Wednesday, August 01, 2007

The Redirection

Is the Administration’s new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism? by Seymour M. Hersh March 5, 2007 Efforts to curb Iran’s influence have involved the United States in worsening Sunni-Shiite tensions. A STRATEGIC SHIFT In the past few months, as the situation in Iraq has deteriorated, the Bush Administration, in both its public diplomacy and its covert operations, has significantly shifted its Middle East strategy. The “redirection,” as some inside the White House have called the new strategy, has brought the United States closer to an open confrontation with Iran and, in parts of the region, propelled it into a widening sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims. To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has cooperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda. One contradictory aspect of the new strategy is that, in Iraq, most of the insurgent violence directed at the American military has come from Sunni forces, and not from Shiites. But, from the Administration’s perspective, the most profound—and unintended—strategic consequence of the Iraq war is the empowerment of Iran. Its President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has made defiant pronouncements about the destruction of Israel and his country’s right to pursue its nuclear program, and last week its supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said on state television that “realities in the region show that the arrogant front, headed by the U.S. and its allies, will be the principal loser in the region.” After the revolution of 1979 brought a religious government to power, the United States broke with Iran and cultivated closer relations with the leaders of Sunni Arab states such as Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. That calculation became more complex after the September 11th attacks, especially with regard to the Saudis. Al Qaeda is Sunni, and many of its operatives came from extremist religious circles inside Saudi Arabia. Before the invasion of Iraq, in 2003, Administration officials, influenced by neoconservative ideologues, assumed that a Shiite government there could provide a pro-American balance to Sunni extremists, since Iraq’s Shiite majority had been oppressed under Saddam Hussein. They ignored warnings from the intelligence community about the ties between Iraqi Shiite leaders and Iran, where some had lived in exile for years. Now, to the distress of the White House, Iran has forged a close relationship with the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. The new American policy, in its broad outlines, has been discussed publicly. In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that there is “a new strategic alignment in the Middle East,” separating “reformers” and “extremists”; she pointed to the Sunni states as centers of moderation, and said that Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah were “on the other side of that divide.” (Syria’s Sunni majority is dominated by the Alawi sect.) Iran and Syria, she said, “have made their choice and their choice is to destabilize.” Some of the core tactics of the redirection are not public, however. The clandestine operations have been kept secret, in some cases, by leaving the execution or the funding to the Saudis, or by finding other ways to work around the normal congressional appropriations process, current and former officials close to the Administration said. A senior member of the House Appropriations Committee told me that he had heard about the new strategy, but felt that he and his colleagues had not been adequately briefed. “We haven’t got any of this,” he said. “We ask for anything going on, and they say there’s nothing. And when we ask specific questions they say, ‘We’re going to get back to you.’ It’s so frustrating.” The key players behind the redirection are Vice-President Dick Cheney, the deputy national-security adviser Elliott Abrams, the departing Ambassador to Iraq (and nominee for United Nations Ambassador), Zalmay Khalilzad, and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi national-security adviser. While Rice has been deeply involved in shaping the public policy, former and current officials said that the clandestine side has been guided by Cheney. (Cheney’s office and the White House declined to comment for this story; the Pentagon did not respond to specific queries but said, “The United States is not planning to go to war with Iran.”) The policy shift has brought Saudi Arabia and Israel into a new strategic embrace, largely because both countries see Iran as an existential threat. They have been involved in direct talks, and the Saudis, who believe that greater stability in Israel and Palestine will give Iran less leverage in the region, have become more involved in Arab-Israeli negotiations. The new strategy “is a major shift in American policy—it’s a sea change,” a U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel said. The Sunni states “were petrified of a Shiite resurgence, and there was growing resentment with our gambling on the moderate Shiites in Iraq,” he said. “We cannot reverse the Shiite gain in Iraq, but we can contain it.” “It seems there has been a debate inside the government over what’s the biggest danger—Iran or Sunni radicals,” Vali Nasr, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who has written widely on Shiites, Iran, and Iraq, told me. “The Saudis and some in the Administration have been arguing that the biggest threat is Iran and the Sunni radicals are the lesser enemies. This is a victory for the Saudi line.” Martin Indyk, a senior State Department official in the Clinton Administration who also served as Ambassador to Israel, said that “the Middle East is heading into a serious Sunni-Shiite Cold War.” Indyk, who is the director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, added that, in his opinion, it was not clear whether the White House was fully aware of the strategic implications of its new policy. “The White House is not just doubling the bet in Iraq,” he said. “It’s doubling the bet across the region. This could get very complicated. Everything is upside down.” The Administration’s new policy for containing Iran seems to complicate its strategy for winning the war in Iraq. Patrick Clawson, an expert on Iran and the deputy director for research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, argued, however, that closer ties between the United States and moderate or even radical Sunnis could put “fear” into the government of Prime Minister Maliki and “make him worry that the Sunnis could actually win” the civil war there. Clawson said that this might give Maliki an incentive to coöperate with the United States in suppressing radical Shiite militias, such as Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army. Even so, for the moment, the U.S. remains dependent on the coöperation of Iraqi Shiite leaders. The Mahdi Army may be openly hostile to American interests, but other Shiite militias are counted as U.S. allies. Both Moqtada al-Sadr and the White House back Maliki. A memorandum written late last year by Stephen Hadley, the national-security adviser, suggested that the Administration try to separate Maliki from his more radical Shiite allies by building his base among moderate Sunnis and Kurds, but so far the trends have been in the opposite direction. As the Iraqi Army continues to founder in its confrontations with insurgents, the power of the Shiite militias has steadily increased. Flynt Leverett, a former Bush Administration National Security Council official, told me that “there is nothing coincidental or ironic” about the new strategy with regard to Iraq. “The Administration is trying to make a case that Iran is more dangerous and more provocative than the Sunni insurgents to American interests in Iraq, when—if you look at the actual casualty numbers—the punishment inflicted on America by the Sunnis is greater by an order of magnitude,” Leverett said. “This is all part of the campaign of provocative steps to increase the pressure on Iran. The idea is that at some point the Iranians will respond and then the Administration will have an open door to strike at them.” President George W. Bush, in a speech on January 10th, partially spelled out this approach. “These two regimes”—Iran and Syria—“are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq,” Bush said. “Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops. We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We’ll interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.” In the following weeks, there was a wave of allegations from the Administration about Iranian involvement in the Iraq war. On February 11th, reporters were shown sophisticated explosive devices, captured in Iraq, that the Administration claimed had come from Iran. The Administration’s message was, in essence, that the bleak situation in Iraq was the result not of its own failures of planning and execution but of Iran’s interference. The U.S. military also has arrested and interrogated hundreds of Iranians in Iraq. “The word went out last August for the military to snatch as many Iranians in Iraq as they can,” a former senior intelligence official said. “They had five hundred locked up at one time. We’re working these guys and getting information from them. The White House goal is to build a case that the Iranians have been fomenting the insurgency and they’ve been doing it all along—that Iran is, in fact, supporting the killing of Americans.” The Pentagon consultant confirmed that hundreds of Iranians have been captured by American forces in recent months. But he told me that that total includes many Iranian humanitarian and aid workers who “get scooped up and released in a short time,” after they have been interrogated. “We are not planning for a war with Iran,” Robert Gates, the new Defense Secretary, announced on February 2nd, and yet the atmosphere of confrontation has deepened. According to current and former American intelligence and military officials, secret operations in Lebanon have been accompanied by clandestine operations targeting Iran. American military and special-operations teams have escalated their activities in Iran to gather intelligence and, according to a Pentagon consultant on terrorism and the former senior intelligence official, have also crossed the border in pursuit of Iranian operatives from Iraq. At Rice’s Senate appearance in January, Democratic Senator Joseph Biden, of Delaware, pointedly asked her whether the U.S. planned to cross the Iranian or the Syrian border in the course of a pursuit. “Obviously, the President isn’t going to rule anything out to protect our troops, but the plan is to take down these networks in Iraq,” Rice said, adding, “I do think that everyone will understand that—the American people and I assume the Congress expect the President to do what is necessary to protect our forces.” The ambiguity of Rice’s reply prompted a response from Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel, a Republican, who has been critical of the Administration: Some of us remember 1970, Madam Secretary. And that was Cambodia. And when our government lied to the American people and said, “We didn’t cross the border going into Cambodia,” in fact we did. I happen to know something about that, as do some on this committee. So, Madam Secretary, when you set in motion the kind of policy that the President is talking about here, it’s very, very dangerous. The Administration’s concern about Iran’s role in Iraq is coupled with its long-standing alarm over Iran’s nuclear program. On Fox News on January 14th, Cheney warned of the possibility, in a few years, “of a nuclear-armed Iran, astride the world’s supply of oil, able to affect adversely the global economy, prepared to use terrorist organizations and/or their nuclear weapons to threaten their neighbors and others around the world.” He also said, “If you go and talk with the Gulf states or if you talk with the Saudis or if you talk with the Israelis or the Jordanians, the entire region is worried… . The threat Iran represents is growing.” The Administration is now examining a wave of new intelligence on Iran’s weapons programs. Current