An Intray
Sunday, February 29, 2004
UK Army chiefs feared Iraq war illegal just days before start: senior military leaders were adamant that war could not begin until they were satisfied
The Observer | Special reports | Army chiefs feared Iraq war illegal just days before start: "Martin Bright, Antony Barnett and Gaby Hinsliff | Sunday February 29, 2004 | The Observer
� Attorney-General forced to rewrite legal advice
� Specialist unit dedicated to spying on UN revealed
Britain's Army chiefs refused to go to war in Iraq amid fears over its legality just days before the British and American bombing campaign was launched, The Observer can today reveal.
The explosive new details about military doubts over the legality of the invasion are detailed in unpublished legal documents in the case of Katharine Gun, the intelligence officer dramatically freed last week after Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney-General, dropped charges against her of breaking the Official Secrets Act.
The disclosure came as it also emerged that Goldsmith was forced hastily to redraft his legal advice to Tony Blair to give an 'unequivocal' assurance to the armed forces that the conflict would not be illegal.
Refusing to commit troops already stationed in Kuwait, senior military leaders were adamant that war could not begin until they were satisfied that neither they nor their men could be tried. Some 10 days later, Britain and America began the campaign.
Goldsmith also wrote to Blair at the end of January voicing concerns that the war might be illegal without a second resolution from the United Nations. Opposition MPs seized on The Observer's revelations last night, accusing Goldsmith of caving in to political pressure from the Prime Minister to change his legal advice on the eve of war.
...
Without this legal reassurace, military leaders and their troops could have laid themselves open to charges of war crimes. At the time, UK troops were already in Kuwait poised for an invasion.
Last week, Goldsmith controversially agreed to drop the Government's prosecution of the former GCHQ whistleblower Katharine Gun. Her defence had demanded documents relating to his legal advice, including communications with the Prime Minister.
Although Goldsmith denied his decision to drop the case was political, critics of the war believe the Government was desperate to prevent these details from being revealed in open court.
...
Last night former Cabinet Minister Clare Short told The Observer that she knew of military doubts over the legality the war: 'I was told at the highest level in the department that the military were saying they wouldn't go, whatever the PM said, with out the Attorney-General's advice. The question is: was the AG lent on?
'This was a very personal operation by Tony Blair. The Attorney-General is a friend of Tony's, put in the Lords by Tony and made Attorney-General by Tony.'
The Observer | Special reports | Army chiefs feared Iraq war illegal just days before start: "Martin Bright, Antony Barnett and Gaby Hinsliff | Sunday February 29, 2004 | The Observer
� Attorney-General forced to rewrite legal advice
� Specialist unit dedicated to spying on UN revealed
Britain's Army chiefs refused to go to war in Iraq amid fears over its legality just days before the British and American bombing campaign was launched, The Observer can today reveal.
The explosive new details about military doubts over the legality of the invasion are detailed in unpublished legal documents in the case of Katharine Gun, the intelligence officer dramatically freed last week after Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney-General, dropped charges against her of breaking the Official Secrets Act.
The disclosure came as it also emerged that Goldsmith was forced hastily to redraft his legal advice to Tony Blair to give an 'unequivocal' assurance to the armed forces that the conflict would not be illegal.
Refusing to commit troops already stationed in Kuwait, senior military leaders were adamant that war could not begin until they were satisfied that neither they nor their men could be tried. Some 10 days later, Britain and America began the campaign.
Goldsmith also wrote to Blair at the end of January voicing concerns that the war might be illegal without a second resolution from the United Nations. Opposition MPs seized on The Observer's revelations last night, accusing Goldsmith of caving in to political pressure from the Prime Minister to change his legal advice on the eve of war.
...
Without this legal reassurace, military leaders and their troops could have laid themselves open to charges of war crimes. At the time, UK troops were already in Kuwait poised for an invasion.
Last week, Goldsmith controversially agreed to drop the Government's prosecution of the former GCHQ whistleblower Katharine Gun. Her defence had demanded documents relating to his legal advice, including communications with the Prime Minister.
Although Goldsmith denied his decision to drop the case was political, critics of the war believe the Government was desperate to prevent these details from being revealed in open court.
