Issandr El Amrani
is a writer living
in Cairo [...]

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Egypt has unexpectedly rescinded its support for a lawsuit filed by the US against the European Union...

For Mamdouh, the music that comes out of his creaky radio is one of the few respites from the dense, noisy Cairo traffic...

Demonstrators riot and try to close the U.S. Embassy in a country where protest has been mostly banned for 20 years...

The word "ebullient" seems barely adequate to describe the atmosphere in the austere Cairo courtroom...

Officials at the Arab League's Cairo HQ - an unassuming building in the city's central square that blends modernist and Islamic architecture - wear long faces these days.

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Shelved

He’s back…

But he’s not very interesting. Go read Riverbend until he gets back up to speed.

19:27 | / iraq | link

Israel’s Syrian ambitions

This could be a dangerous precedent:

A day after Israel attacked what it said was a terrorist training camp in Syria in retaliation for the suicide bombing in northern Israel on Saturday that killed 19 people plus the bomber, Mr. Bush suggested that the responsibility for breaking the growing cycle of violence now rested primarily with the Palestinian leadership.

“I made it very clear to the prime minister, like I have consistently done, that Israel’s got a right to defend herself, that Israel must not feel constrained in defending the homeland,” the president said at the White House in response to a reporter’s question.

Israel’s strategy of hitting a target inside Syria raised the question of whether the Sharon government had adopted Mr. Bush’s policy of focusing on not just terrorists but also states that harbor them. The lack of explicit criticism from the United States did nothing to dispel the impression that the White House, after discouraging Israel from assuming that it could embrace the Bush doctrine in its battle against Palestinian extremists, was now doing nothing to stop Israel from doing so.

The article suggests further down that rather than endorsing a new Israeli policy based on the “Bush doctrine,” this could be merely a pragmatic resignation to the fact that condemning Israel would be politically costly and accomplish little. Either way, it’s scary to think that the Israelis could be tempted by trying to redraw the region in their own way. Syria has long been a thorn in their side, particularly for the Israeli right (including Sharon) who don’t really feel like giving the Golan Heights back (whether for ideological or strategic reasons.)

It must also be kept in mind that the neo-cons in the White House may be very happy with this potential development, which might have Israel continuing what the US started in Iraq. It’s pretty clear that Syria has been sidelined despite its potential usefulness as a source on Al Qaeda, as the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh reported back in July. And ever since Richard Armitage said that “Al Qaeda is the B team of terrorism, and Hizbullah is the A team,” we’ve been waiting to see when Syria would be tackled. With the US bogged down in Iraq, the strategy the neocons want to achieve in the region may now rest on Israel.

Let’s go to tape and dig up “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” the neo-con bible a lot of current national security officials were working on for Bibi Netanyahu when they were in political exile in the Clinton years. Here’s the section on Syria/Lebanon, presumably before Israel withdrew from Southern Lebanon:

Securing the Northern Border

Syria challenges Israel on Lebanese soil. An effective approach, and one with which American can sympathize, would be if Israel seized the strategic initiative along its northern borders by engaging Hizballah, Syria, and Iran, as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon, including by:

* striking Syria’s drug-money and counterfeiting infrastructure in Lebanon, all of which focuses on Razi Qanan.

* paralleling Syria’s behavior by establishing the precedent that Syrian territory is not immune to attacks emanating from Lebanon by Israeli proxy forces.

* striking Syrian military targets in Lebanon, and should that prove insufficient, striking at select targets in Syria proper .

Israel also can take this opportunity to remind the world of the nature of the Syrian regime. Syria repeatedly breaks its word. It violated numerous agreements with the Turks, and has betrayed the United States by continuing to occupy Lebanon in violation of the Taef agreement in 1989. Instead, Syria staged a sham election, installed a quisling regime, and forced Lebanon to sign a “Brotherhood Agreement” in 1991, that terminated Lebanese sovereignty. And Syria has begun colonizing Lebanon with hundreds of thousands of Syrians, while killing tens of thousands of its own citizens at a time, as it did in only three days in 1983 in Hama.

Under Syrian tutelage, the Lebanese drug trade, for which local Syrian military officers receive protection payments, flourishes. Syria’s regime supports the terrorist groups operationally and financially in Lebanon and on its soil. Indeed, the Syrian-controlled Bekaa Valley in Lebanon has become for terror what the Silicon Valley has become for computers . The Bekaa Valley has become one of the main distribution sources, if not production points, of the “supernote” — counterfeit US currency so well done that it is impossible to detect.

Given the nature of the regime in Damascus, it is both natural and moral that Israel abandon the slogan “comprehensive peace” and move to contain Syria, drawing attention to its weapons of mass destruction program, and rejecting “land for peace” deals on the Golan Heights.

It’s not clear yet that it is this agenda that Israel’s current leadership would like to carry out, but it bears thinking about, doesn’t it?

Update: For more analysis and a look at the upcoming Syria Accountability Act that the White House has decided to let Congress pass, look here.

01:05 | / syria | link

Chalabi’s Zionist-friendly family

The Guardian uncovers that Ahmed Chalabi’s nephew is in partnership with an ultra-Zionist lawyer with administration connections to make money in Iraq:

It was established by Salem “Sam” Chalabi, the 40-year-old nephew of Ahmad Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, a Pentagon favourite and now a prominent member of Iraq’s governing council.

Sam Chalabi’s “partner for international marketing” is Marc Zell, a rightwing Zionist lawyer who has offices in Jerusalem and Washington and previously ran a legal practice with Douglas Feith - now a leading Pentagon hawk with responsibility for the reconstruction of Iraq.

Until recently, Mr Zell - an Israeli citizen - was the registered owner of the Iraqi firm’s website. Registration was transferred to Sam Chalabi’s name on September 25 - the day after Mr Zell’s ownership of the site was revealed by an article on Guardian Unlimited.

Zell is a pro-settlement, “Greater Israel” militant. Nice company these Chalabis keep.

00:47 | / iraq | link

Ode to Chalabi

The Star Tribune ran this great ode to Ahmed Chalabi a few days ago:

You are Ahmed Chalabi! You left Iraq when you were 12 years old, but history doesn’t matter. You are the future of Iraq, and the very breath of its liberation.

So go, you Armani-clad warrior, to arms, and ride with the wind.

Go read the rest of it immediately.

16:58 | / iraq | link

New group to rule over Iraq

President Bush announced today that Condoleeza Rice will be heading a new group in charge of monitoring the situation in Iraq — the Iraq Stabilization Group. This means tighter White House control over the situation in Iraq, says the Washington Post , because Bush is afraid that with his ratings dropping, a lingering bad situation in Iraq could hurt his bid for re-election:

Administration officials had insisted this summer that the White House did not plan to play a larger role in the reconstruction effort. The reversal reflects the growing awareness among Bush’s aides that the Iraq task is much bigger and more difficult than they had expected, and the consequences could be dire if the pace and perception of progress does not pick up dramatically before the general election race next year.

A little further down:

The stabilization group is to begin functioning this week and created by Rice in a classified memo on Thursday. The group will have divisions focusing on counterterrorism; economics, to develop plans for obtaining financial support; political institutions and governance, to deal with the development of a constitution and the conduct of elections; and communications, to focus on the administration’s U.S. media message about Iraq.

I think it’s interesting that they include that last bit about the group needing to “focus on the administration’s U.S. media message about Iraq.” So the White House is not happy with the picture of the news in Iraq that’s coming back home? It must be a liberal media conspiracy. Condi’ll sort them out.

Also note that Anna Perez, a deputy assistant to Bush and Rice’s counselor for communications. Here’s Perez bio from results.gov, a White House/Bush-related site:

Anna Perez — White House

Deputy Assistant to the President and Counselor to the National Security Advisor for Communications

Most recently, Anna Perez was General Manager of Corporate Communications and Programs for the Chevron Corporation. From 1995 until 1998, she served as Vice President, California Government Relations for the Walt Disney Company. Previously, she was head of Media Relations for Creative Artists Agency, Inc. in Los Angeles. From 1989 until 1993, she served as Press Secretary to First Lady Barbara Bush. She began her career on Capitol Hill, serving as Assistant Press Secretary and Communications Director to U.S. Senator Slade Gorton in 1981 and as Press Secretary to U.S. Congressman John Miller in 1985. Anna attended Hunter College.

Chevron, Disney, the CAA… I’m sure the US media in Iraq will be in goods hands. Let the spin begin!

23:45 | / iraq | link

Al Jazeera under pressure?

Al Jazeera has apparently removed offensive cartoons from its website at the request of the US government, according to the Arab News.

The two cartoons were pulled “without any hesitation” from both the Arabic and English language websites after a US government official complained about them, according to the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

One cartoon was of so-called “green card soldiers”, young Latino men shown going through an immigration tunnel to emerge from the other side as US soldiers ready to leave for military service in Iraq. The other was of the Twin Towers imploding, and two giant fuel pumps rising to replace them from the ashes. Neither cartoon is now available in Al-Jazeera websites’ cartoon archive.

I bet there’s more to this story than it seems, especially as there are widespread rumors among Arab journalists that there is a mini-civil war brewing inside of Al Jazeera.

15:46 | / media | link

Muslims made me divorce my wife

Laugh or cry? You decide:

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — U.S. Rep. Cass Ballenger blames the breakup of his 50-year marriage partly on the stress of living near a leading American Muslim advocacy group that he and his wife worried was so close to the U.S. Capitol that “they could blow the place up.”

The nine-term Republican lawmaker, in an interview with The Charlotte Observer published Saturday, called the Council on American-Islamic Relations — whose headquarters are across the street from his Capitol Hill home — a “fund-raising arm” for terrorist groups and said he reported CAIR to the FBI and CIA.

15:38 | / potluck | link

Israel/Syria face-off

I watched both the Syrian and Israel ambassadors to the UN give their speech to the Security Council last night. The Syrian ambassador’s speech was fairly poor, engaging in the same tired old song without focusing enough on the strict illegality of what Israel did by attacking it. Of course, he spoke in Arabic and the live translation was hardly inspiring, which perhaps explain that he didn’t come across as well as the Israeli ambassador, who spoke in English.

It has been common knowledge for years that Syria hosts the political leadership of Hamas and Jihad, and that it has a particularly tight relationship with Hizbullah in Lebanon. The question is, why attack now? Was the latest suicide bombing attack unlike the previous ones? Why did Sharon decide to use it as a pretext for an attack at this particular time? Is there in fact an escalation of the conflict with Syria, perhaps with US approval? As Robert Fisk put it (registration required):

Yesterday, we took another little lethal step along the road to Middle East war, establishing facts on the ground, proving that it’s permissible to bomb the territory of Syria in the “war against terror”, which President Bush has himself declared now includes Gaza.

The best course of action for Israel would be to stop occupying the Golan Heights and Palestine. Any terror attacks that occur after that with any form of outside state support would roundly be condemned, and there would definitely be a case for military action. But while Israel continues to occupy these territories and nurture maximalist ambitions and until it refuses to consider a peace process according to the relevant UN resolutions, its appeal to the UN for its right to “self-defense” will just be viewed as more hypocrisy. And that’s why the US and Israel were alone last night in the Security Council in defending Israel’s attack on sovereign territory. One also hopes that not having the excuse of being occupied anymore, the Syrian regime would finally begin a real move towards democratization.

For quotes from the UNSC meeting, go here.

15:21 | / syria | link

Military Balance 2003

Even though it came out a week ago at least, I thought 6 October — a national holiday in Egypt commemorating the 1973 Arab-Israel war — was a good date to tell amateur geo-strategists and military geeks that the new Military Balance report is out. Researched by the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies in Israel, and calling itself “the most authoritative source on Middle Eastern Armies since 1983,” it’s shock-full of yummy military statistics.

And while on the theme of the October/Ramadan/Yom Kippur War, take a look at this piece on how Israel used the threat of nuclear war to get the US to help it in 1973.

15:18 | / egypt | link

Diaa Rashwan and 9/11

In the near four years I’ve worked as a journalist in Egypt, one talking head I often turn to is Diaa Rashwan, an expert on Islamism at the Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. Rashwan is probably one of the world’s top experts on political Islam, and in the year immediately after 9/11 was often quoted in the international press. He is not an Islamist himself, but has studied Egypt’s Islamist movements, as well as Al Qaeda, thoroughly. I believe he has good contacts with both the state security apparatus that deals with the Islamists in Egypt, and with some Islamists. Moreover, he follows Islamist literature and is aware of the debates in the movement. He’s also a very nice guy.

Last week, Rashwan for the first time explained his doubts about who was behind 9/11. He raises some interesting issues, although he does not go into them in enough detail for my taste. His main points seem to focus on the recruitment patterns for the hijackers, and Muhammad Atta — the only Egyptian and allegedly the ringleader of the operation — in particular.

I can’t say that I’m really convinced by what Rashwan wrote — it still seems to me pretty evident that Al Qaeda (or at least a group with loose connection to Al Qaeda) carried out the attack. It’s not enough to find holes in the US government theory of what happened, there must also be some positive proof of someone else being involved. He also doesn’t suggest any other possible perpetrators. A few days after his piece came out, I called him to ask about who he thought was behind 9/11 if not Al Qaeda. He said he didn’t know, adding it was a “sensitive” topic. That answer is not quite good enough if you’re going to make this kind of allegation. But perhaps he’ll clarify his thinking further on.

20:23 | / terrorism | link

“Neither public nor diplomatic”

More on the debate over US public diplomacy in the Muslim world:

Read it all, it’s short and sweet.

15:32 | / media | link

More costly lies

The NYT has this story looking at how a secret study of Iraq’s oil production potential was ignored by the neo-cons last fall when they made their case for war:

Despite those findings, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz told Congress during the war that “we are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.”

Moreover, Vice President Dick Cheney said in April, on the day Baghdad fell, that Iraq’s oil production could hit 3 million barrels a day by the end of the year, even though the task force had determined that Iraq was generating less than 2.4 million barrels a day before the war.

Now, as the Bush administration requests $20.3 billion from Congress for reconstruction next year, the chief reasons cited for the high price tag are sabotage of oil equipment — and the poor state of oil infrastructure already documented by the task force.

“The problem is this,” L. Paul Bremer III, the top civilian administrator in Iraq, asserted at a Senate hearing two weeks ago: “The oil infrastructure was severely run down over the last 20 years, and partly because of sanctions over the last decade.”

Similarly, Bush administration officials announced earlier this year that Iraq’s oil revenues would be $20 billion to $30 billion a year, which added to the impression that the aftermath of the war would place a minimal burden on the United States. Mr. Bremer now estimates that Iraq’s total oil revenues from the last half of 2003 to 2005 will amount to $35 billion, running at a rate of about $14 billion a year.

The administration now plays down the report’s findings.

More lies for the sake of ideology. It’s this kind of self-delusion and manipulation that spelled the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union. Where are the pragmatists in this administration?

15:23 | / iraq | link

Russia adopts pre-emptive strike doctrine

Oh, great. Russia’s top brass just adopted a new military doctrine that allows pre-emptive strike, refers to the UN as useless, has them eyeing Pakistan and Afghanistan as targets and makes the use of WMDs easier.

Presenting the latest military doctrine, Ivanov said that Russia reserves the right of preventive military strikes to thwart threats to its own vital interests or of its allies, including the protection of crucial transport arteries, and stability in the neighbouring countries.

“Russia has virtually declared its right to intervene militarily in the affairs of other countries and has substantially lowered the threshold for the use of weapons of mass destruction in case of aggression,” NTV channel said commenting on the new Russian military doctrine.

Even though the UN and its Security Council have been identified as the main mechanisms of global stability and security, the new Russian military doctrine virtually admits their “impotency” when it says that the Russian armed forces are the key factor for global stability.

Russian Defence Ministry has declared Europe, Middle East, West and Central Asia, and Asia-Pacific regions as the areas of Russia’s strategic interests as in the West it faces the Euro-American world, in the south - the Islamic world and in the east the vast Pacific region.

According to the various Russian media comments about the new doctrine, “the reforms of ex-Soviet armed forces are over and a new ambitious Russian army is born”.

Now who could have ever given them these ideas?

23:58 | / politics | link

Bush wants more funding for WMD search

Having already spent $300 million looking for Iraq’s WMD program, President Bush now wants another $600 million to continue the search. In the meantime, note that the report on Iraq’s WMD program, while partly leaked to the press last week, is still not finished although it was meant to be released in September. The reason, it seems, is that its findings — that no serious WMD capability was found in Iraq — would seriously embarass an administration that currently has enough political problems in the run-up to the elections. I can’t claim to know much about how weapons inspections work, but considering that Iraq’s top scientists, a good part of the intelligence community and the UN’s weapons inspectors are saying that the WMD threat was blown out of proportion, why do we need to spend so much money and time before getting a straight answer? If we’re asking for twice the money, how much longer before we get a definitive answer? And why is looking for these weapons so outrageously expensive?

Here’s the answer to least that last question:

The group has also concentrated on installing an unnecessarily elaborate infrastructure to support its operations, said several military officials who complained there was a disparity between the resources allotted to the two programs.

While the Exploitation Task Force worked out of an abandoned palace and the servants’ housing quarters near Baghdad airport and remained short of vehicles, air support, computers and even electricity during the initial months of the weapons hunt, the Iraq Survey Group spent its first weeks installing air-conditioned trailers, a new dining facility, state-of-the-art software and even a sprinkler system for a new lawn, according to officials and experts who worked with the group this summer.

“They kept unloading crates and crates of new Dell laptops,” said one Pentagon official who complained that the exploitation force lacked resources.

Yeah, let’s give these people more money…

13:59 | / iraq | link

ICG does Egypt

You know a country is in trouble when it starts being studied by the International Crisis Group. The ICG, for the uninitiated, is a Brussels-based think tank that in my opinion pretty much offers the best analysis of any think tank anywhere. They started mostly focusing on Eastern Europe and the Balkans, where they did excellent work, and have more recently started to monitor Algeria, Israel/Palestine, and Iraq. Their Iraq reports are particularly good, combining analysis with recommendations on how to improve the situation there. And now, they have a report on Egypt which can be considered as a definitive overview of the situation that the country is in as a result of the Iraq war. Download it here.

I thought this paragraph in the introduction was particularly interesting in light of the debate over perceptions of the US in the Arab world:

The U.S. administration should take seriously the evidence of political damage that American- Egyptian relations have sustained as a consequence of its regional policies, notably its perceived bias in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, its decision to topple the regime in Iraq, and its heavy-handed admonitions to Egypt and other Arab countries to reform. Washington’s policies, and the manner of their implementation, have embarrassed a friendly government, aggravated its domestic difficulties and undermined the U.S.’s self-proclaimed reform agenda. Significantly, there is far greater anger directed at President Mubarak for supporting the U.S. than there is at the U.S. for supporting Mubarak. For a growing section of the Egyptian intelligentsia and political class, the cause of domestic democratic reform is increasingly associated with opposition to, rather than support for, U.S. policies. Ultimately, the preconditions for the U.S. to recover credibility as a promoter of democracy with Egyptian public opinion have less to do with its actions regarding democracy than with its regional policies. The U.S. would help the cause of reform best by more vigorously pursuing a just settlement of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict and de-Americanising the Iraqi occupation by both empowering the UN and accelerating transition to self-rule.

While you’re on the ICG website, peruse their other reports and download their new newsletter — consider it talking points for geo-strategists.

10:33 | / egypt | link

No kidding

Stop the presses: “U.S. Must Counteract Image in Muslim World, Panel Says”

I’m very weary of these articles that make a not-so-subtle association between Arab opinion on America and terrorism. The two have little to do with each other — 9/11 was the work of a bunch of extremists whose ideas (despite what you may read in the American press) have little sway over ordinary people. I mean, they’re nutters, and I think most people here see as such. Remember in many Arab countries they suffered from Islamist terror long before the rest of the world did.

Part of the problem is that Americans feel they should always be loved, and don’t understand when people don’t like them. The answer is simple. It’s the foreign policy, stupid. It’s not because they hate freedom or have been “taught” to hate the rest of the world.

That being said, the article makes some good points:

The group’s major recommendations, besides creating a new White House director of public diplomacy, were to build libraries and information centers in the Muslim world, translate more Western books into Arabic, increase scholarships and visiting fellowships, upgrade the American Internet presence, and train more Arabists, Arab speakers and public relations specialists.

Since changing policy is not likely to happen anytime soon, that would be an important start to actually getting people to learn about another side of America that they seldom see. Most of the European countries pursue these kinds of cultural policies, funding festivals and often playing an important role on the impoverished local art scene. And they do it in a discreet way, without putting their flags on everything (something that embassy officials do, it seems, to please visiting congressional delegations more than anyone else.) If you want to really know what’s wrong with US public diplomacy in the Middle East, you could so worse than turn to an old classic about South East Asia. Much of what was written there nearly 50 years ago still applies.

01:08 | / media | link

Speaking of hate speech…

The loony Zionist hate brigade over at the New York Daily News has come up with this towering work of bile, bullshit and anti-Arabism to say about Edward Said. It’s perhaps the most disgusting piece of writing I’ve ever read — I’m sure they laughed all the way to the printing press safe in the knowledge that dead men can’t sue. But it’s a good reminder of the kind of sick people in Israel and the US will do anything to fight the work of people like Said who believe in a fair peace between Jews and Arabs.

00:31 | / palestine | link

Bremer on Iraq’s reparations debt

Paul Bremer has apparently suggested that Iraq should not pay reparations back to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Good for him, and good for Iraq. Those two states backed Saddam long enough when it suited them, I don’t see any reason why they should get money now.

Follow the links over at Eclectic Chapbook for details.

00:07 | / iraq | link

Blogging etiquette

I’ve been blogging lightly for the past few days, partly because I’ve been a bit sick (there’s a terrible stomach flu going through Cairo) and because I’ve been pretty busy with stuff that pays the rent (the story will be out this Saturday in The Times, and will get some big play from what I hear.)

But there’s been something I’ve wanted to post ever since a reader alerted me to it. It’s a post by Arab Street Files in response to a post of mine about the arrest of gays in Cairo. Read it and you will see that it’s sickeningly homophobic and, rather perversly, seems to rejoice in the fact that men who are innocent of any wrongdoing under Egyptian law (homosexuality is not illegal here).