and former American officials told me that the intelligence, which came from Israeli agents operating in Iran, includes a claim that Iran has developed a three-stage solid-fuelled intercontinental missile capable of delivering several small warheads—each with limited accuracy—inside Europe. The validity of this human intelligence is still being debated. A similar argument about an imminent threat posed by weapons of mass destruction—and questions about the intelligence used to make that case—formed the prelude to the invasion of Iraq. Many in Congress have greeted the claims about Iran with wariness; in the Senate on February 14th, Hillary Clinton said, “We have all learned lessons from the conflict in Iraq, and we have to apply those lessons to any allegations that are being raised about Iran. Because, Mr. President, what we are hearing has too familiar a ring and we must be on guard that we never again make decisions on the basis of intelligence that turns out to be faulty.” Still, the Pentagon is continuing intensive planning for a possible bombing attack on Iran, a process that began last year, at the direction of the President. In recent months, the former intelligence official told me, a special planning group has been established in the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, charged with creating a contingency bombing plan for Iran that can be implemented, upon orders from the President, within twenty-four hours. In the past month, I was told by an Air Force adviser on targeting and the Pentagon consultant on terrorism, the Iran planning group has been handed a new assignment: to identify targets in Iran that may be involved in supplying or aiding militants in Iraq. Previously, the focus had been on the destruction of Iran’s nuclear facilities and possible regime change. Two carrier strike groups—the Eisenhower and the Stennis—are now in the Arabian Sea. One plan is for them to be relieved early in the spring, but there is worry within the military that they may be ordered to stay in the area after the new carriers arrive, according to several sources. (Among other concerns, war games have shown that the carriers could be vulnerable to swarming tactics involving large numbers of small boats, a technique that the Iranians have practiced in the past; carriers have limited maneuverability in the narrow Strait of Hormuz, off Iran’s southern coast.) The former senior intelligence official said that the current contingency plans allow for an attack order this spring. He added, however, that senior officers on the Joint Chiefs were counting on the White House’s not being “foolish enough to do this in the face of Iraq, and the problems it would give the Republicans in 2008.” PRINCE BANDAR’S GAME The Administration’s effort to diminish Iranian authority in the Middle East has relied heavily on Saudi Arabia and on Prince Bandar, the Saudi national-security adviser. Bandar served as the Ambassador to the United States for twenty-two years, until 2005, and has maintained a friendship with President Bush and Vice-President Cheney. In his new post, he continues to meet privately with them. Senior White House officials have made several visits to Saudi Arabia recently, some of them not disclosed. Last November, Cheney flew to Saudi Arabia for a surprise meeting with King Abdullah and Bandar. The Times reported that the King warned Cheney that Saudi Arabia would back its fellow-Sunnis in Iraq if the United States were to withdraw. A European intelligence official told me that the meeting also focussed on more general Saudi fears about “the rise of the Shiites.” In response, “The Saudis are starting to use their leverage—money.” In a royal family rife with competition, Bandar has, over the years, built a power base that relies largely on his close relationship with the U.S., which is crucial to the Saudis. Bandar was succeeded as Ambassador by Prince Turki al-Faisal; Turki resigned after eighteen months and was replaced by Adel A. al-Jubeir, a bureaucrat who has worked with Bandar. A former Saudi diplomat told me that during Turki’s tenure he became aware of private meetings involving Bandar and senior White House officials, including Cheney and Abrams. “I assume Turki was not happy with that,” the Saudi said. But, he added, “I don’t think that Bandar is going off on his own.” Although Turki dislikes Bandar, the Saudi said, he shared his goal of challenging the spread of Shiite power in the Middle East. The split between Shiites and Sunnis goes back to a bitter divide, in the seventh century, over who should succeed the Prophet Muhammad. Sunnis dominated the medieval caliphate and the Ottoman Empire, and Shiites, traditionally, have been regarded more as outsiders. Worldwide, ninety per cent of Muslims are Sunni, but Shiites are a majority in Iran, Iraq, and Bahrain, and are the largest Muslim group in Lebanon. Their concentration in a volatile, oil-rich region has led to concern in the West and among Sunnis about the emergence of a “Shiite crescent”—especially given Iran’s increased geopolitical weight. “The Saudis still see the world through the days of the Ottoman Empire, when Sunni Muslims ruled the roost and the Shiites were the lowest class,” Frederic Hof, a retired military officer who is an expert on the Middle East, told me. If Bandar was seen as bringing about a shift in U.S. policy in favor of the Sunnis, he added, it would greatly enhance his standing within the royal family. The Saudis are driven by their fear that Iran could tilt the balance of power not only in the region but within their own country. Saudi Arabia has a significant Shiite minority in its Eastern Province, a region of major oil fields; sectarian tensions are high in the province. The royal family believes that Iranian operatives, working with local Shiites, have been behind many terrorist attacks inside the kingdom, according to Vali Nasr. “Today, the only army capable of containing Iran”—the Iraqi Army—“has been destroyed by the United States. You’re now dealing with an Iran that could be nuclear-capable and has a standing army of four hundred and fifty thousand soldiers.” (Saudi Arabia has seventy-five thousand troops in its standing army.) Nasr went on, “The Saudis have considerable financial means, and have deep relations with the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis”—Sunni extremists who view Shiites as apostates. “The last time Iran was a threat, the Saudis were able to mobilize the worst kinds of Islamic radicals. Once you get them out of the box, you can’t put them back.” The Saudi royal family has been, by turns, both a sponsor and a target of Sunni extremists, who object to the corruption and decadence among the family’s myriad princes. The princes are gambling that they will not be overthrown as long as they continue to support religious schools and charities linked to the extremists. The Administration’s new strategy is heavily dependent on this bargain. Nasr compared the current situation to the period in which Al Qaeda first emerged. In the nineteen-eighties and the early nineties, the Saudi government offered to subsidize the covert American C.I.A. proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Hundreds of young Saudis were sent into the border areas of Pakistan, where they set up religious schools, training bases, and recruiting facilities. Then, as now, many of the operatives who were paid with Saudi money were Salafis. Among them, of course, were Osama bin Laden and his associates, who founded Al Qaeda, in 1988. This time, the U.S. government consultant told me, Bandar and other Saudis have assured the White House that “they will keep a very close eye on the religious fundamentalists. Their message to us was ‘We’ve created this movement, and we can control it.’ It’s not that we don’t want the Salafis to throw bombs; it’s who they throw them at—Hezbollah, Moqtada al-Sadr, Iran, and at the Syrians, if they continue to work with Hezbollah and Iran.” The Saudi said that, in his country’s view, it was taking a political risk by joining the U.S. in challenging Iran: Bandar is already seen in the Arab world as being too close to the Bush Administration. “We have two nightmares,” the former diplomat told me. “For Iran to acquire the bomb and for the United States to attack Iran. I’d rather the Israelis bomb the Iranians, so we can blame them. If America does it, we will be blamed.” In the past year, the Saudis, the Israelis, and the Bush Administration have developed a series of informal understandings about their new strategic direction. At least four main elements were involved, the U.S. government consultant told me. First, Israel would be assured that its security was paramount and that Washington and Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states shared its concern about Iran. Second, the Saudis would urge Hamas, the Islamist Palestinian party that has received support from Iran, to curtail its anti-Israeli aggression and to begin serious talks about sharing leadership with Fatah, the more secular Palestinian group. (In February, the Saudis brokered a deal at Mecca between the two factions. However, Israel and the U.S. have expressed dissatisfaction with the terms.) The third component was that the Bush Administration would work directly with Sunni nations to counteract Shiite ascendance in the region. Fourth, the Saudi government, with Washington’s approval, would provide funds and logistical aid to weaken the government of President Bashir Assad, of Syria. The Israelis believe that putting such pressure on the Assad government will make it more conciliatory and open to negotiations. Syria is a major conduit of arms to Hezbollah. The Saudi government is also at odds with the Syrians over the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese Prime Minister, in Beirut in 2005, for which it believes the Assad government was responsible. Hariri, a billionaire Sunni, was closely associated with the Saudi regime and with Prince Bandar. (A U.N. inquiry strongly suggested that the Syrians were involved, but offered no direct evidence; there are plans for another investigation, by an international tribunal.) Patrick Clawson, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, depicted the Saudis’ coöperation with the White House as a significant breakthrough. “The Saudis understand that if they want the Administration to make a more generous political offer to the Palestinians they have to persuade the Arab states to make a more generous offer to the Israelis,” Clawson told me. The new diplomatic approach, he added, “shows a real degree of effort and sophistication as well as a deftness of touch not always associated with this Administration. Who’s running the greater risk—we or the Saudis? At a time when America’s standing in the Middle East is extremely low, the Saudis are actually embracing us. We should count our blessings.” The Pentagon consultant had a different view. He said that the Administration had turned to Bandar as a “fallback,” because it had realized that the failing war in Iraq could leave the Middle East “up for grabs.” JIHADIS IN LEBANON The focus of the U.S.