Informed Comment

Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion

Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute

Saturday, January 31, 2009

Iraqi Voters select provincial Councils in Saturday's Vote

Iraqis go to the polls Saturday to vote in the first provincial elections since January, 2005. This time, two big things are different. The Sunni Arabs are not boycotting the election, as they did 4 years ago; and the Shiite parties are competing against one another rather than running as a monolithic coalition. These two changes bestow a dynamism on the process and make the outcome hard to predict. The final results may well tell us about likely changes in the composition of the Federal parliament in the national elections scheduled for December, 2009.

The LAT reports that the elections can only be held in Iraq via security arrangements that shut down traffic and interfere with ordinary life in other ways.

Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that despite a law forbidding campaigning within 24 hours of an election, most Iraqi parties went on trying to convince Iraqis to give them their votes right up to the last minute.

The number of candidates assassinated recently has risen to 8.

The Baghdad daily said that opinion polling done in Iraq recently suggested that voters will no longer confine themselves to casting their ballots for the religious (i.e. fundamentalist) parties, and that nationalist and secular parties are making a credible showing.

At the same time, clerics used their Friday prayer sermons to campaign for the political parties to which they belong. Cleric Muzaffar al-Musawi, the Imam-Jum`ah or chief Friday prayer leader in the East Baghdad slums of Sadr City, denounced anyone who did not vote for the Sadr Movement as a traitor to Iraq.

Meanwhile, in the Sunni Abu Hanifa Mosque in Baghdad, Sheikh Abd al-Sattar al-Janabi read out a fatwa or considered legal opinion from the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Iraq, Abd al-Karim Zaydan, affirming the duty to vote and disallowing past excuses for staying home on election day (such as that the election is being held under conditions of foreign military occupation or that the results of the polls are illegally fixed and predetermined. These allegations, Zaydan says, do not remove the duty of the individual to vote.

Ayad Allawi, a secular ex-Baathist of Shiite extraction who served as appointed, interim prime minister in 2004, accused incumbent parties of putting the resources of the government to work for them in their campaigns.

McClatchy reports that voters in Basra may be trying to settle political and personal scores by voting. Those Basrawis who hate the rigid, puritanical Mahdi Army may well vote for the Da'wa Party of PM Nuri al-Maliki, since al-Maliki sent the army last spring to crack down on the Sadrists in Basra.

McClatchy reports on a female, Sunni Arab candidate running in Diyala Province, whose husband (a provincial council member) has been kidnapped by insurgents; she is trying to use a seat on the provincial council to bargain for his release.

End/ (Not Continued)


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Friday, January 30, 2009

Ajami's Sleight of Hand: Bush made Emancipator and Obama Smeared

The odd collection of con men, carpetbaggers, mercenaries, court jesters, and professional propagandists that gathered around W. the way pilot fish jostle about a great white shark has now scattered to more obscure reefs. Now, as Meyrav Wurmser admitted, they are thinking about how to make money. They seek perches in the "think tanks" of kooky rich old white men, on the airwaves of corporate media, in the halls of the more corrupt corners of academia, or on the opinion pages of the wackier capitalist tools.

So it is that we now have to listen to Fouad Ajami attacking Barack Obama as a coddler of dictators, in the pages of Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal, whose editorial line brought us the current meltdown of the American economy and our ruinous foreign imbroglios. Ajami, from a southern, Lebanese Shiite background, has been for decades a trenchant critic of the pieties of Arab nationalism and a theorist of Neoconservatism.

Ajami appears not to recognize that in demanding that his adopted country, the United States, go about invading or bullying the Arab world and imposing American institutions on it, he is guilty of the same authoritarianism and lack of faith in the Arab little people as the dictators he professes to decry. Paul Bremer said as he arrived in Iraq, "We dominate the scene and we will continue to impose our will on this country," and Ajami cheered him on, playing a swooning La Malinche to Bremer's Hernan Cortes.

Ajami is so mesmerized by elite power that he even mistakenly attributes the success of Tom Paine's ideas to British arms (yes; see below).

Ajami begins his essay by quoting a passage from Obama's interview on al-Arabiya:

"To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect," President Barack Obama said in his inaugural. But in truth, the new way forward is a return to realpolitik and business as usual in America's encounter with that Greater Middle East. As the president told Al-Arabiya television Monday, he wants a return to "the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago."

Ajami maintains that George W. Bush put "the autocracies" of the Middle East "on notice." He toppled the Taliban and overthrew the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. He frightened Muammar Qaddafi of Libya, he writes, and helped drive Bashar al-Asad's troops willy-nilly from Lebanon.

But Ajami's narrative is selective and slanted. The original plan of the Bush administration for Iraq was to turn it over to corrupt financier Ahmad Chalabi as a soft strongman. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld spoke before the invasion of installing "something like" democracy in Iraq. But democracy is like pregnancy, an all or nothing matter, and Rumsfeld's hope that he could get Iraq a little bit pregnant predictably faltered on Iraqi popular mobilization and the fatwas of Grand Ayatollah Sistani, who, along with the Sunni Arab insurgency, forced Bush to grant open elections.

That Bush's panegyrists always invoke Libya is bizarre. Qaddafi clearly was maneuvered into coming in from the cold primarily by EU economic sanctions, and was also motivated by his own fear of a Muslim radicalism far more extreme than his own. As I noted five years ago,

'One caveat: Qadhafi hasn't offered to step down or become less dictatorial. This isn't an advance for democracy. The Bush administration, despite its rhetoric of democratization, still has to choose in the Middle East between having malleable, known strongmen in power, or having unpredictable democracies that might elect radical Islamists or others odious to Washington. I wouldn't bet a lot on the democratization policy. The US if anything has been urging countries like Tunisia and Yemen to be less democratic and less concerned about civil rights, in the cause of stamping out radical Islamism.'


So despite Ajami's attempt at misdirection, Bush's Libya policy involved coddling a dictator, and cannot be cited as an instance of steadfast commitment to democratization.

As for Lebanon, Bush did not force Syria out, the Lebanese people did. The first thing that happened to them once they chose Bush's security umbrella in preference to that of Damascus was that Bush gave the green light to the Israelis to bomb the country back to 1975, wiping out a generation of economic recovery, degrading infrastructure, scaring off foreign investment, creating massive unemployment, and dropping a million cluster bombs on the farms of Ajami's relatives in the south. Far from destroying Hizbullah, the Bush-Israeli program of what Ajami appears to think was tough love for his native land strengthened radical Shiism and paved the way for a national unity government in which Hizbullah has a virtual veto over government policy and has had its militia formally recognized as an arm of the Lebanese state. Syria's domination of little Lebanon was wrong, but Bush and Ajami's friends among the Neoconservatives were no friends of Beirut and were entirely willing to crush the Lebanese like cockroaches to attain their aims there. To laud Bush as a liberator of the land of the cedars after he actively lobbied against an Israeli ceasefire, prolonging the agony at least an extra month, is like lauding Boris Yeltsin as a liberator of Chechnya.

Ajami cites Samuel Huntington to argue that democracy does not well up from the people but is often "midwifed" by the "dominant power." He says that of 30 democratic countries in 1970, about half had become democratic via foreign rule or made the transition to democracy "right after independence from foreign occupation." But 30 is a very small N on which to generalize, and the Nazi conquest of much of Europe in addition to decolonization in the post-war period introduced profound ambiguities into the whole analysis. Dutch democracy was vital before the German conquest, but was restored by the Allied invasion; so do we count Holland's democracy as being the result of American and British foreign power, or as a result of internal class and economic developments in Holland over centuries, which were briefly interrupted by the Nazis? And, I'll bet you Ajami is counting India as such a case, even though the British ruled India autocratically and it was Indian social and political forces that opted for independent democracy, something Churchill would never have allowed.

Why Ajami wants to cite 40-year-old scholarship on democratization should be clear: because if we looked at The Economist's ranking [pdf] of 167 contemporary countries, we would find that 82 or about half, are "full" or "flawed" democracies. And among those 82, vanishingly few underwent a successful democratic transition because of foreign conquest.

Moreover, Ajami is sidestepping the most important question in democratic transitions, which is not what kicks them off but why they fail or succeed. Adam Przeworski has found that a relatively high per capita income ($8000 a year or more) is highly correlated with successful democratic transitions, whereas very poor countries often fail. The literature on states that depend on income from a single pricey primary commodity ("rentier" states) finds that they seldom function as democracies (Norway is the major exception and it developed its political institutions well before it got oil).

So in today's world, democracy is very seldom the result of foreign conquest, and successful democracy even less so. (The Economist is apparently not convinced that Patton's invasion of Italy has yet borne firm fruit).

Ajami even dares say that "The appeal of the pamphlets of . . . Paine relied on the guns of Pax Britannica."

Tom Paine? Did Ajami really say that? His appeal depended on George III's guns? I mean, Ajami is supposed to be a historian. His topsy-turvey theory of democracy imposed from above has led him to erase the real Tom Paine from history and substitute a bizarro Tom Paine who, instead of hanging out with Jacobins in revolutionary Paris, goes out to vanquish tyranny with the Red Coats at his back! Ajami appears to have gotten Tom Paine mixed up with Benedict Arnold. It might be a telling error.

Some of us think we know exactly what Tom Paine would have thought of W.