...
Last night former Cabinet Minister Clare Short told The Observer that she knew of military doubts over the legality the war: 'I was told at the highest level in the department that the military were saying they wouldn't go, whatever the PM said, with out the Attorney-General's advice. The question is: was the AG lent on?
'This was a very personal operation by Tony Blair. The Attorney-General is a friend of Tony's, put in the Lords by Tony and made Attorney-General by Tony.'
Friday, February 27, 2004
Secret American plan to "reform" the Middle East: deepened anxieties among Arab leaders--plans to reshape countries are being drawn up withot them
Arab Leaders Criticize U.S. 'Reform' Plan: "February 27, 2004 E-mail story Print | THE WORLD | Arab Leaders Criticize U.S. 'Reform' Plan | February 27, 2004 | By Paul Richter, Times Staff Writer
Some officials in the Mideast see a secret effort to democratize the region as a bid to reshape their nations without their consent.
----
WASHINGTON — A secret American plan to "reform" the Middle East was leaked in Europe, drawing criticism from Arab leaders and throwing the Bush administration on the defensive four months before the proposal was to be launched.
The administration had hoped to enlist Europe as a partner in what it describes as a major effort to democratize the Mideast and had made plans to unveil the project at a summit of leading industrial nations in June.
The initiative is part of the broader effort to foster human rights and free-market values outlined by President Bush in November. Countries that choose to sign on could expect closer political ties, as well as U.S. economic incentives and military assistance. The effort is aimed at the Mideast, but it also includes countries from Morocco to Pakistan.
But publication of an early draft of the proposal this month in Al Hayat, a London-based, Arabic-language newspaper, has deepened anxieties among Arab leaders that plans to reshape their countries are being drawn up without them.
Some European governments, though enthusiastic about the goal of "reform," want reassurance that the proposal isn't an election-year gimmick or a plan to force the American way on an area already suspicious about the U.S. agenda. ...
Arab Leaders Criticize U.S. 'Reform' Plan: "February 27, 2004 E-mail story Print | THE WORLD | Arab Leaders Criticize U.S. 'Reform' Plan | February 27, 2004 | By Paul Richter, Times Staff Writer
Some officials in the Mideast see a secret effort to democratize the region as a bid to reshape their nations without their consent.
----
WASHINGTON — A secret American plan to "reform" the Middle East was leaked in Europe, drawing criticism from Arab leaders and throwing the Bush administration on the defensive four months before the proposal was to be launched.
The administration had hoped to enlist Europe as a partner in what it describes as a major effort to democratize the Mideast and had made plans to unveil the project at a summit of leading industrial nations in June.
The initiative is part of the broader effort to foster human rights and free-market values outlined by President Bush in November. Countries that choose to sign on could expect closer political ties, as well as U.S. economic incentives and military assistance. The effort is aimed at the Mideast, but it also includes countries from Morocco to Pakistan.
But publication of an early draft of the proposal this month in Al Hayat, a London-based, Arabic-language newspaper, has deepened anxieties among Arab leaders that plans to reshape their countries are being drawn up without them.
Some European governments, though enthusiastic about the goal of "reform," want reassurance that the proposal isn't an election-year gimmick or a plan to force the American way on an area already suspicious about the U.S. agenda. ...
Thursday, February 26, 2004
Bido: IDF shoots protesters: 2 Pal dead, 42 wounded
Excite News: "Israel Soldiers Kill Two Palestinians | Feb 26, 1:09 PM (ET) | By MUHAMMED MUHEISEN
BIDOU, West Bank (AP) - Hundreds of Palestinians, including farmers and students, threw stones Thursday at Israelis trying to clear a path for the West Bank separation barrier, drawing fire that killed two and wounded dozens in the bloodiest clashes yet over the partition.
...
Hundreds of Palestinians, including many farmers, threw stones at earthmovers leveling ground on terraced slopes for the construction of another section of the barrier. In Bidou, teens and young men used a wrecked car as a shield, dashing out from behind it to hurl stones from slingshots. Middle-aged men scuffled with soldiers and paramilitary border police.