-Saudi relationship, after Iran, is Lebanon, where the Saudis have been deeply involved in efforts by the Administration to support the Lebanese government. Prime Minister Fouad Siniora is struggling to stay in power against a persistent opposition led by Hezbollah, the Shiite organization, and its leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah. Hezbollah has an extensive infrastructure, an estimated two to three thousand active fighters, and thousands of additional members. Hezbollah has been on the State Department’s terrorist list since 1997. The organization has been implicated in the 1983 bombing of a Marine barracks in Beirut that killed two hundred and forty-one military men. It has also been accused of complicity in the kidnapping of Americans, including the C.I.A. station chief in Lebanon, who died in captivity, and a Marine colonel serving on a U.N. peacekeeping mission, who was killed. (Nasrallah has denied that the group was involved in these incidents.) Nasrallah is seen by many as a staunch terrorist, who has said that he regards Israel as a state that has no right to exist. Many in the Arab world, however, especially Shiites, view him as a resistance leader who withstood Israel in last summer’s thirty-three-day war, and Siniora as a weak politician who relies on America’s support but was unable to persuade President Bush to call for an end to the Israeli bombing of Lebanon. (Photographs of Siniora kissing Condoleezza Rice on the cheek when she visited during the war were prominently displayed during street protests in Beirut.) The Bush Administration has publicly pledged the Siniora government a billion dollars in aid since last summer. A donors’ conference in Paris, in January, which the U.S. helped organize, yielded pledges of almost eight billion more, including a promise of more than a billion from the Saudis. The American pledge includes more than two hundred million dollars in military aid, and forty million dollars for internal security. The United States has also given clandestine support to the Siniora government, according to the former senior intelligence official and the U.S. government consultant. “We are in a program to enhance the Sunni capability to resist Shiite influence, and we’re spreading the money around as much as we can,” the former senior intelligence official said. The problem was that such money “always gets in more pockets than you think it will,” he said. “In this process, we’re financing a lot of bad guys with some serious potential unintended consequences. We don’t have the ability to determine and get pay vouchers signed by the people we like and avoid the people we don’t like. It’s a very high-risk venture.” American, European, and Arab officials I spoke to told me that the Siniora government and its allies had allowed some aid to end up in the hands of emerging Sunni radical groups in northern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and around Palestinian refugee camps in the south. These groups, though small, are seen as a buffer to Hezbollah; at the same time, their ideological ties are with Al Qaeda. During a conversation with me, the former Saudi diplomat accused Nasrallah of attempting “to hijack the state,” but he also objected to the Lebanese and Saudi sponsorship of Sunni jihadists in Lebanon. “Salafis are sick and hateful, and I’m very much against the idea of flirting with them,” he said. “They hate the Shiites, but they hate Americans more. If you try to outsmart them, they will outsmart us. It will be ugly.” Alastair Crooke, who spent nearly thirty years in MI6, the British intelligence service, and now works for Conflicts Forum, a think tank in Beirut, told me, “The Lebanese government is opening space for these people to come in. It could be very dangerous.” Crooke said that one Sunni extremist group, Fatah al-Islam, had splintered from its pro-Syrian parent group, Fatah al-Intifada, in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, in northern Lebanon. Its membership at the time was less than two hundred. “I was told that within twenty-four hours they were being offered weapons and money by people presenting themselves as representatives of the Lebanese government’s interests—presumably to take on Hezbollah,” Crooke said. The largest of the groups, Asbat al-Ansar, is situated in the Ain al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp. Asbat al-Ansar has received arms and supplies from Lebanese internal-security forces and militias associated with the Siniora government. In 2005, according to a report by the U.S.-based International Crisis Group, Saad Hariri, the Sunni majority leader of the Lebanese parliament and the son of the slain former Prime Minister—Saad inherited more than four billion dollars after his father’s assassination—paid forty-eight thousand dollars in bail for four members of an Islamic militant group from Dinniyeh. The men had been arrested while trying to establish an Islamic mini-state in northern Lebanon. The Crisis Group noted that many of the militants “had trained in al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan.” According to the Crisis Group report, Saad Hariri later used his parliamentary majority to obtain amnesty for twenty-two of the Dinniyeh Islamists, as well as for seven militants suspected of plotting to bomb the Italian and Ukrainian embassies in Beirut, the previous year. (He also arranged a pardon for Samir Geagea, a Maronite Christian militia leader, who had been convicted of four political murders, including the assassination, in 1987, of Prime Minister Rashid Karami.) Hariri described his actions to reporters as humanitarian. In an interview in Beirut, a senior official in the Siniora government acknowledged that there were Sunni jihadists operating inside Lebanon. “We have a liberal attitude that allows Al Qaeda types to have a presence here,” he said. He related this to concerns that Iran or Syria might decide to turn Lebanon into a “theatre of conflict.” The official said that his government was in a no-win situation. Without a political settlement with Hezbollah, he said, Lebanon could “slide into a conflict,” in which Hezbollah fought openly with Sunni forces, with potentially horrific consequences. But if Hezbollah agreed to a settlement yet still maintained a separate army, allied with Iran and Syria, “Lebanon could become a target. In both cases, we become a target.” The Bush Administration has portrayed its support of the Siniora government as an example of the President’s belief in democracy, and his desire to prevent other powers from interfering in Lebanon. When Hezbollah led street demonstrations in Beirut in December, John Bolton, who was then the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., called them “part of the Iran-Syria-inspired coup.” Leslie H. Gelb, a past president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said that the Administration’s policy was less pro democracy than “pro American national security. The fact is that it would be terribly dangerous if Hezbollah ran Lebanon.” The fall of the Siniora government would be seen, Gelb said, “as a signal in the Middle East of the decline of the United States and the ascendancy of the terrorism threat. And so any change in the distribution of political power in Lebanon has to be opposed by the United States—and we’re justified in helping any non-Shiite parties resist that change. We should say this publicly, instead of talking about democracy.” Martin Indyk, of the Saban Center, said, however, that the United States “does not have enough pull to stop the moderates in Lebanon from dealing with the extremists.” He added, “The President sees the region as divided between moderates and extremists, but our regional friends see it as divided between Sunnis and Shia. The Sunnis that we view as extremists are regarded by our Sunni allies simply as Sunnis.” In January, after an outburst of street violence in Beirut involving supporters of both the Siniora government and Hezbollah, Prince Bandar flew to Tehran to discuss the political impasse in Lebanon and to meet with Ali Larijani, the Iranians’ negotiator on nuclear issues. According to a Middle Eastern ambassador, Bandar’s mission—which the ambassador said was endorsed by the White House—also aimed “to create problems between the Iranians and Syria.” There had been tensions between the two countries about Syrian talks with Israel, and the Saudis’ goal was to encourage a breach. However, the ambassador said, “It did not work. Syria and Iran are not going to betray each other. Bandar’s approach is very unlikely to succeed.” Walid Jumblatt, who is the leader of the Druze minority in Lebanon and a strong Siniora supporter, has attacked Nasrallah as an agent of Syria, and has repeatedly told foreign journalists that Hezbollah is under the direct control of the religious leadership in Iran. In a conversation with me last December, he depicted Bashir Assad, the Syrian President, as a “serial killer.” Nasrallah, he said, was “morally guilty” of the assassination of Rafik Hariri and the murder, last November, of Pierre Gemayel, a member of the Siniora Cabinet, because of his support for the Syrians. Jumblatt then told me that he had met with Vice-President Cheney in Washington last fall to discuss, among other issues, the possibility of undermining Assad. He and his colleagues advised Cheney that, if the United States does try to move against Syria, members of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood would be “the ones to talk to,” Jumblatt said. The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, a branch of a radical Sunni movement founded in Egypt in 1928, engaged in more than a decade of violent opposition to the regime of Hafez Assad, Bashir’s father. In 1982, the Brotherhood took control of the city of Hama; Assad bombarded the city for a week, killing between six thousand and twenty thousand people. Membership in the Brotherhood is punishable by death in Syria. The Brotherhood is also an avowed enemy of the U.S. and of Israel. Nevertheless, Jumblatt said, “We told Cheney that the basic link between Iran and Lebanon is Syria—and to weaken Iran you need to open the door to effective Syrian opposition.” There is evidence that the Administration’s redirection strategy has already benefitted the Brotherhood. The Syrian National Salvation Front is a coalition of opposition groups whose principal members are a faction led by Abdul Halim Khaddam, a former Syrian Vice-President who defected in 2005, and the Brotherhood. A former high-ranking C.I.A. officer told me, “The Americans have provided both political and financial support. The Saudis are taking the lead with financial support, but there is American involvement.” He said that Khaddam, who now lives in Paris, was getting money from Saudi Arabia, with the knowledge of the White House. (In 2005, a delegation of the Front’s members met with officials from the National Security Council, according to press reports.) A former White House official told me that the Saudis had provided members of the Front with travel documents. Jumblatt said he understood that the issue was a sensitive one for the White House. “I told Cheney that some people in the Arab world, mainly the Egyptians”—whose moderate Sunni leadership has been fighting the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood for decades—“won’t like it if the United States helps the Brotherhood. But if you don’t take on Syria we will be face to face in Lebanon with Hezbollah in a long fight, and one we might not win.” THE SHEIKH On a warm, clear night early last December, in a bombed-out suburb a few miles south of downtown Beirut, I got a preview of how the Administration’s new strategy might play out in Lebanon. Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, who has been in hiding, had agreed to an interview. Security arrangements for the meeting were secretive and elaborate. I was driven, in the back seat of a darkened car, to a damaged underground garage somewhere in Beirut, searched with a handheld scanner, placed in a second car to be driven to yet another bomb-scarred underground garage, and transferred again. Last summer, it was reported that Israel was trying to kill Nasrallah, but the extraordinary precautions were not due only to that threat. Nasrallah’s aides told me that they believe he is a prime target of fellow-Arabs, primarily Jordanian intelligence operatives, as well as Sunni jihadists who they believe are affiliated with Al Qaeda. (The government consultant and a retired four-star general said that Jordanian intelligence, with support from the U.S. and Israel, had been trying to infiltrate Shiite groups, to work against Hezbollah. Jordan’s King Abdullah II has warned that a Shiite government in Iraq that was close to Iran would lead to the emergence of a Shiite crescent.) This is something of an ironic turn: Nasrallah’s battle with Israel last summer turned him—a Shiite—into the most popular and influential figure among Sunnis and Shiites throughout the region. In recent months, however, he has increasingly been seen by many Sunnis not as a symbol of Arab unity but as a participant in a sectarian war. Nasrallah, dressed, as usual, in religious garb, was waiting for me in an unremarkable apartment. One of his advisers said that he was not likely to remain there overnight; he has been on the move since his decision, last July, to order the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid set off the thirty-three-day war. Nasrallah has since said publicly—and repeated to me—that he misjudged the Israeli response. “We just wanted to capture prisoners for exchange purposes,” he told me. “We never wanted to drag the region into war.” Nasrallah accused the Bush Administration of working with Israel to deliberately instigate fitna, an Arabic word that is used to mean “insurrection and fragmentation within Islam.” “In my opinion, there is a huge campaign through the media throughout the world to put each side up against the other,” he said. “I believe that all this is being run by American and Israeli intelligence.” (He did not provide any specific evidence for this.) He said that the U.S. war in Iraq had increased sectarian tensions, but argued that Hezbollah had tried to prevent them from spreading into Lebanon. (Sunni-Shiite confrontations increased, along with violence, in the weeks after we talked.) Nasrallah said he believed that President Bush’s goal was “the drawing of a new map for the region. They want the partition of Iraq. Iraq is not on the edge of a civil war—there is a civil war. There is ethnic and sectarian cleansing. The daily killing and displacement which is taking place in Iraq aims at achieving three Iraqi parts, which will be sectarian and ethnically pure as a prelude to the partition of Iraq. Within one or two years at the most, there will be total Sunni areas, total Shiite areas, and total Kurdish areas. Even in Baghdad, there is a fear that it might be divided into two areas, one Sunni and one Shiite.” He went on, “I can say that President Bush is lying when he says he does not want Iraq to be partitioned. All the facts occurring now on the ground make you swear he is dragging Iraq to partition. And a day will come when he will say, ‘I cannot do anything, since the Iraqis want the partition of their country and I honor the wishes of the people of Iraq.’ ” Nasrallah said he believed that America also wanted to bring about the partition of Lebanon and of Syria. In Syria, he said, the result would be to push the country “into chaos and internal battles like in Iraq.” In Lebanon, “There will be a Sunni state, an Alawi state, a Christian state, and a Druze state.” But, he said, “I do not know if there will be a Shiite state.” Nasrallah told me that he suspected that one aim of the Israeli bombing of Lebanon last summer was “the destruction of Shiite areas and the displacement of Shiites from Lebanon. The idea was to have the Shiites of Lebanon and Syria flee to southern Iraq,” which is dominated by Shiites. “I am not sure, but I smell this,” he told me. Partition would leave Israel surrounded by “small tranquil states,” he said. “I can assure you that the Saudi kingdom will also be divided, and the issue will reach to North African states. There will be small ethnic and confessional states,” he said. “In other words, Israel will be the most important and the strongest state in a region that has been partitioned into ethnic and confessional states that are in agreement with each other. This is the new Middle East.” In fact, the Bush Administration has adamantly resisted talk of partitioning Iraq, and its public stances suggest that the White House sees a future Lebanon that is intact, with a weak, disarmed Hezbollah playing, at most, a minor political role. There is also no evidence to support Nasrallah’s belief that the Israelis were seeking to drive the Shiites into southern Iraq. Nevertheless, Nasrallah’s vision of a larger sectarian conflict in which the United States is implicated suggests a possible consequence of the White House’s new strategy. In the interview, Nasrallah made mollifying gestures and promises that would likely be met with skepticism by his opponents. “If the United States says that discussions with the likes of us can be useful and influential in determining American policy in the region, we have no objection to talks or meetings,” he said. “But, if their aim through this meeting is to impose their policy on us, it will be a waste of time.” He said that the Hezbollah militia, unless attacked, would operate only within the borders of Lebanon, and pledged to disarm it when the Lebanese Army was able to stand up. Nasrallah said that he had no interest in initiating another war with Israel. However, he added that he was anticipating, and preparing for, another Israeli attack, later this year. Nasrallah further insisted that the street demonstrations in Beirut would continue until the Siniora government fell or met his coalition’s political demands. “Practically speaking, this government cannot rule,” he told me. “It might issue orders, but the majority of the Lebanese people will not abide and will not recognize the legitimacy of this government. Siniora remains in office because of international support, but this does not mean that Siniora can rule Lebanon.” President Bush’s repeated praise of the Siniora government, Nasrallah said, “is the best service to the Lebanese opposition he can give, because it weakens their position vis-à-vis the Lebanese people and the Arab and Islamic populations. They are betting on us getting tired. We did not get tired during the war, so how could we get tired in a demonstration?” There is sharp division inside and outside the Bush Administration about how best to deal with Nasrallah, and whether he could, in fact, be a partner in a political settlement. The outgoing director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, in a farewell briefing to the Senate Intelligence Committee, in January, said that Hezbollah “lies at the center of Iran’s terrorist strategy… . It could decide to conduct attacks against U.S. interests in the event it feels its survival or that of Iran is threatened… . Lebanese Hezbollah sees itself as Tehran’s partner.” In 2002, Richard Armitage, then the Deputy Secretary of State, called Hezbollah “the A-team” of terrorists. In a recent interview, however, Armitage acknowledged that the issue has become somewhat more complicated. Nasrallah, Armitage told me, has emerged as “a political force of some note, with a political role to play inside Lebanon if he chooses to do so.” In terms of public relations and political gamesmanship, Armitage said, Nasrallah “is the smartest man in the Middle East.” But, he added, Nasrallah “has got to make it clear that he wants to play an appropriate role as the loyal opposition. For me, there’s still a blood debt to pay”—a reference to the murdered colonel and the Marine barracks bombing. Robert Baer, a former longtime C.I.A. agent in Lebanon, has been a severe critic of Hezbollah and has warned of its links to Iranian-sponsored terrorism. But now, he told me, “we’ve got Sunni Arabs preparing for cataclysmic conflict, and we will need somebody to protect the Christians in Lebanon. It used to be the French and the United States who would do it, and now it’s going to be Nasrallah and the Shiites. “The most important story in the Middle East is the growth of Nasrallah from a street guy to a leader—from a terrorist to a statesman,” Baer added. “The dog that didn’t bark this summer”—during the war with Israel—“is Shiite terrorism.” Baer was referring to fears that Nasrallah, in addition to firing rockets into Israel and kidnapping its soldiers, might set in motion a wave of terror attacks on Israeli and American targets around the world. “He could have pulled the trigger, but he did not,” Baer said. Most members of the intelligence and diplomatic communities acknowledge Hezbollah’s ongoing ties to Iran. But there is disagreement about the extent to which Nasrallah would put aside Hezbollah’s interests in favor of Iran’s. A former C.I.A. officer who also served in Lebanon called Nasrallah “a Lebanese phenomenon,” adding, “Yes, he’s aided by Iran and Syria, but Hezbollah’s gone beyond that.” He told me that there was a period in the late eighties and early nineties when the C.I.A. station in Beirut was able to clandestinely monitor Nasrallah’s conversations. He described Nasrallah as “a gang leader who was able to make deals with the other gangs. He had contacts with everybody.” TELLING CONGRESS The Bush Administration’s reliance on clandestine operations that have not been reported to Congress and its dealings with intermediaries with questionable agendas have recalled, for some in Washington, an earlier chapter in history. Two decades ago, the Reagan Administration attempted to fund the Nicaraguan contras illegally, with the help of secret arms sales to Iran. Saudi money was involved in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal, and a few of the players back then—notably Prince Bandar and Elliott Abrams—are involved in today’s dealings. Iran-Contra was the subject of an informal “lessons learned” discussion two years ago among veterans of the scandal. Abrams led the discussion. One conclusion was that even though the program was eventually exposed, it had been possible to execute it without telling Congress. As to what the experience taught them, in terms of future covert operations, the participants found: “One, you can’t trust our friends. Two, the C.I.A. has got to be totally out of it. Three, you can’t trust the uniformed military, and four, it’s got to be run out of the Vice-President’s office”—a reference to Cheney’s role, the former senior intelligence official said. I was subsequently told by the two government consultants and the former senior intelligence official that the echoes of Iran-Contra were a factor in Negroponte’s decision to resign from the National Intelligence directorship and accept a sub-Cabinet position of Deputy Secretary of State. (Negroponte declined to comment.) The former senior intelligence official also told me that Negroponte did not want a repeat of his experience in the Reagan Administration, when he served as Ambassador to Honduras. “Negroponte said, ‘No way. I’m not going down that road again, with the N.S.C. running operations off the books, with no finding.’ ” (In the case of covert C.I.A. operations, the President must issue a written finding and inform Congress.) Negroponte stayed on as Deputy Secretary of State, he added, because “he believes he can influence the government in a positive way.” The government consultant said that Negroponte shared the White House’s policy goals but “wanted to do it by the book.” The Pentagon consultant also told me that “there was a sense at the senior-ranks level that he wasn’t fully on board with the more adventurous clandestine initiatives.” It was also true, he said, that Negroponte “had problems with this Rube Goldberg policy contraption for fixing the Middle East.” The Pentagon consultant added that one difficulty, in terms of oversight, was accounting for covert funds. “There are many, many pots of black money, scattered in many places and used all over the world on a variety of missions,” he said. The budgetary chaos in Iraq, where billions of dollars are unaccounted for, has made it a vehicle for such transactions, according to the former senior intelligence official and the retired four-star general. “This goes back to Iran-Contra,” a former National Security Council aide told me. “And much of what they’re doing is to keep the agency out of it.” He said that Congress was not being briefed on the full extent of the U.S.-Saudi operations. And, he said, “The C.I.A. is asking, ‘What’s going on?’ They’re concerned, because they think it’s amateur hour.” The issue of oversight is beginning to get more attention from Congress. Last November, the Congressional Research Service issued a report for Congress on what it depicted as the Administration’s blurring of the line between C.I.A. activities and strictly military ones, which do not have the same reporting requirements. And the Senate Intelligence Committee, headed by Senator Jay Rockefeller, has scheduled a hearing for March 8th on Defense Department intelligence activities. Senator Ron Wyden, of Oregon, a Democrat who is a member of the Intelligence Committee, told me, “The Bush Administration has frequently failed to meet its legal obligation to keep the Intelligence Committee fully and currently informed. Time and again, the answer has been ‘Trust us.’ ” Wyden said, “It is hard for me to trust the Administration.” ♦