Ajami argues that the image of Saddam Hussein flushed out of his spider hole has given hope to the Arab masses that tyrants can be overthrown. But I don't know any Arabs who look at it that way. Most seem to see the humiliation of Saddam as a joint project of American imperialism and Iranian, Shiite plotting, and they see Saddam's botched execution as a Shiite lynching. Ajami's own Shiite background makes him so unsympathetic to Sunni Arab nationalism that he is a poor guide to mass sentiment outside the two Souths, of Lebanon and Iraq.

Ajami argues that W. was a "force for emancipation in Muslim lands," whereas Obama was signaling in his speech that he would accept the established order. He calls on Obama to "recognize" Bush as having been a liberator!

But a US military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan is not liberation, and nobody thinks it is, even the Iraqi Shiite political elite that Bush "midwifed" (he actually tried to forestall it by installing ex-Baathist strong man Ayad Allawi, but the Iraqi masses outfoxed him). If Ajami thinks that the basket case that is Afghanistan deserved flowery rhetoric and soaring figures of speech, he should compose an ode to Somalia while he is at it.

Ajami contrasts Obama, whom he configures as a Republican Realist in the Brent Scowcroft tradition, to emancipator Bush.

But note that it was Bush who backed Gen. Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan to the hilt against the masses and the politicians clamoring for a free judiciary and open parliamentary elections. And it was Barack Obama who congratulated Pakistanis on their return to civilian democracy. Ajami invents an imaginary democratic Bush and an imaginary Republican Obama.

Let us consider Bush's actual relations with Middle Eastern states beyond Pakistan, which would in itself be enough to demonstrate the falsity of Ajami's case. At what point did Bush pressure King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to turn himself into a constitutional monarch? When did Bush cut off the $2 billion a year his government bestowed on Hosni Mubarak's soft military dictatorship in Egypt? Did he not accept Qaddafi back into the fold without putting any 'democratic' preconditions on the deal? What of Gaza and the West Bank? Does Israel run them as "democracies"? Did Bush give a rat's ass?

Ajami the prestidigitator makes the elephant of Abu Ghraib, military occupation, the displacement of 4 million Iraqis from their homes, the excess deaths of a million, all disappear in favor of a shining Baghdadi democracy on a hill. The unstable and possibly violent confrontation of Arab and Kurd is celebrated as a tolerant binational state.

By focusing on this fantasy, of a stable democratic transition in places like Afghanistan (!), and by selectively ignoring all the dictatorial regimes Bush held hands with and kissed on both cheeks, Ajami sets up a false dichotomy that allows him to smear Obama.

Ajami descends to new lows in denying that the Palestinians have any legitimate grievances or that their resistance is grounded in those discontents, and blames Obama for acknowledging this obvious fact. (Readers should know that when the Israeli army expelled 100,000 Palestinians into south Lebanon in 1948, the Palestinian refugees found themselves competing for resources with Lebanese Shiites. While Shiite Islamists made common cause with the Palestinians, many traditional or secular Lebanese Shiites came to dislike them. They even garlanded Israeli soldiers who invaded Lebanon in 1982 to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization, whose local leaders or za'ims had often assassinated or displaced Shiite notables in the south). Ajami's hatred of the Palestinians has a local history, which he has not transcended, and he apparently still keeps garlands to give out to the enemy of his enemy.

Ajami makes a pitiful plea for Obama and the US to go back to imagining that Osama Bin Laden is ten feet tall and that we are still plunged into a fateful confrontation with a new Soviet Union-type threat. In fact, al-Qaeda was a small, clever terrorist organization that has been largely if not completely disrupted. Further bankrupting the country by exaggerating its importance makes no sense to anyone who doesn't get millions of dollars in consulting fees as a "terrorism expert." This is not to say that al-Qaeda or other groups of that sort are not dangerous or should not be fought. It is to say that they are not the end-all and be-all of American foreign policy, however much Ajami would like them to be.

Ajami keeps warning us against the return of the Clinton age, as though peace and prosperity were bad and we should be nostalgic for the cataclysmic Bush era.

Let the Middle East get to democracy as Brazil and the Czech Republic and Taiwan have. We live in the age of the Third Wave of demoratization, not in 1945. We know the paths by which advances are made in our own time. Ajami's ways are those of another, darker era, and his aspirations, of playing comprador or dragoman to a friendly enlightened emperor, belong to an imperial epoch that is long past.

Ajami and his fellow travelers have gone a large way toward destroying everything good about the United States. If he wants to be a democratic revolutionary, let him emulate the real Tom Paine and go back to the Middle East and agitate for democracy there, instead of lolling about on the emoluments of the Hoover Institution in perilous Palo Alto. Tom Paine did not actually have the Empire's armies marching alongside him, and neither should Ajami expect to. Even less should he expect the rest of us to go on frittering away billions that we do not even have on his fantastic project of making fourth-world countries into advanced democracies at the point of a bayonet.

One of the most delightful things about January 20 is that it marked the end of a long Dark Age in which persons with Ajami's views had the ear of power in Washington.

---------

(H/t Taylor Marsh.)

End/ (Not continued.)

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Thursday, January 29, 2009

Provincial Elections in Iraq

More on Iraq's provincial elections, slated for Saturday for most people, though some categories of voter have already voted,on Wednesday (e.g.police, the sick).

This sample is a skewed one and might not be representative of the electorate. But the early results of this vote , according to al-Hayat writing in Arabic, could tell us something about the general election to be held on Saturday. Leaks suggest that the Islamic Mission Party (Da`wa) of PM Nuri al-Maliki, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq led by cleric Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, and the party of Interior Minister Jawad Bulani, and are leading in Baghdad and the Shiite south.

McClatchy wonders if the provincial elections in Iraq will succeed and will avoid an outbreak of violence or a refusal of the vanquished to relinquish power to the victors. I don't think failure or electoral violence are likely to derail things at the provincial level, except possibly in highly contested provinces such as Diyala and Babil. After all, there are still large numbers of US troops in the country to keep the peace. Most provinces have a dominant ethnicity. It is the parliamentary elections of 2013 that will be the test of whether the current parliamentary system in Iraq can endure.

Erik Gustafson of EPIC explains the provincial elections and expresses alarm at how the parties are being funded by outside powers.

End/ (Not Continued)


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Talabani's PUK Worried about Iraqi Army in Kirkuk

The USG Open Source Center translates a Kurdish newspaper article warning of Iraqi central government aspirations to have its army take over the northern oil city of Kirkuk (where the police and security forces are largely Kurdish). The Kurdistan Regional Government wishes to annex Kirkuk to itself, but this move is being resisted by Baghdad and by the Arabs and Turkmen of Kirkuk. This dispute has the dark potential to kick off another civil war in Iraq, this one not Sunni-Shiite but rather Arab-Kurdish.

Iraqi president's party concerned of army's attempt to 'control' Kirkuk - paper
Hawlati
Monday, January 26, 2009 . . .
Document Type: OSC Translated Text

Iraqi president's party concerned of army's attempt to "control" Kirkuk - paper

Text of report headlined "Iraqi army wants to put Kirkuk under its control; PUK forms emergency action committee", published by privately-owned Iraqi Kurdish newspaper Hawlati on 18 January

Iraqi army wants to drive peshmerga forces out of Kirkuk and its surrounding area and put the security of the area under its control. (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) Secretary-General Jalal) Talabani's spokesperson in Peshmerga Forces General Command states that they do not accept the Iraqi army's control over Kirkuk and they will stand against it.
Cont'd (click below or on "comments")

According to information obtained from many sources by Hawlati, the Iraqi army intends to come as far as checkpoints which were under the Ba'th regime's control until 19 March 2003 to force peshmerga forces out or make them withdraw form all the disputed areas, and the Iraqi army's 12th Division and its regiments will be deployed in their places.

According to a source: "The army will be deployed as far as Bani Maqan on the Sulaymaniyah (-Kirkuk) motorway, as far as Sherawa on the Arbil motorway and from the other side (north-west of Kirkuk) the army will be deployed near Qushtapa, Makhmur and Dibagah."
He also said: "This is a success (as published) of the plan according to which the army wants to control the area stretching from Khanaqin (town in Diyala Governorate) to Makhmur (town in Mosul Governorate). "

According to information obtained by Hawlati, the PUK Political Bureau has formed an emergency action committee. The committee consists of Mustafa Sayyid Qadir, in charge of security, Uthman Hajji Mahmud to supervise police, Mahmud Sangawi to supervise peshmerga and Mustafa Chaw-Rash to take charge of border guards."

In a statement to Hawlati, PUK Leadership Council member and Jalal Talabani's representative in Peshmerga General Command Mustafa Chaw-Rash said that the army's intention was obvious, and that is why they oppose their coming to Kirkuk. He also said: "Our final word is that we don't accept that at all."

Mustafa Chaw-Rash also said: "We held a meeting with the commander of the US forces; we discussed the possibility of Iraqi army's coming. We stated our final word there, namely we do not accept the army's coming and stand against any such move. Because there are no elections in Kirkuk and those areas, and there are neither terror threats nor insecurity. It is obvious they have other aims."