Troops fired tear gas, rubber-coated steel pellets and live rounds, witnesses said. Two men in their 20s were killed and 42 protesters were hurt, including eight by live fire and 12 by rubber bullets, Palestinian hospital officials said. More than 20 suffered beating injuries, the doctors said.
The Israeli military and police denied officers used live fire, though an Associated Press reporter saw two men with live fire wounds at Ramallah Hospital. Police said six officers were hurt in the clashes, including three who were hospitalized.
Excite News: "Israel Soldiers Kill Two Palestinians | Feb 26, 1:09 PM (ET) | By MUHAMMED MUHEISEN
BIDOU, West Bank (AP) - Hundreds of Palestinians, including farmers and students, threw stones Thursday at Israelis trying to clear a path for the West Bank separation barrier, drawing fire that killed two and wounded dozens in the bloodiest clashes yet over the partition.
...
Hundreds of Palestinians, including many farmers, threw stones at earthmovers leveling ground on terraced slopes for the construction of another section of the barrier. In Bidou, teens and young men used a wrecked car as a shield, dashing out from behind it to hurl stones from slingshots. Middle-aged men scuffled with soldiers and paramilitary border police.
Troops fired tear gas, rubber-coated steel pellets and live rounds, witnesses said. Two men in their 20s were killed and 42 protesters were hurt, including eight by live fire and 12 by rubber bullets, Palestinian hospital officials said. More than 20 suffered beating injuries, the doctors said.
The Israeli military and police denied officers used live fire, though an Associated Press reporter saw two men with live fire wounds at Ramallah Hospital. Police said six officers were hurt in the clashes, including three who were hospitalized.
Wednesday, February 25, 2004
One of the most sensitive questions for America: are we engaging in double standards in the Middle East
Op-Ed Columnist: Calling the Kettle Black: "By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF | Published: February 25, 2004
This week's hearings at the International Court of Justice on Israel's "security fence" raise again one of the most sensitive questions for America: are we engaging in double standards in the Middle East?
One of the central reasons for anti-Americanism in Iraq, as well as elsewhere in the Islamic world and in Europe, is a conviction that Americans are hypocrites for invading Iraq after Saddam Hussein violated U.N. resolutions, while donating billions of dollars to Israel as Ariel Sharon defies other U.N. resolutions.
This indictment is nearly universal, even among our allies. "There is a real concern, too, that the West has been guilty of double standards — on the one hand saying the United Nations Security Council resolutions on Iraq must be implemented; on the other hand, sometimes appearing rather quixotic over the implementation of resolutions about Israel and Palestine," the British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, said last year.
Tony Blair was more concise: "U.N. resolutions should apply [to Israel] as much as to Iraq."
He's right. President Bush has been cozying up to Mr. Sharon, despite his incursions into the West Bank, his use of settlements to grab Palestinian lands and his barrier that cuts off Palestinian farmers from their farms. Anyone who goes to Israel feels the gut fear of bombings that drive such policies, but anyone who goes to Gaza or the West Bank sees the humiliations that spawn bombings and a vicious cycle of violence.
Yet if we are guilty of double standards, that's not the end of the discussion. ...
...
Mr. Sharon has indeed often dealt brutally with Palestinians, ever since he answered the 1953 murder of an Israeli woman and her two children by leading a raid on the Jordanian village of Qibya that killed some 69 Arabs, many of them women and children. But it's also true that the Middle East leader who arguably grants his own Arab citizens the greatest democratic rights is . . . that's right, Ariel Sharon. It's a double standard to notice only how Israel represses Arabs and not how it empowers them. More important, Arabs erupt at every outrage by Israel, but seem unmoved when Arabs abuse other Arabs.
So if the Muslim world wants to hold our feet to the fire, it should hold its own rulers to the same standards it applies to Israel. Yet in the end, other people's hypocrisy should not excuse our own. We cannot fix other people's double standards, but we can address our own, and speaking out much more forcefully against the construction of the Israeli "security fence" on Palestinian land would be a good place to start.
Op-Ed Columnist: Calling the Kettle Black: "By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF | Published: February 25, 2004
This week's hearings at the International Court of Justice on Israel's "security fence" raise again one of the most sensitive questions for America: are we engaging in double standards in the Middle East?