The reader who let me know about it asked me, essentially, whether I endorsed this since I’ve out Arab Street Files in my sidebar. The answer is, of course, no. I don’t endorse it. I put Arab Street Blog in my sidebar because it’s one of the very few political blogs about Egypt that I found, and thought it was good to let people know that it existed. I thought in the past that some of what he wrote was interesting, and this latest post does not change that. So for now I won’t remove it from the sidebar, and I hope that doesn’t offend too many people. I disagree with most Shia Pundit, for instance. Granted, it isn’t (as far as I know) spouting off hate speech. But I often fundamentally disagree with it and only have it in the sidebar because I think it’s interesting to read different points of view. And I can also change my mind and take someone I find offensive, boring or whatever off the list.

I realize, as Arab Street Files points out, that most Egyptians strongly disaprove of homosexuality. I know that this is a fundamentally conservative country whose social mores, in some cases, are comparable to Europe and America 50 years ago. But I’m not moral relativist or multi-culturalist. I don’t like it, and think it’s wrong. But then again I’m an atheist and social libertarian, and I know that means I’m at odds with 99% of the people I live among. But that won’t make me change my mind.

One last point. Arab Street Files ends his post writing:

So forgive me for not showing much concern for the plight of a few pleasure-seeking fags who got arrested for debauchery. I’ve got a government to overthrow.

Well, in that case you’ve missed the point. The thing that troubles me about the Queen Boat and other gay cases in Egypt is that they are seemingly pointless attacks on ordinary Egyptian citizens. I spoke to one of the human rights organizations that will represent them (at the end only 15 were charged and will go to trial, not 62, although a few more are still in the limbo of administrative detention) and was told that after being kept for a day and beaten, they were told that they would be released if they signed a piece of paper. Many signed without reading it. The piece of paper was a confession saying that they were homosexuals and that they were prostituting themselves. It will now form the cornerstone of the case. As the human rights worker told me, “that’s what they [the police] usually do.” Unfortunately, this is an all too common strategy in Egyptian police stations, and it has created the kind of atmosphere that makes you want to overthrow the government. Cases of persecution like this, when the victims aren’t even political activists who pose a threat to the regime, show what’s fundamentally wrong with Emergency Laws and other anti-terrorist legislations that start being used as a replacement for real, honest police work. Next time they decide to randomly arrest someone and charge them with being gay (ensuring their public humiliation in this country and almost total lack of support), just remember it could be you.

00:03 | / egypt | link

Clark on “doctrinaire” Bush administration

If there is a Pulitzer prize for blogs, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo should get it. Take a look at his must-read exclusive interview with Wesley Clark, which unlike all of the stupid profiles I’ve read on him lets you know something about what the man thinks. I had worried that Clark, while an appealing candidate, would be weak on domestic policy and burn a little too fast in the primaries to still excite people after them. Although this interview deals mostly with foreign policy, it shows that Clark a sophisticated and thoughtful person. That might not make a winner, but it certainly makes for a real contender.

The following paragraph struck me for several reasons:

Why is it impossible to take an authoritarian regime in the Middle East and see it gradually transform into something democratic, as opposed to going in, knocking it off, ending up with hundreds of billions of dollars of expenses. And killing people. And in the meantime, leaving this real source of the problems — the states that were our putative allies during the Cold War — leaving them there. Egypt. Saudi Arabia. Pakistan.

If you read this in the context of the entire interview, you get the sense that Clark believes that the real problems in the Middle East aren’t Iran, Iraq and Syria as the Bush administration would have you believe, but Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. (He only mentions Egypt here, and I’m not sure in what sense.) Unfortunately, two years after 9/11 the Bushies have managed to convince many people (and have been endorse by heavyweight media figures like Fareed Zakaria and Thomas Friedman) that the problem is something about the general nature of the Arab world.

I’ve always thought that while there are certainly serious problems of governance and democracy in the Arab world, these have little to do with 9/11. These terrorist attacks —if you accept that they were carried out by Al Qaeda and not some other fundamentalist group — were conducted by a bunch of zealots that had for the most part broken off contact with the Arab world for a good decade, were trained by the Afghan war, hosted by the Taliban, funded by the Saudis, backed at least logistically by the Pakistanis and were at least tolerated (perhaps more) by the United States. Look for the responsibility there before you ask “Why do they hate us?” as if it was the question that explained it all.

In any case, it’ll be interesting to see what will become of these ideas if Clark becomes the next president. And there’s a decent chance that will happen.

While you’re reading the interview, scroll down and take a gander at Marshall’s excellent work on the CIA/White House scandal. He put it on the table, forced the media to discuss it, and is now fighting off the right-wing press machine’s agitprop faster than they can spin it. What a sorry bunch us journalists are…

22:51 | / politics | link

The liars who helped the liars lie

Ahmed Chalabi and his friends deliberately lied to their friends in Washington about their credentials and the information they had on Saddam and his WMD program:

An internal assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that most of the information provided by Iraqi defectors who were made available by the Iraqi National Congress was of little or no value, according to federal officials briefed on the arrangement.

In addition, several Iraqi defectors introduced to American intelligence agents by the exile organization and its leader, Ahmad Chalabi, invented or exaggerated their credentials as people with direct knowledge of the Iraqi government and its suspected unconventional weapons program, the officials said.

There’s a good case to arrest Chalabi and his INC friends — after all in the first month after Baghdad was taken it almost happened because of their thieving and banditry. The US should get rid of these guys now before they cause any more damage and deal only with the real political forces in Iraq. And the civilians in the Defense Dept. who wanted to believe the INC should be punished for their incompetence/collaboration.

Or we’re stuck with a monster we’re already losing control over…

01:50 | / iraq | link

Mask of Wanker

When a new William Safire Op-Ed comes out, I always rush to read it because I know it’s going to produce an intense emotional reaction. It’s almost addictive, I want him to make me angry. Sometimes I think he’s getting soft and I merely get mildly irked, but he always comes back to get my blood boiling (especially with those phone-ins to his old friend Arik.) It’s nice to have (ideological) enemies you can rely on.

Anyway, in this column, as he continues to extol the war in Iraq as a “a major victory in the war on terror,” laments European betratal and liberal “failure-mongers” (so many myths, so little time…) he kind of takes me off-guard by making a point I actually agree with:

We should take full advantage of the Franco-German-Russian shortsighted unwillingness to take part in Iraq’s reconstruction. For example, that means the $10 billion claim on Iraq’s empty treasury to pay for Saddam’s arms should be paid by New Iraq on the day Vladimir Putin redeems the czarist debt, including interest, and not a day sooner.

I’m all for the cancellation of all odious debt. Not just the Russians of course, but anyone that Saddam owed money too — French, American, British and especially the Kuwaitis, who are still awaiting reparation money under UN resolutions. Iraq is really not in a position to pay any of this money back anytime soon, and remember all of these countries (and especially Kuwait) were major lenders to Saddam when he fought Iran. In a sense, it was their money that helped keep him in place in one of the most terrible war of attrition of the second half of the twentieth century.

Luckily, this point of agreement didn’t last too long. Here’s the next paragraph:

We should also take the $21 billion portion of the $87 billion budget that Bush earmarked for rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure and make that an obligation of an Iraq Reconstruction Finance Corporation. It is right for America to pay the military costs of regime change because it was clearly in our (and the free-riding world’s) anti-terror interest. But New Iraq’s huge oil reserves should be collateral for our low-interest loans to pay for the rebuilding of that nation’s economy.

So basically in one place he cancels debt that the Iraqis never wanted, and on another he wants to make them pay for the costs of cleaning up the invasion of their country? And this without them having a say, since they don’t have a government? Not exactly in the spirit of the Marshall Plan, is it? And what’s this low-interest loan business? I never knew that the $87 billion package was a low-interest loan?

Obviously it seems that the conservatives are worried enough about the costs of their Grand Plan to Remake the Region that they want to play Enron with the accounting, passing it on to people who currently have no choice to decide in the matter.

I wonder who planted this idea with Safire… Expect it to be raised by Congress or the White House soon.

12:31 | / iraq | link

Iraq’s budding media

Baghdad Burning (I’m never sure to call it that or Riverbend, as many others do, but that’s the name in the title) has a really nice post about Iraqi media and eating on the floor. What is it anyway about these Iraqi bloggers, where did they learn how to write so well?

10:39 | / iraq | link

The 7-step plan

According to Wesley Clark, Bush has a list of seven nations he wants to attack: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan. If this is true, notice that it leaves out North Korea, despite it being on the “axis of evil.” Kinda strantge considering it is the only one that is actually close or has just developed nuclear weapons, and is by far the most totalitarian of that bunch. But it seems we’ve kind of forgotten about the North Koreans anyway, with the Iranians now hurrying to get a bomb before that get attacked…

09:46 | / politics | link

Bullet points

05:24 | / potluck | link

Iraq profiteering galore

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo — which I feel compelled to check several times a day for blogging that puts “real” journalism to shame — has uncovered some interesting links between top Republican party officials, the White House, and companies that are looking to milk the Iraqi cash cow. Check out these entries here, here and here.

The first and third links point to cases where people close to the administration, including President Bush personally, are setting up companies to use their contacts to make a quick buck. But what caught my eye was the second one, where it appears that Bush cronies are teaming up with Ahmed Chalabi’s nephew Salem. Brian Whitaker of the Guardian has more details.

05:04 | / iraq | link

Egypt’s nationality law changed

This may be small news amidt what’s happening in the region, but it’s nice to see that Egypt’s unfair nationality laws are going to be changed. Currently, the children of Egyptian women who marry foreign men cannot have Egyptian nationality themselves. This has created a big problem, with people who were born here and lived here all their lives among Egyptian families unable to get the nationality. In a country that is (to use a cliché) a crossroad of civilizations, this was simply ridiculous. Glad to see it’s changing.

04:00 | / egypt | link

New massive arrest of gays in Cairo

Two and a half years after the Queen Boat arrests, which started a still ongoing campaign against Egyptian gays by State Security police, 62 allegedly gay men were arrested in late August and charged with “debauchery” — the same charge as in the Queen Boat case.

According to eyewitness accounts, police had paddy wagons parked at either end of Qasr el-Nil bridge, which spans the Nile in downtown Cairo and is a popular gay cruising area, and then policemen and informants combed the entire bridge. They began questioning, checking identification and picking up those whom they found suspicious. By the time they converged in the center of the bridge, they had rounded up a total 62 men.

The arrested men told their lawyers that when they reached the wagons, the policemen shouted to the onlookers in Arabic, “Look at these faggots! The country’s become full of faggots!”

The 62 arrested men were shepherded to Qasr el-Nil police station and reportedly forced to sign confessions of their debauchery. After three days in jail, the prosecutor’s office released them on a guarantee of their addresses. The hearings are scheduled in November or December.

Apparently, unlike the previous time the press did not comment on the arrests — either because they didn’t know about them (unlikely) or because they were discouraged from talking about the case. Al Fatiha, a US Muslim gay organization, was the first to spread the word after an Egyptian gay activist told them about it.

This marks an upswing in anti-gay activities by State Security, although things have by no means been quiet. Although widely unreported by the Western media, there has been a series of anti-gay cases in Egypt over the past two years. In many cases, there were sting operations by State Security officers posing as gay men on gay chat sites on the internet and setting up dates. When people turned up, they arrested them.

It’s important to stress that these are allegedly gay men — many of the defendants in the Queen Boat case, some of whom are still serving jail sentences, were probably not gay but simply at the wrong place at the wrong time. That is also often the case with the some 15,000 alleged Islamists that are held in Egyptian prisons (often without being charged). The problem here is a case of complete incompetence and wilfull malpractice by police and state security — often they’ll just have a quota to meet, or simply arrest the “usual suspects” who will have nothing to do with the crime they are accused of.

There has not been a lot of pressure on Egypt for this campaign against gays, although Representative Barney Frank has brought up the subject many times before and even threatened to lobby against a US-Egypt Free Trade Agreement until the campaign stops.

In prison, these people can expect the same kind of mistreatment as any other prisoner (it already seemed they were tortured so they would confess), plus all kinds of extra humiliating treatment. I’ll write more on this as the situation develops and I speak to some human rights activists here. For background, see this page Google cached from GayEgypt.com — it seems I canÕt access it directly from Egypt, which is also a new development IÕll also have to look into. It would be scary to think that Egypt is beginning to ban sites as they do in Iran and Tunisia.

03:44 | / egypt | link

More on “Hi!”

Al Ahram Weekly just published this article on Hi! magazine, the latest attempt by public diplomacy folks to woo the “hearts and minds” of the Arab world. They appropriately titled it “Hi! is not enough”:

In an introductory paragraph to the magazine’s first edition, Hi’s editors explained that Arabs usually perceive American lifestyle via popular stars like Michael Jordan and Madonna, who present only a fraction of the large, diverse, multi-race social fabric of the United States. By presenting the real stories of “other Americans who live an ordinary simple life away from the lights of Hollywood”, the editors hoped to “introduce the real face of America”.

Ross said that, “anyone watching American movies and thinking that America is nothing but violence and sex is wrong. And so we thought of explaining American life in a more accurate way, indicating points of common ground where the American experience might be useful to young people in the Arab world.”

That, Ross insisted, does not necessarily mean Hi is all about “US propaganda”.

According to Ross, “we’re trying to show a more balanced picture by accentuating the positive in the face of all the negative that appears on television and in the movies. We leave it up to the individual to form their own balances of the good and the bad, by getting exposed to all different kinds of mass media. But we also don’t shy away from discussing bad sides as well as good ones.”

…

Although many critics think the magazine is too naive to “be anything other then an exercise in brainwashing”, Toensing would not dismiss the magazine as “simply mindless happy talk”,

Salama agreed, saying, “the US media campaign may still be premature but the Americans are not giving up. Knowing that the campaign is geared towards immature youngsters, we have to at least study the effects of that campaign before we let the US mess with the minds of our youths.”

Ross had previously been quoted in the Washington Post as saying that Hi was “a long-term way to build a relationship with people who will be the future leaders of the Arab world”, and that “it’s good to get them in a dialogue while their opinions are not fully formed on matters large and small.”

By saying this, Toensing said, “Ross has unscrambled the inner voice of Hi. “ According to Toensing, “it is that of an adult setting the ground rules for an adolescent. The Hi editors are saying ‘Why have a dialogue on such issues as US Middle East policy, which, after all, is not up for discussion? We’ve had plenty of dialogue with Arabs about the subject, anyway. Learn to accept what you cannot change.’”

This “subtext beneath a smiling face” is why Toensing speculated that Hi magazine would not be successful in the Middle East.

According to Toensing, “only the State Department could have [come up with] a magazine so purportedly apolitical, and yet whose message is so essentially political” at the same time.

There really is something truly sinister about this refusal to talk about politics — completely avoiding the most salient issue about America in the Arab world. The article is right to point out that there is plenty of exposure to American culture in the Arab world — in the form of entertainment, Nike, McDonald’s and others. This especially true in Egypt, where American lifestyles have been embraced more than in any other Arab country I’ve been to. (I suspect it’s because Egyptians, like Americans, are natural born consumers.)

My guess is that there’s a good reason they don’t want to talk about politics. It’s because US politics, particularly with regards to Israel, is so irrationally biased that they wouldn’t be able to have a coherent argument (how can you when even when Howard Dean says that the US should be more “even-handed” in the Middle East, he gets booed down?)

Remember, $4.3 million of American taxpayers’ money is being spent on this garbage. What a waste.

10:38 | / media | link

Berlusconi toasted by ADL

As if we needed any more confirmation of the moral vacuum in the American Jewish right, the Anti-Defamation League — an organization that poses as a defender of human rights and dignity but mostly seems to serve as an attack dog against those critical of Israel — has awarded Sylvio Berlusconi its Òdistinguished statesman award this week. The Forward reports:

The ceremony for the fast-talking prime minister, just weeks after he made comments sympathetic toward World War II fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, has generated a roiling debate about whether the ADL is compromising its self-proclaimed role as the “nation’s premier civil rights/human rights agency” in deference to the interests of the United States and Israel.

Berlusconi uttered his controversial remarks just three weeks before the ADL dinner. Defending the regime of Mussolini against comparisons to Saddam Hussein, Berlusconi said Mussolini — Adolf Hitler’s chief ally and ideological mentor — had been a “benign” dictator. “Mussolini never killed anyone. Mussolini sent people on holiday in internal exile.”

The “holiday” that he sent people to included places such as Auschwitz. Perhaps the most famous Italian to survive Auschwitz is Primo Levi, who wrote some of the most moving literature and poetry on the Holocaust. In addition to Jews and political prisoners that were sent to death camps, many were imprisoned and tortured during his reign.

But ADL head Abraham Foxman (one of the most shameless men I’ve had the displeasure of interviewing) defended his toasting of Berlusconi with these sickening words:

In a conversation with the Forward, Foxman accused Berlusconi’s and the ADL’s critics as using the scandal as an opportunity to grind their political axes: “The criticism is political. There are a lot of people who have the luxury to be political. I respect their political views. That has nothing to do with my decision or our decision. Everybody’s got an agenda. My agenda is America.”

His and the ADL’s agenda is tarnishing the reputation of anyone who is critical of Israel or of US foreign policy in thhe Middle East as anti-semitic. This is the kind of people who go apoplexic when Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean suggests that US policy in the region should be more “even-handed.” Organizations like this are corrupting the political fabric of the country through slander and intimidation. But when it’s convenient for them, they have so problems celebrating one of the most corrupt and racist politicians in Europe. I simply don’t understand why so many American Jews let these opportunists speak in their name.

21:00 | / politics | link

Edward Said, 1935-2003

Edward Said, the Palestinian-American academic and campaigner for Palestinian rights, died this morning in New York after a long fight with pancreatic cancer. He was 67.

I had only seen Said in person a few times and although I frequently didn’t agree with him I admired the resolve he had in defense of a one-state solution for Israel and Palestine. I remember him giving a lecture at Oxford where a women got up and said that by advocating peace with Israelis he was giving up their historical homeland. He was furious and raged against warmongers, saying that the two people had no alternative but to learn how to live together, because the alternative was unthinkable.

It’s an enormous loss for the Palestinian cause, which has few defenders of Said’s stature, as well to the academic world. People who want to read his prolific writing or listen to one of his lectures should turn to The Edward Said Archive.

20:32 | / palestine | link

Chalabi vs. neo-cons?

The New York Times can be quite an educating read. If you just count Monday and Tuesday’s issues, you get three Op-Eds on why the answer to the problems in Iraq is not more troops but more power to the Iraqis.

Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute, that bastion of neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism (all things neo, really) writes:

Making the transition to an Iraqi security force is an imperative for the liberation of the country. But it should not be done cavalierly. Washington’s willingness to grab former Baathists and Saddam Hussein’s security thugs and press them back into service is an enormous mistake, as is the selection of a new “interior minister,” Nouri Badran, whose background consists of defending Saddam Hussein’s military. (The Iraqi National Accord, the minister’s original political home, is made up of former Baathists and military nostalgists.)

Clearly, the job in Iraq is not done. But sending in more troops is not the answer. With the number of ground engagements down and the recruitment of Iraqi players up, the solution lies in thinking about the transition from postwar triumph over Saddam Hussein to the empowerment of Iraqis.

Note the denunciation of the Iraqi National Accord, the main opposition group other than Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. Now remember that according to most of the historiography of the war and Iraqi opposition movements, the INA was favored by the Dept. of State and the CIA while the Dept. of Defense preferred the INC. The AIE, of course, is close to the Defense crowd such as Perle, Wolfowitz and company.

Then you have Noah Feldman, the one-time writer of Iraq’s new constitution (before they decided that Iraqis should be seen as being the authors of their own constitution), who argues that Iraqi peace-keeping institutions should quickly be formed but that more time should be given for self-rule:

Still, the answer to this threat isn’t bringing in foreign troops or putting more Americans on the ground, but creating an effective Iraqi security force — fast. Only Iraqi police officers and soldiers, knowledgeable about local conditions and populations, and with access to high-quality local intelligence, stand a chance of breaking Sunni resistance cells and identifying foreign agents. The call by Democrats (and, lately, many Republicans) to internationalize the coalition forces is well taken in terms of saving money and patching up diplomatic relations. But Indian and French troops would have no better luck combating terrorists than the Americans.

As for French and German suggestions that we speed up the transfer of sovereignty to an Iraqi interim government, it would be just as unlikely to aid security. The violence is not coming from people who would be sympathetic to any such interim government. Worse, unless the police and military have been truly reconstituted, an interim body would be a travesty of a sovereign government. Actual control is the indispensable hallmark of sovereignty. Nothing could be worse for the future of democracy in Iraq than the creation of a puppet government unable to keep the peace.

Then the NYT’s own David Brooks — a conservative columnist who is also an editor at the neo-con magazine The Weekly Standard — adds his own two cents about why all the debate taking place at the UN and in Washington is irrelevant:

It’s time to acknowledge that the reconstruction of Iraq is too important to be left to the foreign policy types, who are trained to think too abstractly to grapple with the problems that matter.

Ah, those foreign policy types! Isn’t it outrageous that decision-making about foreign policy is left to foreign policy professionals!? I tell you, I don’t know where the world is coming to these days…

But luckily, Brooks knows what we really need:

Over the long term, we need to create an apolitical reservist force, made up of of businesspeople, administrators and police officers who have concrete experience in moving societies from dictatorship to democracy. In the meantime, we need to focus on serving the Iraqis first, second and last. We don’t need to get caught up in a distracting round of lofty debates among the world’s Walter Mitty Metternichs, who treat the Iraqi people as pawns in their great game-power struggles.ÊÊ

What’s interesting here is that is these three opinions — which exclude the view among some traditional conservatives, many centrists and some of the left that a stronger military presence is needed to control the violence — is that while they go in the general direction of what Chalabi and his INC allies want, they don’t go quite fast enough.

Here’s what the NYT’s UN correspondents report about the new Chalabi:

Ahmad Chalabi, the president of Iraq’s interim government, is in New York this week to press alternatives to the Bush administration’s occupation policy in postwar Iraq, he and his aides say. In the process, he may complete a personal transformation from protégé of Pentagon conservatives to Iraqi nationalist with a loud, independent voice.

In an interview today in New York, Mr. Chalabi professed gratitude to the Bush administration for toppling Saddam Hussein’s government, but his specific proposals were directly at odds with the policies Washington is pursuing in Baghdad and at the United Nations. He demanded that the Iraqi Governing Council be given at least partial control of the powerful finance and security ministries, and rejected the idea of more foreign troops coming to Iraq.