(Description of Source: Al-Sulaymaniyah Hawlati in Sorani Kurdish -- weekly independent newspaper)


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Purohit & Atallah: International Justice Systems and the Muslim World: Why Bashir is Wrong

Raj Purohit and Amjad Atallah write in a guest op-ed for IC:

If the International Criminal Court (ICC) issues an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir in February, it will certainly be met by a volley of criticism from the accused as he continues to frame the ICC as a tool of the west in its fight against the Muslim world. Al-Bashir can be expected to use the world-wide revulsion over the civilian deaths in the Gaza Strip to deflect attention from his own crimes.

Human rights activists, however, should not cede ground to Mr. al-Bashir and his allies on this issue; instead they should embrace a debate centered on the relationship between international justice and the Arab and Muslim worlds while maintaining a moral consistency across every conflict that highlights the inviolability of every civilian life.
Cont'd (click below or on "comments")

In fact, current developments within the international justice system paint a more complex picture than the one illustrated by Mr. Bashir. While it is true that the accused in this instance is a Muslim, his supporters try to ignore the fact that the victims of his actions are entirely Muslim civilians living in the Darfur region of Sudan.

Beyond Darfur and the ICC, a crucial part of the debate around international justice and the Muslim world should be centered on the work of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). At present the ICTY is conducting a trial of the Bosnian Serb ultranationalist Radovan Karadzic, who was the chief architect of the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia during the Yugoslav war in the mid 1990’s. Karadzic’s victims were primarily Bosnian Muslim civilians, but included Bosnian and Croatian Catholics, as well as other supporters of a multi-ethnic state.

Sudan/Darfur and Yugoslavia/Bosnia; the victims in each case share at least one commonality, they are primarily Muslim, a fact that does not fit the narrative of al-Bashir and his sympathizers. So does the fact that these two tribunals are responding to crimes against Muslims prove that Mr. Bashir is wrong and consequently negate the need for a dialogue? Hardly.

The work of these tribunals should be the entry point for both rebutting the likes of Mr. Bashir and for a more holistic discussion of why his comments are received with such credence in the Muslim world. It is important to note that Muslim critics are not attacking the concept of justice itself, but the concept of selective justice. An international justice mechanism, for example, that fails to take note when a government is engaged in war-crimes if it is allied with major western powers would be hard pressed to be taken seriously as an objective court.

Mr. Bashir has effectively manipulated those concerns with some success. Illustratively, the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) called an emergency meeting after the ICC prosecutor announced that he was targeting Mr. Bashir. The OIC responded by calling for the case to be suspended and noted, in part, that the ICC’s credibility would be challenged by “any kind of selectivity and double standards in the application of principles of criminal justice…”

To respond to such sentiments, international justice activists must respond by painting a more complete picture of tribunal activity, take steps to bring the issue of justice closer to the victims, and specifically discuss how alleged limitations in objectively addressing crimes can be overcome. But they also need to point out the fallacy at the heart of the OIC complaint.

There is an obvious absurdity to the argument that as long as anyone can commit a war-crime, everyone should be allowed to commit a war-crime. For example, if there are crimes that the OIC believes need to be investigated, those countries should sign and ratify the Rome Statute, and bring evidence of these crimes to the attention of prosecutors. Only if they were ignored can they make the argument that the process is fundamentally unfair.

It is important to recognize that a true breakthrough in the way in which international justice systems are viewed, and function, may require more time and more cases. Perhaps we will need to wait until the public in the Muslim world see more cases that do not involve those who share their faith, or see cases of leaders allied with major powers brought forward.

It might take ICC cases from countries such as Colombia and Georgia to illustrate that these tribunals are global in nature and can be part of the solution. But in the meantime, justice activists need to point out that even if every war criminal in the world is not brought to justice immediately, there is importance in beginning the process. And if the majority of victims of those who are indicted are Muslim, then Muslim leaders should be among the first to provide support to these international mechanisms, not become apologists for the Karadzics and Bashirs of the world.


Raj is the Founder and CEO of the Atrocity Response Community and Amjad is the Director of the Middle East Task Force at the New America Foundation


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Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Croken: Found in Translation-- How a Thirteenth Century Islamic Poet Conquered America

Ryan Croken on translating the mystical poet Rumi, and on how Muslims are translated and mistranslated in America.

Jalal al-Din Rumi was born in Afghanistan, wrote mainly in Persian, and lived much of his life in Konya, in what is now Turkey. He has some mixed Persian/ Arabic and Persian/ Greek verses, as well.

Coleman Barks's transmogrifications of Rumi have made him the best-selling poet in contemporary America, with tens of thousands of volumes sold.
Cont'd (click below or on "comments")

This phenomenon recalls the popularity around the turn of the century of Omar Khayyam, another medieval Persian poet, who, however, was known for being a closet atheist, cynic and libertine rather than a neoplatonic mystic and moralist like Rumi. Khayyam was an astronomer and scientist; Rumi was a court judge who dealt with people's problems every day. Although Fitzgerald's loose translation of Khayyam sometimes caught some of his spirit, in other instances he reversed the poet's meaning. Khayyam at one point castigates people who believe in astrology and think that their fates are determined by the planets. Khayyam, being an astronomer well aware of the laws of motion as then understood, observes that planets and stars "are a thousand times more helpless" than human beings. Fitzgerald reverses his meaning and delivers him into a supposed Oriental fatalism. I think upper crust Westerners inclined to secularism and a little fun used Khayyam as a foil to the evangelicals of Victorian times. Nowadays Americans use Rumi for spiritual individualism.

My favorite Rumi anecdote, and I can't remember now where I heard it or how solid it is, concerns his exchange with a general. The story goes that a military man criticized Rumi and other mystics for devoting themselves to imaginary matters like spirituality and miracles. Rumi is said to have replied that generals devote their lives to fighting massive battles and spreading death and bloodshed over borders between countries, and what could be more imaginary than a border demarcating territory. It is just in the mind, after all. And, spirituality, Rumi said, at least doesn't kill anyone.

For more on Rumi and his life see Franlin Lewis's "Rumi--Past and Present, East and West: The Life, Teachings, and Poetry of Jalal al-Din Rumi".



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Obama on the Middle East

The transcript of President Obama's interview on al-Arabiya Television (Dubai)is at the latter's site and I will mirror it here, below.

Just a few quick observations. Obama emphasized respect for the Muslim world, affirmed that the United States is not its enemy, and that, on the contrary, Washington has a stake in the well-being and prosperity of the Muslim world. He underlined that he has Muslim relatives and had lived in the largest Muslim country, Indonesia, as a child. So he established some strong connections.

He also implicitly condemned the rhetoric of "Islamic fascism" used by the Bush administration and Republican politicians more generally from September of 2006. He made a firm distinction between violent groups like al-Qaeda, which he said existed in every religion, and other movements. (I take it he was saying not all fundamentalists are terrorists.) He reaffirmed his commitment to withdrawing from Iraq and to closing the prison camp at Guantanamo and ending the use of torture techniques such as waterboarding.

Obama said he thought al-Qaeda is pretty nervous about his having become president, and condemned them as a group that just destroys things without building anything or making anyone's life better. The implication is that Obama is not a polarizing figure in the Muslim world, and since al-Qaeda is all about polarization and sowing massive conflict, its task just got a lot harder-- helping explain the organization's vehement attacks on Obama.
Cont'd (click below or on "comments")

Obama praised the 2002 peace plan offered by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, which proposed a comprehensive peace between Israel and the Arab League states based on an Israeli withdrawal to 1967 borders. He affirmed that a Palestinian state is still feasible that is "contiguous." He meant that it would be contiguous in the West Bank. The only way you get a contiguous state in the West Bank is frankly by moving Israeli settlements, which I think is highly unlikely, especially if Binyamin Netanyahu of the Likud Party becomes prime minister. You would also have to undo the division of the West Bank into cantons by Israeli superhighways and checkpoints. You'd have to get the Israelis to give up control of the water, land and borders of the West Bank.

Obama still has said very little about the Gaza War or the issue of the Israeli government's callous disregard for civilian life in that operation, an omission that rankles in the Muslim world and which contrasts even to Israeli politicians such as Meretz figure Shulamit Aloni.

I fear I think 60 Minutes was more realistic in concluding that the 2-state solution is dead. Netanyahu has vowed to expand Israeli colonies on the West Bank if he gets in.

Obama seemed well informed about some of the realities of the Middle East. But he for some odd reason just has a blind spot when it comes to Iran. He said:

"Iran has acted in ways that's not conducive to peace and prosperity in the region: their threats against Israel; their pursuit of a nuclear weapon which could potentially set off an arms race in the region that would make everybody less safe; their support of terrorist organizations in the past."

So, Iran has not threatened to do anything practical to Israel. Its leaders have prayed for it to collapse the way the Soviet Union did, and generally talk insultingly about it, but that is different from threatening to invade with tanks or something. Iran's leaders consistently deny that they are seeking a nuclear weapon, maintaining they only want peaceful nuclear power plants. (They may be lying, but you have to acknowledge what they say, at least). When Bush said that Iran had vowed to get a nuclear bomb, we laughed at him. And the main thing American politicians seem to mean when they accuse Iran of supporting terrorism is that it backs the Lebanese Hizbullah Party, which hasn't done anything that qualifies as international terrorism for a decade at least. (Being a national liberation movement and working against the Israeli occupation of Lebanese territory was not terrorism in international law.) At least, Obama put the 'support of terrorism' clause in the past tense (was he thinking of the 1980s and early 1990s?) and avoided the odd rhetoric of Condi Rice, who branded Iran the biggest supporter of terrorism in the world; wouldn't that be al-Qaeda?