posted by Sound Diaspora at 12:20 PM 0 comments

Saturday, July 21, 2007

Unstable peace in Beirut ( Work & Play)

posted by Sound Diaspora at 11:04 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Darkness Everywhere

Posted on michaeltotten.com by Michael Totten

“This is the new Middle East. Not the new Middle East of Ms [Condoleezza] Rice. Darkness everywhere.” – Lebanese Druze chief Walid Jumblatt, August 2006

Syrian soldiers occupied Lebanon the first time I went to Beirut. They left before I did, as I figured they would. The Lebanese project was the best thing going in the Middle East at the time. Baghdad was burning. But look at Beirut! Modern. Prosperous. Liberal. Arab. And free.

Bashar Assad threatened to “break Lebanon” if his troops were forced out the country. A wave of car bombs, assassinations, terrorism, and sectarian incitement began immediately.

But there was a lull there for a while. Only one person, An Nahar newspaper editor Gebran Tueni, was assassinated during my six month stay. Assad’s terror campaign didn’t work. Little did most of us know that a terrible war hatched in Tehran and Damascus was gearing up at that time. It looked like Israel was the target, but make no mistake: Lebanon was targeted, too. The Syrian-Iranian-Hezbollah war against Israel isn’t over. And the Syrian-Iranian-Hezbollah war against Lebanon is not over either.
BEIRUT: Washington warned of "mounting evidence" Wednesday that Iran, Syria and Hizbullah are "preparing plans to topple" the Lebanese government. White House spokesman Tony Snow said in a statement that "support for a sovereign, democratic and prosperous Lebanon is a key element of US policy in the Middle East."

"We are therefore increasingly concerned by mounting evidence that the Syrian and Iranian governments, Hizbullah and their Lebanese allies are preparing plans to topple Lebanon's democratically elected government, led by Prime Minister [Fouad] Siniora," Snow added.

"Any attempt to destabilize Lebanon's democratically elected government through such tactics as manufactured demonstrations and violence, or by physically threatening its leaders, would, at the very least, be a clear violation of Lebanon's sovereignty" and UN resolutions, he said.

Hizbullah's leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, warned late Tuesday that Hizbullah and its allies will take to the streets "for as long as it takes ... to either topple the government or hold early and new parliamentary elections," if consultations to form a national unity government should fail.
The Syrian ambassador to the US said this is “ridiculous.” Pay him no mind. He also said “We, in Syria, respect the sovereignty of Lebanon.” Syria won’t open an embassy in Lebanon. That would force the Baathists to admit that Lebanon does not belong to them.

Street demonstrations by Hezbollah may not sound like that big a deal. Street demonstrations are a part of the democratic process, after all. They certainly are preferable to a coup or a violent insurgency.

Hezbollah, though, is a terrorist army as well as a political party. We’re not talking about a Free Mumia rally or a Million Mom March here.

Nasrallah is threatening "street demonstrations" because the state won’t reward his minority Hezbollah bloc with more power in a “national unity” government. They lost the election, but Nasrallah thinks that shouldn’t count. They “won” against Israel. That’s what he thinks should count.

Most Lebanese fear and loathe Hezbollah precisely because they fear Nasrallah points his guns at Beirut and Tel Aviv at the same time. Nasrallah’s current belligerence proves they’re correct.

Lebanon’s Defense Minister Elias Murr – who luckily survived an assassination attempt last year – takes seriously Nasrallah’s threat to flood downtown with angry Hezbollah supporters from the dahiyeh and the south. He deployed 20,000 troops of his own into the streets of Beirut. Beirut is less than three miles wide. You can walk across downtown in five minutes. Imagine 20,000 troops in that small an area.

Lebanese Forces political party leader Samir Geagea says if protests degenerate into riots "we will be there to back up the security forces anywhere and we put ourselves under their command."

They are right to be worried. Recent "street demonstrators" in Beirut burned the Danish embassy and violently tore apart the U.N. building downtown. Shortly afterward someone fired rockets at a nightclub across the street from the U.N., most likely to demonstrate that even the most “secure” part of the city built and all but owned by the Hariri clan can be assaulted with impunity by shadowy forces. During the war against Israel Nasrallah threatened his political opponents with violence. Defense Minister Murr would be derelict in his duty if he did not send in the army. Even Speaker of Parliament Nabih Berri, Nasrallah’s closest Lebanese ally, is worried now about what Hezbollah will do.

The Israelis may have temporarily depleted Hezbollah’s arsenal stock, but it makes little difference. Syria and Iran are arming them all over again. (For God’s sake, didn’t the Israelis know that would happen?)

Someone most likely from the Syrian-Iranian-Hezbollah axis attacked an army barracks with hand grenades twice in the last three weeks. Charles Malik says sectarian clashes are a routine occurrence and are rarely mentioned in local or international media. I’ve received anecdotal messages by email that suggest this may be the case.

If Israel is almost back to Square One – they’re at Square Two at best -- Lebanon is at Square Negative Three. British military historian John Keegan says another war in Lebanon is inevitable. I fear he must be right. The last one, in hindsight, was inevitable. I should have known that at the time when I went to the Hezbollah dahiyeh south of Beirut. Their state-within-a-state reeks of fascism, terrorism, and war. The next round is just as inevitable as the last one. Hezbollah was finally thrown off the fence, but none of the war’s principle causes have been resolved.

There’s a case to be made that Lebanon is at war even now, not only with Israel and Syria but with itself. As Bart Hall put it at Winds of Change: “Peace is the absence of threat not the absence of conflict.”

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posted by Sound Diaspora at 3:13 AM 0 comments

Monday, October 23, 2006

Coalitions of the unwilling

Oct 19th 2006 | CAIRO From The Economist print edition

Resistance to the West, and rejection of Israel, are the pillars of a rapidly strengthening alliance in the world's most volatile region

THE Middle East is no stranger to doom and gloom. The most enduring conflict of the past century, between Israelis and Palestinians, drags on drearily today. The first wars of the 21st century have also unfolded there, in Afghanistan, Iraq, western Sudan and Lebanon.

This being so, the West has a long history of espying new spectres in the region. In the 1950s and 1960s it was Nasser, Egypt's passionate pan-Arabist leader. In the 1970s it was Palestinian terrorism; in the 1980s Khomeini's Islamic revolution; since the turn of the century, al-Qaeda-style mayhem; and now again revolutionary Iran, newly expansionary and perhaps, some day, armed with nukes.

Some of these imagined threats to the global order have been leftist and nationalist, some reactionary and religious, some radical and violent. Yet all have drawn their mobilising power from a single source. They have all been, in essence, resistance movements, inspired by a seemingly unquenchable popular urge to challenge the dominant perceived injustice of the day, whether it be European colonialism, Zionism, American hegemonism or the grip of local governments charged with selling out to the West.

The most reliable populist cry today remains “resistance”. Sudan's strongman, Omar al-Bashir, blasts the proposed deployment of UN troops in Darfur as the spearhead of a new Western crusade. The Shias and Sunnis in Iraq may be fighting each other for dominance, but the call to “resist” the American occupiers and the weak (though elected) government they sponsor wins passionate followers to both camps. Hizbullah rouses region-wide cheers for bloodying Israel's nose. Clearly, although times have changed, this dynamic has not.

What has changed is that the call to resist now inspires unprecedented enthusiasm, galvanising many disparate political streams at once, secular and nationalist as well as Islamist. The religious element, boosted by the great revival that has swept Muslim societies across the globe, adds a scriptural drumbeat to the call. And lately the impulse to resist has also been strengthened by the failing prestige of traditional countervailing forces—America, the moderate governments in the region and the liberal-minded minority of their citizens.

The most obvious sign of the renewed attraction of resistance is the strengthening of a rejectionist front built around the alliance between Iran and Syria. The bond between these countries' very different regimes—one ostensibly secular and Arab nationalist, but in fact an insular, sectarian dictatorship, the other a Shia theocracy—goes back a quarter-century. It was forged in opposition to their mutual neighbour, Iraq, then under the belligerent fist of Saddam Hussein. But the scope of this odd couple's shared interests widened over time. It came to include such goals as keeping Lebanon under Syria's thumb, undermining peace moves between Israel and the Palestinians so as to pressure Israel into disgorging the Golan Heights, occupied in 1967, and making sure America burned its fingers so badly in Iraq that the superpower would not think of similar adventures elsewhere. The Syrian-Iranian alliance also embraces smaller clients who share these goals, such as the main Islamist parties championing “resistance” in Lebanon and Palestine, Hizbullah (the Party of God) and Hamas (which means “zeal”, but is, revealingly, an Arabic acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement).

Not so long ago, this ungainly partnership was faring poorly. In 1997 Iranians elected a liberal-leaning president, Muhammad Khatami, who seemed intent on shedding his predecessors' confrontational stance. In early 2000, Syria came close to making peace with Israel. (Very close indeed: the actual area of the Golan Heights that remained disputed was a 150-metre-wide strip.) Though hailed as a victory by Hizbullah, Israel's unilateral withdrawal from southern Lebanon that spring put into question the need for continued resistance by Lebanese guerrillas. At Camp David that summer the Palestinian issue looked set for a resolution that would have rendered quaint Hamas's stated aim of destroying the Jewish state.

The Iraq factor

The past few years have reversed all these trends. The collapse of the Camp David summit and the eruption of a second, far more violent intifada radicalised the Palestinians, with the result that elections in January of this year produced a landslide for Hamas. Disappointed by the failure of American peace brokerage and America's drift, under the Bush administration, into ever more solid support for Israel, Syria reverted to putting pressure on its Israeli adversary by other means, such as supplying huge numbers of rockets to its Lebanese client, Hizbullah, and offering political sanctuary to Hamas. Radical conservatives in Iran, meanwhile, outmanoeuvred fractious liberals to secure the election, in June 2005, of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a hardliner, as president. The supreme leader of Iran's revolution, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who masterminded this coup, quickly proceeded to accelerate the country's nuclear programme.

But it was, above all, American policy that boosted the rejectionist alliance. Seeking targets to retaliate against after September 11th, the Bush administration chose to focus on what it labelled “state sponsors” of terrorism. It also lumped together groups such as Hizbullah and Hamas, whose chief agenda was local and nationalist and did not threaten America, with the global terrorist network of al-Qaeda, which had not only declared war on the superpower and on “Jews and Crusaders”, but had also launched hostilities in the most dramatic fashion conceivable.