Mr. Chalabi’s strategy, he says, is to get from the United Nations General Assembly sovereign status for the unelected 25-member Governing Council. This move to lobby other nations for a swift transfer of some sovereignty is going down poorly in Washington, according to the Iraqi leader’s aides.

And then at the end of the piece:

“We don’t want to come out in the open and pick a fight with Bremer,” [an aide to Chalabi] said, “but the sovereignty issue is coming to a head, and it is pretty clear that a breach is coming pretty soon between the Governing Council and Bremer.”

Another aide was more blunt: “We are going to find a place where we can pick a fight.”

Is Chalabi getting impatient? It would seem logical that, considering his greatest asset is the support of key administration figures, a transition to self-rule sooner than later would benefit him the most. Parties with a stronger local anchor — whether Sunni, Shia or Kurdish — have more potential in the long-term. But while he and his patrons seem to agree on the general plan — no more troops, more devolvement to the Iraqis, strengthening the Iraqis’ own police and military capability (remember the INC has its own militia) and bringing in the corporate world “to the rescue” — they disagree on the timetable. Watch Chalabi morph from Washington’s man into nationalist-populist hero in the next few months.

13:08 | / iraq | link

Iraq investment law reconsidered

A quick update on Iraq’s new investment laws: the Governing Council has said that the new minister of finance’s comments last Sunday were “unnoficial” and that only the council’s president could officially announce policy.

A statement issued by the US-installed council distanced it from a key part of a sweeping economic package presented by interim Finance Minister Kamel al-Kilani at the International Monetary Fund meeting in Dubai on Sunday.

The text said only the council president could announce policy, “and the statements attributed to the finance minister about the law of investment cannot be considered official.”

It’s worth remembering that Kilani is a member of the Iraqi National Congress, and therefore an ally of Ahmad Chalabi, the current president of the congress. (By the way, wasn’t it awfully handy that Chalabi got the month-long rotating presidency just when the UN was going to hold its first general assembly since the way — enabling him to sit in as the official representative of Iraq? Just sayin’…)

12:25 | / iraq | link

For the record

Nothing very new here, but this interesting transcript of a press conference by Colin Powell and Egypt’s then foreign minister (and current head of the Arab League) Amr Moussa in February 2001 revealed quite a different stance towards Iraq’s WMDs. Colin sez:

We had a good discussion, the Foreign Minister and I and the President and I, had a good discussion about the nature of the sanctions — the fact that the sanctions exist — not for the purpose of hurting the Iraqi people, but for the purpose of keeping in check Saddam Hussein’s ambitions toward developing weapons of mass destruction. We should constantly be reviewing our policies, constantly be looking at those sanctions to make sure that they are directed toward that purpose. That purpose is every bit as important now as it was ten years ago when we began it. And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq, and these are policies that we are going to keep in place, but we are always willing to review them to make sure that they are being carried out in a way that does not affect the Iraqi people but does affect the Iraqi regime’s ambitions and the ability to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and we had a good conversation on this issue.

I can understand, after 9/11, the worry that Saddam might pass on WMDs to Osama — even if in practice it all seemed so extremely unlikely that the two would cooperate. But if Powell thought that there was no significant WMD program and that containment had worked (at the time the big issues were dealing with the humanitarian problems caused by the sanctions and illegal oil trade through new “smart sanctions”), why the war?

12:05 | / iraq | link

Pirates of the Red Sea

The movie industry is getting worried about online downloads:

Also, as early as next month the industry will begin promoting a “stealing is bad” message in schools, teaming up with Junior Achievement on an hourlong class for fifth through ninth graders on the history of copyright law and the evils of online file sharing. The effort includes games like Starving Artist, in which students pretend to be musicians whose work is downloaded free from the Internet, and a crossword puzzle called Surfing for Trouble.

Why are these corporations allowed to spread their advertising into schools? Are these students (or their schools) getting paid to listen to this? Shouldn’t they be studying maths or geography rather than learn how to become better consumers?

I’m not defending internet piracy, but I have to say there are good sides to it too. When Egypt’s censors banned Matrix Reloaded, for instance, within a day I had several friends who had acquired a pirated copy on the internet. Once they were done watching it, these ordinary middle class Egyptians couldn’t really see what the problem was. In countries were the flow of information is controlled, getting information of any kind is difficult. The internet is making controlling that information more and more difficult, which in my book is a good thing, even if you get downsides like piracy and child pornography along with it.

11:50 | / technology | link

That Iraq place again

I’m am back from the Western end of the Arab world to its supposed center. In the former, a courageous press (and a few imprisoned journalists) , a timid reform movement that just hopes to hang on against government pressure and those unhelpful Islamists. In the latter, continuing aimlessness under the yoke of a lingering mediocracy. In other words, boring stories about slow changes, small regressions, petty oppression, routinized corruption and technocratic malpractice. Only 100 million people are concerned, so let’s get back to that exciting eye-rack place further East.

Since Sunday, the big story is “the sale of Iraq” — the announcement of new rules that will allow unfettered foreign ownership of Iraq’s non-oil state companies. That means the ability for foreign companies to bid for up to 100% of all the state-owned companies that are going to be put on the privatization block, with the ability of repatriating 100% of the profit they make and both personal and corporate taxes fixed at 15%. Imports, for their part, will only face a tariff duty of 5%. I don’t think an economic set-up like this exists in any country in the world. It’s a neo-liberal economist’s wet dream — except that it’s bound to cause all kinds of problems, is not adapted to the needs of a ravaged country (or even its indiginous business class) and even theoretically, it’s absolutely useless in a world where no one operates this. Anyone remember last week’s Cancun WTO talks?

The Guardian says:

The last big socialist, centralised economy that opted for such sudden and drastic shock therapy was Russia in 1992. The result was economic devastation, rampant corruption and the rise of a powerful class of businessmen, the oligarchs

…

In adopting a neoliberal economic orthodoxy, the US falls into the trap of believing that the state has only to be removed from the sphere of the economy to see a vibrant free market appear. History suggests this process has to be managed by a stable, home-grown government.

I believe in the US we called this the New Deal, and I seem to remember that it got us out of a lot of trouble.

The LA Times gets some local reactions:

“It’s the wrong approach,” said Sam Kubba, who heads the American Iraqi Chamber of Commerce in Washington. “It’s a recipe for disaster because it gives the impression that they’re trying to sell off all the Iraqi resources. They should go about it much more slowly. Start by getting a democracy in place first and letting the people elect a government.”

Juan Cole notes that it’s probably illegal under the Geneva Convention, which the US is bound to as an occupying power:

The US occupying forces blatantly contravened the Fourth Geneva Convention on Monday, announcing that they were opening the Iraqi economy to foreign investment and setting low trade tariffs. The economy has been plagued by massive unemployment (estimated by many observers at 60%) since the fall of the Baath regime, which had channeled oil money to employees through state industries and patronage. US civil administrator Paul Bremer, a fanatical devotee of the “Washington Consensus” on the absolute benefits of “free trade,” has managed to get the Interim Governing Council to sign off on a wideranging set of new economic regulations.

Iraq Democracy Watch has a series of posts and tons of links on this and related subjects. It’s probably the most comprehensive source if you bother to read them all and see what they add up to. All this reading made him make this interesting point:

Comparing the British and American papers’ coverage of the new economic liberalization laws in Iraq should be a lesson for anyone who thinks that the media is unbiased.Ê The Guardian, Independent, and even the conservative UK Telegraph all had headlines variously proclaiming, “Iraq for Sale.”Ê

The American headlines, in contrast, used phrasing like, “A Free Iraq Economy…” ( LA Times ), or “Economic Overhaul” (Washington Post ).

Also, do dig up his excellent overview of “America’s conflicting interests with Iraqi agriculture” from an older post, which points out that the man currently in charge of the US Department of Agriculture effort in Iraq, Dan Amstutz, is a former executive at one of the biggest agro-business companies in the world, Cargill:

Dan Amstutz had at one time worked for Cargill, a US agribusiness giant — the largest privately-owned corporation in the world and the third largest food processor on the globe, and also a company that controls a sizable portion of US grain exports, according to an article by Emad Mekay from Inter Press News Service and written for the Global Policy Forum.

In a press conference this year, Mr. Amstutz insisted that he no longer had any relationship with Cargill, but an article in The Holland Sentinel from June 22nd, 2003, as late as “ late-October 2000, Amstutz was named chairman of the board of directors of a new company established by ADM, Cargill, Cenex Harvest States, DuPont and Louis Dreyfuss.”

Mr. Amstutz isn’t just drawing the wrath of NGOs and international agriculture ministers. Jeffrey St. Claire, in his article, “The Rat in the Grain, Dan Amstutz and the Looting of Iraqi Agriculture,” reprinted in various news media, quotes George Naylor, president of the National Family Farm Coalition as saying,

Daniel Amstutz, an ex-Cargill executive, is there to push the agribusiness agenda, not a democratic agenda…He will excel in telling the world that his policy is good for farmers, consumers and the environment when just the opposite is true.

Says Mr. St. Claire,

The small farmers of the grain belt of the Midwest have a particular loathing for Amstutz. During his stint in the first Bush administration, Amstutz devised the notorious Freedom to Farm Bill, which eliminated tariffs and slashed federal farm price supports. As a result, thousands of American farmers lost their farms and monopolists like Cargill reaped the benefits.

Doesn’t sound good, does it? And why again did those Cancun talks fail?

The Arms and the Man — the definitive blog on “who’s making a killing on killing in Iraq” — notes that big capital is getting ready for all these juicy prospects, for instance by hosting $1500-a-head conferences on “Exploring Business Prospects in Iraq.” In the meantime, Richard “Prince of Darkness” Perle himself goes on teevee and counters claims of war profiteering by one of those pesky human rights activists. She (Medea Benjamin of Global Exchange) says:

The resentment will only grow unless the U.S. turns this over to a legitimate authority, which is the United Nations, which will have a quick time line for Iraqi self rule and that the money that is pledged by the U.S. and the international community — and let’s remember the international community will not pledge money unless it is in the hands of the United Nations — and that money should go directly to Iraqis and not to companies like Halliburton and Bechtel that are profiteering from this war.

Perle replies:

What you just heard is a tirade against American companies in the left-wing tradition that she represents.

Those America-bashing left-wing liberals. Why do they hate us?

For a local perspective, if you read anything read this post on Baghdad Burning, which has a few concrete examples of why unfettered foreign investment is bad and how it can lead to serious economic and moral abuse. Here’s the first ‘graf, to set the tone:

For Sale: A fertile, wealthy country with a population of around 25 million… plus around 150,000 foreign troops, and a handful of puppets. Conditions of sale: should be either an American or British corporation (forget it if you’re French)… preferably affiliated with Halliburton. Please contact one of the members of the Governing Council in Baghdad, Iraq for more information.

Read it all.

11:43 | / iraq | link

The wrong Iraqi

David Phillips has a good overview in the NYT of how Ahmad Chalabi’s bad advice before the war was partly responsible for the mess after it. That bad advice was especially listened to the civilians in the Dept. of Defense, who also gave him funding for a militia and made him one of the three key members of the temporary Council, which he presides this month. Many Iraqis must be asking themselves what he’s doing there.

Why such devotion to a man whose prewar advice proved so misguided? For one thing, Mr. Chalabi has shown himself amenable to those in Washington who want to reshape the entire Middle East. They envision Iraq as a springboard for eliminating the Baath party in Syria, undermining the mullahs in Iran and enhancing American power across the region.

I wonder when the people that supported Chalabi are going to start to realize that before enacting their grand plans to transform the region, they’re going to have to deal with stabilizing Iraq and bringing legitimacy to its new government. It doesn’t seem to me that a new government where Chalabi plays an important role would be that legitimate, especially as he continues to base himself and his cronies in property that belongs to the Iraqi people, not some rag-tag militia.

15:38 | / iraq | link

A looming bread crisis?

The last time Egyptians took to the streets really en masse, it wasn’t because of US and Israeli policies or some other external political reason. It was because Sadat, in 1977, had raised the price of bread by cutting subsidies to bakeries. It’s this “Arab street” of the stomach that the regime fears much more than the inevitably limited political Arab street that we hear so much about in the West.

It now seems that we may be heading for another bread crisis:

Newspapers have for days been reporting shortages of bread, which is subsidized by the state. Long lines of customers have formed outside bakeries.

The situation is expected to come to a head on Saturday when summer holidays end and hundreds of thousands of children return to the classroom.

Observers say the problem stems from a national flour shortage caused by a below average wheat harvest, technical problems at mills and higher international wheat prices.

Back in 1977, it wasn’t only bread prices that had upset Egyptians. Many were also upset with the effects of liberalization policies and the fact that Sadat had abandoned the Palestinians while negotiating peace with Israel — a treaty that most in Egypt did not support, something that is often forgotten by Westerners who just remember the “historic” handshake at the White House. At the time, many were a lot more ambivalent, or simply opposed, to what Sadat was doing (and many still are.)

It was the combination of angry political activists, protesting for against dealing with Israel or for more democracy, with a real mass anger because of falling living standards that made the 1977 riots what they were. But I’m reminded of an anecdote a friend has told me many times. During one of the protests, a democracy activist was out on the street shouting for democracy and the release of political prisoners. A poor old man standing next him turned to him and said: “Look, young man, don’t think that we’re here for your democracy. We just want to eat, and once we get decent prices for our bread, we’re going back home.”

Now, obviously I’m not saying that “the masses” in Egypt don’t want democracy — although I suspect they would like to know more concretely what the word “democracy” means, since after all they are currently governed by the National Democratic Party. Nor am I saying that revolution is about to happen in Egypt — I think the regime has learned its lesson from 1977 and would never allow the situation to degrade this far. But that it’s even getting this close is bad timing, and shows a worrying degree of carelessness.

My point is more that we’ve reached a point where both the apolitical “masses” (I hate that word) and militants may converge. Something similar also happened at another time in Egypt’s history — the Cairo fire and riots that preceded the 1952 Free Officers’ coup. At that time, various political movements instrumentalized and worsened what was originally a mostly non-violent protest.

For a good look at the current situation, you wouldn’t be able to do much better than Mona El-Ghobashy’s article on “Egypt’s summer of discontent.” Since I can’t find it on MERIP’s website, I’m going to post it in its entirety here. Read and savor.

Egypt’s Summer of Discontent

Mona El-Ghobashy

September 18, 2003

(Mona El-Ghobashy is writing a doctoral dissertation on Egyptian politics at Columbia University.)

As the long, hot Egyptian summer of 2003 wore on into autumn, gloom-and-doom scenarios filled opposition papers and daily conversations, warning of a terrible quiet before the storm. Elites and the masses are slowly being pushed together by palpable disaffection at rapidly deteriorating economic conditions, fueled by the government’s January devaluation of the Egyptian pound, and the stagnation in the nation’s political life, symbolized by raging speculation that Husni Mubarak is grooming his son Gamal to succeed him as president.

The decision to float the pound has dealt a further blow to Egyptians’ already meager purchasing power. Officials argued that the depreciation would boost the competitiveness of Egyptian exports, but because 72 percent of consumer goods, foodstuffs and industrial inputs are imported, citizens watched prices skyrocket for tea, cooking oil, sugar, transportation and utilities. Coming on top of a liquidity crisis and recession since 1999, double-digit unemployment and the loss of an estimated $1.2-2 billion worth of exports to Iraq under the UN Oil for Food program, the devaluation hit the vast majority of Egyptians hard, especially the fifth of the population living in poverty.

The regime is still stinging from massive anti-war sentiments unleashed during the US-led invasion of Iraq, which dovetailed with rising discontent at the government to produce the largest street protests since the January 1977 “bread riots,” complete with biting anti-Mubarak slogans, such as: “O Gamal, tell your father Egyptians hate him!” The war accelerated a significant trend among elites and masses alike to directly challenge Mubarak, such as a March statement signed by prominent intellectuals disagreeing with Mubarak’s view that Saddam Hussein alone was to blame for the impending invasion of Iraq. In July, prominent lawyer Essam al-Islamboli sued Mubarak in the administrative courts for failing to appoint a vice president. A ruling is set for November 11.

THE RISE AND RISE OF GAMAL MUBARAK

By far the hottest political issue over the summer was the increasingly public role of Gamal Mubarak, 39, who has taken a prominent position in the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), and led what the semi-official press called “high-level delegations” to the United States in February and June 2003. With the gradual political promotion of Gamal since 2000 has come the advancement of a group of big businessmen who share a self-described “pragmatic” worldview that seeks to integrate Egypt into the global economy and to strengthen bilateral ties with the US.

In February 2000, Mubarak appointed Gamal to the General Secretariat of the NDP, laying to rest rumors that Gamal was to found a new party called Hizb al-Mustaqbal (Party of the Future), but fueling speculation on his political ambitions. Gamal Mubarak holds degrees from the American University in Cairo and is a former investment banker with the Bank of America in Cairo and London. In November 1998, while chairing a private equity fund, Medinvest Associates, he founded the Future Generation Foundation, an NGO which provides job training to young people. In September 2002, at the NDP’s eighth annual congress, an elaborate political pageant which inaugurated the party’s “New Thought,” Gamal was further promoted to head the newly created Policies Secretariat. The Policies Secretariat is a 123-member core group of relatively young economists, businessmen and academics close to Gamal, but also includes university presidents, heads of government think tanks and professors with no background in politics.

Party members say official NDP candidates’ resounding defeat in the 2000 parliamentary elections convinced its leadership of the need for a housecleaning. Since then, figures like Minister of Youth Alieddine Hilal have worked to reinvent the party of the government, instead casting the government as representatives of the party. Glossy literature distributed last September announced the NDP as “the party of positive centrism” and “the party of all Egyptians” in an effort to delink the NDP from the government. The role of the Policies Secretariat is to oversee the transformation of the NDP from a state patronage machine run by old-guard party bosses to a modern majority party managed by a clique of savvy technocrats.

On March 6, 2003, Gamal announced that his Secretariat was introducing a “package of reform bills” to Parliament. The three bills proposed dissolving the state security courts that had drawn international criticism after twice convicting Egyptian-American sociologist Saad Eddin Ibrahim, abolishing hard labor as a criminal penalty and establishing a National Human Rights Council to defend Egypt’s human rights record abroad and “deepen the culture of human rights” in the country. The package was railroaded through Parliament in June. Majority NDP deputies heaped praise on the Policies Secretariat for leading Egypt into the twenty-first century with such progressive new legislation.

Critics in Parliament, the opposition parties and civil society dismissed the reforms and the Policies Secretariat as vehicles for the political rise of Gamal Mubarak, noting that his September promotion coincided with a high-profile “anti-corruption” campaign by the government which aimed to portray Gamal as a fresh-faced reformer. In the same month, the right-hand man to old-guard NDP powerhouse Youssef Wali was charged with accepting bribes to import carcinogenic French pesticides into Egypt. At the party congress, Wali was shoved out of his post as NDP secretary-general to make room for Information Minister Safwat al-Sherif, another Mubarak crony. The critics pointed out that the law abolishing state security courts, whose verdicts were subject to appeal, leaves intact emergency state security courts whose verdicts are subject only to presidential review. They added that the hard labor penalty has not been applied for 30 years. In August, the government referred five anti-war activists to an emergency state security court on charges of “reviving a communist organization,” and the latest roundup of Muslim Brothers on September 8 included ousted MP Gamal Heshmat.

During the summer months, Gamal’s public visibility continued unabated. His statements received front-page coverage in the semi-official press, and the evening news often showed him delivering slick PowerPoint presentations to enraptured audiences. The board meetings of his NGO were televised, he was once filmed sitting unobtrusively in a corner during a cabinet meeting, and during his father’s annual talk before university students, he was shown sitting between presidential foreign policy adviser Osama al-Baz and chief of staff Zakariyya Azmi. Gamal and members of his Policy Secretariat visited the US in February and June, meeting with Dick Cheney and others. In June, the delegation was to push for a bilateral free trade agreement, but Trade Representative Robert Zoellick poured cold water on the request, declaring that an agreement “isn’t going to be handed to them just because Egypt is a big and important country.” Observers theorized that the comment came in retaliation for Egypt pulling out of a US-sponsored lawsuit against the European Union for prohibiting the import of genetically modified foods.

Asked by interviewers whether he had his eyes on the presidency, Gamal has said, “There are rumors that I am being groomed for the post, but they are baseless and have nothing to do with reality. Scaling down my activities is not an option; I want to encourage the youth to be active and I will not alter the role I believe in.” He has also said, “I’m pretty much satisfied with what I’m doing now.” Much as many Egyptians may wish to believe him, Gamal’s unmistakable ascendancy has convinced them that a surreptitious process of inheritance of power (tawrith al-sulta) is underway and must be resisted.

SENSE OF OUTRAGE

Since September 2002, tawrith al-sulta has become a main motif in Egyptian political discourse. Anti-war demonstrations in March and April condemned the apparent father-son succession scenario, and a recent internal party document of the leftist Tagammu’ party attacks “hidden attempts to bequeath the regime to President Mubarak’s 39 year-old son, Gamal.” The most consistent and explicit anti-succession pulpit is the weekly Nasserist al-Arabi, which has morphed from a shrill, predictable and marginal broadsheet into a bold and entertaining political forum, earning positive mention in the influential annual review put out by the quasi-governmental Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. The NDP congress that midwifed Gamal’s rise breathed new life into al-Arabi, and under the editorship of Abdallah al-Sennawi and Abd al-Halim Qandil, the weekly newspaper has run a constant Gamal watch, skewering the president’s son in editorials and maintaining a sense of outrage over the prospect that Egypt could turn into another Syria.

Every Sunday, al-Arabi crosses the “red line” against direct criticism of the president. In May 2003, on Mubarak’s birthday, the newspaper’s main headline blared, “President Mubarak, on your birthday we ask you: are you democratic?” In June, the front page featured a now infamous photo of George W. Bush at the Sharm al-Sheikh summit driving a golf cart with Arab leaders in the passenger seats. The accompanying headline read, “Arab rulers in Bush’s cart.” On the fifty-first anniversary of the July 1952 coup, best-selling novelist Alaa’ al-Aswani wrote a page-long fictitious dialogue between Presidents Nasser and Mubarak in which the former comes back from the dead to advise Mubarak to reassure citizens once and for all that his son will not assume power, and to implement democracy as soon as possible. In September, Qandil began his column, “The desired change begins with President Mubarak himself, begins with the head…. These are constitutional basics.” The newspaper has run countless op-eds heavily criticizing the Mubaraks, and its gifted satirists Gamal Fahmi and Akram al-Kassas write laugh-out-loud funny appraisals of Egypt’s ruling class.