At least Obama reaffirmed his willingness to talk to Iran, in contrast to Bush.

The video is at YouTube-- Part I:



and Part II:



Here is the full transcript:

Q: Mr. President, thank you for this opportunity, we really appreciate it.

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you so much.

Q: Sir, you just met with your personal envoy to the Middle East, Senator Mitchell. Obviously, his first task is to consolidate the cease-fire. But beyond that you've been saying that you want to pursue actively and aggressively peacemaking between the Palestinians and the Israelis. Tell us a little bit about how do you see your personal role, because, you know, if the President of the United States is not involved, nothing happens – as the history of peace making shows. Will you be proposing ideas, pitching proposals, parameters, as one of your predecessors did? Or just urging the parties to come up with their own resolutions, as your immediate predecessor did?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think the most important thing is for the United States to get engaged right away. And George Mitchell is somebody of enormous stature. He is one of the few people who have international experience brokering peace deals.

And so what I told him is start by listening, because all too often the
United States starts by dictating -- in the past on some of these issues --and we don't always know all the factors that are involved. So let's listen. He's going to be speaking to all the major parties involved. And he will then report back to me. From there we will formulate a specific response.

Ultimately, we cannot tell either the Israelis or the Palestinians what's best for them. They're going to have to make some decisions. But I do believe that the moment is ripe for both sides to realize that the path that they are on is one that is not going to result in prosperity and security for their people. And that instead, it's time to return to the negotiating table.

And it's going to be difficult, it's going to take time. I don't want to prejudge many of these issues, and I want to make sure that expectations are not raised so that we think that this is going to be resolved in a few months. But if we start the steady progress on these issues, I'm absolutely confident that the United States -- working in tandem with the European Union, with Russia, with all the Arab states in the region -- I'm absolutely certain that we can make significant progress.

Q: You've been saying essentially that we should not look at these issues -- like the Palestinian-Israeli track and separation from the border region -- you've been talking about a kind of holistic approach to the region. Are we expecting a different paradigm in the sense that in the past one of the critiques -- at least from the Arab side, the Muslim side -- is that everything the Americans always tested with the Israelis, if it works. Now there is an Arab peace plan, there is a regional aspect to it. And you've indicated that. Would there be any shift, a paradigm shift?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, here's what I think is important. Look at the proposal that was put forth by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia --

Q: Right.

THE PRESIDENT: I might not agree with every aspect of the proposal, but it took great courage --

Q: Absolutely.

THE PRESIDENT: -- to put forward something that is as significant as that.
I think that there are ideas across the region of how we might pursue peace.

I do think that it is impossible for us to think only in terms of the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict and not think in terms of what's happening with Syria or Iran or Lebanon or Afghanistan and Pakistan.

These things are interrelated. And what I've said, and I think Hillary Clinton has expressed this in her confirmation, is that if we are looking at the region as a whole and communicating a message to the Arab world and the Muslim world, that we are ready to initiate a new partnership based on mutual respect and mutual interest, then I think that we can make significant progress.

Now, Israel is a strong ally of the United States. They will not stop being a strong ally of the United States. And I will continue to believe that Israel's security is paramount. But I also believe that there are Israelis who recognize that it is important to achieve peace. They will be willing to make sacrifices if the time is appropriate and if there is serious partnership on the other side.

And so what we want to do is to listen, set aside some of the preconceptions that have existed and have built up over the last several years. And I think if we do that, then there's a possibility at least of achieving some breakthroughs.

Q: I want to ask you about the broader Muslim world, but let me – one final thing about the Palestinian-Israeli theater. There are many Palestinians and Israelis who are very frustrated now with the current conditions and they are losing hope, they are disillusioned, and they believe that time is running out on the two-state solution because – mainly because of the settlement activities in Palestinian-occupied territories.

Will it still be possible to see a Palestinian state -- and you know the contours of it -- within the first Obama administration?

THE PRESIDENT: I think it is possible for us to see a Palestinian state -- I'm not going to put a time frame on it -- that is contiguous, that allows freedom of movement for its people, that allows for trade with other countries, that allows the creation of businesses and commerce so that people have a better life.

And, look, I think anybody who has studied the region recognizes that the situation for the ordinary Palestinian in many cases has not improved. And the bottom line in all these talks and all these conversations is, is a child in the Palestinian Territories going to be better off? Do they have a future for themselves? And is the child in Israel going to feel confident about his or her safety and security? And if we can keep our focus on making their lives better and look forward, and not simply think about all the conflicts and tragedies of the past, then I think that we have an opportunity to make real progress.

Obama praised Saudi King Abdullah for his Middle East peace plan

But it is not going to be easy, and that's why we've got George Mitchell going there. This is somebody with extraordinary patience as well as extraordinary skill, and that's what's going to be necessary.

Q: Absolutely. Let me take a broader look at the whole region. You are planning to address the Muslim world in your first 100 days from a Muslim capital. And everybody is speculating about the capital. (Laughter) If you have anything further, that would be great. How concerned are you -- because, let me tell you, honestly, when I see certain things about America -- in some parts, I don't want to exaggerate -- there is a demonization of America.

THE PRESIDENT: Absolutely.

Q: It's become like a new religion, and like a new religion it has new converts -- like a new religion has its own high priests.

THE PRESIDENT: Right.

Q: It's only a religious text.

THE PRESIDENT: Right.

Q: And in the last -- since 9/11 and because of Iraq, that alienation is wider between the Americans and -- and in generations past, the United States was held high. It was the only Western power with no colonial legacy.

THE PRESIDENT: Right.

Q: How concerned are you and -- because people sense that you have a different political discourse. And I think, judging by (inaudible) and
Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden and all these, you know -- a chorus --

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, I noticed this. They seem nervous.

Q: They seem very nervous, exactly. Now, tell me why they should be more nervous?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think that when you look at the rhetoric that they've been using against me before I even took office --

Q: I know, I know.

THE PRESIDENT: -- what that tells me is that their ideas are bankrupt. There's no actions that they've taken that say a child in the Muslim world is getting a better education because of them, or has better health care because of them.

In my inauguration speech, I spoke about: You will be judged on what you've built, not what you've destroyed. And what they've been doing is destroying things. And over time, I think the Muslim world has recognized that that path is leading no place, except more death and destruction.

Now, my job is to communicate the fact that the United States has a stake in the well-being of the Muslim world that the language we use has to be a language of respect. I have Muslim members of my family. I have lived in Muslim countries.

Q: The largest one.

THE PRESIDENT: The largest one, Indonesia. And so what I want to communicate is the fact that in all my travels throughout the Muslim world, what I've come to understand is that regardless of your faith -- and America is a country of Muslims, Jews, Christians, non-believers -- regardless of your faith, people all have certain common hopes and common dreams.

And my job is to communicate to the American people that the Muslim world is filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives. My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy. We sometimes make mistakes. We have not been perfect. But if you look at the track record, as you say, America was not born as a colonial power, and that the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago, there's no reason why we can't restore that. Andthat I think is going to be an important task.

But ultimately, people are going to judge me not by my words but by my actions and my administration's actions. And I think that what you will see over the next several years is that I'm not going to agree with everything that some Muslim leader may say, or what's on a television station in the Arab world -- but I think that what you'll see is somebody who is listening, who is respectful, and who is trying to promote the interests not just of the United States, but also ordinary people who right now are suffering from poverty and a lack of opportunity. I want to make sure that I'm speaking to them, as well.

Q: Tell me, time is running out, any decision on from where you will be visiting the Muslim world?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I'm not going to break the news right here.

Q: Afghanistan?

THE PRESIDENT: But maybe next time. But it is something that is going to be important. I want people to recognize, though, that we are going to be making a series of initiatives. Sending George Mitchell to the Middle East is fulfilling my campaign promise that we're not going to wait until the end of my administration to deal with Palestinian and Israeli peace, we're going to start now. It may take a long time to do, but we're going to do it now.

We're going to follow through on our commitment for me to address the Muslim world from a Muslim capital. We are going to follow through on many of my commitments to do a more effective job of reaching out, listening, as well as speaking to the Muslim world.

And you're going to see me following through with dealing with a drawdown of troops in Iraq, so that Iraqis can start taking more responsibility. And finally, I think you've already seen a commitment, in terms of closing Guantanamo, and making clear that even as we are decisive in going after terrorist organizations that would kill innocent civilians, that we're going to do so on our terms, and we're going to do so respecting the rule of law that I think makes America great.

Q: President Bush framed the war on terror conceptually in a way that was very broad, "war on terror," and used sometimes certain terminology that the many people -- Islamic fascism. You've always framed it in a different way, specifically against one group called al Qaeda and their collaborators. And is this one way of --

THE PRESIDENT: I think that you're making a very important point. And that is that the language we use matters. And what we need to understand is, is that there are extremist organizations -- whether Muslim or any other faith in the past -- that will use faith as a justification for violence. We cannot paint with a broad brush a faith as a consequence of the violence that is done in that faith's name.

And so you will I think see our administration be very clear in
distinguishing between organizations like al Qaeda -- that espouse violence, espouse terror and act on it -- and people who may disagree with my administration and certain actions, or may have a particular viewpoint in terms of how their countries should develop. We can have legitimate disagreements but still be respectful. I cannot respect terrorist organizations that would kill innocent civilians and we will hunt them down.