In May 2002 the administration added Syria to its “axis of evil” (originally Iran, Iraq and North Korea). This seemed odd at the time, since Syria was providing America with useful counter-terrorism intelligence, and Iran had played a helpful role in the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan. In 2003 America rebuffed a back-channel Iranian effort to start a dialogue, and later that year slapped sanctions on Syria. “We would have been happy to play the game with them,” sighed a Syrian official at the time. “But they wanted all our cards with nothing in return.”

America's invasion of Iraq, meanwhile, produced a cascade of responses that bolstered the resistance front. The intrusion threatened to drive a physical wedge between Iran and Syria, and so reinforced their mutual need. It emboldened Iraq's Kurdish minority, so raising fears of unrest in Syria's and Iran's own oppressed Kurdish regions. Yet it also empowered the long-disenfranchised Shia majority, a natural bridgehead for Iranian influence. And obviously it removed Saddam Hussein's army, the main military obstacle to the projection of that influence farther afield.

Far more important, the invasion massively buttressed the old rejectionist thesis that America's aim was to divide and rule the Muslim world, to control its oil and to impose Western culture. Here, stirring faded memories, was a Christian army overrunning a Muslim land, in pursuit of what George Bush once carelessly called a “crusade” against terrorism. And here, on the ground, was “resistance” in action, visibly humiliating the intruding warriors.

In this potent narrative of victimhood Israel, of course, has been held up as a prime example of Western malevolence. But Israel's recent war with Hizbullah added rich fuel. Hizbullah may have provoked the war, but that counted little to the Arab world's television audiences. The tenacity of Hizbullah fighters in defence of their villages added to the lustre of resistance. America's foot-dragging diplomacy, and the hypocritical aloofness of the “moderate” Arab leaders of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, who clearly hoped privately for Hizbullah's defeat, seemed to substantiate charges of complicity in the killing.

So entrenched now is the idea of an American-led assault on Muslims that virtually any new development is immediately enlisted as further evidence. The fact that terror attacks on Westerners, carried out in the name of Islam, may have raised some hackles goes without mention. So does the fact that countries such as Syria, under the cloak of resistance to the West, continue to promote agendas in Lebanon and elsewhere that have nothing to do with anti-Americanism, but with cementing their own regional influence.

Even high-minded Western initiatives now arouse suspicion. The effort to deploy a tougher peacekeeping force in Darfur, where some 200,000 people have been killed and perhaps 1m displaced by a government-assisted slaughter of Darfuris, is widely seen as a subterfuge. The head of the Egyptian lawyers' union, a group which might be expected to defend the rights of the weak, recently declared that the true target of UN peacekeepers was Egypt: Sudan was simply “the next stop after Iraq on the road to the heart of Cairo”.

The manner of the ceasefire in Lebanon aroused scepticism, too. To many, the insertion of a UN peacekeeping force was aimed at recouping by diplomacy what Israel had lost by fighting. A recent poll found that 84% of Lebanese believe the war was “a premeditated attempt by the United States and Israel to impose a new regional order in the Middle East”. As for the international siege of the Palestinians until they renounce terrorism and accept the right of Israel to exist (see story), the popular perception is that the West, having claimed to support democracy, is now punishing Palestinians for having elected Hamas in a fair vote.

The shadow of Iran

In the popular mind, attempts to curb Iran's nuclear ambitions also mesh neatly with the narrative of Western powers holding back Muslims, or applying double standards. Why can't Iran have nukes if Israel can? Iranian diplomats ably exploit such doubts. So do a growing number of fellow-travellers in regional politics, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian Islamist group whose ideological offshoots include Hamas and the main opposition movements in American-allied Morocco, Jordan, Kuwait and Yemen. “Any country should have the right to obtain nuclear technology or even nuclear arms for deterrence, especially if it is being threatened by another nuclear country,” says the Brotherhood's deputy leader, Muhammad Habib.

Such overt support from the most influential Sunni political grouping is telling. Clearly, Iran's vociferous backing of resistance movements has done wonders—outside Iraq—to heal the age-old rift between the two main branches of Islam. Elsewhere, the example of Hizbullah has—among ordinary citizens, at least—largely dispelled looming fears, first voiced by Jordan's King Abdullah, about the emergence of a “Shia crescent” from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf where Iranian mullahs might call upon millions of minority Arab Shias to rise up against Sunni Muslim dominance. Lebanon's Shia resistance has provided what one senior Western diplomat calls a new political paradigm: “an Arab party that actually means what it says and does what it promises.”

Reuters Khamenei with Kalashnikov

Ayatollah Khamenei, brandishing a Kalashnikov and speaking in his fluent classical Arabic in a Friday sermon on October 13th, put the matter more bluntly. Blasting critics of Hizbullah as “cringing hirelings of the Great Satan”, he said that the Iranian-funded militia's victory had made the group so loved that Muslims everywhere felt they had participated in it. The claim is not far-fetched. In far-off Brunei, by the South China Sea, the sultan issued orders for the obligatory performance of special prayers for Israel's defeat. In Egypt, a solidly Sunni country ostensibly allied to America, the two most popular politicians, according to a recent survey, are the Hizbullah chief, Hassan Nasrallah, and President Ahmadinejad of Iran.

Understandably, such evidence of a powerful mood-swing on the Arab “street” dismays and alarms pro-Western Arab leaders. It is not simply that the governments of countries such as Egypt and Jordan, which long ago settled their own problems with Israel, fear renewed public pressure to resume “resistance” (ie, war), which is what the Muslim Brotherhood promises if it comes to power. These American allies are hostile to Hizbullah because the group provides a dangerous example of a potent non-state actor armed and supported by neighbours. They abhor the Syrian regime, blaming it for meddling (and murdering) in Lebanon and for undermining efforts to persuade Hamas to recognise Israel. They are spooked by Hamas's electoral success and the possibility of Islamist encroachment much closer to home. The Muslim Brotherhood made impressive gains in Egypt's parliamentary elections last year, and is expected to do equally well in Jordanian polls scheduled for 2007. Morocco, another American ally, also faces elections next year, with analysts predicting a shoo-in for the Islamist opposition.

America's shaky friends

As for Iran, Egyptians have never forgiven its revolutionary leaders for naming a Tehran street after one of the assassins of their peacemaking president, Anwar Sadat. Lebanon's shaky governing coalition, now in a stand-off with Hizbullah, sees Iran as the main obstacle to a deal under which Hizbullah might focus on being a political party and give up its arms. Gulf states feel a more direct threat, since many of them host American military bases.

The rulers of archly Sunni and conservative Saudi Arabia, in particular, have long viewed Iran as a dangerous rival. In the 1980s they blamed it for stirring unrest among the kingdom's large Shia minority, and in response helped bankroll Saddam Hussein's war against the Islamic Republic. During the recent Israel-Lebanon war, when some Saudi youths made the mistake of sticking posters of the admired Mr Nasrallah on their windscreens, Saudi police promptly arrested them.

The Bush administration has belatedly tried to rally its allies and to bolster such beleaguered figures as the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and the prime ministers of Lebanon and Iraq. But the response has been half-hearted. This loose collection of accommodationist governments is finding it hard to gain traction against the resistance ideal. One problem they face is Israel, whose increasingly harsh operations against Palestinian fighters in the West Bank and Gaza have made it more toxic than ever. Israeli and Arab moderates both want to cool temperatures over Palestine and Lebanon and to contain Iran. But Arabs are uneasy at any hint of an alliance with the Jewish state.

America's own refusal to engage directly with the resistance block has polarised and complicated the situation. Discomfort with America grew particularly acute over the Lebanon war, when countries such as Saudi Arabia were forced, by public outrage at Israel's crushing response, to back away from their criticism of Hizbullah for having started the war.

Yet, although it may lack the rejectionists' unity of purpose and their popular appeal, the accommodationist axis of American friends is not entirely toothless. Gulf countries now have plenty of oil cash with which to win goodwill by, for instance, rebuilding Lebanon and shoring up the Palestinian economy. Such largesse could prove persuasive, too, in trying to coax Syria away from its tight embrace of Iran, since Syria's economy relies on oil reserves that are fast running out.

They might also make progress, with those on the Arab street who are still willing to listen, by posing the question of whether ordinary people really want to sacrifice lives and treasure in an endless fight against Israel. The answer of large numbers of Lebanese during the recent war was a resounding no. Raghida Dergham, a columnist for the Saudi-owned daily Al Hayat, writes sarcastically that if what she calls the axis of extremism is resolved on war, “we hope it is ready to liberate Palestine and not exploit the Palestinians as a tool for the ideology and hegemony of others.”

This comment pricks at both Iran and Syria. Few Muslims elsewhere are aware that Mr Khamenei, aside from being supreme leader of the revolution and running the powerful intelligence services, also styles himself Leader of the Islamic World. This suggests a much wider agenda than simple “resistance”. As for Syria, while it champions Islamist liberation movements abroad, mere membership of the Muslim Brotherhood inside the country remains a capital crime.

Arab moderates may be able to convince the Bush administration that the best way to ease tension would be for America itself to be more flexible. That would be wise, because the rejectionist front may not be as intractable as it appears. Syria's president has repeatedly signalled that he would shift his position if only some reward, such as a chance to recover the Golan Heights, were offered. Recent polling among Palestinians shows a similar openness to persuasion.

It is also clear that a powerful sector of Islamist opinion is so fundamentally rejectionist that it will never change. The best the West can do may be to ensure that it does not push more moderates into that camp. It could start by remembering that people choose to “resist” when they feel threatened.

posted by Sound Diaspora at 5:59 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Inside Hezbollah, Big Miscalculations

Militia Leaders Caught Off Guard By Scope of Israel's Response in War

Washington Post Foreign Service Sunday, October 8, 2006; Page A01

BEIRUT -- The meeting on July 12 was tense, tinged with desperation. A few hours earlier, in a brazen raid, Hezbollah guerrillas had infiltrated across the heavily fortified border and captured two Israeli soldiers. Lebanon's prime minister summoned Hussein Khalil, an aide to Hezbollah's leader, to his office at the Serail, the palatial four-story government headquarters of red tile and colonnades in Beirut's downtown.