Beyond political shock value, the pages of al-Arabi offer a coherent critique of Gamal Mubarak and Company’s “pragmatic” worldview that seeks to relieve the state of providing social services beyond subsidies of basic foodstuffs. On foreign policy, Gamal’s group favors a regionally isolationist stance that puts “Egypt first,” while downplaying Egypt’s Arab orientation and role in regional power dynamics. At home, the NDP policy mandarins favor what they call “development of political culture” rather than constitutional reform, free elections and the direct election of the president from among several candidates — all major demands of independents and the opposition.

TWO VISIONS

Ironically, the fact that Gamal is Husni Mubarak’s son may be a distraction. While he parrots his father’s stance on Egypt’s pro-US orientation and has no plans to liberalize the country’s political life, the younger Mubarak is emblematic of an influential new class that has mushroomed in the past 15 years. Its members have close economic ties to the US (many are the Egyptian agents of American companies) and merge business interests with political influence; many are MPs or protégés of politicians. They advocate free-market policies while retaining an elitist, cautious attitude when it comes to extending democracy to the masses. As Mubarak fan and Policies Secretariat member Hala Mostafa wrote, addressing herself to US policymakers pushing political reforms in the Arab world, “Certainly there is a danger latent in the excessive emphasis on democratic processes. Free elections, for example, could well bring victory to populist or totalitarian forces that would subvert the future of democracy in the region as soon as they came into power.”

Al-Arabi’s writers question the younger Mubarak’s claim to represent the aspirations of new generations and call for a serious rethinking of Egypt’s “strategic relationship” with the US, proposing a much more autonomous Egyptian foreign policy. They dispute that the free market is the solution to Egypt’s grave economic ills and blame neo-liberal economic policies for the shrinking of the middle class and the alarming increase of poverty. On domestic politics, they favor allowing the Islamists to establish legal political parties, and call for truly free elections where all compete on a level playing field. Instead of only airing the views of Nasserists and Arab nationalists, as it has done in the past, the newspaper includes the views of Islamists and independent voices brought together by shared alienation from the status quo. While occasional Nasser nostalgia still appears in al-Arabi’s pages, it is of a qualitatively different kind from the reflexive hero worship peddled by the newspaper not so long ago. Now, reflections on Nasser’s achievements are laden with bitter comparisons to a defeated present, when Egypt seems devoid of effectiveness on the international stage or dignity and justice at home.

THIRST FOR CHANGE

The scale of disaffection with the regime manifests itself in extra-parliamentary politics. On July 30, Egyptian journalists elected the first non-government chairman of their union in 22 years and a board dominated by independent journalists, sending a clear message that thrilled many and perturbed some: we’ve tried the government and look where it got us. Newly minted Chairman Galal Aref’s election-day motto was simply: “Change.” Turnout was 77 percent of 4,332 eligible voters, and 53.6 percent chose Aref in a heated battle whose outcome was genuinely uncertain. Egyptian professional syndicate elections have long been far more contested affairs than parliamentary or municipal elections, a trial run for what Egyptian democracy might look like if the state lifts its heavy hand. In light of Egypt’s sclerotic leadership in both government and opposition, the journalists’ choice was an obvious call for turnover in executive positions.

Contributing to Aref’s success was the government’s candidate, Salah Montasser, a lackluster septuagenarian scribbler for the semi-official al-Ahram with no record of activism in union politics. Montasser was the eleventh-hour choice when al-Ahram editor-in-chief Ibrahim Nafie, union chairman for eight years (1993-1997, 1999-2003), bowed out after first announcing he would run despite union bylaws prohibiting reelection after two consecutive two-year terms. Before the elections, a series of court rulings and counter-rulings invalidating and revalidating previous election results would have given Nafie an opportunity to run. But a day before a final court ruling on July 7 confirming previous election results, Nafie announced his withdrawal from the race, while keeping the door open to a candidacy in 2005.

Regime power brokers in the syndicate scrambled to find a replacement and came up with Montasser, who later said he was “sitting in the shade” when he was informed of his candidacy. He ran a pathetic campaign that angered many journalists, not least women, for his position that female journalists with small children should stay at home rather than go to work. Two days after his candidacy was announced, Montasser had an audience with Prime Minister Atef Ebeid after which he proudly proclaimed that Ebeid had generously granted journalists a 40 pound hike in their monthly paychecks. Many journalists were offended by this unsubtle attempt to buy their votes. But Montasser’s real Achilles’ heel was his position advocating normalization with Israel, having visited the country twice in the 1990s in violation of resolutions adopted by the union’s general assembly. Montasser protested, “I thought there was peace,” and affirmed that as chair he would prohibit any journalist from visiting Israel.

By contrast, Aref is a veteran union activist who almost defeated Nafie in 1993 and was instrumental in key battles between the union and the government, notably the struggle over a press law imposing hefty fines and a two-year prison sentence for slander. A journalist at the other leading state-owned publishing house al-Akhbar, Aref’s campaign platform centered on abolishing the law and regaining the syndicate’s independence after 22 years of government control and masked bribes to journalists in the form of perks such as reduced rates on cell phones and summer resorts. Though Aref beat Montasser by only 370 votes, he took the majority of votes of all the state-owned publishing houses and 29.6 percent of al-Ahram votes, a significant precedent given the pressure on journalists at the state-owned outfits to vote for the government’s man. Nine seats on the 12-seat board were captured by independent journalists, all of whom work in the state-owned press. The only journalist from an opposition newspaper to win a seat was al-Arabi’s Gamal Fahmi.

Four Islamists won seats on the board, notably Muhammad Abd al-Qaddous of al-Akhbar who garnered the highest number of votes of any candidate. Four Nasserist-leaning candidates also won, leading to triumphal columns in al-Arabi hailing a supposed Islamist-Nasserist alliance. Yet, on election day journalists did not appear to be voting for political trends so much as trusted individuals with track records of union service and credible promises of taking back the syndicate from government control. Veteran journalists also pointed out that many were simply casting a protest vote against the government. Pro-government writers, on the other hand, warned that unfettered democracy brings in “undemocratic forces,” as putatively liberal columnist Reda Helal at al-Ahram opined. He argued that the journalists had made a “suicidal” choice they would later regret. The majority, however, hailed election results as examples of real change in contrast to other developments on the political scene and in the economy.

FED UP

Six months after the depreciation of the pound, prices on basic foodstuffs have risen by 40 percent. By the government’s own count, 6.8 million government and public sector employees have lost half the value of their salaries, while more than half of household budgets go to cover the cost of food and drink. Pensioners learned that higher delivery fees would be taken out of their meager checks. Traditional garbage collectors saw their livelihoods being taken over by private European sanitation companies, while households were suddenly informed that sanitation fees would be calculated according to their electricity consumption. Citizens sued, but the court ruled in favor of the incomprehensible new system.

In his recent book “The Arabs Confront Aggression,” public intellectual and ex-judge Tariq al-Bishri theorized that Egypt was witnessing a yawning gap between government and people and a growing rapprochement between socio-political groups in the opposition and civil society. Recent events bear out his thesis. The Egyptian regime, its new policy elite and their American patrons appear ever more isolated from majority sentiments. Ambient anger at crushing economic conditions and the Egyptian government’s tepid stance on Iraq and Palestine unites disparate strata of society. A fin de siecle mood fills the air, with vast social inequalities bringing back memories of the days before the 1952 coup, as colloquial poet Ahmad Fouad Negm says.

Housewives, ex-judges, centrist columnists, garbage collectors, unemployed university graduates and civil servants with diverse grievances are ranged against an indifferent and incompetent government that seems to have dispensed with even the pretense of responding to public needs. Time will tell if the Egyptian state’s vaunted powers of cooptation are coming apart at the seams, or if 2003 is merely a turbulent transitional period where traditional alliances are being reshuffled and new social alignments formed.

00:42 | / egypt | link

Amr Khaled and religiosity in Egypt

In a post below, I mentioned Patrick Haenni’s new piece in Le Monde Diplomatique and my own interviews with him for an article on Sheikh Amr Khaled, the preacher of Cairo’s gilded youth. Here’s the link for my article, “A sheikh for modern living.”

18:19 | / egypt | link

The Iraq situation

“Well, I think we’re fucked.” TPM interviews veteran ambassador Joseph Wilson.

18:09 | / iraq | link

Bullet points

01:00 | / potluck | link

The state and the blog

The Eclectic Chapbook writes:

Issandr El Amrani has a powerful entry posted this weekend that raises issues revolving around Mubarak’s seemingly endless incumbency. It’s hard for an outsider to determine how sensitive it might be for a writer who usually lives in Cairo to even raise this subject in public. Or… how dangerous.

It is, I believe, cogent to keep in mind that a pro-American Egyptian journalist named Reda Hilal just “disappeared.” [Last noted on this blog on Sept 11th.] One suspects that the Muslim Brotherhood may have kidnapped him to shut him up. That would be somewhat like the KKK kidnapping someone. One worries that Hilal may not have survived.

Because of these contextual circumstances, one hesitates to draw too much attention to El Amrani , so as to avoid exposing him to similar risk by raising his public profile too much. I certainly wouldn’t want to be responsible for him coming to harm.

Thanks for the link and concern, but I feel I should clarify a few things. First, I have no idea how dangerous it is to maintain a weblog on links or posts critical of Mubarak. It is certainly less dangerous to me that it might be to an Egyptian. I’m Moroccan-American, and that little blue passport can offer a lot of protection. Of course, there is always a risk that I’ll be kicked out of the country, which I wouldn’t want to happen. I love Egypt and love my life there, which is why I like to write about the place and hope it progresses towards a more open sort of government. When I write editorials for the foreign (i.e. British or American) press, that is what I write. It has landed me in trouble once, but Egypt is not Syria or Iraq. Critical information on Egypt is aplenty in human rights organizations, starting with Egyptian ones. So I think I’ll be OK. It might not be the case with Egyptian bloggers, such as Arab Street Files, who prefers to remain anonymous. And in any case I’m not sure how sophisticated the powers that be are about blogging, or how much they care.

As for the Reda Hilal disappearance, no one knows what happened. The Muslim Brotherhood does not engage in kidnappings — it’s a moderate group and would be extremely unlikely to carry out anything like this. I mean, 16 of its members are MPs (as independents), so it has no interest in appearing extremist. And while it could be a more radical group, there is really no evidence of that whatsoever. It’s kinda like Saddam and 9/11: he might have been happy about it, but there’s no logical reason he would have participated. The whole affair remains a mystery.

Eclectic Chapbook also notes the following:

On another note related to this weblog, whenever I read this one, my fan goes on, and I get the impression that reading it strains my computer. I don’t know why this is happening, but it worries me. El Amrani seems to be on the Mac system, and I’m on the Windows system, but I thought that internet browsers would make any of these systems (including Unix) cross-accessible. Whatever the cause may be, I think it’s worth noting.

That was indeed worth noting. I do use a Mac, and do my testing for the site mostly on Safari, the Apple browser. As it’s a great standards-compliant browser, I have no problems. But I do notice that other browsers do not display things the same way, for instance IE for Mac does not show the red lines on the side. I’ve been meaning to redesign the site, and even did a draft version that uses entirely CSS (no tables) but many browsers are not yet standards compliant (which is an outrage). As for the problems with your computer, I think it’s problems with the Javascript in the Iraq Body Count and Cost of War gizmos in the sidebar. I’m removing them for now until I find a solution. But if you’re interested in seeing this site exactly as I intend it to look, use Safari. I only learned HMTL about four months ago, so it’s gonna take a while before I make the site fully cross-platform.

Finally, I’ll be making big design changes to the whole site and will be adding a section on current live bands in Cairo, a picture library, a book review/recommendation section and possibly more stuff. The blog will be just one part of a bigger thing. I’m also interested in creating an Agonist-style Middle East news-only blog that will be moderated by people who can claim some expertise on the topics. It will also have discussion forums, document collections, etc. I’ll be looking for editors/moderators, so if anyone has any suggestions or wants in, drop me a line.

20:23 | / about | link

The Saudi bomb

Saudi Arabia apparently wants to develop nukes, the Guardian reports. I can’t say I’m that surprised, especially considering their uncertain relationship with the US — particularly the neo-cons — and the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program. Not to mention the fact that Israel has its own nukes, and that its nuclear policy is still pretty unclear.

But there is also another powerful rationale for building nuclear weapons: it protects you from regime change. Look at the Koreans, who do have them. Look at the Pakistanis, who were helping Bin Laden and the Taliban (and might still be doing so) right until 9/11. Look at Saddam, who was gotten rid off partly because there was a fear he would get them (This was the only remotely “legitimate” reason for the war as I have a hard time believing anyone in the Bush administration cared that much about the humanitarian disaster that was Iraq.) With a rising of chorus of voices in the US either calling for change in Saudi Arabia, some people in Riyadh must have realized that if they have a bomb, not only will there no be regime change but that they will be supported against internal dissent because the US and others won’t want to see the bomb fall into the wrong hands. Look at Pakistan, where the US supports a military dictator just as it claims to want to spread democracy in the Muslim world. Being a nuclear power means people are going to deal with you much more carefully.

Another aspect of the Guardian story is that they are considering buying their nukes rather than developing the technology themselves:

David Albright, director of the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington thinktank, said he doubted whether the Saudis would try to build a nuclear bomb, preferring instead to try to buy a nuclear warhead. They would be the first of the world’s eight or nine nuclear powers to have bought rather than built the bomb.

It would certainly be in line with the past record of weapons purchases. But who might they buy it from? The North Koreans might be willing, but they are under heavy scrutiny. The Europeans are unlikely to be selling — even the French, who cooperated with Israel on its weapons program and built Saddam Hussein a nucler power station in the early 1980s, seem unlikely to do so. Pakistan is a maybe, but probably doesn’t have that many bombs itself. China has no clear incentive, not even money, that would make it sell its arsenal.

Who’s left? Russia, with whom the Saudis recently signed an oil agreement and have started talking to for the first time since Saudi Arabia was created. The Saudis have some pretty strong bargaining chips for the Russians. Aside from the oil — the Saudis are trying to get the Russians into OPEC, and still have the greatest impact on international oil prices, the only thing that has fueled the recovery of the Russian economy in the past few years — there are also geopolitical considerations:

This week’s state visit is not only about oil. Abdullah’s trip is repairing bilateral ties forged in 1926, when the Soviet Union was the first country to recognize the Saudi Kingdom. But relations were severed ahead of the second World War, and remained frosty for decades after. Riyadh was angered by the Soviet presence in east Africa and the Afghan invasion, and kept ties on ice even in the final days of the Soviet collapse.

But when Moscow and Riyadh both showed their support for Kuwait following the Iraqi invasion in 1990, their formal hostilities “began to look absurdly anachronistic,” according to Igor Timofeev, a historian specializing in the Middle East.

Diplomatic relations were restored in 1992. But many observers agree that the true reunion came only a decade later, in the aftermath of 9-11 and the subsequent war on terror. Some say the U.S. offensive in Iraq may have Riyadh — which is suspected of harboring Islamic extremists — worrying about its own future. Timofeev says Abdullah’s visit may be a way of shoring up Moscow’s support: “There are already threats. You have the example of Iraq. We won’t analyze here how everything happened [in Iraq], but we know that it happened by [circumventing] the United Nations. And in order for something like that not to repeat itself and to avoid similar risks, Saudi Arabia needs support among well-respected countries like Russia, the [EU states], India, and China.”

With this in mind, the Saudi leader will attempt to reassure Putin that Saudi charities provide no support to Chechen rebels in their four-year war with Russia.

Riyadh is not the only possible benefactor. Closer ties with Saudi Arabia would also improve Russia’s standing in the Islamic world. Last month, Putin announced that Russia may seek to join the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), a body of 59 countries.

In a page-long press released published in today’s “Vremya Novostei” daily, Saudi Information Minister Fouad al-Farsi appeared to give his backing to Russia’s OIC bid. The press release said, in part, that Moscow’s membership would “stimulate Russia’s contacts with the Muslim world.”

As a major economic power and a founding OIC member, Saudi Arabia’s support may prove key for Russia.

Formally, Russia is not eligible for OIC membership because its 20 million Muslims account for less than 25 percent of its population. But Moscow may still find a persuasive argument for joining the OIC — which, according to Timofeev, would effectively cut Chechen separatism off at the knees.

“It is a well-known fact that territorial integrity is a condition [of membership in] the Organization for the Islamic Conference,” Timofeev said. “This means that if Russia joins this organization, 59 Muslim countries will be telling the Chechens, ‘Don’t think you’ll be seceding from Russia. That would be against our principles. Russia has Islamic status and you can only exist only as a part of [Russia].”

Russia’s OIC membership bid is expected to be discussed in October, during the next assembly of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. Russia will be present as an observer.

A Saudi-Russia alliance would present many advantages to both parties. Together, the two countries would have unprecedented power over international oil prices, and by extension gas prices. Both Russia and Saudi Arabia are important providers of oil for Europe and Japan — much less for the US. The Russians would get backing over the Chechnyans (which must be a hard pill to swallow for all the powerful Saudi backers of the Islamist rebels there), and perhaps a more important role in Gulf politics if the US continues to have doubts about the Saudis. And the Saudis have already agreed to crack down on the charities that send money to Chechens. This is pure speculation, but I could imagine, a few years down the line, Saudis trying to acquire bombs from their new Russian allies. It’s a story to watch.

19:40 | / saudi arabia | link

Fight the future

Keeping up his great series of columns for the Beirut Daily, Kamel Labidi last week addressed the political hot potato of succession in Egypt in a piece called “Fighting a hereditary republic in Egypt.” With the congress of the ruling National Democratic Party coming in a few days — and probably offering Gamal Mubarak and his cronies yet another opportunity to grab power and everyone’s attention.

Regime figures in Egypt — and even a couple people who claim to be anti-regime democrats (you know who you are)— say that although Gamal and his father have said that he won’t be the next president, they don’t necessarily see what’s wrong with it in principle. After all, they argue, Gamal Mubarak is an Egyptian citizen and he has the right to run for president. One even told me that “it would be unfair to discriminate against Gamal Mubarak because of who is father is.” That would all be swell if elections in Egypt were run honestly, if state security forces didn’t prevent people from voting (I’ve seen it myself) or harass opposition candidates, if party politics allowed a serious opposition opposition — whether liberal, leftist, or Islamist — to flourish (something Kamel wrote about before), or if “anti-terrorist” emergency powers did not give so much power to the president in the first place. After all, the tendency towards hereditary political dynasties is a fact of political life everywhere. But under the current circumstances, this argument is so such a shame-faced lie that I wonder how anyone with any self-respect can utter it.

But there is an even more pernicious argument defending a Gamal Mubarak presidency out there. It is the one that may just be uttered in Western capitals in 2005, when Hosni Mubarak comes up for re-election and may step down in favor of his son. (It should be noted for the record that both father and son have publicly denied this scenario, and that Mubarak has not said that he had any intention of stepping down in 2005. The last time he came up for re-election in 1998, there was a referendum campaign — not an election — for Egyptian to vote “yes” or “no” for Mubarak. He won over 99% of the votes.) This second argument is that Gamal Mubarak, in a strategic country like Egypt, represents the only alternative to chaos or the Islamists. This is the same kind of argument that kept Saddam in place after the Gulf War (and led to the failure of the Shia uprising) and also secured the reign of countless third world autocrats. There is an alternative, and it’s called the law. Egypt has a constitution which clearly guarantees a democratic electoral process. The problem is that it has never been applied in letter or spirit, which is why over the past twenty years Egypt’s Supreme Court has declared several parliaments illegal.

Handling the legal aspect of things is simple — judges can observe, as they did in the 2000 parliamentary election, or international institutions. As well as the electoral practice itself, other engrained habits like the exclusion of opposition voices from public media or the busing of public servants to polling stations to vote for the ruling party would need to be addressed. But there’s an even bigger problem that Kamel touches upon at the end of his article:

It seems unlikely that the Egyptian regime will soon allow intellectuals free and unfettered access to a society eager to hear new and independent voices. Intellectuals cannot play a healthy role under the 22-year-old emergency law and other laws curtailing basic rights. Much the same situation faces beleaguered opposition parties, which are struggling to lay the foundations for a national front to defend democracy.

Unless the marketplace of ideas, to borrow a term from pop academia, is liberalized enough so that different voices are heard than the state’s droning monologue, it won’t matter. In a democracy, citizens need to be educated about their choices and responsibility. Currently, the only voice they are likely to hear is either the state’s tired old song or the Islamists. And that’s not enough. What Western countries, with their recently discovered passion for spreading democracy in the Middle East, can do for the people of this region is not impose democracy from above in a crude way that will be easily manipulated by so-called patriots (remember, patriotism is the first refuge of the scoundrel), but by putting subtle pressure on governments when they repress an intellectual, human rights activist, or journalist. With a little help like that, those on the ground will be able to accomplish much more than they would otherwise. Sometimes it’s the little things that count the most.

18:21 | / egypt | link

Amazigh

For the first time in the history of modern Morocco, Berber children are being taught their own language in schools. I doubt there will be much about it in the international press in these days of occupation and failing peace processes, so here’s the BBC story (they seem to cover everything). I’m preparing my own pieces on it, but it will be in a few days.

Last night I met with Mounir Kejji, a Berber militant, who alleged that — according to a former minister — over 80% of Morocco’s population is Berber speaking. That’s a pretty staggering statistic, but there’s no way to really know because while there is a census, the figure is a state secret. Still, this is an important development because the more the multicultural aspects of Moroccan identity are emphasized, the more the monolithical vision of Islam favored by the Wahabbis and other fundamentalists seems ridiculous and unnatural. Morocco is an Arab country, but it also a Berber country and a Jewish country. And those identities and perfectly co-exist and cohabit without a problem.

“Amazigh,” by the way, is the way Berbers refer to themselves in their own language. It means “Free Men”.

18:17 | / morocco | link

I’m a profane pervert Arab blogger too!