One of the central reasons for anti-Americanism in Iraq, as well as elsewhere in the Islamic world and in Europe, is a conviction that Americans are hypocrites for invading Iraq after Saddam Hussein violated U.N. resolutions, while donating billions of dollars to Israel as Ariel Sharon defies other U.N. resolutions.
This indictment is nearly universal, even among our allies. "There is a real concern, too, that the West has been guilty of double standards — on the one hand saying the United Nations Security Council resolutions on Iraq must be implemented; on the other hand, sometimes appearing rather quixotic over the implementation of resolutions about Israel and Palestine," the British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, said last year.
Tony Blair was more concise: "U.N. resolutions should apply [to Israel] as much as to Iraq."
He's right. President Bush has been cozying up to Mr. Sharon, despite his incursions into the West Bank, his use of settlements to grab Palestinian lands and his barrier that cuts off Palestinian farmers from their farms. Anyone who goes to Israel feels the gut fear of bombings that drive such policies, but anyone who goes to Gaza or the West Bank sees the humiliations that spawn bombings and a vicious cycle of violence.
Yet if we are guilty of double standards, that's not the end of the discussion. ...
...
Mr. Sharon has indeed often dealt brutally with Palestinians, ever since he answered the 1953 murder of an Israeli woman and her two children by leading a raid on the Jordanian village of Qibya that killed some 69 Arabs, many of them women and children. But it's also true that the Middle East leader who arguably grants his own Arab citizens the greatest democratic rights is . . . that's right, Ariel Sharon. It's a double standard to notice only how Israel represses Arabs and not how it empowers them. More important, Arabs erupt at every outrage by Israel, but seem unmoved when Arabs abuse other Arabs.
So if the Muslim world wants to hold our feet to the fire, it should hold its own rulers to the same standards it applies to Israel. Yet in the end, other people's hypocrisy should not excuse our own. We cannot fix other people's double standards, but we can address our own, and speaking out much more forcefully against the construction of the Israeli "security fence" on Palestinian land would be a good place to start.
Raise again one of the most sensitive questions for America: are we engaging in double standards in the Middle East?
Op-Ed Columnist: Calling the Kettle Black: "By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF | Published: February 25, 2004
This week's hearings at the International Court of Justice on Israel's "security fence" raise again one of the most sensitive questions for America: are we engaging in double standards in the Middle East?
One of the central reasons for anti-Americanism in Iraq, as well as elsewhere in the Islamic world and in Europe, is a conviction that Americans are hypocrites for invading Iraq after Saddam Hussein violated U.N. resolutions, while donating billions of dollars to Israel as Ariel Sharon defies other U.N. resolutions.
This indictment is nearly universal, even among our allies. "There is a real concern, too, that the West has been guilty of double standards — on the one hand saying the United Nations Security Council resolutions on Iraq must be implemented; on the other hand, sometimes appearing rather quixotic over the implementation of resolutions about Israel and Palestine," the British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, said last year.
Tony Blair was more concise: "U.N. resolutions should apply [to Israel] as much as to Iraq."
He's right. President Bush has been cozying up to Mr. Sharon, despite his incursions into the West Bank, his use of settlements to grab Palestinian lands and his barrier that cuts off Palestinian farmers from their farms. Anyone who goes to Israel feels the gut fear of bombings that drive such policies, but anyone who goes to Gaza or the West Bank sees the humiliations that spawn bombings and a vicious cycle of violence.
Yet if we are guilty of double standards, that's not the end of the discussion. ...
...
Mr. Sharon has indeed often dealt brutally with Palestinians, ever since he answered the 1953 murder of an Israeli woman and her two children by leading a raid on the Jordanian village of Qibya that killed some 69 Arabs, many of them women and children. But it's also true that the Middle East leader who arguably grants his own Arab citizens the greatest democratic rights is . . . that's right, Ariel Sharon. It's a double standard to notice only how Israel represses Arabs and not how it empowers them. More important, Arabs erupt at every outrage by Israel, but seem unmoved when Arabs abuse other Arabs.