"What have you done?" Prime Minister Fouad Siniora asked him.

Khalil reassured him, according to an account by two officials briefed by Siniora, one of whom later confirmed it with the prime minister. "It will calm down in 24 to 48 hours."

More technocrat than politician, Siniora was skeptical. He pointed to the Gaza Strip, which Israeli forces had stormed after Palestinian militants abducted a soldier less than three weeks earlier. Israeli warplanes had blasted bridges and Gaza's main power station.

Calmly, Khalil looked at him. "Lebanon is not Gaza," he answered.

What followed was a 33-day war, the most devastating chapter in Lebanon's history since the civil war ended in 1990, as Hezbollah unleashed hundreds of missiles on Israel and the Israeli military shattered Lebanon's infrastructure and invaded its south. Nearly three months later, parts of the country remain a shambles and tens of thousands are still homeless as winter approaches.

In speeches and iconography, Hezbollah has cast the war as a "divine victory." But a reconstruction of the period before and soon after the seizure of the soldiers reveals a series of miscalculations on the part of the 24-year-old movement that defies its carefully cultivated reputation for planning and caution. Hezbollah's leadership sometimes waited days to evacuate the poor, densely populated neighborhood in southern Beirut that is its stronghold. Only as Israeli warplanes began reducing the headquarters to rubble did they realize the scope of what the Israeli military intended. Hezbollah fighters were still planning to train in Iran the very month that the soldiers were seized; Hezbollah leaders in Beirut had assured Lebanese officials of a relatively uneventful summer.

"They were prisoners of their assumptions," said Nizar Abdel-Kader, a retired Lebanese general.

The outcome of the war, still a matter of perceptions, reveals both the strengths and weaknesses of Hezbollah, perhaps the world's best-organized guerrilla group. The movement, even by the admission of its leaders, misjudged the Israeli response. But by virtue of its complex infrastructure and preparations -- years spent digging tunnels, positioning weapons, upgrading its arsenal and carrying out surveillance along the border -- Hezbollah survived.

"We were always prepared because we always knew that the day would come when we have to fight this war," said Hussein Hajj Hassan, a Hezbollah member of parliament. "We also knew that God was with us. He was with us."

Timur Goksel, a former spokesman and adviser to the U.N. peacekeeping force in Lebanon, put it more bluntly: "Hezbollah did not expect this response, but they were ready for it."

The Militia as Deterrent

On March 2, to great fanfare, leaders from across Lebanon's fractured political landscape began what was hailed as a National Dialogue. It drew together implacable foes: Walid Jumblatt, the chieftain of the Druze sect, sat across from Hasan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's leader; the two regularly traded thinly veiled insults. Michel Aoun, the most popular Christian leader, sat with Saad Hariri, a political novice who derives clout as the son of a former prime minister slain in a car bombing in 2005. For months, they tackled issues that threatened to tear the country apart: relations with Syria, the presence of armed Palestinians and the future of the isolated, pro-Syrian president.

Last on the agenda were Hezbollah's weapons.

Backed by France and the United States, U.N. Resolution 1559 was passed in September 2004. Under it, all militias in Lebanon -- diplomatic phrasing for Hezbollah -- were supposed to disarm. Five months later, Hariri's father, Rafiq, was assassinated, setting in motion events that forced Syria's withdrawal from Lebanon after a 29-year military presence. Deprived of the cover of one of its two main allies -- Iran is the other --Hezbollah was left relatively isolated, and its weapons became an even more pressing issue in a country whose sectarian tension was as pronounced as at any time since the civil war began.

Virtually no one expected the Lebanese army and its meager, outdated arsenal to disarm Hezbollah, which has cultivated broad support among Shiite Muslims through a variety of social services, political representation and a language of empowerment that resonates with the community's long sense of disenfranchisement. Only consensus could reach a solution short of strife.

On June 8, at the parliament building on place de l'Etoile, amid a security blanket that shut downtown, Nasrallah offered his defense at the National Dialogue. Dressed in clerical robes and a black turban, he spoke for more than an hour, participants recalled. Lebanese often remark on Nasrallah's highly organized speaking style; this speech was no different. Point by point, confident and determined but not arrogant, he explained why the militia -- what Hezbollah calls the Islamic resistance -- should retain its arms, from guns to thousands of missiles.

First, Nasrallah said, it provided a cover to the Lebanese state; in any battle with Israel, Hezbollah would suffer the consequences of Israeli reprisals, not the rest of the country. Second, Hezbollah had created a deterrent -- in the words of one participant, "a balance of fear and terror." Third, he said, the Lebanese army alone was not enough to protect a border that Israeli routinely violates by air and sometimes by sea.

In that session and the next on June 29, Hezbollah's critics at the dialogue questioned, sometimes sharply, the supposed balance of terror.

"I can reach Haifa and beyond Haifa," Nasrallah was quoted as answering them, according to Marwan Hamadeh, the telecommunications minister and a critic of Hezbollah who took part in the dialogue. Israel would not risk a Hezbollah missile attack, Nasrallah added, which could strike its petrochemical industry and the northern third of the country, including some of its most populated regions.

"He considered his potential threat as his deterrent," Hamadeh said, "that Israel would not escalate."

At the time, much of the talk was hypothetical. Participants were put at ease by what they took as Nasrallah's reassurance that nothing would disrupt the crucial tourist season, one of the Mediterranean country's lone patches of economic vitality. "He said this summer would be a quiet summer," Hamadeh recalled. "He said all the actions they would do would be reminders of their presence."

But almost as a footnote in Nasrallah's speech was a reiteration of a promise he had made many times before: the need to capture Israeli soldiers as leverage to win the release of three Lebanese prisoners. Hezbollah had tried before, in November 2005.

"He didn't say it to take approval," said Boutros Harb, a member of parliament, who sat three seats away from Nasrallah. Harb flicked his wrist in a flippant gesture. "He mentioned it like you'd write in the margins of a text."

"It didn't draw the attention of anyone at all."

Goksel, the former spokesman for the U.N. force, has watched Hezbollah's evolution since its incarnation in the wake of Israel's devastating 1982 invasion of Lebanon. He recalled an incident in 2001-02, more than a year after the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon. In two locales near the border, Khiam in the east and on the road to Naqoura on the coast, Hezbollah brought out excavation equipment and trucks, hauling away dirt. Men hung around, looking suspicious. And over as many as six months, in plain sight, tunnels were dug into the limestone of rugged southern Lebanon.

"We were meant to see these things," he said. "They were not making any effort to stop us looking."

At the time, he said he now believes, Hezbollah, farther from view, was digging other tunnels around Labouna, Aita al-Shaab and Maroun al-Ras, all along the Israeli border, that they employed for ambush and cover in combat to sometimes devastating effect during this summer's war.

"Looking back, they really fooled us on that one," Goksel added.

While Hezbollah's missiles were supposed to deter an all-out Israeli assault, the movement, by its own admission, also began preparing for a ground war almost from the day Israeli forces left in May 2000. Most of the militiamen were drawn from their villages and kept their weapons at home. Abdel-Kader said the town or village became the unit of defense, where other arms were stashed. The towns, in turn, were organized into three or four sectors, with a regional command.

"All the weapons were in the right place," he said. "They didn't need to mobilize."

Elias Hanna, another retired general, said the arsenal was updated over the past two years. In addition to rockets, anti-tank weapons were ferried through Syria; their use required at least some degree of training and their sophistication surprised Israeli forces.

As important to Hezbollah was surveillance. Goksel recalled fighters sometimes sitting for three months on the border "and they would write about everything that moves." He added, "They are the most patient watchers in the world."

On July 11, Goksel and seven students from a university class he was teaching stood on the Qasmiya Bridge, which spans the Litani River, the natural border of southern Lebanon. "I said, 'Look at this bridge. If anything happens, this is the first target.' " He wasn't worried, though. It was summer, and towns were filled with vacationing Shiite expatriates, many of them Hezbollah supporters. "I've never been so wrong in my life," he said.

The cross-border raid was carried out at 9:05 a.m. the next day. Soon after, Israeli warplanes struck the Qasmiya Bridge.

Three months later, Hezbollah's timing remains puzzling.

"They don't attempt adventures. They're not adventurous types," Goksel said. In every operation, they would project "what it means for Shiites, what it means for the party, what it means for Lebanon, what it means for Syria."

He paused. "One wonders if that process collapsed somehow," he said.

Hezbollah officials have hewed to the line Nasrallah delivered that night: They had long telegraphed such an operation, and the opportunity arose. Nasrallah has acknowledged that they did not anticipate the Israeli response, though Hezbollah's officials say they believe the Israelis were planning to carry out such a campaign by this October. In statement after statement, Nasrallah has dismissed charges by critics that Iran and Syria, both under international pressure, encouraged or even ordered the ambush.

Others offer a domestic rationale. The last session of the National Dialogue was set for July 25, nearly two weeks after the war began. Hamadeh suggested that Hezbollah could return to the table "with the proof that the deterrence philosophy would work." But even he admits, "The precipitation has something of a mystery around it."

Underrating a Threat

Two hours after the raid, Hassan, a reticent chemistry professor and one of the longest-serving members of parliament from Hezbollah, was sitting in a meeting for the committee on public works. His cellphone rang. "I smiled, hung up the phone and told the members of parliament in the room, 'Congratulations, our hostages will be coming home soon.' " Some smiled with him; others sat expressionless.

In another room, Nawwar Sahli, a Hezbollah representative who sends his children to an American-affiliated high school, sat in a parliamentary meeting on computerizing Lebanon's ministries. He, too, broke the news to colleagues.

"God help us," he recalled one of them responding.