Salam Pax has resurfaced after two weeks’ absence. Apparently he’s been busy plugging his new book and doing interviews and stuff like that. Good for him. Just don’t let it to your head.

As part of this media blitzkrieg, he wrote this piece for the Guardian, which has this nice little paragraph:

The first reckless thing I did was to put the blog address in a blog indexing site under Iraq. I did this after I spent a couple of days searching for Arabs blogging and finding mostly religious blogs. I thought the Arab world deserved a fair representation in the blogsphere, and decided that I would be the profane pervert Arab blogger just in case someone was looking.

You’re not alone anymore, Salam. I’m a profane perverted Arab blogger too. In large part thanks to you, because you made me realize that there was a definite need for that “fair representation” of the Arab world in the blogosphere. In many ways, you’re the pioneer. (I’m talking about the blogging, the perversion and profanity came beforehand.)

Speaking of profanity, a Google search for “Arab atheist” recently took me to The Raving Atheist, a blog dedicated to praising the Lord’s non-existence. There I found this interesting post quoting a Reuters story saying that Saudi Arabia’s chief executioner had clean conscience because he is an atheist. It’s so fantastic it is obviously not true. Here’s his quote:

RIYADH (Reuters) - The leading executioner in Saudi Arabia, which implements strict Islamic sharia law, has no compunction about beheading convicts because he is an atheist.

“I sleep very well,” Arab News daily quoted executioner Mohammed Saad al-Beshi as saying Thursday in a rare interview that offered an insight into a job that is much-criticized in the West and by human rights groups.

“It doesn’t matter to me: two, four, 10. Because there is no god, it doesn’t matter how many people I execute.”

Of course, this is horseradish. He’s no atheist at all. Here is the same paragraph in the original story:

RIYADH (Reuters) - The leading executioner in Saudi Arabia, which implements strict Islamic sharia law, has no compunction about beheading convicts because it is “God’s work”.

“I sleep very well,” Arab News daily quoted executioner Mohammed Saad al-Beshi as saying on Thursday in a rare interview that offered an insight into a job that is much-criticised in the West and by human rights groups.

”It doesn’t matter to me: two, four, 10. As long as I’m doing God’s work, it doesn’t matter how many people I execute.”

For a split-second he almost had me going. Very funny.

23:36 | / about | link

Johnny Cash, 1932-2003

I can’t claim to know much about country music, and for a long time I didn’t think that any of it was worth listening to. But was of the first artists I started listening to after being introduced to the genre by an Egyptian-American born in Louisiana and raised in Texas was Johnny Cash, and I haven’t looked back since. As I type this I’m listening to Live at Folsom Prison, a chilling album considering how grim some of the songs are, and even more so if you’re in prison. Take for instance “25 minutes to go,” a song that counts down as a man is about to hanged. Here are the end lyrics:

I can see the buzzards
I can her the crows
One more minute to go
And now I’m swinging and here I go…

Or the beginning of “Send me a picture of mother:”

After seven years behind these bars together
I’ll miss you more than a brother
When you go
When you go
I only I had not tried to escape
They’d pardon me with you
I know
Yes, I know
Won’t you tell the folks back home I’ll soon be coming soon
And don’t let them ever know
I’ll never be free
Be free

He could be funny too, as when he sang “I’ve been flushed from the bathroom of your heart.”

One thing that I liked about Cash is that he sang about the poor, the downtrodden, the misfits and all the people who didn’t fit in, the damned of the earth. We could use that kind of reality check now.

02:10 | / potluck | link

“It’s plus ça change all over again”

A great Maureen Dowd column:

But he’s like a kid singing with fingers in his ears, avoiding mentioning Saddam or bin Laden, or pressing the Pakistanis who must be protecting Osama up in no man’s land and letting the Taliban reconstitute (even though we bribed Pakistan with a billion in aid). He doesn’t dwell on nailing Saddam either.

Guess who’s she talking about?

02:21 | / politics | link

Qandil on Mubarak

I don’t normally trust MEMRI, the soi-disant Middle East press watchdog that drags up the most extremist writing in the Arab press and brands it as typical and representative. But this astounding translation of an article in the Nasserist weekly Al Arabi has to be seen:

The Longest Incumbency in Egypt’s Modern History

“Perhaps it is incorrect to demand of President Mubarak that he make changes [in the government], as the story is not the failure of [Egyptian Prime Minister] ‘Atef ‘Ubeid’s government, of the government that preceded it, or of the one that will follow it. The necessary change begins with President Mubarak himself. The necessary change begins at the top.

“I’m not talking out of personal caprices for which I alone will bear the responsibility. I am not seeking a great battle beyond what I can withstand. We are talking, in my opinion, about constitutional axioms. …[T]he constitution gives the president quasi-divine powers; he is the president of everything in Egypt. He is responsible for the minister and for the guard. He is the one who is responsible, first and foremost, and solely, for the decisions made in political, economic, and cultural areas. The ministers and the prime minister are a group of clerks in the president’s office. [The president] is responsible for success, if there is success, and responsible for failure.

“The main flaw does not lie in the kleptocratic government; it is the bitter fruit of the choices of a regime that has grown old on its seats, the bitter fruit of the lengthy stagnation that has taken over Egyptian life.

“In the meantime, President Mubarak has had the longest incumbency in Egypt’s modern history, except for Muhammad ‘Ali. President Mubarak began his era with beautiful words on morality and ‘shrouds that do not have pockets’; but the story ended with the theft of the shrouds themselves, and there is no criminal investigation examining who took [what] and who gave [them] the keys. This is not our job. The bottom line, unfortunately, looks shocking.”

…

“We need to remember only one example. In the early 1990s, the [various] Mubarak governments estimated the worth of the public sector designated for sale [i.e. privatization] at 500 billion Egyptian pounds in the early 1990s. Afterwards, the value of what was sold and what was not sold dropped to a mere 28 billion. The time difference: 10 years. The price difference: 472 billion Egyptian pounds.

“Don’t ask where this huge sum went. It’s a long, complex, and complicated story that can be justly called ‘The Labyrinth of a Country,’ and in it, kleptomania can certainly be attributed to people and elements, as well as – and this is the most important – [an] actual kleptomaniac policy. Here I stop, and refrain from stating clearer words.

“These days in Egypt, the sun does not rise in the morning without the state being plundered as it has never been plundered in its history. The public robbery is only one aspect of the picture. The general oppression is far too clear, and obviates any need to point it out. The constitution has taken a long vacation, and it is emergency law that is actually [in force]…

“The [international] role played by Egypt has shrunk to the point of disappearance… and Egypt is compared to Burkina Faso, not South Korea, which we were ahead of in the 1960s. This is a picture that is undisguised, un-retouched, and un-faked. This is a picture with no optical illusions. This is the catastrophic disaster that aroused the rage of great Egypt and turned it into a small farm, an estate that looks tempting to bequeath, an open buffet for thieves…”

…

“I assume that the president is dissatisfied with the condition to which Egypt has fallen. He realizes that the solution does not lie in replacing the prime minister or disbanding the People’s Council. The only solution is transferring the rule, in its entirety, to the hands of the public. If the president did this, it would be the greatest of his achievements.”

Al Arabi has been pushing and pushing close to the edge for over a year now, particularly on the touchy subject of whether Mubarak intends to put his son Gamal in his place. But by all standards, this should take it over the edge. It’s either a sign the Al Arabi editors have thrown all caution to the wind, or that they think Mubarak is in no position to retaliate, that he’ll actually let it slide. If it’s the latter, than he is in trouble. Several reputable Egypt-watchers (who are Egyptian themselves) have voiced the opinion that it will be over for Mubarak within a couple of years (most say by 2005, when he comes up for re-election), but I’ve never quite believe them. But lately, with the increasing frenzy around the Gamal Mubarak crowd and strident criticism by the Egyptian left, it is starting to seem possible. I’d like to check that Al Arabi article, which I’m unable to do now not being in Cairo, but if it’s true this is quite a coup.

22:06 | / egypt | link

Redemption?

Forgive me government for I have sinned: the strange story of Gamma Islamiya’s rethink gets stranger. The group that waged a civil war in Egypt’s south during the 1980s and 1990s, killed Sadat and was behind the 1997 Luxor massacre now condemns Al Qaeda and describes Sadat as a martyr. Are they for real? Hossam El-Hamalawy, rising expert on all things Islamist, thinks that there’s a split that may lead to a resurgence of a younger Gamaa.

The old leadership and its loyal middle ranks, have been exhausted by years of incarcerations, and could clearly see that violence was not leading anywhere. On the contrary, the young cadres, more zealots by age, didnÕt come in close contact with the middle (let alone old) generation. They did not go through the prison experience, as they were likely detained for short periods but released for their then organizational unimportance.

A split led by radical disillusioned youth, if it happens, will be the first major incident in the GamaaÕs history, but can be very similar to other groupsÕ experiences.

ÒSuch [splinter] movements are usually motivated by youth, inside or outside prison,Ó explained Zayat. ÒThey seek an elder figure inside prison, who would share their views. TheyÕll take him as a figurehead to gain legitimacy or guidance, and would cluster their group around him. This is just what happened in the case of Sayyed Qutb. ItÕs possible it may occur again.Ó

One to watch. (We definitely have to get that book done, Hossam…)

21:44 | / egypt | link

OK, some comment

I was too struck by the Haaretz story below to write anything about it — it all seems so obvious anyway — but I was glad to see I’m not the only one who thinks so. Juan Cole has a post about it that’s appropriately scathing towards Lieberman, as does Abu Aardvark.

It just seems unbelievable to me that Dean would actually get heat for suggesting that the US should be more even-handed in Israel/Palestine. It just shows how the political consensus on this issue has gotten hijacked by extremists who will do anything to paint those who disagree with them as radicals.

20:18 | / politics | link

No comment

Democrat’s remarks on Israel may lead Jews to cut funds

By Nathan Guttman

Haaretz 12 September 2003

WASHINGTON - The recent statements about Israel by leading Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean were the last thing the Democratic Party needed. The Israel issue sparked off a public confrontation among the candidates, with Democratic congressmen joining the fray.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are thrilled by the crack in their rival party’s united front regarding Israel. They are also heartened by the surveys indicating the growing tendency of American Jews to vote for the Republican Party.

How did the Israel issue rise to the fore of the Democratic primaries debate? It all began with a statement by front-runner Howard Dean, a former Vermont governor, at an election event at Santa Fe last week. He said “it is not our place to take sides” in the Middle East conflict. A few days later he told the Washington Post “the United States needs an evenhanded approach to the conflict.”

Senator Joseph Lieberman, also a Democratic candidate, responded sharply: “If this is a well-thought-out position, it’s a mistake and a major break from a half a century of American foreign policy.” Lieberman said Dean either understands nothing about foreign policy, or wants to damage the special relations between the U.S. and Israel since the state’s establishment.

John Kerry, once the Democratic front-runner and today second after Dean in the polls, said “it is wrong that Governor Dean has proposed a radical shift in the U.S. policy toward the Middle East.”

The argument climaxed at a debate among the nine Democratic candidates in Baltimore on Wednesday. In contrast to the previous restrained, polite discourse, the Israeli issue became the main sparring arena between Lieberman and Dean.

“All of us here … have quite correctly criticized George W. Bush for not standing by our values in our foreign policy and for breaking our most critical alliances. That, with all respect, is exactly what Howard Dean’s comments over the last week about the Middle East have done,” attacked Lieberman.

“I am disappointed in Joe. My position on Israel is exactly the same as Bill Clinton’s,” retorted Dean.

“Not right,” interrupted Lieberman.

“Excuse me, Joe,” said Dean. “I didn’t interrupt you and I’d appreciate it…”

“Not right,” Lieberman interjected, turning Israel into the hottest subject in the Democratic camp.

Jewish organizations protested Dean’s comments, which indicate he wants to change the American pro-Israeli policy to reflect a balanced approach to both sides. A letter is being circulated in Dean’s party denouncing his statements and position, and even Democratic minority leader Nancy Pelosi and her deputy Steny Hoyer have criticized his position.

Dean is trying to mend the impression, maintaining his positions are the same as Clinton’s. This week he wrote to President Bush, calling on him to ask Clinton to embark on an urgent mediation mission to the Middle East.

In an interview to CNN on Wednesday, Dean refused to withdraw his statement but admitted “I have learned that `evenhanded’ is a very sensitive term and I could have used a different one.”

Sources in the Jewish community say that Dean has wrecked his chances of getting significant contributions from Jews. However, some say this is less significant to Dean, whose campaign is based on contributions from citizens via the Internet. Many believe Dean’s statement will drive more Jews toward Lieberman and Kerry, enabling Kerry to take the lead again.

Republicans hastened to denounce Dean, hoping angry Jews would cross over to the Republican side. The Republican camp is now celebrating last November’s interim election results that were published this week. The exit polls were conducted by Voter News Service, whose systems crashed on election day. The data indicates that 35 percent of Jews voted for Republican candidates, compared to an average of 25 percent in previous congressional elections.

Howard Dean visited Israel last year and left the impression that he is sympathetic to Israel’s cause. He also appointed Steve Grossman, formerly one of the heads of the pro-Israeli lobby in Washington, to a senior post in his campaign.

However, Jewish sources believe his utterances reflect his true positions, which are left of the Democratic Party consensus.

Dean is now maintaining a consistently moderate pro-Israeli line. He says the settlements are an issue of negotiation between the sides. As for the assassinations, he says he opposes violence but the Hamas men are soldiers, not civilians. He is against deporting Arafat, and believes Israel can build the separation fence, but not set a border which deviates from the Green Line.

17:41 | / politics | link

Bullet points

16:26 | / potluck | link

At the center, and elsewhere too

Juan Cole has published a post looking at Bush’s speech on Iraq. He makes many good points, but this one stuck in my mind:

“In Iraq, we are helping the long-suffering people of that country to build a decent and democratic society at the centre of the Middle East.”

But Iraq isn’t at the center of the Middle East. Egypt is. Egypt’s ruling National Party is drafting a new election law. All the US would have to do is lean on them a bit, and Egypt could suddenly be much closer to being a democracy. But the US coddles Mubarak’s soft police state because it is a US ally. Apparently you have to virtually declare war on the US to have any hope that the Americans will turn your country into a democracy. Otherwise you are stuck with pro-US dictatorships. As for a decent and democratic society, what the Iraqis have so far is a peremptory American administration of the country, a huge crime wave, lack of electricity and potable water, and an unemployment rate hovering around 60%, not to mention deep insecurity from huge bombs going off.

Got that right. There may several parties in Egypt, and they all get to run in the elections, but that does not a democracy make. Not when there is no rotation of power possible and the most important opposition party, the Muslim Brotherhood, is not allowed to run. I dislike and disagree with the Brothers, but they’ve said they’ll abide by the rules of parliamentary democracy and I think they should be given the chance.

And it’s not only Egypt that had the problem of being a paper democracy. In another staunch US ally where I am at the moment, Morocco, the 16 May bombings in Casablanca have put an end to an already faltering democratic experiment. There is multiparty election politicking going in Morocco, and at least there the moderate Islamists are allowed to run, but the game is rigged. There are local elections taking place next Friday, and it’s common knowledge that the Parti de la Justice et du Developpement, the moderate Islamist party, is limiting the numbers of candidates it is fielding at the request of the interior ministry. A lot of the middle class here supports containing the Islamists to avoid a repeat of the bombing that took 19 lives in Casablanca. It was very sad to hear an old family friend saying this morning, “The King wanted democracy so much… he really did. But what can he do? With these Islamists, it’s simply not possible.”

People here value their security more than their freedom in many cases, especially if they are well off. The poor — i.e. the vast majority of the population — has nothing to lose, and offers its votes (its only assets) to those who really seem different from the establishment, i.e. the Islamists. But until Islamists actually have enough responsibility in government to govern, make mistakes, and have people be disappointed in them (and get rid of them in the next elections) things will not change. The Islamists, their ideas untested, will remain heroes to many people. For more security, people should look for more democracy, not less.

22:22 | / islam | link

Unblogged

19:08 | / potluck | link

Chalabi’s turn

At the beginning of this month, Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, the main exiled Iraqi group allied with the neo-cons in Washington, assumed the presidency of Iraq’s Governing Council. He’ll only be there for a month, but I’m sure he’ll be trying to lay the groundwork for a more permanent position. After all, his allies in Washington are.

Take for instance a recent Wall Street Journal Op-Ed by Bernard Lewis, famed orientalist historian, on the need to “put Iraqis in charge” to solve the growing Iraq crisis, which I saw pointed out by top Chalabi-watcher Josh Marshall:

Fortunately, the nucleus of such a government is already available, in the Iraqi National Congress, headed by Ahmad Chalabi. In the northern free zone during the ’90s they played a constructive role, and might at that time even have achieved the liberation of Iraq had we not failed at crucial moments to support them. Despite a continuing lack of support amounting at times to sabotage, they continue to acquit themselves well in Iraq, and there can be no reasonable doubt that of all the possible Iraqi candidates they are the best in terms alike of experience, reliability, and good will. It took years, not months, to create democracies in the former Axis countries, and this was achieved in the final analysis not by Americans but by people in those countries, with American encouragement, help and support. Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress deserve no less.

Marshall of TPM however omits the preceding paragraph, which is more telling of the plans for Iraq that the neo-cons (ideological allies of Lewis even if he may be too old-fashioned to be a neo-con himself) have:

What then should we do in Iraq? Clearly the imperial role is impossible, blocked equally by moral and psychological constraints, and by international and more especially domestic political calculations. An inept, indecisive imperialism is the worst of all options, with the possible exception of subjecting Iraq to the tangled but ferocious politics of the U.N. The best course surely is the one that is working in Afghanistan—to hand over, as soon as possible, to a genuine Iraqi government. In Iraq as in Afghanistan, a period of discreet support would be necessary, but the task would probably be easier in Iraq. Here again care must be taken. Premature democratization—holding elections and transferring power, in a country which has had no experience of such things for decades, can only lead to disaster, as in Algeria. Democracy is the best and therefore the most difficult of all forms of government. The Iraqis certainly have the capacity to develop democratic institutions, but they must do so in their own way, at their own pace. This can only be done by an Iraqi government.

So basically what he’s saying is, put Chalabi in charge but don’t push him to be democratic. Hmmm sounds familiar… oh yes, that’s right, that’s the US policy for every other country in the region. “Discreet support” of dictators with the justification that if democracy is going to develop, these people must to do it “at their own pace.” Nevermind that many Iraqis don’t seem to care much for Chalabi, who let’s remember is still wanted for a large-scale bank fraud in Jordan. But in any case, for Lewis the Arab world is probably — for essentialist “cultural” reasons — probably incapable of democracy in any case. For an in-depth critique of Lewis, take a look at this new article on MERIP by Adam Sabra.

TPM has more on Chalabi, including speculation that he may have been responsible for the failure of a CIA coup attempt in 1996. His thinking is that Chalabi wanted the coup to fail because the CIA was carrying it out with exiled Baathist generals, and not his group. Chalabi, along with his best buddy Richard Perle, may have played the CIA into taking a more hardline stance against Iraq after the failed coup, which Chalabi may have warned Saddam about.

In another post, TPM notes a Washington Post article that refers to an interview with Perle in the conservative French daily Le Figaro. He only quotes a part of the interview that was translated by the post, so I dug up the original Le Figaro interview (now in its paid archives) and translated part of it. It picks up on the new neo-con theme of putting Iraqis in charge as soon as possible (and you know who he means) and has Perle making a ludicrous comparison between the occupation of Iraq and the liberation of France in 1944:

How can you pretend that the situation in Iraq under American control is going well?

The situation in Iraq is in any case much better than under Saddam Hussein, although I will not say that it is easy to change a country that was submitted for thirty years to a dictatorship like Saddam’s.

Do you think that anarchy is preferable to dictatorship?

I don’t think you can speak of anarchy. Yes, there is a lot of violence. But wasn’t there anarchy in France after its liberation in 1944?

Not a single American soldier was then killed, behind the front lines, in liberated French territory. Same thing in Germany, even though it was an enemy country.

But 10,000 French collaborators where killed by other Frenchmen! You cannot, from one day to the next, succeed in transforming a country that has gone through a history like Iraq’s recent history. There are Iraqis who worked for Saddam, belonged to his torture apparatus, his secret police. There are thousands of them and they have nowhere to go. What we are seeing now is a desperate attempt to show that the American administration of Iraq is not working.

Don’t the current problems come rather from militant Islamists who were not there under Saddam and who have succeeded in infiltrating the country in the midst of the anarchy? Don’t you think that the attacks against your soldiers and against the UN come from these Islamists rather than Arab nationalists from the former Baath party?

Evidently, we have problems with both groups. Three groups of people are responsible for the current violence and sabotage in Iraq: the Baathists who have nowhere to go, the Muslim extremists for whom the attacks are part of a global strategy, and, finally, common criminals, many of whom were freed from prison by Saddam. But the vast majority of Iraqis do not support any of these three groups.

Isn’t there a shocking contrast between the quality of military preparation, the rapidity of the invasion, and America’ total lack of preparedness in terms of civilian administration [of Iraq]? All the looting, the vandalized ministries, the burnt archives… Yet, you knew that the world would be judging you foremost on your civilian [as opposed to military] efforts. Isn’t there a historic American failure here?

Of course we didn’t do everything well. Mistakes were made and there will be others. Invading a country in order to run it is not part of American culture. We do not have colonial experience from which we could have pulled a doctrine. Our approach was necessarily empirical. Our main mistake, in my opinion, was to have failed to work in depth with the Iraqis before the war, so that an Iraqi opposition would have been able to immediately take charge of things. Today, the solution is to hand over power to the Iraqis as soon as possible.

Perle is right when he says that “Invading a country in order to run it is not part of American culture.” But setting up puppet regimes and not caring about whether they are democratic is. I wonder what tension is now developing between the hawks that truly believe they can install a form of democracy in Iraq and those that just wanted Saddam out and a tame regime — of any kind — in.

17:49 | / iraq | link

Herbert / blogs / Heseltine / Hi / design

02:17 | / potluck | link

Homage to Hossam

Hossam Bahgat, a good friend and former colleague at the Cairo Times, has been awarded a “Young Human Rights Hero” award by Amnesty International Netherlands for his work as program director at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR). Hossam is not only a remarkably intelligent person, but also an incredibly precocious man who must be one of the youngest human rights activists in the world. Over the past two years he has shown great courage in taking up causes that many Egyptian human rights organizations simply won’t touch, such as Egypt’s ongoing crackdown against gays. Because of his work, his name has been dragged through the mud in some of the Egyptian press, which typically dubs him “the defender of perverts.”