So if the Muslim world wants to hold our feet to the fire, it should hold its own rulers to the same standards it applies to Israel. Yet in the end, other people's hypocrisy should not excuse our own. We cannot fix other people's double standards, but we can address our own, and speaking out much more forcefully against the construction of the Israeli "security fence" on Palestinian land would be a good place to start.
Op-Ed Columnist: Calling the Kettle Black: "By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF | Published: February 25, 2004
This week's hearings at the International Court of Justice on Israel's "security fence" raise again one of the most sensitive questions for America: are we engaging in double standards in the Middle East?
One of the central reasons for anti-Americanism in Iraq, as well as elsewhere in the Islamic world and in Europe, is a conviction that Americans are hypocrites for invading Iraq after Saddam Hussein violated U.N. resolutions, while donating billions of dollars to Israel as Ariel Sharon defies other U.N. resolutions.
This indictment is nearly universal, even among our allies. "There is a real concern, too, that the West has been guilty of double standards — on the one hand saying the United Nations Security Council resolutions on Iraq must be implemented; on the other hand, sometimes appearing rather quixotic over the implementation of resolutions about Israel and Palestine," the British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, said last year.
Tony Blair was more concise: "U.N. resolutions should apply [to Israel] as much as to Iraq."
He's right. President Bush has been cozying up to Mr. Sharon, despite his incursions into the West Bank, his use of settlements to grab Palestinian lands and his barrier that cuts off Palestinian farmers from their farms. Anyone who goes to Israel feels the gut fear of bombings that drive such policies, but anyone who goes to Gaza or the West Bank sees the humiliations that spawn bombings and a vicious cycle of violence.
Yet if we are guilty of double standards, that's not the end of the discussion. ...
...
Mr. Sharon has indeed often dealt brutally with Palestinians, ever since he answered the 1953 murder of an Israeli woman and her two children by leading a raid on the Jordanian village of Qibya that killed some 69 Arabs, many of them women and children. But it's also true that the Middle East leader who arguably grants his own Arab citizens the greatest democratic rights is . . . that's right, Ariel Sharon. It's a double standard to notice only how Israel represses Arabs and not how it empowers them. More important, Arabs erupt at every outrage by Israel, but seem unmoved when Arabs abuse other Arabs.
So if the Muslim world wants to hold our feet to the fire, it should hold its own rulers to the same standards it applies to Israel. Yet in the end, other people's hypocrisy should not excuse our own. We cannot fix other people's double standards, but we can address our own, and speaking out much more forcefully against the construction of the Israeli "security fence" on Palestinian land would be a good place to start.
Raise again one of the most sensitive questions for America: are we engaging in double standards in the Middle East?
Op-Ed Columnist: Calling the Kettle Black: "By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF | Published: February 25, 2004
This week's hearings at the International Court of Justice on Israel's "security fence" raise again one of the most sensitive questions for America: are we engaging in double standards in the Middle East?
One of the central reasons for anti-Americanism in Iraq, as well as elsewhere in the Islamic world and in Europe, is a conviction that Americans are hypocrites for invading Iraq after Saddam Hussein violated U.N. resolutions, while donating billions of dollars to Israel as Ariel Sharon defies other U.N. resolutions.
This indictment is nearly universal, even among our allies. "There is a real concern, too, that the West has been guilty of double standards — on the one hand saying the United Nations Security Council resolutions on Iraq must be implemented; on the other hand, sometimes appearing rather quixotic over the implementation of resolutions about Israel and Palestine," the British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, said last year.
Tony Blair was more concise: "U.N. resolutions should apply [to Israel] as much as to Iraq."
He's right. President Bush has been cozying up to Mr. Sharon, despite his incursions into the West Bank, his use of settlements to grab Palestinian lands and his barrier that cuts off Palestinian farmers from their farms. Anyone who goes to Israel feels the gut fear of bombings that drive such policies, but anyone who goes to Gaza or the West Bank sees the humiliations that spawn bombings and a vicious cycle of violence.
Yet if we are guilty of double standards, that's not the end of the discussion. ...
...