Sahli went on with his day, getting an MRI exam at 3 p.m. for a pain in his neck. (He picked up the results after the war.) He listened to Nasrallah's speech, then went to his office at night to deal with paperwork in the Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs known as the Dahiya. He ignored warnings by Hezbollah security not to stay late. From Khalifah, a local fast-food restaurant that was later bombed, he ordered a chicken fajita sandwich and Philly steak sandwich, then went for an interview on a Lebanese television station.

"I said that we shouldn't exaggerate, that Israel will just retaliate a bit, bomb a couple of targets and that would be the end of it," he recalled. "When I stayed in the office, I wasn't trying to be a hero. I seriously didn't think there was a threat."

Near the airport, Amin Sherri, another Hezbollah representative, sat with his wife, four children and three grandchildren.

"My family asked me if we should evacuate the house," he remembered. "I told them, 'Absolutely not.' " On that first day and early into the war, Hezbollah's political arm was relatively lax about security. Officials said they at times slept in other homes and changed their cars, but little else. Sherri kept his cellphone on throughout; Sahli said he was only occasionally advised to shut it off and remove its SIM card. Only by the third day, after Israeli forces had struck the airport road, Nasrallah's offices, Hezbollah's television and radio stations and several bridges, was the Dahiya fully evacuated, military officials said.

It was on that day, Sahli said, that he began getting worried.

But, he added, "I kept telling myself that no war lasts forever."

A Fighter's Call to Duty

Along the rolling hills of southern Lebanon that face the Israeli border, Shadi Hani Saad was getting ready for breakfast in the village of Aita al-Shaab on July 12. He was the oldest son of Zeinab Hammoud and her favorite. But when he was as young as 8, with southern Lebanon still occupied, she remembered him asking her, "Will Hezbollah still be there when I grow up?"

Tall and broad-shouldered, Saad joined the Hezbollah youth movement in 2000 after the Israeli withdrawal. As a 14-year-old, he bypassed the lower grades of the Mahdi Scouts -- the Blossoms, the Cubs and the Sailors -- and had become Infantry. Within two years, he had achieved the highest rank, a Rover, and then carried out his first operation as a militiaman.

"They didn't tell us where," she said.

He trained once or twice a week. This summer, he was groomed for even more responsibility; his mother said Hezbollah was about to send him for six months of military training in Iran.

The trip never happened. A little after 9 a.m. on July 12, after Saad had gotten out of the shower, another fighter showed up at her door and whispered something to him. Saad grabbed his M-16 rifle, along with ammunition he kept at the house, and walked away in a T-shirt and jeans. "He told me, 'I might return, I might not return,' " his mother recalled.

Years of surveillance had given Hezbollah an idea of where the Israeli forces might cross the border, Goksel said. Of 24 gates, they entered four, and at each, Hezbollah had guessed right with its fortifications and defenses, he said.

Aita al-Shaab was one. "They were waiting for them," he said.

In addition, Lebanese analysts say Israeli hesitation in the early part of the war allowed Hezbollah, caught off guard, time to prepare its defenses. By the time Israeli troops entered in force, more than a week later, Hezbollah's men were in place in villages like Aita al-Shaab. Saad's mother said he called her the first day, then the second, using a land line they deemed more secure. On the third day, he planned to come home to visit and asked her to cook dinner.

That was the last time they spoke. Israeli raids escalated that day, and the Israeli military warned residents of border towns to flee. In a blue 1986 Mercedes, she left with her four other children for Tyre, then north to the Chouf Mountains. After they fled, Saad called an uncle. "Where's my family?" he asked. Nearly three weeks later, on a Thursday night, he was killed in an airstrike.

"What God wants to leave me, he'll leave," his mother said. "What he wants to take, he'll take."

She sat at her home, with a picture of Nasrallah on the wall. A school picture of Saad hung nearby in a black frame. A sprawling poster, with a purple tint, pictured Saad in military uniform and declared him a martyred crusader. Another picture showed all nine of the Hezbollah fighters who died in the village, among the 30 or so who stayed -- by local legend, against Nasrallah's wishes -- to face Israeli troops.

Her blue eyes glimmered with tears, and she recalled a conversation before the war. As they sat at home, Saad had asked that when he died he be buried among martyrs. "What do you mean martyrs?" she shot back, half-joking. "Why do you tell me this kind of stuff?"

She shook her head. "Who knew there would be a war?"

Special correspondent Alia Ibrahim contributed to this report.

posted by Sound Diaspora at 12:51 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Oil polluted lebanon after israeli raid on county's oil supply.

posted by Sound Diaspora at 12:45 AM 0 comments

Friday, August 04, 2006

A great text written by Philippe Ducros on the 13th day of the Israel incursion on Lebanon, forwarded to me by a great Friend.

When cluster bombs tell the truth
I want to join my voice to thousands of people around the world.
The people who are outraged and infuriated as much by the aggressions of Israel in Lebanon and Palestine as by the hideous support of the leaders of the Western and the Arab Worlds in accordance with these crimes.
Israel has the right to defend itself. So be it.
But when a whole population is massacred, when a whole country is destroyed:
we cannot call it self-defense anymore.
After 13 days of systematic aggressions:
more than 400 lebanese are killed,
more than 1000 wounded,
more than 500 000 displaced.
How can we talk about self-defense?
One third of the 400 victims are children, only 11 of them are Hizbollah militants.
On day 16 of the aggressions we are talking about one million displaced people (practically one third of the Lebanese population!).
Some of Hizbollah's actions are criminal.
The missiles on Haifa are condemnable.
The death of civilians is deplorable.
But when all of the Lebanon is aggressed and massacred, the influence of the so-called radicals cannot but grow. Hatred and humiliation cannot but be structured.
All this, the world knows it.
Israel has the most sophisticated army of the region; its weapons are very precise.
They do not seem to be targeting the Hizbollah.
Israel pretends to be defending itself, but it is only creating more enemies.
It is creating new generations of people who are condemned to righteously hate Israel. Generations who would never want to acknowledge the mere existence of the state of Israel.
The wounded, the humiliated will obviously become militants;
and they would want to reestablish history with their weapons... with their blood...
This also, the world knows it.
Can peace be made of terror?
Can peace be built on pain and suffering?
The radicals are practical, pragmatic; they allow your own radicalism.
Injustice is unbearable, intolerable. But in the name of interests, alliances, agendas; nobody moves, nobody reacts.
The destruction of the Lebanon, the massacre of its population is throwing it back into feudalism, back into the spheres of the princes of war.
The bombing is delimitating new borders, new frontiers, new demarcation lines.
The seeds of the next civil war are being planted.
The country is isolated, ideas are spinning.
The dynamo of hatred and violence is at its best.
The scales of fear are shaped.
And the world knows where this would lead.
The world knows that the Israeli army bombed
all the ports and the airports of the Lebanon,
all the infrastructure of the country,
all the roads leading to Syria,
the radars,
part of the telecommunications,
television and radio stations,
residential areas,
farms,
churches,
mosques,
factories,
warehouses,
schools,
orphanages,
hospitals,
red cross ambulances,
fuel, water and food reserves,
buses carrying refugees,
trucks carrying humanitarian help.
In 16 days of aggressions, 7000 Israeli missiles fell on Lebanon.
There are strong evidence that the Israeli army might be using phosphoric bombs, cluster bombs, chemicals and other illegal weapons forbidden by international conventions, and nobody is reacting!
Now that the foreigners have been evacuated, will the horror trespass more limits?
As long as Israel occupies Palestinian territories it will feel threatened.
The heart of the problem is there.
For one Israeli soldier, one prisoner of war, over 60 members of the Palestinian parliament were kidnapped, 20 of which are deputies and 8 are members of the cabinet.
We talk about the artisan missiles of Hamas, but we forget to mention that between the end of February and the 15th of April, within 6 weeks 5000 Israeli missiles fell on Gaza.
No water, no electricity anymore.
They also bombed the university, the ministry of interior and once again all the infrastructure that could have given a minimum of autonomy to the country...
And this without mentioning the other impacts of the occupation:
four generations of people living in camps, living in ghettos,
hundreds of houses destroyed in a process of collective punishment,
each mountain invaded by a settlement,
and the wall encircling some cities like Qalquiliya.
Nobody talks about all this anymore.
We talk about the supposed Israeli withdrawal proposed by the Kadima Party,
but we forget to mention that only 70 000 settlers of the 250 000 are to withdraw.
We forget to mention that the 8 000 settlers of Gaza represent 1% of the population there, and that they own 20% of the land. Gaza has the highest population density of the world: 104 000 people living on 1.4 squared meter in Jabalya's camp. We forget to mention that only 22% of the territory is left to the Palestinians.
All this in the name of the war on terrorism.
But terror is also when every night the Israeli army invades the camps, destroys the houses, aligns the families in the streets for hours...
Women cry, children pee in their pajamas...
Soldiers shout, they demolish the parents in front of the eyes of their children...
and this, every night... every single night.
We forget to mention that since the Hamas was elected, Israel took hold of the taxes and customs of the Palestinians: 50 to 60 million US dollars per month! We forget that it is precisely when the Palestinians were about to agree on the so-called prisoners plan which implicitly recognizes the state of Israel that the Israeli army came to destroy everything.
The world seems to forget too many things.
We forget too many things.
But there, they do not forget.
They remember everything.
World War III? World War IV? Did it start already?
Is this generalized state of Hell planned?
Spreading it to the entire Middle East is putting the world in big black whole.
Syria is being accused, already. They point their fingers in the direction of Iran, already.
Irak is a Ground Zero on the scale of the whole country.
Let us all be ready, tomorrow is a day of war... a global war... an international war...
And in our days, wars are also being exported by planes.
Philippe DUCROS
is a playwright, director & actor.
He visited the Middle East many times during the previous 2 years.

posted by Sound Diaspora at 12:21 AM 0 comments