But to the broader Muslim world what we are going to be offering is a hand of friendship.

Q: Can I end with a question on Iran and Iraq then quickly?

THE PRESIDENT: It's up to the team --

MR. GIBBS: You have 30 seconds. (Laughter)

Q: Will the United States ever live with a nuclear Iran? And if not, how far are you going in the direction of preventing it?

THE PRESIDENT: You know, I said during the campaign that it is very important for us to make sure that we are using all the tools of U.S. power, including diplomacy, in our relationship with Iran.

Now, the Iranian people are a great people, and Persian civilization is a great civilization. Iran has acted in ways that's not conducive to peace and prosperity in the region: their threats against Israel; their pursuit of a nuclear weapon which could potentially set off an arms race in the region that would make everybody less safe; their support of terrorist organizations in the past -- none of these things have been helpful.

But I do think that it is important for us to be willing to talk to Iran, to express very clearly where our differences are, but where there are potential avenues for progress. And we will over the next several months be laying out our general framework and approach. And as I said during my inauguration speech, if countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us.

Q: Shall we leave Iraq next interview, or just --

MR. GIBBS: Yes, let's -- we're past, and I got to get him back to dinner with his wife.

Q: Sir, I really appreciate it.

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you so much.

Q: Thanks a lot.

THE PRESIDENT: I appreciate it.

Q: Thank you.

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you



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Blog of the Day

A shout out to comedian Margaret Cho, whose material I've always found fresh, insightful and funny. As a public speaker who sometimes delves into humor, I can attest that it is way more difficult than most people think. But Margaret is clearly also into other cultural and charitable activities of interest. Just thought I'd suggest checking out her blog, since she kindly blogrolled mine.

End/ (Not Continued)


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Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Cole/ Marsh Debate on Obama's Bombing of Pakistan

My Democratic Party colleague Taylor Marsh took exception to my Salon piece on Obama's decision to bomb Pakistan during his first week in office.

I always welcome vigorous debate and believe that arguing substance in public is essential to our attaining the ideals of a democratic republic. I value Taylor Marsh's perspective and we have often agreed in the past, when public opinion in this country was against us. I offer the following in the way of an an honest disagreement, and with full respect for my debating partner.

That said, I really must object to the way Marsh argued this case. First, one of her main concerns is that my analysis might give comfort to the Right insofar as it offers a critique of an Obama policy. She wrote "Talk about your wingnut New Years gift, presented on the wings of hyperbole." And ended, "Sean Hannity says thanks. Or who knows, maybe it's a gift." She said that such figures on the right have been talking about Obama being criticized by the antiwar Left and suggests that my column gave support to their talking point.

The notion that we should not say something critical of the policy of a Democratic president because it might give aid and comfort to the rightwing enemy is completely unacceptable. It is a form of regimentation, and equivalent to making dissent a sort of treason. We had enough of that the last 8 years (it used to be from different quarters that I was accused of traitorously succoring the enemy).

I am an analyst, and a truth-teller. I don't work for anyone except, in a vague way, the people of Michigan, who took it into their heads to hire me to tell them about the Middle East, and their charge to me is to call it as I see it. I serve no interest. I am a member of the Democratic Party, but I don't accept everything in the party platform, and I am not so partisan that I cannot admire politicians and principles of other parties, whether the Greens or (some) Republicans. I didn't agree to join the Communist Party, such that no dissent is allowed lest it benefit the reactionaries and revanchists.

So that dimension of her posting is objectionable and rejected. I don't care what people like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh say or think, and I certainly am not going to self-censor so as to avoid giving them ammunition. Hannity was put there by crackpot rightwing billionaire Rupert Murdoch for a purpose, and he will serve that purpose regardless of what we analysts say.

In a democratic republic, open dissent is valued.

Another rhetorical feature of Ms. Taylor's essay is to compare my column on the hellfire missiles rained down near Wana and Mir Ali to Bob Woodward's attempt to gossip on Chris Matthew's show about an alleged affair on the part of Caroline Kennedy. Matthews stopped him on the grounds that inadequate proof was being offered for the allegation.

My piece in Salon involved no gossip and all my points were backed by hyperlinked citations. I did not allege on shaky grounds or on the basis of a single source that the US military bombed Pakistan. It bombed Pakistan. It killed a whole family near Wana. There was a funeral:

"Thousands of tribesmen on Saturday attended the funeral prayers of the victims of Friday’s drone attacks in the North and South Waziristan Agencies. They condemned the killings and asked US President Barack Obama to spend the money on the welfare of the tribal people instead of killing them with sophisticated weapons. . . They claimed that all those killed in the attack were innocent and local villagers, who had nothing to do with militancy or Taliban."


So how is discussing this air strike and the reaction it evoked in the Pakistani public in any way like Woodward gossiping about Caroline Kennedy?

If it is being alleged that my column contained unsubstantiated speculation, then the details of that speculation should have been pointed to, and alternative information calling it into question should have been presented. Simply likening an analysis to gossip is insufficient to discredit it unless actual proof of false or shaky assertions is offered.

Among the few points at which Ms. Marsh engages with the substance of my argument is her comment, "Whether President Obama approved continuing these strikes or not, he did, the fundamentalists in Pakistan will continue their work to make an Islamic state independent of what the new American President does or does not do."

There are several things wrong with this assertion. It assumes that the "fundamentalists" in Pakistan are unchanging in their essence and that they are unpersuadable and cannot be reasoned with or negotiated with. But this is how the Jamaat-i Islami responded to Obama's inauguration speech:
"Jamaat-e-Islami welcomed a pledge from US President Barack Obama to seek a "new way forward" with the Muslim world after eight turbulent years at the White House. "We welcome it very much," said Khurshid Ahmed, a senior leader in the Jamaat-i-Islami -- the main religious political party in Pakistan and an organiser of angry demonstrations against the US and Israel. Ahmed slammed outgoing US president George W. Bush, accusing him of "alienating the US and Americans from the Muslim world." "Obama has to face the real issues, go into the causes and work seriously for the abdication of Bush's policies," Ahmed told AFP. "Unless he does that, mere words will not be sufficient."


The JI leader Qazi Husain Ahmad is old enough to remember admiring the United States back in the 1950s and 1960s for the stance it often took in favor of decolonization in the Third World. (The US typically only opposed decolonization if the liberation movement had been taken over by Communists). At least according to leaders such as Qazi Husain, he Jamaat-i Islami is not intrinsically anti-American, though some tensions between it and US policy do arise.

My point, moreover, was not about whether JI cadres will remain committed to their Islamization project. It was about the attitude to the JI of the Pakistani electorate over time. The Jamaat-i Islami has only occasionally performed well in Pakistani elections. Its high points were 1970, when it and two clerical parties collectively won 14% of seats in parliament; and 2002, when the Islamic Action Council of which it formed part won 17% at the federal level and actually took over the North-West Frontier Province and (in coalition) Baluchistan, the two provinces most crucial to Afghanistan security. This 2002 good showing by the fundamentalists was certainly a result of Pakistanis casting a protest vote against the US bombing and invasion of neighboring Afghanistan.

The Jamaat declined to participate in the Februay 2008 polls on the grounds that they were held under a corrupted judiciary, since Gen. Musharraf had dismissed the Supreme Court and replaced it with more pliable justices. (By the way, for the JI to defend the secular supreme court suggests that its political project is broader than just establishing an Islamic state).

The current political eclipse of the Jamaat is not written in stone. The Pakistani public does not usually vote fundamentalist, but some proportion of the electorate sometimes does, and anti-imperalism and Muslim nationalism are impetuses for it. Continued America airstrikes on Pakistani territory, which are extremely unpopular with the Pakistani public, could shift the electorate to the religious right over time. It happened in 2002, and could happen again. The airstrikes make the Pakistan Peoples Party government, secular and left of center, look wimpy and even like collaborators in the country's humiliation.

I lived in Pakistan off and on for a couple of years and know Hindi-Urdu and have followed Pakistani politics since 1981. I have authored academically on South Asian Islam. These things do not mean I am right, only that my views on what could happen are not uninformed and not based on mere armchair speculation.

Marsh writes, "In other words, unlike Bush, who made everything about Anything But What Clinton Did, Obama will approve airstrikes if they are warranted in Pakistan (or elsewhere), not stop them just because it was Bush policy."

What I was saying is that Obama cannot possibly have known, 4 days into his presidency, whether airstrikes on Pakistan are "warranted." I was saying that he should have called a time-out and heard Holbrooke's report first. He should have had formal face-to-face consultations with President Asaf Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, and perhaps with the opposition, such as former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, as well.

Bombing Pakistan unilaterally is illegal in international law where Pakistan has not attacked the United States or where there is no United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing such an attack. Please see the Charter of the United Nations, to which the US is a signatory. If the US had a formal treaty with Pakistan, signed off by the legislatures of the two countries, that permitted hot pursuit of militants from Afghan territory, that would bestow a basic legality on it. But the only warrant for the US to shoot Hellfire missiles into Pakistan and kill Pakistani women and children along with militants, is the Bush Doctrine, which I want to be abolished and which I had understood Obama and his team to object to, as well. Contravening US treaty obligations and international law is a war crime.