Mr. Sharon has indeed often dealt brutally with Palestinians, ever since he answered the 1953 murder of an Israeli woman and her two children by leading a raid on the Jordanian village of Qibya that killed some 69 Arabs, many of them women and children. But it's also true that the Middle East leader who arguably grants his own Arab citizens the greatest democratic rights is . . . that's right, Ariel Sharon. It's a double standard to notice only how Israel represses Arabs and not how it empowers them. More important, Arabs erupt at every outrage by Israel, but seem unmoved when Arabs abuse other Arabs.
So if the Muslim world wants to hold our feet to the fire, it should hold its own rulers to the same standards it applies to Israel. Yet in the end, other people's hypocrisy should not excuse our own. We cannot fix other people's double standards, but we can address our own, and speaking out much more forcefully against the construction of the Israeli "security fence" on Palestinian land would be a good place to start.
Op-Ed Columnist: Calling the Kettle Black: "By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF | Published: February 25, 2004
This week's hearings at the International Court of Justice on Israel's "security fence" raise again one of the most sensitive questions for America: are we engaging in double standards in the Middle East?
One of the central reasons for anti-Americanism in Iraq, as well as elsewhere in the Islamic world and in Europe, is a conviction that Americans are hypocrites for invading Iraq after Saddam Hussein violated U.N. resolutions, while donating billions of dollars to Israel as Ariel Sharon defies other U.N. resolutions.
This indictment is nearly universal, even among our allies. "There is a real concern, too, that the West has been guilty of double standards — on the one hand saying the United Nations Security Council resolutions on Iraq must be implemented; on the other hand, sometimes appearing rather quixotic over the implementation of resolutions about Israel and Palestine," the British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, said last year.
Tony Blair was more concise: "U.N. resolutions should apply [to Israel] as much as to Iraq."
He's right. President Bush has been cozying up to Mr. Sharon, despite his incursions into the West Bank, his use of settlements to grab Palestinian lands and his barrier that cuts off Palestinian farmers from their farms. Anyone who goes to Israel feels the gut fear of bombings that drive such policies, but anyone who goes to Gaza or the West Bank sees the humiliations that spawn bombings and a vicious cycle of violence.
Yet if we are guilty of double standards, that's not the end of the discussion. ...
...
Mr. Sharon has indeed often dealt brutally with Palestinians, ever since he answered the 1953 murder of an Israeli woman and her two children by leading a raid on the Jordanian village of Qibya that killed some 69 Arabs, many of them women and children. But it's also true that the Middle East leader who arguably grants his own Arab citizens the greatest democratic rights is . . . that's right, Ariel Sharon. It's a double standard to notice only how Israel represses Arabs and not how it empowers them. More important, Arabs erupt at every outrage by Israel, but seem unmoved when Arabs abuse other Arabs.
So if the Muslim world wants to hold our feet to the fire, it should hold its own rulers to the same standards it applies to Israel. Yet in the end, other people's hypocrisy should not excuse our own. We cannot fix other people's double standards, but we can address our own, and speaking out much more forcefully against the construction of the Israeli "security fence" on Palestinian land would be a good place to start.
Raise again one of the most sensitive questions for America: are we engaging in double standards in the Middle East?
Op-Ed Columnist: Calling the Kettle Black: "By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF | Published: February 25, 2004
This week's hearings at the International Court of Justice on Israel's "security fence" raise again one of the most sensitive questions for America: are we engaging in double standards in the Middle East?
One of the central reasons for anti-Americanism in Iraq, as well as elsewhere in the Islamic world and in Europe, is a conviction that Americans are hypocrites for invading Iraq after Saddam Hussein violated U.N. resolutions, while donating billions of dollars to Israel as Ariel Sharon defies other U.N. resolutions.
This indictment is nearly universal, even among our allies. "There is a real concern, too, that the West has been guilty of double standards — on the one hand saying the United Nations Security Council resolutions on Iraq must be implemented; on the other hand, sometimes appearing rather quixotic over the implementation of resolutions about Israel and Palestine," the British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, said last year.
Tony Blair was more concise: "U.N. resolutions should apply [to Israel] as much as to Iraq."