You can read a recent Op-Ed piece of his on human rights and business in Al Hayat (in Arabic) here.

Mabrouk ya Hossam… and keep up the good work.

01:12 | / egypt | link

Against “Israeli escapism”

Avraham Burg, the former speaker of the Knesset and centrist candidate for leadership of the Labor party, has written an eloquent plea for a saner Israel that originally appeared in Hebrew in Yediot Aharonot and in English in the American Jewish magazine Forward. Considering that Burg was running as the more “moderate” candidate against Amram Mitzna, who lost the last general elections to Sharon, this piece comes as quite a shock.

It turns out that the 2,000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens and to their enemies. A state lacking justice cannot survive. More and more Israelis are coming to understand this as they ask their children where they expect to live in 25 years. Children who are honest admit, to their parents’ shock, that they do not know. The countdown to the end of Israeli society has begun.

…

Israel, having ceased to care about the children of the Palestinians, should not be surprised when they come washed in hatred and blow themselves up in the centers of Israeli escapism. They consign themselves to Allah in our places of recreation, because their own lives are torture. They spill their own blood in our restaurants in order to ruin our appetites, because they have children and parents at home who are hungry and humiliated.

I had mentioned below in the post about neo-conservatism, the neo-cons seem be defending a certain idea of Israel — one that is maximalist and seeks to create a regional order based on Israel’s current overwhelming military superiority over its neighbors. The Israel of Benyamin Netanyahu — possibly even more than Ariel Sharon, who seems like a relic of another era compared his younger, and more ruthless rival. It would be nice to think that the alternative Israel to this is something like Burg’s or Mitzna’s. It would be nice to think that people like them could win elections.

The right-wing drift of Israeli politics — the crisis in both the traditional Zionism of the Labor party as well as the slow death of the “peace camp” and the growing irrelevance of the once potent far left — is something I’ve been reading about over the past few days at The Head Heeb, a very well-written and well-read blogger that was kind enough to add this site to his links. (I am returning the favor.) In an interesting post dating from last January, just before the general elections took place in Israel, he makes a tentative comparison between the Likud and the Wafd, Egypt’s sadly moribund liberal party, based on a Cairo Times story published when I still was editor there. The comparison may not really hold (we agree on this point) but there is some food for thought: the Likud, like the Wafd, like today’s Republican party, is not what is used to be.

For at least a partial answer to what has happened, I would suggest to start with Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler’s The Global Political Economy of Israel, a startling book that offers a new way of looking not only at recent Israeli political history, but a new way of looking at politics and economics period. Nitzan and Bichler may really be on to something big — I can also recommend reading their theories regarding the real reasons behind the war on Iraq on their website. It’s pretty mind-blowing stuff. I haven’t finished reading the book yet, but I’ll be sure to post more — perhaps a review — when I have.

00:57 | / israel | link

Neo-conservatism defined

Irving Kristol, considered by many as the godfather of neo-conservatism, has provided a long sought-after definition in the Weekly Standard, the neo-con magazine run by his son and owned by Rupert Murdoch.

The definition he gives is a surprisingly social-democratic one — albeit with a few caveats — confirming the generally accepted notion that neocons are by and large former liberals that became disillusioned by the perceived “moral decadence” of the 1970s. They’ve read Trotsky and company, but are reinterpreting it in a radical-conservative way much like the neo-realist school of international relations theory took old ideas about power and realpolitik and added a fiercely anti-communist, normative streak to them.

But aside from a distinct ideological history, neo-conservatism as defined here really seems quite eclectic, and in certain respects rather shallow. Take their fiscal attitude:

One of these policies, most visible and controversial, is cutting tax rates in order to stimulate steady economic growth. This policy was not invented by neocons, and it was not the particularities of tax cuts that interested them, but rather the steady focus on economic growth. Neocons are familiar with intellectual history and aware that it is only in the last two centuries that democracy has become a respectable option among political thinkers. In earlier times, democracy meant an inherently turbulent political regime, with the “have-nots” and the “haves” engaged in a perpetual and utterly destructive class struggle. It was only the prospect of economic growth in which everyone prospered, if not equally or simultaneously, that gave modern democracies their legitimacy and durability.

The cost of this emphasis on economic growth has been an attitude toward public finance that is far less risk averse than is the case among more traditional conservatives. Neocons would prefer not to have large budget deficits, but it is in the nature of democracy—because it seems to be in the nature of human nature—that political demagogy will frequently result in economic recklessness, so that one sometimes must shoulder budgetary deficits as the cost (temporary, one hopes) of pursuing economic growth. It is a basic assumption of neoconservatism that, as a consequence of the spread of affluence among all classes, a property-owning and tax-paying population will, in time, become less vulnerable to egalitarian illusions and demagogic appeals and more sensible about the fundamentals of economic reckoning.

Doesn’t the casual hope that tax cuts will lead in more prosperity for everyone seem rather weak, especially considering that the recent tax cuts passed by the Republican-dominated Congress and the White House mostly benefit the richest taxpayers? And there is a certain degree of recklessness with the idea the deficits will be “temporary, one hopes.” As for the idea that “political demagogy will frequently result in economic recklessness,” well, that kinda seems ironic, doesn’t it. Finally, the last sentence about “egalitarian illusions and demagogic appeals” vs. “economic reckoning” is incredibly dismissive of the fundamental idea behind what constitutes a just society as not being simply a question of how to create the most economically efficient society. This kind of reductionism (also found in free-trade fanatics, for whom the idea of a perfectly free economic system is the most desirable without regards to human consequences) makes you wonder whatever happened to ideas of justice inherent to the American system — it’s “pursuit of happiness,” remember, not “pursuit of maximum profits no matter what.”

Since Kristol’s article came out, there’s been a few critiques and reviews of it — two interesting ones I’ve come across are at The Agonist and Strike The Root. Both are well worth reading, and pore through Kristol’s every statement, which I’m not really interested in doing.

All this talk of neo-conservatism made me want to look into more expanded histories of the neo-conservative movement, and focus on one particular aspect that few like to focus on: their unconditional support of Israel, or to be more precise, a certain kind of Israel.

One great, if simple, resource on neo-conservatism is the Christian Science Monitor’s Empire Builders special, which looks at the neo-cons from different angles. It’s well worth reading the compiled articles and interviews there, and there’s a great quiz you can take too to find out if you are a neo-con too. (I scored liberal on it, but I think I’m more somewhere between liberal and realist…)

Much more exhaustive, and for my needs much more interesting, is this long, two-part article by Jihad Al Khazen that originally appeared al Al Hayat in June and has been reproduced and translated on Philosophy Notes (part one, part two.) Jihad Al Khazen is a senior editor at Al Hayat and one of the newspaper’s top editorialists. That does not make him popular in some circles — see what Michael Levitt, a “senior fellow in terrorism studies” at the pro-Israel, neo-con leaning Washington Institute for Near East Policy, has to say about him in an article subtitled “Arab journalists and intellectuals are apologists for terror” and published by the arch-conservative National Review:

The prime example of this state of denial and intellectual atrophy is Jihad al-Khazen, an outspoken apologist for Middle Eastern terrorist groups like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah Ñ and one of the region’s most prominent editorialists. In fact, al-Khazen is not only considered the region’s Tom Friedman, he is a senior editor for al-Hayat, the paper widely regarded as the New York Times of the Arab world. His prominence has gained him considerable prestige, including membership on the board of advisers to Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. With people like this feeding the Mideastern denial frenzy, it’s no wonder the Arab street has responded with such hostility to Western efforts to expose international terrorist activities, even after September 11.

It’s incredible the lengths some of Israel’s American supporters go to discredit anyone who disagrees with them or poses a threat — Levitt even goes to the extent for asking that Al Khazen be barred from entering the United States. For his part, Al Khazen had this to say on suicide bombing in a recent column:

I reject suicide operations on principle. I also reject the last one, whatever the reason or pretext. I do not defend the planner and the executor. But I also condemn the policy of the Israeli government, which operates, with premeditation, to destroy the peace process and dispose of the Roadmap.

…

For over a year, I have been trying to convince Hamas and Islamic Jihad to stop suicide operations. I worked on this, first with Mohamad Dahlan and Mohamad Rashid, and later with Mahmoud Abbas himself (prior to the cabinet formation), and I still am. I registered from those efforts and contacts what I could in this column. And I noticed, as did Abbas and the others, that every time we come close to an agreement, Israel does something to take us back to the starting point.

Judge for yourselves, take a look at Al Khazen’s article — it contains nothing that cannot be verified from many other sources. Or take a look at his excellent column in today’s Al Hayat where he draws parallels between the situation in Iraq and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Doesn’t sound like a fanatic, does it?

Anyway, the article looks specifically at the Israel connection among the neo-cons. Although the use of terms such as “Israel’s gang in the current administration” may cause some eyebrows to raise, the general tone is not conspiratorial and certainly not anti-Semitic. Instead, it’s a persuasive and exhaustive list of all the different institutions that make up or play host to the neo-conservative movement, with an eye for their positions towards Israel. Much of this information is already well-known (indeed a lot is culled from articles in the US press, such as Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker), but seeing it here collected makes a powerful impact.

The section on A Clean Break, the policy recommendations put together by neo-con luminaries headed by Richard Perle is particularly enlightening:

The 1996 paper A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm is a chilling and prophetic statement of neo-conservative thinking on Israel, the Palestinians and the wider Middle East which prefigures events in the seven years following its preparation. It was written for the incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The report was prepared within the Jerusalem-based Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies by the Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000.

…

The report is adamantly against the Oslo peace process and the moves towards a “New Middle East” and criticizes Israeli for “agreeing to negotiate sovereignty over its capital, and responding with resignation to a spate of terror.”

The report says that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government comes in with a new set of ideas. “While there are those who will counsel continuity, Israel has the opportunity to make a clean break; it can forge a peace process and strategy based on an entirely new intellectual foundation, one that restores strategic initiative and provides the nation the room to engage every possible energy on rebuilding Zionism, the starting point of which must be economic reform.”

In order to secure its streets and borders in the immediate future, Israel should break from the slogan “comprehensive peace” to a traditional concept of strategy based on balance of power. It should work closely with Turkey and Jordan “to contain, destabilize and roll back some of its most dangerous threats.”

Israel should change the nature of its relations with the Palestinians, “including upholding the right of hot pursuit for self defense into all Palestinian areas and nurturing alternatives to Arafat’s exclusive grip on Palestinian society.”

The report calls for Israel to “forge a new basis for relations with the United States-stressing self-reliance, maturity, strategic cooperation on areas of mutual concern, and furthering values inherent to the West. This can only be done if Israel takes serious steps to terminate aid, which prevents economic reform.”

The report says the new prime minister must adopt a bold new perspective on peace and security. Rather than “land for peace” there should be “peace for peace”, “peace through strength” and self-reliance: i.e. the balance of power. “Only the unconditional acceptance by Arabs of our rights, especially in their territorial dimension, ‘peace for peace’, is a solid basis for the future.”

A Clean Break is anti-Syrian to the extreme, and constantly suggests ways in which Israel can undermine the Syrian regime. “Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq - an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right - as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.” Since Iraq’s future “could affect the strategic balance in the Middle East profoundly, it would be understandable that Israel has an interest in supporting the Hashemites in their efforts to redefine Iraq…”

Given the nature of the regime in Damascus, it is both natural and moral that Israel abandon the slogan “comprehensive peace” and move to contain Syria, drawing attention to its weapons of mass destruction program, and rejecting “land for peace” deals on the Golan Heights.

The report states that Damascus “fears that the ‘natural axis’ with Israel on one side, central Iraq and Turkey on the other, and Jordan, in the center would squeeze and detach Syria from the Saudi Peninsula. For Syria, this could be a prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East which would threaten Syria’s territorial integrity.” A Clean Break calls for a new U.S.-Israeli relationship based on self-reliance, maturity and mutuality. Prime Minister Netanyahu should highlight his desire to work more closely with the U.S. on anti-missile Defense “in order to remove the threat of blackmail which even a weak and distant army can pose to their state. Not only would such cooperation on missile Defense counter a tangible physical threat to Israel’s survival, but it would broaden Israel’s support among many in Congress who may know little about Israel, but care very much about missile Defense. Such broad support could be helpful in the effort to move the U.S. embassy in Israeli to Jerusalem.”

A Clean Break advises the Israelis on the language to be used in addressing the Americans, in order to manage and constrain U.S. reactions. “Prime Minister Netanyahu can formulate the policies and stress themes he favours in language familiar to the Americans by tapping into themes of American administrations during the Cold War which apply well to Israel.

The paper says that Israel’s new strategic agenda can shape the regional environment in ways that grant Israel the room to focus its energies back to where they are most needed: to rejuvenate its national idea, which can only come through replacing Israel’s socialist foundation with a more sound footing; and to overcome its “exhaustion” which threatens the survival of the nation.

Spooky, isn’t it? I think that one of the questions that the rise of the neo-conservatives in American politics bring up is not just where to place them on the political spectrum. It’s also — particularly since they have no clear constituency in America like traditional conservatives or liberals but make alliances with certain established movements like fundamentalist Christians — what is their agenda? Who are they defending? Whose interests do they want to further? After all, all of the other movements are trying to push for somebody’s interests, whether it’s the labor unions, big business, anti-abortionists or whoever else.

I don’t think that the whole of the answer is that the neo-cons are acting on behalf of Israel. They do have other causes, as explained in the Kristol article. But Israel certainly seems to be unusually close to their heart. My guess is that they are defending a certain idea of Israel, and a certain group within Israel whose rise can be placed either in the 1970s with the emergence of Likud or in the 1990s with the Likud taking a more “pro-business” approach under the likes of Benyamin Netanyahu. These ideas are not just anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian or maximalist a la Eretz Israel. They are also anti-Labor. Just go read the document. It may not be politically correct to be thinking about these things these days, but it makes one wonder.

23:59 | / politics | link

Halliburton and Cheney

12:55 | / iraq | link

Salam Pax gets raided

12:28 | / iraq | link

Rendon / Chalabi / Moran

To add a little more to the Chalabi puzzle, there is an interesting story on Australian journalist Paul Moran over at Back to Iraq 2.0. Most of the story itself is concerned with Moran, officially a journalist working for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, was also working for the Rendon Group, the American PR firm that was more or less handling the Iraqi National Congress dossier for the Pentagon. Naturally there is some outrage that, even if through a proxy, the Pentagon was using a journalist as a spy. It also raises suspicion that the Office of Strategic Interests, set up by Rumsfeld to disseminate false information to foreign journalists, may still be in action through some other name.

But my Chalabi fixation picked up this ‘graf:

In 1992, the Rendon Group helped organize the Iraqi National Congress. The PR firm, in fact, came up with the name and channeled $12 million in CIA funds to the group between 1992 and 1996. In October 1992, John Rendon chose one of his protŽgŽs, Ahmed Chalabi, to head the group.

12:51 | / iraq | link

Aloufok.net

I want to recommend a site that I came across while researching Moroccan politics for my upcoming trip over there. Aloufok.net calls itself “the electronic publication of the Arab democratic movement” and has links to a lot of different materials on different countries. Although it focuses on (and is dedicated to) the intifada, it also has sections on Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq and Morocco. I thought this speech by Nabil Helaly of the Egyptian Committee for the Defense of Democracy was particularly interesting.

Here’s a few choice morsels:

“We are neither slaves nor commodities, and we will no longer be passed down as inheritance !”

…

The fundamental democratic change will not be achieved through the struggle of the national elite, the struggle based on speeches given in closed halls and surrounded offices. The battle for democratic transformation will only be settled in the heart of the political street. The struggle for democracy can only succeed when it attracts regular, non-politicized citizens who should learn that absenting political democracy deprives them of the means to defend their right to a better life and their social and economic rights.

…

With the growing public demand for change inside, and the growing suspicious and rejected American pressure over the Arab regimes from outside, the police rule in our country tries to improve its flawed image by continuing to allow an eroding margin of democracy represented in a calculated measure of the freedom to shout in non-government media, in addition to taking some theatrical deceiving measures, such as the repeal of state security courts while continuing to use military courts against civilian citizens, and the formation of a governmental national council for human rights. These measures bring to mind Sadat when he took power and destroyed with his hands the first brick of the Egypt (Misr) prison to end his era with the September 1981 massacreÊ! The allowed margin for the freedom to scream does not mean that there is democracy in Egypt. What is the use of such a margin in the absence of freedom of political and party activities and the freedom to bring about change through the circulation of powerÊ? The freedom to scream in the absence of these other freedoms is a safety valve for dictatorship that guarantees prolonging its life through venting the vapors of anger pent up inside the pots of popular/public fury. An individual angry word replaces collective effective action. Real democratic powers should refuse to swallow this bait.

…

The people’s struggle in Egypt to seize democracy and achieve the fundamental change be absolutely separate from the attempts of American imperialism to take advantage of the situation and invade the Arab region disguised as defenders of democracy.

23:06 | / egypt | link

Israel’s Iraqi oil pipeline

The Prime Minister’s Office, which views the pipeline to Haifa as a “bonus” the U.S. could give to Israel in return for its unequivocal support for the American-led campaign in Iraq, had asked the Americans for the official telegram.

The new pipeline would take oil from the Kirkuk area, where some 40 percent of Iraqi oil is produced, and transport it via Mosul, and then across Jordan to Israel. The U.S. telegram included a request for a cost estimate for repairing the Mosul-Haifa pipeline that was in use prior to 1948. During the War of Independence, the Iraqis stopped the flow of oil to Haifa and the pipeline fell into disrepair over the years.

…

National Infrastructure Minister Yosef Paritzky said yesterday that the port of Haifa is an attractive destination for Iraqi oil and that he plans to discuss this matter with the U.S. secretary of energy during his planned visit to Washington next month. Paritzky added that the plan depends on Jordan’s consent and that Jordan would receive a transit fee for allowing the oil to piped through its territory. The minister noted, however, that “due to pan-Arab concerns, it will be hard for the Jordanians to agree to the flow of Iraqi oil via Jordan and Israel.”

…

Iraqi oil is now being transported via Turkey to a small Mediterranean port near the Syrian border. The transit fee collected by Turkey is an important source of revenue for the country. This line has been damaged by sabotage twice in recent weeks and is presently out of service.

In response to rumors about the possible Kirkuk-Mosul-Haifa pipeline, Turkey has warned Israel that it would regard this development as a serious blow to Turkish-Israeli relations.

Sources in Jerusalem suggest that the American hints about the alternative pipeline are part of an attempt to apply pressure on Turkey. Iraq is one of the world’s largest oil producers, with the potential of reaching about 2.5 million barrels a day. Oil exports were halted after the Gulf War in 1991 and then were allowed again on a limited basis (1.5 million barrels per day) to finance the import of food and medicines. Iraq is currently exporting several hundred thousand barrels of oil per day.

Naturally, this isn’t something that the Israelis have just thought of now. Plans for the pipeline were first brought up by Minister Paritzky in March, just before the war, in talks with US officials and… Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. Josh Marshall of TPM had noted this last April, and has links to three stories about the discussions and a nice juicy quote of Chalabi’s best buddy in Washington, Richard Perle, saying that Chalabi “and his people have confirmed that they want a real peace process, and that they would recognize the state of Israel. There is no doubt about that if they come to power.”

22:40 | / iraq | link

Prostitution, the Wafd party, and C. Wright Mills

Only two of these topics are related — guess which?

02:45 | / potluck | link

More on Iraq and the occupation

There are a few links I wanted to mention in the earlier post but lost after a computer crash. First, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has published a thorough report on the situation in Iraq. You can get it here in either text or PDF format if you scroll down at the bottom of the page. Perhaps even more interesting will be the latest International Crisis Group report on Iraq — ICG usually gets things spot on.

In light of the growing debate on the need for more soldiers on the ground — something that many people are saying (and I would agree) is needed whether you agreed with the invasion in the first place or not — there seems to be an incredible level of denial at the Pentagon. Faced with requests by congressmen for more support for the troops in Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld has proposed a radical reform of the entire military.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, seeking to increase the nation’s combat power without hiring more troops, is poised to order a sweeping review of Pentagon policies, officials say. It will include everything from wartime mobilization and peacekeeping commitments, to reservist training and incentives for extended duty.

…

The review will be seen in some circles as answering powerful members of Congress who have demanded more active-duty troops for the military. Lengthy deployments to Iraq drew scattered complaints from families of soldiers, and some reservists criticized their extended call-ups.

So basically, there’s a pressing issue at hand and he’s proposing that instead of solving that with what’s available, the Pentagon wonks put on their policy caps and radically change the way they operate. How exactly is this going to help the immediate situation in Iraq? Also note a little further down:

Other proposals are based in pragmatism. Mr. Rumsfeld told Congress he wanted to transfer to civilians or contract workers an estimated 300,000 administrative jobs now performed by people in uniform.

In other words, he wants to apply corporate restructuring to the US military. It’s exactly the kind of thinking that is being applied in Medicare, Social Security, schools and hospitals. I still fail to understand why public services need to be run like corporations. The thinking is fundamentally flawed — corporations are run for profit, whereas public services are run for a greater public welfare that is much harder to quantify. This may be in part free market fundamentalism, which sees the corporate way as the only way and everything else as thinly disguised communism, but you also have to wonder: who’s gonna get the contracts to replace the administrative staff? Sounds like more taxpayer subsidies for corporate America to me.

This just in — the powers that be mount the oh-no-we-don’t-need-more troops PR offensive just as Congress gets more impatient.

Going from evasive Newspeak to plain talk, read this great column by the always interesting Joe Galloway, who says that the US should either “do the job or get out.” I’m sure I probably wouldn’t see eye to eye with this guy on many things (like his view of Egypt and Syria as “volcanos that could erupt at any moment”), but I certainly appreciate his candor:

Unless we are prepared to sit back and watch as our soldiers die by ones, twos and threes day by day in an open-ended occupation of Iraq, it may be time to fish or cut bait.

The alternatives would seem to be that we put an Iraqi face on the situation and swiftly withdraw in the sure and certain knowledge that things there will go to hell in short order - or we follow the prescription of former Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. Eric K. Shinseki and put “several hundred thousand troops” into Iraq and clean that place out.