Toward the end of the essay it is suggested that my column could be lumped in with the blogging of pacifists who oppose all military action. I supported the 2001-2002 US war in Afghanistan and am not a pacifist. I do, however, advocate an option for peace, which is that I believe peaceful means of addressing conflict should trump violent ones until it becomes clear that they simply are not working and that violence is necessary for self-protection.

The danger of Obama becoming mired down in Afghanistan and Pakistan is very real, and is obvious to anyone who knows the history of imperial interventions in the former. Warning Obama that he started out on a bad foot in Pakistan and suggesting that he take some time to consider charting his own, original course, is not injurious to Obama. Blind support for whatever he does is what would harm him.

I have been thrown out of organizations and even a whole country for refusing to toe a party line. Baathist Syria censored my news articles when I was working for a newspaper in Beirut. Theocratic Iran, where you have to follow the khatt-i Imami, the line of the Supreme Leader, once had me blackballed from an academic conference they helped fund. I object to party lines. I am not interested in being a court poet who spouts panegyrics. I am interested in being the academic equivalent of Hunter S. Thompson.

End/ (Not Continued)
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Monday, January 26, 2009

Iraqi Politicians seek Wins in Provincial Elections

The big news in Iraq this week is the provincial elections due to be held on Saturday. These elections will have little direct impact on the Federal parliament or cabinet, since new parliamentary elections won't be held until December. But they will bolster or weaken existing parties at the center by acting as bellwethers of public opinion. They will also provide parties with new sources of patronage or cut them off from existing ones, where they lose. The outcome of the elections will tell us something about how realistic Obama's plans to withdraw from Iraq on a short timetable are.

Iraq has 18 provinces. The three Kurdistan provinces and Kirkuk will not be participating. That leaves 14, four of them largely Sunni Arab and 10 with Shiite majorities. So the two big questions are "Who will win the four Sunni Arab-majority provinces?" and "Who will win the 10 Shiite provinces?
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Al-Maliki's cabinet has participation from the Big Four-- the Sunni Arab Iraqi Accord Front, the Kurdistan Alliance, the Shiite Da'wa or Islamic Mission Party, and the Shiite Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq.

The leading party withing the Sunni Arab Iraqi Accord Front is the Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP: descended from the Iraqi Muslim Brotherhood). It performed well in the December, 2005, parliamentary elections, in which the Sunni Arabs took part. But they had boycotted the January 2005 provincial elections. So the IIP has a commanding position in the provincial government of al-Anbar. But only 2% of voters in al-Anbar took part in the January polls, so their victory is meaningless. Now it seems unlikely that the IIP will retain control of al-Anbar, which would diminish its national standing, as well.Anthony Shadid reports on the central role of tribalism in electoral politics in the Sunni Arab province of al-Anbar. (The Iraqi Islamic Party is not tribally based but rather grounded in urban religious fundamentalism).

The NYT observes that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is trying to turn the secretive, cell-based al-Da`wa into a grassroots Shiite political party that will support him. He may succeed. Al-Zaman, Iraq's leading newspaper, says a new opinion poll (Arabic) shows al-Maliki is the most popular politician in Iraq. In the Shiite south, his set of parties, the "Coalition for a Government of Laws," is garnering between a fourth and a third of voters in the poll and outstrips all other parties there. (This poll contradicts another that showed dissatisfaction with religious parties; it is likely that the religious parties will win again).

Al-Maliki's rivals fear, however, that he is gathering too much military might into his hands, and that this step will allow him to fix the lection.


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Cole in Salon: Obama's Vietnam?

My column is out in Salon.com: "Obama's Vietnam? Friday's airstrikes are evidence Obama will take the hard line he promised in Pakistan and Afghanistan. But he should remember what happened to another president who inherited a war.

Excerpt:

"On Friday, President Barack Obama ordered an Air Force drone to bomb two separate Pakistani villages, killing what Pakistani officials said were 22 individuals, including between four and seven foreign fighters. Many of Obama's initiatives in his first few days in office -- preparing to depart Iraq, ending torture and closing Guantánamo -- were aimed at signaling a sharp turn away from Bush administration policies. In contrast, the headline about the strike in Waziristan could as easily have appeared in December with "President Bush" substituted for "President Obama." Pundits are already worrying that Obama may be falling into the Lyndon Johnson Vietnam trap, of escalating a predecessor's halfhearted war into a major quagmire. What does Obama's first military operation tell us about his administration's priorities?

Obama's first meeting with his team on national security issues focused on Afghanistan and Pakistan, in the course of which the new president is reported to have endorsed the drone attacks. Friday's were the first major U.S. airstrikes on Pakistani territory since Jan. 1, because the Pakistan Taliban Movement in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) had launched a campaign to discover local informants for the Central Intelligence Agency, killing 40 of them. The two cells the U.S. hit are accused of raiding over the border into Afghanistan, lending support to the Taliban there."


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End/ (Not Continued)

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Lyons: The Crusades are Over;
The West needs to Engage with the Muslims

Jonathan Lyons writes in a guest op-ed for IC:

With the change of administration in Washington, the time has come to acknowledge the so-called war on terrorism for what it truly is: the latest reminder of the West’s enduring failure to engage in any meaningful way with the world of Islam. For almost 1,000 years, attempts at understanding have been held hostage to a grand Western narrative that shapes what can – and, more importantly, what cannot – be said about Islam and Muslims. This same narrative, an anti-Islam discourse of enduring power, dominates every aspect of the way we think, and write, and speak about Islam. It shapes how we listen to what they say and interpret what it is they do. As such, it exercises a corrosive effect on everything from politics, the history of ideas, and theology to international relations, human rights, and national security policies. This has left the West both intellectually and politically unable to respond to some of the most significant challenges of the early 21st century – the global rise of Islamist political power, the more narrow emergence of terrorism in the name of Islam, tensions between established social values and multi-cultural rights on the part of growing Muslim immigrant populations, and so on.
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These failings have pushed the theoretical notion of a clash of world civilizations, advanced by Samuel Huntington back in 1993, toward self-fulfilling prophecy. In such an atmosphere it has been all too easy for the neoconservatives to sell the war on terrorism as essential to national security and to lead the West into its greatest confrontation with Islam since the Middle Ages. But the anti-Islam discourse does more than underpin the war on terrorism, the present wave of Islamophobia, or the broader cultural project advanced by proponents of a coming civilizational clash. Indeed, it has silently shaped 1,000 years of shared history – and seems destined to shape the future as well. Its powers explain a whole host of cultural, intellectual, and political attitudes without which the clash of civilizations thesis would be literally unthinkable.

Central to this narrative is a series of familiar ideas across the political arena, on the Internet, on talk radio, in the mainstream media, and, all too frequently, in academia. Such notions include: Islam is a religion of violence; its tenets are upheld by coercion or outright force; Islam’s prophet, its teachings, and even its God are false; Muslims are “medieval” and fearful of modernity; Muslims are sexually perverse – either lascivious polygamists, repressive misogynists, or both; and, finally, they are caught up in a jealous rage at the West’s failure to value them or their beliefs. Rarely are these core ideas of Islam subjected to any nuanced analysis. Rather, they are often asserted or simply left to operate quietly in the background. In a remark as apt today as when it was first advanced 900 years ago, the Crusades chronicler Guibert de Nogent noted that it was not important to know anything about Islam in order to attack it: “It is safe to speak evil of one whose malignity exceeds whatever ill can be spoken.”

As a result, the West’s “conversation” with Islam has always been a one-sided affair, a dialogue with itself. This has meant a fatal decoupling of the Western idea of Islam from its meaning and content as a vital religious, social, and cultural institution in its own right. Incompatible with Western interests or outside its conceptual understanding, the belief system of the Muslims has been set aside in favor of a denatured Islam that better first the established discourse.

To begin to address this phenomenon, we must peel back the layers of the Western narrative Islam and to uncover the wartime propaganda of the First Crusade that sits at its core. In fact, many of the same themes and images of Islam prevalent in the West today can be found in their original form. Before the 11th century CE, the Muslims were just another barbarian nuisance for much of Western Christendom, like the Vikings or the Magyars. The build-up to the First Crusade, called in 1095, changed all that forever; from then on, Muslims would be endowed with social, political, and religious qualities that were the mirror-opposite of Western ideals and values. Today, such assertions still echo: We love liberty, They hate freedom; We are rational, They are not; We are modern, They are medieval; We are good, They are evil.

The resultant distortions in public policies are clear to see. Less noticed are the underlying assumptions that serve to valorize these policies in the first place. Among the most potent is the idea that Islam and modernity are antithetical, a view supported by a Western history of science that has literally written the Muslims out of the textbooks. Yet, the arrival in Europe of Arab science and philosophy transmuted the backward West into a technological superpower. Like the elusive “elixir” – from the word al-iksir of the Arab alchemists – for changing base metal into gold, Muslim science altered medieval Christendom beyond recognition. For the first time in centuries, Europe’s eyes opened to the world around it. This encounter with Arab science even restored the art of telling time, lost to the Western Christians of the early Middle Ages. Without accurate control over clock and calendar, the rational organization of society was unthinkable. And so was the development of science, technology, and industry, as well as the liberation of man from the thrall of nature. Muslim science and philosophy helped rescue the Christian world from ignorance and made possible the very idea of the West.