He's right. President Bush has been cozying up to Mr. Sharon, despite his incursions into the West Bank, his use of settlements to grab Palestinian lands and his barrier that cuts off Palestinian farmers from their farms. Anyone who goes to Israel feels the gut fear of bombings that drive such policies, but anyone who goes to Gaza or the West Bank sees the humiliations that spawn bombings and a vicious cycle of violence.
Yet if we are guilty of double standards, that's not the end of the discussion. ...
...
Mr. Sharon has indeed often dealt brutally with Palestinians, ever since he answered the 1953 murder of an Israeli woman and her two children by leading a raid on the Jordanian village of Qibya that killed some 69 Arabs, many of them women and children. But it's also true that the Middle East leader who arguably grants his own Arab citizens the greatest democratic rights is . . . that's right, Ariel Sharon. It's a double standard to notice only how Israel represses Arabs and not how it empowers them. More important, Arabs erupt at every outrage by Israel, but seem unmoved when Arabs abuse other Arabs.
So if the Muslim world wants to hold our feet to the fire, it should hold its own rulers to the same standards it applies to Israel. Yet in the end, other people's hypocrisy should not excuse our own. We cannot fix other people's double standards, but we can address our own, and speaking out much more forcefully against the construction of the Israeli "security fence" on Palestinian land would be a good place to start.
Op-Ed Columnist: Calling the Kettle Black: "By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF | Published: February 25, 2004
This week's hearings at the International Court of Justice on Israel's "security fence" raise again one of the most sensitive questions for America: are we engaging in double standards in the Middle East?
One of the central reasons for anti-Americanism in Iraq, as well as elsewhere in the Islamic world and in Europe, is a conviction that Americans are hypocrites for invading Iraq after Saddam Hussein violated U.N. resolutions, while donating billions of dollars to Israel as Ariel Sharon defies other U.N. resolutions.
This indictment is nearly universal, even among our allies. "There is a real concern, too, that the West has been guilty of double standards — on the one hand saying the United Nations Security Council resolutions on Iraq must be implemented; on the other hand, sometimes appearing rather quixotic over the implementation of resolutions about Israel and Palestine," the British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, said last year.
Tony Blair was more concise: "U.N. resolutions should apply [to Israel] as much as to Iraq."
He's right. President Bush has been cozying up to Mr. Sharon, despite his incursions into the West Bank, his use of settlements to grab Palestinian lands and his barrier that cuts off Palestinian farmers from their farms. Anyone who goes to Israel feels the gut fear of bombings that drive such policies, but anyone who goes to Gaza or the West Bank sees the humiliations that spawn bombings and a vicious cycle of violence.
Yet if we are guilty of double standards, that's not the end of the discussion. ...
...
Mr. Sharon has indeed often dealt brutally with Palestinians, ever since he answered the 1953 murder of an Israeli woman and her two children by leading a raid on the Jordanian village of Qibya that killed some 69 Arabs, many of them women and children. But it's also true that the Middle East leader who arguably grants his own Arab citizens the greatest democratic rights is . . . that's right, Ariel Sharon. It's a double standard to notice only how Israel represses Arabs and not how it empowers them. More important, Arabs erupt at every outrage by Israel, but seem unmoved when Arabs abuse other Arabs.
So if the Muslim world wants to hold our feet to the fire, it should hold its own rulers to the same standards it applies to Israel. Yet in the end, other people's hypocrisy should not excuse our own. We cannot fix other people's double standards, but we can address our own, and speaking out much more forcefully against the construction of the Israeli "security fence" on Palestinian land would be a good place to start.
Interim Plan From Israel May Receive U.S. Backing (washingtonpost.com)
Interim Plan From Israel May Receive U.S. Backing (washingtonpost.com): "Vacating Gaza Settlements Could Encourage Peace Talks | By Glenn Kessler | Washington Post Staff Writer | Thursday, February 26, 2004; Page A14
The United States and Israel are discussing a fresh approach to Mideast peace in which the Bush administration would embrace Israel's proposal to give up settlements in Gaza as a way of encouraging Palestinians and Arab states to take their own steps toward peace, senior U.S. and Israeli officials said.
...