02:27 | / iraq | link

Iraq, the occupation and the future of the UN

Since last week’s bombing of the UN building in Baghdad, there’s been a lot written about whether the UN could be relied on, whether it should have a more important role in the reconstruction of Iraq, and the general state of the institution. Considering that the Bush administration had decided just a few days before the bombing to sideline the UN, the bombing added urgency to an important question.

From what we’ve seen in the past few weeks, the “resistance” or “terrorist” movement against the occupation forces is rising. The bombing indicates that either those behind the violence think the UN is fully complicit with the US-UK invasion of Iraq, or that it is a soft but symbolic target that is easier to hit than, say, the coalition’s HQ. It also raises the question of whether the UN should integrate more closely with the efforts of the CPA, or on the contrary leave as much as possible in the hands of the US, the UK and the coalition of the willing to send troops without the sanction of a UN resolution.

From the reporting that is coming out of Iraq, we can see if not outright hostility towards US troops, at least a degree of frustration and humiliation in having to deal with an occupying army. Many think that this is justification enough to give the UN a greater role, as Juan Cole and Kofi Annan.

Here’s Cole:

The bombing of UN headquarters may reveal that the guerrillas fear most of all the moral authority and legitimacy of the international body. Without this, the US and Britain look suspiciously like neoimperialists to angry young Iraqis, whom the radicals hope to enlist in their fight. Ironically, the wisest American response may be to involve the UN much more extensively in Iraqi security and reconstruction.

And Annan, quoted in the NYT:

But it was clear from Mr. Annan’s public remarks today and a brief interview that he is certain that a new United Nations mandate is required to give the organization a clearly defined role and to allow Iraqis to have confidence that control over Iraq’s future is reverting to them.

“We are focusing a lot on the force, the multinational force, and security,” he said. “I think it’s because of what happened. But that is only part of the answer. The other part of the answer is to move quickly to create an environment where the average Iraqi will support the operation and see that what is happening is in their interest.”

He added, “That’s why I keep saying, let’s come up with a timetable to let them know that the occupation is really time-bound.”

Bringing in the UN may not only be a question of revitalizing an institution that has been enfeebled by the Bush administration and its own past, or even giving a more acceptable face to the occupation for the Iraqis. It may also be a question of necessity to bring the level of commitment to Iraq that the task at hands needs. The situation in Iraq is not under control. Terrorists from abroad are coming in. Some say that, considering the war was based on the wrong reasons, troops should be getting out now before the death toll mounts. But that’s irresponsible — we started this mess, and now we have to clean it up. And the UN, which would hopefully bring in foreign troops experienced in peacekeeping operations (French, German, Canadian, Norwegian etc…), is probably the best way to do that.

17:26 | / iraq | link

“Welcome to the Machine”

23:21 | / politics | link

Do what your Mamma says

The New York Observer ran this thought-provoking piece about a group of four 9/11 widows who conducted their own investigation into the intelligence failure to prevent the attacks. They relentless asked (and asked and asked) tough questions until someone listened to them, which certainly isn’t done by the meek Washington press these days.

Although probably goes over the top praising them, they were apparently responsible in part for the fact that there was a 9/11 commission at all. And they’re still not satisfied with the answers. It’s well worth reading, if only to remind ourselves that you don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to see that there is something very wrong about the way the Bush administration and certain government agencies have handled 9/11.

Kristen and the three other housewives who also lost their husbands in the attack on the World Trade Center started out knowing virtually nothing about how their government worked. For the last 20 months they have clipped and Googled, rallied and lobbied, charmed and intimidated top officials all the way to the White House. In the process, they have made themselves arguably the most effective force in dancing around the obstacle course by which the administration continues to block a transparent investigation of what went wrong with the countryÕs defenses on Sept. 11 and what we should be doing about it. They have no political clout, no money, no powerful husbandsÑno husbands at all since Sept. 11Ñand they are up against a White House, an Attorney General, a Defense Secretary, a National Security Advisor and an F.B.I. director who have worked out an ingenious bait-and-switch game to thwart their efforts and those of any investigative body.

Speaking of Moms, it’s not often mentioned that they are a potentially extremely powerful political group and I don’t just mean “soccer moms.”) If you look at the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon or the Soviet withdrawal from the Soviet Union, they took place largely because governments could not face the pressure from grassroots Mom movements protesting that their sons were coming home in bodybags from places they had no business being. In the case of Afghanistan, I’ve even heard some people make the argument that the Soldiers’ Mothers movement was one of the first truly independent grassroots movement under the Communists. (See also here for similar movements against the Chechnya war.) And the apparratchiks, with all their might, could do nothing about it. I mean, what were they gonna do? Torture their mothers?

21:09 | / terrorism | link

Arab public opinion and America

Foreign Affairs, not exactly my favorite magazine lately, is running in its current issue this thoughtful call for a rethink of American public diplomacy towards the Arab world and a better understanding of the dynamics of public opinion there.

Some elements of the U.S. government recognize the problem and have tried to correct it. Their efforts have focused on promoting the administration’s policies through occasional media appearances by official and semiofficial speakers and promoting a positive image of the United States through popular culture. The former approach has achieved little, however, because the target audiences sense that they are being “spun,” and the latter is unlikely to do much better. A planned U.S.-sponsored Arabic satellite television station will have a difficult time finding a market, for example, since any political content will automatically be discounted as propaganda, and existing satellite stations already fill the demand for music videos, reality shows, and mainstream entertainment such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The bottom line is that the new Arab media, both broadcast and print, are more than a match for any popular-culture alternative the United States might muster.

The Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World, a panel established this July at the request of Congress, will therefore miss a crucial opportunity if it recommends simply greater resources for or better implementation of traditional approaches to these issues. What it should press for is a fundamentally different approach to the United States’ interactions with the region — one that speaks with Arabs rather than at them and tries to engage rather than manipulate. The German philosopher JŸrgen Habermas has distinguished between “strategic” and “communicative” action, with the first designed to manipulate others so as to further one’s own self-interest and the second designed to search for truth. This echoes a widely recognized distinction drawn by Arab thinkers between dialogue (hiwar) and other forms of intellectual combat. All too often, U.S. public-diplomacy efforts have fallen crudely into the strategic category and missed their mark for that very reason. Information has gone in one direction; the target’s views and thoughts have been of interest only insofar as they could be molded.

I’ve seen public opinion in Egypt swing back and forth about the US in the past few years, even on issues of as little real import as the occasional (and empty) White House declarations against Israeli policy. Perhaps the most telling example of all, though, was George Bush Sr.’s threat to cut Israel’s loan guarantees in 1991 to force it to engage seriously in the peace process. At the time, Poppy Bush was a virtual hero in the Arab world for saying that (and that was just after the Gulf War), and is remembered to this day for it. All of which is to say that, as some will likely argue, trying to woo Arab public opinion is not pointless. There is no deep-seated hatred of America in this region — just a largely justified suspicion of American motives, especially in the context of the White House’s current disastrous public diplomacy and continuing lack of transparency in its relations with Arab dictators.

20:58 | / media | link

Attack on the UN

Yesterday’s car bombing of the UN building in Baghdad (see latest here) was pretty shocking, if only because many of my journalist and photographer friends from Cairo are in Baghdad at the moment. Thankfully, I’ve heard from them and none of them were armed. Still, it’s worrying that the attack timed with a press conference — as if they were trying to get the maximum number of non-Iraqis as possible. It is making me think (but not rethink) about my own plans to move there.

There is a lot of interesting stuff to read about — things I was reading and thinking about before the attack, such as why there have been so many attacks in the past few weeks against civilian services like power stations, sewage treatment plants, water systems and so on. Are these nihilists trying to deprive Iraqis of much needed basic sanitation and services in hope that they’ll get angry at the occupation forces? The mind boggles.

Salam Pax has his usual thoughtful comments to make, although he sounds very down indeed:

I am plunging into a fucking depression, do we have a future? is this country going to be hijacked by shit extremists who want to prove a point? …we have plunged into darkness.

There have been some interesting theories floating out there suggesting that this is Al Qaeda’s work. Possibly. I find the news, reported by the Financial Times, that up to 3000 men have gone missing in Saudi Arabia and may have crossed into Iraq more worrying. They don’t need to be Al Qaeda, just some Wahhabi fanatics who share their ideology. Remember the 9/11 report where 28 pages implicating the Saudis were not released? The Saudis and their backward bedouin religious extremism have been the poison the in the blood of the Arab world for nearly half a century now. When will it end?

The journalist Peter Bergen, one of the rare Westerners to interview Osama bin Laden, thinks that while Al Qaeda and Iraq had nothing to do with each other, the war has caused Al Qaeda to infiltrate Iraq and use an issue with immense appeal across the Arab world to boost its standing:

Bin Laden has long modeled al Qaeda’s tactics on that of Hezbollah in Lebanon during the early ’80s. Hezbollah’s 1983 suicide bombing of a US Marine barracks in Beirut that killed two hundred and forty US soldiers, led to the withdrawal of American forces from Lebanon. And bin Laden has reveled in the fact that the deaths of eighteen US servicemen in Somalia in 1993 also precipitated a quick withdrawal of American troops from that country. It is this model that al Qaeda hopes to follow in Iraq, fighting a war of attrition against US soldiers that will eventually lead to a humiliating withdrawal of American forces. It is only a matter of time before al Qaeda is able to pull off a significant terrorist attack that kills a large number of American soldiers. At that point perhaps the American public will ask: “Didn’t we invade Iraq to prevent exactly what is happening now?”

13:31 | / iraq | link

The Pentagon; Fascism; Arnold; Iraq; Conason; Belly dancing

Finally, I wanted to share a great quote I got today while working on a forthcoming story about belly dancers:

“This is a very corrupt business — it’s about sabotage, lies, power, money, pussy…”

Who knew?

19:49 | / potluck | link

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Idi’s Israeli connection

Despite the many obituaries published in the last week for Idi Amin, it is quite amazing that only one paper, the Independent, noted that it was Israel that had helped put Amin — who killed over 300,000 people during his reign — in power.

But why was Israel so interested in a landlocked country in Central Africa? The reason is spelt out by Slater in a later telegram. Israel was backing rebellion in southern Sudan to punish Sudan for supporting the Arab cause in the Six-Day War. “They do not want the rebels to win. They want to keep them fighting.”

The Israelis had helped train the new Uganda army in the 1960s. Shortly after independence Amin was sent to Israel on a training course. When he became chief of staff of the new army Amin also ran a sideline operation for the Israelis, supplying arms and ammunition to the rebels in southern Sudan. Amin had his own motive for helping them: many of his own people, the Kakwa, live in southern Sudan. Obote, however, wanted peace in southern Sudan. That worried the Israelis and they were even more worried when, in November 1970 Obote sacked Amin. Their stick for beating Sudan was suddenly taken away.

According to the article, it was only after they found out that the Israelis were helping Amin that they decided to fly to Tel Aviv to tell the Israelis that they too would back him — “as if getting permission.”

In the meantime, the New York Times chose to focus instead on the country that hosted Amin after his demise, Saudi Arabia.

But what would prompt the Saudi government to play host to such a man? The answer, when the question was posed to Saudi officials, was an excursion into the desert habits of hospitality, and Mr. Amin’s conversion to Islam. His support for the Arab boycott of Israel in the 1970’s certainly also endeared him to his hosts.

During the nearly quarter-century of his soft exile, no nation tried to bring Mr. Amin to justice. A few years ago, after Spain’s government went after Chile’s former dictator, Augusto Pinochet, Human Rights Watch did bring up Mr. Amin’s case to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, but to no avail. Under international law, any nation, including Saudi Arabia, could have and should have prosecuted Mr. Amin.

I know it’s fashionable these days to put down the Saudis, and to a large extent they certainly deserve it. But it’s a bit hypocritical to mention Saudi Arabia but not Israel, which allowed Amin to start his reign of terror in the first place. All the more so when the US has played host to a countless number of exiles with shameful pasts, such as the Iraqi generals who switched sides at the beginning of the recent war in exchange for asylum.

11:25 | / israel | link

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“The underdog who dares to fight back is always better off”

Joe Conason of Salon (whose column I read religiously) apparently has a new book out and judging from the first excerpt they published today, I’ll be buying it:

What do liberals stand for? Their adversaries constantly accuse them of elitism, political correctness, immorality, socialism, communism, even treason. These are standard-issue lies from the right-wing propaganda arsenal. Liberalism is an American philosophy that encompasses a broad variety of ideas — yet is probably more coherent than the current brand of conservatism, which ranges from atheist libertarianism to theocratic fundamentalism.

The most basic liberal values are political equality and economic opportunity. Liberals uphold democracy as the only form of government that derives legitimacy from the consent of the governed, and they regard the freedoms enumerated in the Bill of Rights as essential to the expression of popular consent. Their commitment to an expanding democracy is what drives liberal advocacy on behalf of women, minorities, gays, immigrants, and other traditionally disenfranchised groups.

Liberals value the dynamism and creativity of democratic capitalism, but they also believe in strong, active government to protect the interests of society. They understand that markets function best when properly regulated, and they also know that unchecked concentrations of private power encourage environmental pollution, financial fraud, and labor exploitation. Liberals see a broad social interest in ensuring real opportunities and decent standards of living for everyone, while requiring basic responsibility from everyone.

I would have liked to quote a lot more, but you can read the whole thing for yourself. Which means you’ll probably have to watch an ad, or subscribe. I encourage the latter, not only because I did and because they occasionally give me some of that money, but also because it is absolutely worth it.

00:14 | / media | link

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Mon, 18 Aug 2003

Is this counter-terrorism?

According to the New York Daily News, the reason there hasn’t been a new massive terrorist attack on US soil is not that there has been more effective counter-terrorist measures, or that the threat posed by Al Qaeda for another attack was exaggerated, or even that terrorists are too scared to act these days. Oh no. It’s that life in America is just too damn comfortable:

“A lot of these guys lose the jihadi, desert spirit,” one official told the magazine. “They get families, they get jobs, and they lose the fire in the belly. Welcome to America.”

Never underestimate the tempering power of the bourgeoisie.

14:18 | / terrorism | link

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Seen on a London hip boutique…

10:15 | / potluck | link

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Sun, 17 Aug 2003

Unjust war, but…

Michael Walzer, who is probably the greatest living philosopher of war, is interviewed in this fascinating piece. It’s interesting reading just to see how he saw the recent war in light of his book Just and Unjust Wars, but also remains critical of the reluctance of Europeans, and France and Germany in particular, to embrace their responsibilities and adequately fund their militaries. Over the past decade, whenever these countries have complained about US actions, they have been unable to provide credible alternatives (just see the former Yugoslavia.) It’s about time they bite the bullet and, if they want to be equal to the US, be able to act on their own.

Also interesting in this piece is how Walzer (who describes himself as having a “long involvement in Zionist politics in the Jewish diaspora and in Israeli politics too”) sees the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

There is a Palestinian war to destroy and replace the state of Israel, which is unjust, and a Palestinian war to establish a state alongside Israel, which is just. And there is an Israeli war to defend the state, which is just, and an Israeli war for Greater Israel, which is unjust. When making particular judgements, you always have to ask who is fighting which war, and what means they have adopted, and whether those means are legitimate for these ends, or for any ends. Most of the people attacking Israel or defending it, and most of the people attacking the Palestinians or defending them, don’t even begin to do the necessary work. I can’t do that work here, but I will suggest some of the judgements that I think it leads to Ð most crucially these two: Palestinian terrorism, that is, the deliberate targeting of civilians, should always and everywhere be condemned. And Israeli settlement policy in the occupied territories has been wrong from the very beginning of the occupation. But this second wrongness doesn’t mitigate the first: Palestinian attacks on the occupying army or on paramilitary settler groups are justified Ð at least they are justified whenever there is an Israeli government unwilling to negotiate; but attacks on settler families or schools are terrorist acts, murder exactly. (I want to insist that this is not special pleading: I am old enough to have made similar arguments at the time of the Algerian war: FLN attacks on French soldiers or on OAS militants were justified; putting a bomb in a cafe or a supermarket in the French section of Algiers was murder.) And similarly, Israeli attacks on Hamas or Islamic Jihad fighters are justified; dropping a bomb on an apartment house in Gaza was a criminal act.

Although it’s nice to see a Zionist imply that Palestinian resistance fighters targeting occupation forces or paramilitary settlers are fighting a just war, the way he argues against attacking settlers seems dishonest. Why are attacks on (non-paramilitary) settlers “terrorist acts, murder exactly” whereas Israel dropping a bomb on Gaza is a mere “criminal act”?

I also wonder what Walzer would think about this incredible and relatively little-reported news that the US has “abandoned” the idea of giving the UN a bigger role in the occupation of Iraq.

Instead, the officials said, the United States would widen its effort to enlist other countries to assist the occupation forces in Iraq, which are dominated by the 139,000 United States troops there.

What now, a coalition of the willing for the occupation as well as the war? It’s not as if US soldiers didn’t need the help…

03:19 | / palestine | link

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Apocalypse soon

MSNBC’s The Scoop reports that President Bush turned to fundamentalist Christian Jack Van Impe for doomsday advice:

The issue of the alleged involvement with the Bush administration came up on his Web site when someone asked Van Impe, “Do you think that President Bush, apparently a Christian man, believes and knows he is involved in prophetic events concerning the Middle East and final battle between good and evil?”

“I believe he is a wonderful man,” Van Impe responded, and goes on to say, “I was contacted a few weeks ago by the Office of Public Liaison for the White House and by the National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice to make an outline. And I’ve spent hours preparing it. I will release this information to the public in September, but it’s in his hands. He will know exactly what is going to happen in the Middle East and what part he will have under the leading of the Holy Spirit of God. So, it’s a tremendous time to be alive.”

When they asked the administration about it, this is what they got:

“My investigation into it is that there’s no truth to it,” National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack told The Scoop, “but I’m continuing to look into it.”

This Van Impe guy is an interesting character. A tele- and radio-evangelist, he shares the belief increasingly common among fundamentalist Christians in America that the world is about to end, and that only the pious will be saved, or “raptured,” by God before Judgement Day. What bring said apocalypse, of course, is an evil alliance of the European Union and corporations. See what he told a reader of his “Internet Prophecy Portal Website” who asked him about the mark of the beast:

What is the mark of the beast? Well, out of the European Union, a leader arises in Revelation 13, verse 1, he has power over all kindreds, tongues, people and nations, verse 7. He has a religious cohort who works with him in verse 11, makes an image of him, verse 15, and they get a numerical system, including 666 and maybe some other number with it, to identify human beings in revelation 13, verses 16 to 18. Now, he only does it after the first 42 months of the tribulation period, so you don’t have to worry about it. Plus, we probably won’t be here because we’ve been evacuated, raptured, Revelation 3, verse 10.

For more fundie craziness, look no further than the Presidential Prayer Team, an association devoted to providing daily prayers to the head honcho at the White House (That’s Dubya, not Dick Cheney in case you weren’t sure). The PPT claims to be

a spiritual movement of the American people which is not affiliated with any political party or official. It gains no direction or support, official or unofficial, from the current administration, from any agency of the government or from any political party, so that it may be free and unencumbered to equally serve the prayer needs of all current and future leaders of our great nation.

This fiercely independent, nonpartisan organization offered the following prayer on 15 August:

Pray for the President as he seeks wisdom on how to legally codify the definition of marriage. Pray that it will be according to biblical principles. With many forces insisting on variant definitions of marriage, pray that God’s Word and His standards will be honored by our government.

Well, as long as they’re not trying to push a particular point of view…

02:11 | / politics | link

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WMD lies

It’s not that we didn’t know it already, but it’s sure is nice to see the authoritative press zeroing in, calling a spade a spade and saying out loud that the administration lied and invented evidence for the war in Iraq — see the Washington Post, Associated Press and Newsweek. The AP story has great list of all the weapons allegedly in Iraq but that haven’t been found, but the choicest morsel comes in this now oft-quoted Post paragraph:

The new information indicates a pattern in which President Bush, Vice President Cheney and their subordinates — in public and behind the scenes — made allegations depicting Iraq’s nuclear weapons program as more active, more certain and more imminent in its threat than the data they had would support. On occasion administration advocates withheld evidence that did not conform to their views. The White House seldom corrected misstatements or acknowledged loss of confidence in information upon which it had previously relied…

Incidentally, Tom Tomorrow points out that there was an editorial attacking Al Gore’s great speech for having “validated just about every conspiratorial theory of the antiwar left” in the very same issue (9 August) of the Post. Aside from the fact that it contradicts the article they ran, it’s worth reading the editorial to see how they are trying to discredit Gore as a conspiracy theorist just because he pointed out what’s obvious to all. It shows just how courageous Gore was to make that speech.

02:03 | / iraq | link

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Iraq’s exile poets

OpenDemocracy ran this nice transcript of a discussion panel of exiled Iraqi poets at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. It includes a rather amusing poem about Saddam Hussein called The Runaway President. Iraqi poetry is a topic I’ve always found interesting since I first read Abdel Wahab Al Bayati, the father of modern Iraqi poetry, a few years ago while doing research on Iraq for my Master’s and more recently while writing an article during the war.

I first read about Al Bayati by chance when I picked up a French compilation of his work called Autobiographie du voleur de feu (Autobiography of the fire thief) published by Actes Sud and UNESCO in 1987. (A similar compilation in English is Love, death and exile.)

Fire is a recurrent theme in his work — perhaps link to the traditional worship of fire that was common in the ancient religions of Iraq. One particularly nice poem that refers to it is Secret of Fire:

On the last day
I kissed her hands,
Her eyes / her lips.
I said to her: you are now
Ripe like an apple
Half of you: a woman
The other half: impossible to describe.
The words
Escaped me
And I escaped them
Both of us collapsed.
Now I pray
For the childhood of this light face
And for this ripe, burning body
I bring my face closer
To this gushing spring,
Thirsty.
On the last day, I said to her:
You are the fire of the forests
The water of the river
The secret of the fire
Half of you cannot be described
The other half: a priestess in the temple of Ishtar.

Georgetown’s Arab Information Project has some recitals of Bayati’s poetry online, which you can download here.

