liberate" the rest and annex it? The author conveniently remains silent there.

Makdisi again claims to speak on behalf of "all" the Arabs: "Although Saddam sought to portray Khomeini as a grave 'Persian' threat to the Arabs," he writes, "few Arabs regarded Iran as a greater menace than Israel, and fewer still were uncritical of the manner in which the United States had consistently turned its back on the Palestinians" (p. 324). From where did Makdisi get his numbers to corroborate these assertions?

Worse than speaking on behalf of the Arabs, Makdisi does not notice an ethical failure on his part.

When analyzing Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, he only views it from the prism of military confrontation with America and the "demoralization" of the Arabs because of his defeat. None of these demoralized Arabs seems to have cared that Saddam had actually invaded a country, Kuwait, and occupied it.

In Makdisi's words: "Saddam Hussein's inexplicable military challenge to the United States and the consequent crushing defeat to which his nation was subjected demoralized most Arabs outside the Gulf. Syrians, Lebanese, Palestinians, Algerians, Yemenis, and Egyptians had initially rallied around Saddam as a symbol of defiance of the West" (p. 335).

If you wonder who gave Makdisi the right to speak on behalf of "few," "fewer" and "most" Arabs, a bigger surprise hits you when he uses the "Arab press" to gauge the anti-Sadat feeling. "Sadat was condemned in the non-Egyptian Arab press as an 'agent of imperialism.' Syria, Algeria, South Yemen, Libya and the PLO were appalled and terrified at Sadat breaking ranks" (p. 315).

For those unfamiliar with the Arab world in 1979, except for a few Lebanese newspapers, there were no free Arab media outlets, most of which were owned and run by the different Arab governments. Still, Makdisi sees it as OK to use the "Arab press" as an impartial indicator.

By the end of the manuscript, Makdisi tries to use his "history" book to draw themes for political purposes. "That the Shia Hassan Nasrallah was able to sustain his popularity in the predominantly Sunni Arab world at a moment of extraordinary sectarian violence in Iraq is remarkable," according to Makdisi, who adds a footnote to see Amal Saad Ghorayeb, "What the Moderate Arab World Is," Al-Ahram Weekly, April 26-May 2, 2007.

Amal Saad Ghorayeb is a Lebanese analyst whose father runs a Hezbollah "polling" center. Regardless of her neutrality, and regardless of the fact that this is the only time in the book that Makdisi uses a poll to support any of his claims, Makdisi is using a 2007 poll to make a point in an epilogue he penned in 2010. "In his pan Arab appeal during Israel's 2006 war on Lebanon, Nasrallah appeared to be a latter-day Gamal Abdel Nasser and stood for the same secular desire for self-determination," he writes (p. 364).

If after more than 60 years of the Arab conflict with Israel, Makdisi still looks for a latter-day Nasser, the populist autocrat, to "liberate" Palestine, that's a disaster. Perhaps it might be better for Makdisi to call for the creation of Arab democracies that can decide what is the best way to deal with the Palestine question. Every Arab opinion, outside elected parliaments, is a mere claim, and this book has a lot of them.

Washington still confused on Syria

2011-08-01T16:55:00.004-04:00

Obama and Ford in the Oval office on Monday

President Barack Obama received US Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford in a show of presidential interest in the situation in Syria. The White House released the following statement:

The President took the opportunity today to consult with U.S. Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford, who is in Washington D.C. for meetings with the Senate and key Administration officials. The President thanked Ambassador Ford for his extraordinary service to the American people at a very challenging time in Syria. The President also reiterated his strong condemnation of the Syrian regime’s outrageous use of violence against its own people, and reaffirmed America’s support for the courageous Syrian people, and their demands for universal rights and a democratic transition.

But Secretary of State Hillary Clinton could not but show the world America's inexcusably mild reaction on Assad's massacres in Syria. In a statement, Clinton said that Assad is ensuring that he and his regime "will be left in the past."

So, from Clinton's perspective, Assad is not "in the past" yet. He is, however, still in the process of "ensuring" his place in the past.

The Clinton statement below:

The Syrian regime's violent assault on civilians continued today, even as Ramadan began, highlighting again the brutality and viciousness of the Assad regime. Yesterday, President Obama said that President Assad has shown that he is incapable and unwilling to respond to the legitimate grievances of the Syrian people. Today, as the campaign of violence continues, President Assad is further ensuring that he and his regime will be left in the past, and that the Syrian people themselves will be the ones to determine its future.

During what should be a time of prayer and family gathering, we mourn the deaths of all those killed, especially innocent children like Layal Askar, a one-year old killed by a stray bullet from a security officer’s gun in the southern city of al-Hirak. The United States stands with the Syrian people and we condemn the Assad regime's violent campaign against them. We call on President Assad to stop the slaughter now. We call on those members of the United Nations Security Council who have opposed any Security Council action that would call on Assad to stop the killing to reconsider their positions. And we call on the international community to come together behind the people of Syria in this critical time.

As I have said before, President Assad has lost his legitimacy with the Syrian people. Syria will be a better place when a democratic transition goes forward.