Yet how many among us today would stop to acknowledge our enormous debt to the Arabs, let alone endeavor to repay it? How many would recognize their invaluable bequest of much of our modern technical lexicon: from azimuth to zenith, from algebra to zero? Or attest to more mundane Muslim influence in everything from foods we eat – apricots, oranges, and artichokes to name a few – to such common nautical terms as admiral, sloop, and monsoon? The names al-Khwarizmi, Avicenna, al-Idrisi, and Averroes – giants of Arab learning and dominant figures in medieval Europe for centuries – today invoke little if any response from the educated lay reader. Most are forgotten, little more than distant memories from a bygone era.

Yet these were just a few of the players in an extraordinary Arab scientific and philosophical tradition that lies hidden under centuries of Western ignorance and outright anti-Muslim prejudice. A recent public opinion survey found a majority of Americans see “little” or “nothing” to admire in Islam or the Muslim world. But turn back the pages of time and it is impossible to envision Western civilization without the fruits of Arab science: al-Khwarizmi’s art of algebra; the comprehensive medical teachings and philosophy of Avicenna; the lasting geography and cartography of al-Idrisi; or the rigorous rationalism of Averroes. Even more important than any individual work was the Arabs’ overall contribution that lies at the very heart of the contemporary West – the realization that science can grant man power over nature.

Our willful forgetting of the Arab legacy accelerated with the “Renaissance,” when the West increasingly looked for inspiration to an idealized notion of classical Greece. Eager to claim direct descent from the likes of Aristotle, Pythagoras, and Archimedes, Western thinkers deliberately marginalized the role of Arab learning. “I shall scarcely be persuaded that anything good can come from Arabia,” wrote Petrarch, the most prominent of the early humanists, in the fourteenth century. Western historians of science have largely carried on in this vein; many cast the Arabs as benign but effectively neutral caretakers of Greek knowledge who did little or nothing to advance the work of the Ancients. Such accounts are grounded in the persistent notion of the West’s “recovery” of classical learning, with the clear implication that this knowledge somehow comprised the natural birthright of Christian Europe and was merely misplaced during the Middle Ages. They are also colored profoundly by a Western consensus, often invoked to explain the state of the Muslim world today, that Islam is inherently hostile to innovation.

Unraveling the anti-Islam discourse allows us to identify an alternative narrative of relations between Islam and the West. This would take their undoubted rivalries and opposing interests out of the accepted framework of East versus West and place them within a common cultural arena. The prevailing discourse, however, is so powerful and authoritative that such an appeal has failed to make any serious inroads into Western thought. The result is an unnatural, and clearly unhelpful, separation of two rich and powerful cultural traditions that share far more than we are generally prepared to accept. This, in turn, perverts Western understanding of the Muslim world and its culture and all but guarantees that any attempt at east-West communication will result in what the Turks call “a dialogue of the deaf.”

Still, I would like to conclude by proposing just such an alternate reading, one that shifts the problem from the traditional view of inter-cultural rivalry to one of intra-cultural contest. Rather than delimit a boundary between East and West, it would then be possible to assign one large “interactive” cultural space, from the Indian sub-continent in the East to the Canary Islands, the traditional westernmost point of the medieval world. In effect, this would mark a return to the view of the world captured in one of the most remarkable landmarks in the history of ideas: the atlas produced by the Muslim scholar al-Idrisi in the mid-12th century by commission of the Christian king of Sicily which was then multi-faith – Muslim, Christian, and Orthodox.

We are then faced with a compelling, new history of Islam and the West – one of continuous interaction between two cultures locked in relations for 1,000 years – in which it is hard to say where one stops and the other begins. Might this not require a radical rephrasing of the West’s favorite polemical question – “What’s wrong with Islam?” – to a less comfortable query, “What’s wrong with us?”

Jonathan Lyons is author of The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization, just released by Bloomsbury Press. A former Reuters correspondent and editor, he is completing his PhD in sociology of religion at Monash University, in Melbourne, Australia, and teaching at George Mason University, in Fairfax, Va. Details of the book, including an image gallery and notes on the leading figures, can be found here.


It is available at your local bookstore, or through Amazon.com



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Sunday, January 25, 2009

Gaza War! Hunh! What was it Good For?

According to UNICEF, their preliminary estimate of the damage done by the Israeli military to Gaza infrastructure is $1.9 billion. Note that this is Gaza infrastructure, not Hamas infrastructure.

So at least the war weakened Hamas's political control of Gaza, right? Not so much.

So then, the Israeli military boasted that it destroyed 60% of the tunnels whereby Gazans smuggle food, medicine and other goods into Gaza (the Israelis say they bring in explosives for rocket-making as well; but since rockets can be made from simple materials and petroleum products, and since the rockets are so primitive, they can't be bringing in very good explosives). So at least, the Israeli war on the people of Gaza permanently reduced the capacity of those tunnels, right? Naw, the Gazans are working Caterpillar backhoes to rebuild the tunnels, already!

If the goal was to stop the rockets, so the ceasefire last June stopped the rockets from Hamas for 4 months until Israel broke the truce. Negotiation had been proven to work. Henry Siegman has decided that the Israeli narrative of the lead-up to the Gaza War was just lies, which American media largely bought, hook, line and sinker. He outlines what really happened.

How unpopular Israel made itself in Europe with this war was still visible nearly a week after it ended, when 20,000 protesters marched in Paris on Saturday, still protesting the war.

On the other hand, if the ceasefire holds, I suppose that this weekend will witness the last big demonstrations. And then the US Congress will go back to giving the Israeli military $30 billion in arms, and Israeli colonization of the West Bank will proceed apace, and the statelessness and expropriation of the Palestinians will worsen. And those quotidian processes won't generate any headlines or massive protests, and they will proceed inexorably because no one is pressuring the US congress day to day except the Israel lobbies.

For Democratic congressional representatives, at least, there is now a web site where American voters can give campaign support to those who declined to jump through AIPAC's hoops and did not assent to a resolution, the purpose of which was to garner support for this dirty war.

A CNN poll found that 63% of Americans felt that Israel's war on Gaza was right. They say only 17% of Americans supported the Palestinians.

An earlier Rasmussen poll found that 44% of Americans supported the war and 41% opposed it. That may be an artifact of the way the question was asked. Americans like Israelis (and I am among them), so if you ask them if they support the Israelis or the Palestinians, you get a skewed answer. The question is whether this war was a good idea, or was prosecuted honorably. Moreover, there was a big difference among political parties, with only 45% of Democrats supporting the Gaza War. (I'll bet you a lot of the opposition to the war within the party came from Jewish American liberals).

CNN has a lot of gall, since their coverage was completely one-sided and helped produce the results found in the poll. I can remember that they had Michael Oren on in uniform, speaking for the Israeli army, a Sunday afternoon. But they had no Palestinian policeman from Gaza. And then Oren dishonestly published an op-ed in the LA Times without identifying himself as being active duty Israeli military. This is a guy who claims to tell us the balanced historical narrative of the 1967 war or of American-Muslim relations? CNN never agressively challenged the lies of Israeli spokesmen the way British journalists did. And, of course, American channels seldom interviewed journalists based inside Gaza.

No wonder millions of Americans went to Aljazeera English on the Web for the other side of the story. By the way, the argument that Aljazeera English is not carried by the satellite television companies in the US because of lack of interest is ridiculous. They carry stations in obscure languages for which the audience must be tiny. I get Aljazeera Arabic; would the English really be less watched? Aljazeera English was most likely kept off because the Bushies made threats behind the scenes. The Obama administration should open up the airwaves.

But anyway, even a 60-30 split in the US for Israel in a war strikes me as not such great news for Tel Aviv. Surely in 1967 it was almost 100 percent in favor. And Rasmussen was probably closer to the truth with 44/41, which is in American terms an absolute disaster for Israeli public relations.

I fear the Israeli public is going to elect that maniac Binyamin Netanyahu on Feb. 10, and that will be the complete end of any 2-state solution, and we just have to live with a horrific Apartheid for decades, which will cause more conflict and further poison much of the world against the United States. (The Right-Zionists have been complaining about me wanting to put America first. For that I don't apologize.)


End/ (Not Continued)




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Sunday Reading

Don't miss Barney Rubin's long and personal meditation in the Boston Review on his involvement in Afghanistan diplomacy over the past decades. The depth of that involvement in recent years makes all the more poignant his growing suspicion that the situation is past the point where Obama's 30,000 extra US troops are going to make the difference.

Tomdispatch.com has two must-see entires. One is Tony Karon's essay on "Obama's Gaza Opportunity." The other is an online excerpt from the graphic novel of "Waltz with Bashir," based on the Israeli animated feature film, by Ari Follman, teating the Sabra and Shatila episode during the 1982 Israel-Lebanon War.

End/ (Not Continued)




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Saturday, January 24, 2009

Ibrahim: Al-Qaeda wants to Hit the US Again and turn Obama into another Bush

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports in Arabic that Shaikh Najih Ibrahim, the leader of the fundamentalist group al-Gama'a al-Islamiya in Egypt, said Friday that his organization fears that al-Qaeda will launch an attack on the United States shortly, in revenge for Israel's assault on Gaza, with the aim of turning Barack Obama into "another George W. Bush."