The OpenDemocracy piece also has a series of good links, not least to this upbeat BBC article about the revival of poetry post-Saddam. I hope these artists finally have a chance to restore some dignity to their country’s cultural landscape. OpenDemocracy, by the way, is running more and more interesting pieces — such as this story on the impact of the war on Arab media. Well worth bookmarking.

00:45 | / iraq | link

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Go Gore go

Just when you thought he’d disappeared into irrelevance, Al Gore springs back out of nowhere with what is probably the best speech on the Bush administration of any senior Democrat since 2000.

Millions of Americans now share a feeling that something pretty basic has gone wrong in our country and that some important American values are being placed at risk. And they want to set it right.

Yup. The speech is really worth reading and rereading, and makes you think about why Gore’s fellow New Dems are crying wolf about those presidential candidates, such as Howard Dean and John Kerry, that are saying the same things in their campaign. That should be the central message of the party, and they are harming their own chance in the next presidential elections if they don’t dare to take a stance. If Gore, a centrist moderate and consummate Beltway insider if there ever was one, can say it, then so should they. As the NYT Op-editorialist Bob Herbert puts it:

That says a lot about us and the direction we’re headed in as a nation. You can agree with Mr. Gore’s politics or not, but some of the points he’s raising, especially with regard to President Bush’s credibility on such crucial issues as war and terror and the troubled economy, deserve much closer attention.

Incidentally, Bob Herbert is really worth reading religiously (and what a great picture!) He may not have the panache of Maureen Dowd (but then again he doesn’t have her ego) or Paul Krugman’s relentlessly aggressive stance, but makes some pretty powerful points. In an earlier column about a meeting of top Bushie economic policymakers, he repeats what Krugman has been saying for months:

It’s too bad George Akerlof wasn’t at the meeting. Mr. Akerlof, a 2001 Nobel laureate in economics, bluntly declared on Tuesday that “the Bush fiscal policy is the worst policy in the last 200 years.” Speaking at a press conference arranged by the Economic Policy Institute, Mr. Akerlof, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, said, “Within 10 years, we’re going to pay a serious price for such irresponsibility.”

It may not be new, but it’s nice to hear someone else say it.

00:29 | / politics | link

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Sat, 16 Aug 2003

Soldiers’ complaints

It’s long been known that the Bush administration, for all its patriotic chest-beating, doesn’t exactly have the best track record in defending the interests of uniformed men and women. You just need to look at the cutbacks in veterans’ benefits over the past few years to see that — nevermind Dubya’s own spotty National Guard career or his use of soldiers as props for photo-ops.

However, things for soldiers seem to be going from bad to worse. The Pentagon now wants to cut back the extra $225 a month in “imminent danger pay” and “family separation allowance” that soldiers serving in Iraq are getting in order to save $3 million in this year’s budget.

Susan Schuman of Shelburne Falls, Mass., said her son, Army National Guard Sgt. Justin Schuman, had told her “it’s really scary” serving in Samarra, a town about 20 miles from Saddam Hussein’s ancestral hometown of Tikrit.

Schuman, who like Syverson has become active in a group of military families that want service personnel pulled out of Iraq, said the pay cut possibility didn’t surprise her.

“It’s all part of the lie of the Bush administration, that they say they support our troops,” she said.

Damn right. And if you look around the web, it’s clear that soldiers serving in Iraq are among the most disgruntled with US military policy. Not only do many feel that they have been sent to Iraq under the false impression that they would be only be staying shortly in the country, but they clearly feel that there isn’t enough of them and that they aren’t being given the website uncovering the real situation in Iraq. It’s worth reading through it, as well as through the equally valuable Soldiers for the truth website, which Hackworth also frequently contributes to. Or go straight to the source and scan the blogs maintained by soldiers serving in Iraq with regular access to computers (presumably comms guys), such as the excellent …turningtables…, which today is running this incredible story about soldiers finding out that they can exchange now nearly worthless Iraqi dinars at the old exchange rates back in the States. It sounds like an urban myth, but it could be true. Also worth reading is Soldier’s Paradise, who has this to say about the increasingly tense relations between US soldiers and Iraqis:

Senseless acts of violence dominate Iraq. That is certain. They are not only being committed by the ‘Sadam Loyalists’, they are also being committed by American soldiers. The snowball effect has begun. Where did it begin is not what is important. What is important is that it has begun, and everyone who is involved who isnÕt working to stop it is wrong.

If I was in danger of being blown up by some disgruntled local twenty four hours a day seven days a week I may begin to become very suspicious of every local national I saw. On the other hand, if someone I knew was beaten, and made to lie face down with a bag over his head by hostile occupying soldiers for doing his job, I would be upset with the occupying forces as well. Does this make any of this right? Absolutely not!

No one is having to answer for what they are doing out here it seems. The persons responsible for the attacks on coalition soldiers are not being brought to justice as they just blend back into their surroundings. As well the overzealous soldier who takes it too far and beats a photographer for trying to do his job is probably not being reprimanded for his actions either.

Speaking of tense relations, it was sad to hear about what happened to Salam Pax’s friend G.:

G. my friend got beaten up by US Army last night, he was handcuffed and had a bag put on his head. he was kicked several times and was made to lie on his face for a while. All he wanted to do was to take pictures and report on an attack, he works for the New York Times as a translator and fixer. He got more kicks for speaking english.

His sin: he looks Iraqi and has a beard.

You get the feeling that, as many are beginning to suggest, if Rumsfeld and the neocons had not been minimalists in the numbers of troops they thought they would need in Iraq — or indeed how “welcome” these troops would be made to feel once there — this kind of stuff would not happen as much. It’s sad, considering that the US army usually takes very good care of its own.

16:28 | / iraq | link

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Only in India

Of all the ink spilled on California’s insane elections, this was my favorite story. Not only does it put things into perspective, but it shows that if “the world’s largest democracy” can handle actors-turned-politicians, then California also can. It’ll survive. And if Californians really want to show that they are serious, then the answer is not to not vote for action movie stars, have-been child actors, pornographers, porn stars or socialite columnists, but do the right thing in the first place by keeping Gray David in his job until the next real election. Maybe there’ll be some real candidates.

02:01 | / politics | link

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Fri, 11 Jul 2003

Will Niger be Bush’s undoing?

Let’s hope so. Josh Marshall continues to deliver the goods on the story with peerless analysis. Perhaps he can do on Niger what he did on Trent Lott. Also see Eric Alterman for some priceless Ari Fleischer quotes and more digging.

13:55 | / iraq | link

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Tue, 08 Jul 2003

Guardianistas to invade USA

This well-intentioned article about The Guardian’s intention to launch a US edition seems to kinda miss the point when it calls that paper anti-establishment. The Guardian has not been anti-establishment since 1997, when Tony Blair first came to 10 Downing Street. It has been for the most part loyally New Labourite, critical from time to time of course and always willing to pander to the right-thinking North London (well, and South and West) set by including a few truly leftist columnists like George Monbiot. But it’s certainly not the revolutionary rag this makes it out to be, and a far cry from the original, borderline Communist Manchester Guardian or the Guardian that defended the dockers and the miners from Thatcher in the 1980s. The Guardian today is a good paper, often critical, but once gets the feeling that its particular brand of indignation is slightly ironic or modishly PC. The G2 section in particular shows how much The Guardian is a paper that caters more to creative types hanging around the Institute of Contemporary Arts in fashionable Japanese clothing and well-meaning middle class Twinkies (TWin Income No Kids Yet) than anything else. The reason some people will welcome The Guardian stateside is not mostly because it’s an antidote to Fox’s poison. It’s because it’s trendy.

12:38 | / media | link

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Mon, 07 Jul 2003

Wright’s Baghdad

The Washington Post had this fantastic story last week about Frank Lloyd Wright’s plans for an opera house in Baghdad in 1957. Who knows, these plans may well be dusted and brought back to life… (via American Samizdat)

23:35 | / iraq / baghdad | link

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And so it begins

There have been a lot good articles about the phantom WMDs in Iraq lately, but this one is different. It’s a career diplomat who was sent by the CIA to investigate the Niger uranium allegations, found nothing and said so. And was ignored. Will he continue to be ignored? Let’s hope not.

[Update: Josh Marshall has the goods on the White House’ reaction. Priceless.]

23:10 | / iraq | link

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Nixon in purgatory, Safire in hell

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. William Safire’s Op-Ed in today’s NYT is so over the top ridiculous that one wonders if he’s actually sane.

First, of course, there’s the concept of writing an interview with Nixon, which is cute at best and gimmick at worst. Perhaps he’s spending too much time with Thomas Friedman these days, which is a shame because for all his faults Safire is a better writer — he just masters the English language much more fluently, as his columns on linguistics show. And I think talking to Nixon is completely valid even if he’s vilified by many people. Hell even the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm thinks Nixon an “able” US president. And at least it’s not as sycophantic as his phone calls to his good friend Arik Sharon. What is outrageous, though, is that the reason Nixon is in purgatory is not Watergate or Vietnam, but “his sin of imposing wage and price controls.” Is he looking for a fight?

Then he goes on to explain that Bush’s approval rating is still high despite economic problems because he’s focusing on the war on terror and the war on Iraq — “keeping his eye on the ball in center court.” As if Bush is some kind of Mr. Smith man of the people defending freedom from sinister elites, he adds: “The more the elites here and in Europe holler, the solider the Bush support gets.” Because of course Bush is not the elitist son of an elite family brought to power by elite, Beltway-insider politicians and elite corporate power. Noooooo. Not our W!

Then, he explains, Bush is “moving to the center” with his token spending increases, aid to Africa, and support for the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision. Never mind all of the other programs he slashed, the future cuts that will be the necessary outcome of an unbalanced budget, and all the pandering to a tiny minority of extremely wealthy people and companies.

Virtually every paragraph is either a celebration of the lack of accountability that the Bush administration has shown in its three years in power (such as not holding formal press conferences where the “fourth branch of government” could ask tough questions to the president) or a cynical endorsement of manipulative politicking. I wish I had the time and energy to debunk it in full, but is it really worth it?

One last thing to point out is singling out Dean as the looniest of Democratic candidates for the presidency (the other have problems like smiling too much, not enough, or not having eyebrows). This is a common refrain in right-wing circles, arguing that Dean would be a “Godsend” because he’s such an extreme liberal — a communist, really. But of course, Dean is a loony liberal who supports the death penalty (but responsibly), has a clear track record of being pro-business (particularly small businesses) and shows every sign of being a moderate. But the problem is more that the designation “liberal”, which Dean most certainly is in the finest of ways, has become synonymous with Trotskyist. For more outrage at this go here. And to see what Dean really stands for, go to his excellent site. It’s not that I particularly support him, but the way he’s portrayed as a loony is simply surreal.

William Safire, you’re going to hell for this.

17:18 | / politics | link

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Wed, 18 Jun 2003

Iran’s students and the American debate

This morning I came across this Andrew Sullivan column on Salon. Although he might be right to say that the Iranian students deserve more international support, as he has been arguing on his blog his argument here is disingenuous. He tries to portray the American left as so obsessed with the human rights abuses at home (those carried out by Bush & Co.) as to be blind to human rights elsewhere in world. Who comes to the rescue? The rabidly right-wing National Review, Sullivan argues. Of course the only thing they have in mind is helping out the poor Iranian students. No domestic agenda.

It’s increasingly frequent that right-wing bloggers and columnist will use what they call a “silence” among leftists on a human rights issue to argue that the left has lost its “moral compass.” But their own lack of a moral compass becomes all too clear when they use other people’s suffering to justify their domestic ideological wars. It got me angry enough to write this letter to the editor:

Typical of Andrew Sullivan to use the events in Iran to attack the American left. Rather than commenting on the importance of these protests, or what their impact is going to be, he prefers to use them to attack the left and characterize it as wimpish.

This type of tactic is becoming increasingly frequent on some of the more famous right-wing attack dogs’ blogs, such as Sullivan’s or Glenn Reynold’s Instapundit.

Is something nasty happening in Congo? Well, isn’t it terrible that the left says nothing. Protests in Iran? Where’s the left? Torture in Burma? Why is the left still talking about Iraq?

This line of approach is hypocritical and cynically misleading. It is “lefty” institutions such as Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International — often criticized by the some right-wing bloggers for being anti-American — that have been relentlessly documenting human rights abuses for years now. Not the Heritage Foundation, not the American Enterprise Institute, and certainly not Andrew Sullivan. They only care when it advances their ideological fancy of the moment or that of their paymasters.

In any case, his column needs a few corrections. Why does he include the Boston Globe, the BBC and the New York Times as examples of leftist publications in the same vein as Eric Alterman’s blog? I think Mr. Alterman would beg to differ. As for lefty outlets not covering Iran, The Nation ran a piece on Iran a couple of weeks ago by Juan Cole (not available online), and he has been following the developments on his blog, juancole.com. But most pernicious — and unfounded — is his assertion that the left (whatever that means) would rather ignore the Iran situation than agree with the right. I ask him: where was the American right when, 25 years ago, a bunch of students took to the streets of Tehran to overthrow a corrupt monarch and his CIA-trained torture squads?

Sullivan’s latest semi-Hitchensian attack on the left reeks of intellectual opportunism. While I appreciate all the pro-Iranian entries on his own blog and his highlighting of the Iranian blogging phenomenon, lashing out at the left as he does in this column makes me suspect that his recent focus on Iran is more motivated by ideology than genuine concern.

For what it’s worth, I think the Iranian students are heroes. I wish there were those kinds of balls in the Arab world. Their protests certainly deserve more attention, although I suspect that the reason they aren’t is that it doesn’t look like they will amount to much in the near future — no strong leadership. I just hope this time around, if there is a revolution, the students and other Iranians fed up with their retrograde theocracy don’t lose the political battle to some secular version of Khomeini, as they did in 1980.

09:04 | / iran | link

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Tue, 17 Jun 2003

War by any other name

More US soldiers have died since the official end of the war in Iraq than during the war itself.

Meanwhile, the low-intensity/guerrilla warfare that people had been afraid of before the war is starting to take place. Some people talking to journalists there are even afraid to give their names just in case Saddam comes back. Speaking of the devil, a veteran Middle East reporter just back from northern Iraq said that he was convinced Saddam was still in Iraq, moving along the Sunni tribes near the Kurdish region. It’s a story that is getting growing attention these days, although I have yet to see anything that convincingly puts Saddam behind the Falluja-style guerrilla groups.

16:41 | / iraq | link

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Debut

After a couple of months of learning HTML and tinkering with Perl and other forms of geekiness, I am finally going online. This is still very much a beta site, so please be patient. I’m even still looking for a title… any suggestions?

13:36 | / about | link

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Mon, 16 Jun 2003

Reps and Dems battle it out

The Democrats are trying to outdo the Republicans in being pro-Israel. If the presidential election is going to be fought on these kinds of issues — on trying to be tougher than the Republicans — then we’re stuck with W. until 2008. Great. And after that, Hillary?

17:47 | / politics | link

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Not a war against christendom

Tom Tomorrow has a hilarious cartoon in today’s edition of Salon.

On a similar theme, very nice-straightforward story on a Hamas supporter who lost 16 relatives to the Israeli army in today’s Times. The article may require a subscription to read, but here’s the end quote that sets the story straight:

“The hatred and enmity between us and the Jews is not because they are Jewish. It is because they took our land and threw us off it. That is the only reason.”

17:39 | / islam | link

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Sun, 08 Jun 2003

At least they don’t hurt Christians

I’m torn whether this New York Times Op-Editorialist is a Bashar Assad apologist or a bizarre type of Christian fundamentalist:

For if Syria is a one-party police state, it is a police state that tends to leave its citizens alone as long as they keep out of politics. And if political freedoms have always been severely and often brutally restricted, Mr. Assad’s regime does allow the Syrian people cultural and religious freedoms. Today, these give Syria’s minorities a security and stability far greater than their counterparts anywhere else in the region. This is particularly true of Syria’s ancient Christian communities.

Almost everywhere else in the Levant, because of discrimination and in some cases outright persecution, the Christians are leaving. Today in the Middle East they are a small minority of 14 million; in the last 20 years at least two million have left to make new lives for themselves in Europe, Australia and America. Only in Syria has this pattern been resisted. As the Syrian Orthodox metropolitan of Aleppo, Mar Gregorios Ibrahim, told me on my last visit: “Christians are better off in Syria than anywhere else in the Middle East. Other than Lebanon, this is the only country in the region where a Christian can really feel the equal of a Muslim.”

Perhaps the reason Syrian Christians feel so “equal” in Syria is that the regime there represses everyone equally. I believe the situation was the same in Iraq under Saddam Hussein — in fact, many say that Christians were even favored through prominent representatives at the heart of the regime such as Tariq Aziz. Perhaps the author should look at the notion that regimes such as Assad’s (and probably Hussein’s too) use “identity politics” to divide and rule. It certainly comes in handy to justify the dominance of the Alawi sect in Syria or the Tikriti tribe in Iraq — at least, they can say, it’s not the orthodox Sunnis running the place. Indeed Hafez Assad did murder between 10,000 and 25,000 — depending on who you believe — people in Hama in 1982 when that town was taken over by Muslim Brothers. I’m sure many of those who died weren’t even Muslim.

When the Assad regime does go, we will be likely to see the same type of resentment from the divisive politics played by the Hussein regime in Iraq. Although more broad-based — consisting of Alawis, provincial (i.e. non-Damascene, especially from the East) Sunnis and a few Christians — the Assad regime shows the kind of provincialism that makes any kind of internal regime reform seem unlikely.

Of course, there are also other problems with this piece, such as the notion that Syria and Lebanon are the only countries in the Arab world where Christians are treated well. I think including Lebanon is a bit odd since there the Christians unfairly dominate politics in the constitution, at the expense of Shi’as especially. Furthermore, I seem to recall there was a rather long civil war there in which Muslims were set against Christians… hardly the model for a healthy, equal society. Also, for both of these countries, one may also want to look at how colonial politics under the French (and through missionaries of various religions) helped create the feeling (and reality) that Christians were different from the Muslim population. I also think that Egypt, with its substantial Christian population, should be on the list of countries were Christians are generally treated equally by the government — or as equally badly as everyone else.

It’s worrying that this kind of garbage, with its faint scent of evangelicalism, makes it to the Op-Ed page of the NYT. Especially when the editor of those pages is in the running to replace Howell Raines as editor-in-chief.

20:33 | / syria | link

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Tue, 03 Jun 2003

Hep C tragedy

Salon is a running a good piece on the Hepatitis C epidemic in Egypt, caused by an effort to wipe out Bilhazia in the 1970s. The article is right is avoiding laying too much blame on the government for this — after all Hep C had not been diagnosed at the time of the anti-Bilharzia campaign — but it the way in which no one here wants to discuss the problem is depressingly familiar. It’s astounding to what extent an unaccountable government will always prefer burying its head in the sand rather than face up to a problem. And in Egypt, it’s also the same with AIDS.

11:55 | / egypt | link

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Sat, 10 May 2003

Beslusconi’s delusions of grandeur

Poor Silvio. Those nasty communists are trying to put him in jail and he doesn’t get to use his yacht very often. For the full hilarious interview see here, but in the meantime here are some choice morsels.

“It’s a great sacrifice to do what I’m doing,” Mr. Berlusconi, who is also Italy’s richest man, said over a nearly two-hour dinner that went past midnight in Palazzo Chigi, the prime minister’s official residence. “I’m not having fun at all.”

“I have a sailboat, but in two years, I’ve only been on it one day,” he said, speaking in Italian and striking a stoic tone. “And I haven’t been to my house in Bermuda for two or three years. And the same goes for my house in Portofino. I’ve been there for only one day in the last nine months.”

“Do you understand?” he asked. “My life has changed. The quality has become terrible. What a brutal job.” He added that he worked constantly and was “always alone, always alone here.”

Asked why he endures it, he said that he entered politics in 1993 and remains in politics today to keep Communists and other leftists from undermining Italian democracy. “Otherwise,” he said, “there would be no freedom in Italy.”

“If I left political life right now, Italy would fall into the hands of Communists,” he added later, resurrecting a specter that long defined Italian politics, although not in the last few years.

He said he alone had the ability to prevent that.

“There is no one else in Italy today,” he said, as two aides, flanking him at the dinner table, chimed in simultaneously: “Who else? Who else?”

“It’s a question I ask myself,” the 66-year-old prime minister said. “How much longer do I have to keep living this life of sacrifices?

12:08 | / politics | link

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From the hearts-and-minds dept.

The coalition line of winning Iraqi hearts and minds aims to bring about permanent behavioural change. Yet this is unlikely to occur, since the Iraqis — of all Arabs — have long experience of propaganda.

This somewhat winding article also has some interesting notes about the role of Arab poetry in forming public opinion during the recent war.

12:07 | / iraq | link

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Thu, 08 May 2003

From the “what, me, kafr?” dept.

Roger Pol-Droit’s column in today’s Le Monde asks the fascinating question, in which language was the Quran written? It seems that it’s a question worth asking, as recent philological research suggests that it might not be plain old Arabic, but a Syriac version of it. Meaning that some verses would have different meanings — e.g. the hourias awaiting the faithful in heaven may actually be tasty fruit. Oh yes, and that it might all be an attempt to explain the Bible rather than divine revelation. Sounds unlikely, but certainly something that would be worth investigating. Of course, doing that in most of the Islamic world would probably just result in a Nasr Abou Zeid scenario…

14:24 | / islam | link

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Leo-conservatives?

An interesting James Atlas article in the NYT — and a few days later by the New Yorker’s inimitable Seymour Hersh — points out the common intellectual heritage of many neo-cons: Leo Strauss, a political philosopher from the University of Chicago who seems to essentially be a kind of hardcore Platonist. His ideas seem sophisticated — if sinister and elitist — and may go a long way to explain the neo-conservatives intellectual dexterity and cohesion. My question is, where are the Aristotelians?

12:14 | / politics | link

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Wed, 01 Jan 2003

A little bit more about me

Issandr El Amrani is a freelance writer living in Cairo and the former editor of the Cairo Times. He is a correspondent for The Times, the Sunday Times and United Press International. His articles on Egyptian and Middle Eastern politics and culture have appeared in the Al Jazeera Online, the Boston Globe, Business Monthly, Courier International, Egypt Today, the Middle East Times, New African, Salon, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Times, and the World Press Review. He also regularly appears on radio and television, including the BBC World Service’s, various BBC affiliates in the UK, US and Ireland, National Public Radio and Sky News.

01:01 | / about | link

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