Ibrahim's group called on al-Qaeda instead to observe a 4-month ceasefire toward the United States, so as to give Obama a chance to show he is really different.

Ibrahim said, "A repetition by al-Qaeda of new operations" [against the US] "will be a victory for Israel and a victory for the point of view of George W. Bush, underlining that violence is the natural character of Muslims."

Al-Gama'ah al-Islamiya had been led spiritually in the 1970s by Shaikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the "Blind Sheikh," who some say authorized the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat in 1981. The blind sheikh thereafter emigrated to the United States and formed an al-Qaeda-affiliated cell at his mosque that carried out the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. The blind sheikh is now in prison and has lost his popularity among the al-Gama'a al-Islamiya in Egypt. The leaders of that group, mostly in prison by the late 1990s, announced in 1998 that they had renounced violence, and the group has published 20 "recantation booklets" reinterpreting the Qur'an and Islam in the terms of peace.

Al-Qaeda's number 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was the leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a kindred organization that cooperated with the Gama'a in the killing of Sadat. Al-Zawahiri has loudly condemned the turn of the Gama'a toward peace as an ideal.

The Gama'a still has enough members connected to the radical vigilante fundamentalist underground that they might well be in a position to hear al-Qaeda chatter, and it makes me worried that they are worried.

End/ (Not Continued)





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Guest Comment: Afghanistan Can't be Fixed Just by Changing its President

An experienced observer writes with regard to rumors that President Obama may cease supporting Afghan President Hamid Karzai:

"I read with interest the story about Afghanistan in today's Independent by Starkey and Sengupta, to which you provided a link. My suspicion is that it certainly captures the politics of the hour. But it also worries me a great deal. I was in Afghanistan in December, and came away with concerns rather different from those being currently aired. . .

It seems to me that yet again, the wider world is at risk of staking too much on individuals. We've seen that strategy unravel with the decline and fall of Musharraf, the assassination of Benazir, and sundry similar events elsewhere. (I wonder sometimes whether this is a déformation professionelle of US officials!)
Cont'd (click below or on "comments")

In Afghanistan, I see no reason to expect that merely changing the president will either address the structural flaws in Afghanistan's institutional framework, or do much to inspire the ordinary population. If one credits the Asia Foundation's survey work in Afghanistan, the big drop in optimism in Afghanistan came between 2004 and 2006, and was grounded in economic concerns. The 2008 survey of Afghan opinion found that in the most turbulent parts of Afghanistan, the insurgency-ridden southeast and southwest, only 8 per cent of respondents identified corruption and weak government as the biggest problem facing Afghanistan; insecurity, cited by 33 per cent of respondents, carried much more weight.

Insecurity in these regions is intimately related to the presence of sanctuaries in Pakistan, to which Bush et al culpably turned a blind eye for years while assuring Karzai that they knew how to handle Pakistan! (There are problems of governance and corruption in the north of Afghanistan, but by and large the further one gets from the Durand Line, the better the security environment.)

For all the talk of corruption, there is very little serious analysis of its roots. (The only corrupt behaviour I actually saw in Afghanistan was an American bribing a security policeman at Kabul airport to allow his luggage into the terminal without going through the X-ray machine!) At one level, of course, the mere perception of extensive corruption is itself a political reality. But if it is to be seriously addressed, we will need a much more nuanced exploration of the relations between statebuilding, poverty, inequality, and the breakdown of trust than any US or European officials seem to have on offer. I suspect that the gravy train created by Western donors with targets to meet has contributed far more to the spread of corruption than has moral failure on the part of the Afghans.

One view I picked up in Kabul is a suspicion held by Afghans and non-Afghans alike that the British think that they are back in the 19th century, in a Great Game configuration (for example, the British Ambassador's leaked statement that what Afghanistan needs is an 'acceptable dictator'). There may be something to this suspicion, but I have a rather cruder view: that in the aftermath of the July 2005 bombings, the British feel dependent on Pakistan for policing cooperation to address the perceived threat from radicalised youth of South Asian origin living in the Midlands, and that blaming the Afghans for the problems of Afghanistan is a way of distracting attention from their unwillingness to address the sanctuaries issue.

None of this is to deny that Karzai has some notable weaknesses. He has made some poor choices of associates (for example, Afghanistan might just as well not have a Foreign Minister), and he is not a dynamic policy leader. That may well lead Afghan voters to the view that he should be replaced. But I see real dangers in Western governments involving themselves in this process. Karzai may still end up winning an election; more seriously, overt foreign involvement may simply add to anti-foreigner feelings; and most seriously, even if there is a change of leader, nothing much may change on the ground. It is easy to idealise opposition figures whose portfolios of skills remain untested."


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Friday, January 23, 2009

Obama as Anti-Bush

President Barack Obama signalled on several fronts on Thursday that the new president is his own man and is eager to actively reverse Bush administration policies. There will be a lot of dispute among journalists and historians over how much continuity there is between Bush and Obama, and how much of a rupture. These matters are to some extent in the eye of the beholder. But I would argue that premises matter, and Obama's premises are diametrically opposed to those of Bush
Cont'd (click below or on "comments")

Obama ordered that the US prison at Guantanamo Bay be closed within a year. He had already,the previous day, suspended trials against prisoners there, which many attorneys hold are intrinsically unfair or even unconstitutional. On Thursday, Obama came out unambiguously against the use of waterboarding, a tool to which Bush and Cheney were attached.

' "I can say without exception or equivocation that the United States will not torture," the president said at the State Department. "The message that we are sending around the world," he said as he signed the executive orders in the Oval Office, "is that the United States intends to prosecute the ongoing struggle against violence and terrorism, and we are going to do so vigilantly, we are going to do so effectively and we are going to do so in a manner that is consistent with our values and our ideals." "It is precisely our ideals that give us the strength and the moral high ground to be able to effectively deal with the unthinking violence that we see emanating from terrorist organizations around the world," he added. "We intend to win this fight. We're going to win it on our terms." '


Obama did not simply issue a technical piece of guidance, he put forward a theory of combatting terrorism, in which he asserted that upholding the Constitution and the Bill of Rights has to be part of the armory if we are to succeed. We will do it on our terms, he said.

I wrote in late 2005,
' Is there even a single one of the guarantees in the Bill of Rights that Bush and his henchmen have not by now abrogated by royal fiat? And why? Because of a single attack by a few hijackers from a small terrorist organization? The thousands lost in the Revolutionary War did not deter the Founding Fathers from enshrining these rights in the Constitution! The fledgling American Republic was far more unstable and facing far more dangers when this document was passed into law than the unchallengeable hyperpower that now bestrides the globe as a behemoth.'


And in late 2003 I had explained the scale of those challenges faced by the early American Republic, which did not deter the founding fathers from framing their bill of rights:
' George Washington, who faced proportionally much more devastating attacks and loss of life after 1775 (the population was only 4 million then) never threw in the towel on democracy like that. Let's think about the statistics. At 280 million, the US population is now 70 times larger than it was during the Revolutionary War. The US lost 4,435 ordinary soldiers in 1775-1783 in the war against King George III, and the number rises to 25,324 if you include Native American scouts, mercenaries, and civilians who took up arms. Proportionally, that would be like losing between 310,450 and 1.7 million US troops in 2001-2009. And it doesn't count innocent civilians killed in the Revolutionary War. It is highly unlikely that a terrorist WMD attack would inflict as much damage on the contemporary US as the British did in that period, and yet, amazingly enough, Madison, Jefferson, Washington and others were not stampeded by the Redcoats' attacks into resigning themselves to a military government in 1783.'


Obama is saying much the same thing, that the US has faced down more dire challenges without betraying its values, and there was no reason for Bush to start whittling away at them now.

Obama, unlike Bush, wishes to foreground the US battles in Afghanistan. And unlike Bush, he is not pigheaded about his professed loyalty to figures such as Afghan president Hamid Karzai. Indeed, there is some thinking that he may drop Karzai in favor of someone less ineffective and corrupt.

When he finally spoke on the Gaza War, Obama strongly took Israel's side, but he did express at least a little interest in the conditions under which Gazans live; he asked for an end to the Israeli blockade of Gaza:
' "Let me be clear: America is committed to Israel's security. And we will always support Israel's right to defend itself against legitimate threats," he said.

"For years, Hamas has launched thousands of rockets at innocent Israeli citizens. No democracy can tolerate such danger to its people, nor should the international community, and neither should the Palestinian people themselves, whose interests are only set back by acts of terror."

He added, however, that, "Just as the terror of rocket fire aimed at innocent Israelis is intolerable, so, too, is a future without hope for the Palestinians.

"I was deeply concerned by the loss of Palestinian and Israeli life in recent days and by the substantial suffering and humanitarian needs in Gaza. Our hearts go out to Palestinian civilians who are in need of immediate food, clean water and basic medical care, and who've faced suffocating poverty for far too long.

"We must extend a hand of opportunity to those who seek peace. As part of a lasting cease-fire, Gaza's border crossings should be open to allow the flow of aid and commerce, with an appropriate monitoring regime" and with the international community and the Palestinian Authority participating.'


The last couple sentences are worth the price of admission. Considering the humanitarian needs of the Palestinians, caring at least a little about them as human beings. It is not enough by any means, but at least it is pointing in the right direction.

Riz Khan at Aljazeera English on the transition to a new administration with new priorities.




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