Elements of the plan include Israel's vacating possibly all of Gaza and as many as 17 West Bank settlements, giving Egypt responsibility for security on the Gaza border and moving a planned fence separating Israelis and Palestinians closer to Israel's 1967 borders.
Israeli officials describe the Sharon plan as an "interim arrangement" but suggest it could be in place for a long time. In talks with U.S. officials, Israeli officials also appear to be seeking to trade Israeli withdrawal from territories for receiving greater flexibility to build housing in West Bank areas it would want in a final peace deal.
...
U.S. officials stressed that they were not negotiating with Israel but instead were offering ideas. "We have been listening to the prime minister's ideas and helping the prime minister and his people think through them," McCormack said. "But it is an Israeli initiative, a Prime Minister Sharon initiative."
...
Sharon is also seeking assurances the United States would not support other diplomatic initiatives until Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is removed from power and that Israel could respond forcefully if it is attacked from areas it vacates.
...
In discussions, Israeli officials have been eager to win an understanding with the United States on a key element of the road map -- a definition of a settlement freeze. They would like the flexibility to add housing units in settlements that, under almost any proposed peace plan, would be ceded to Israel.
Interim Plan From Israel May Receive U.S. Backing (washingtonpost.com): "Vacating Gaza Settlements Could Encourage Peace Talks | By Glenn Kessler | Washington Post Staff Writer | Thursday, February 26, 2004; Page A14
The United States and Israel are discussing a fresh approach to Mideast peace in which the Bush administration would embrace Israel's proposal to give up settlements in Gaza as a way of encouraging Palestinians and Arab states to take their own steps toward peace, senior U.S. and Israeli officials said.
...
Elements of the plan include Israel's vacating possibly all of Gaza and as many as 17 West Bank settlements, giving Egypt responsibility for security on the Gaza border and moving a planned fence separating Israelis and Palestinians closer to Israel's 1967 borders.
Israeli officials describe the Sharon plan as an "interim arrangement" but suggest it could be in place for a long time. In talks with U.S. officials, Israeli officials also appear to be seeking to trade Israeli withdrawal from territories for receiving greater flexibility to build housing in West Bank areas it would want in a final peace deal.
...
U.S. officials stressed that they were not negotiating with Israel but instead were offering ideas. "We have been listening to the prime minister's ideas and helping the prime minister and his people think through them," McCormack said. "But it is an Israeli initiative, a Prime Minister Sharon initiative."
...
Sharon is also seeking assurances the United States would not support other diplomatic initiatives until Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is removed from power and that Israel could respond forcefully if it is attacked from areas it vacates.
...
In discussions, Israeli officials have been eager to win an understanding with the United States on a key element of the road map -- a definition of a settlement freeze. They would like the flexibility to add housing units in settlements that, under almost any proposed peace plan, would be ceded to Israel.
Saturday, February 21, 2004
Intelligence: C.I.A. Admits It Didn't Give Weapon Data to the U.N.: misled Congress [undermined Congressional opponents of the war]
Intelligence: C.I.A. Admits It Didn�t Give Weapon Data to the U.N.: "C.I.A. Admits It Didn't Give Weapon Data to the U.N.
By DOUGLAS JEHL and DAVID E. SANGER | Published: February 21, 2004
WASHINGTON, Feb. 20 � The Central Intelligence Agency has acknowledged that it did not provide the United Nations with information about 21 of the 105 sites in Iraq singled out by American intelligence before the war as the most highly suspected of housing illicit weapons.
The acknowledgment, in a Jan. 20 letter to Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, contradicts public statements before the war by top Bush administration officials.
Both George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said the United States had briefed United Nations inspectors on all of the sites identified as 'high value and moderate value' in the weapons hunt.
The contradiction is significant because Congressional opponents of the war were arguing a year ago that the United Nations inspectors should be given more time to complete their search before the United States and its allies began the invasion. The White House, bolstered by Mr. Tenet, insisted that it was fully cooperating with the inspectors, and at daily briefings the White House issued assurances that the administration was providing the inspectors with the best information possible.
In a telephone interview on Friday, Senator Levin said he now believed that Mr. Tenet had misled Congress, which he described as "totally unacceptable."
Senior administration officials said Friday night that Ms. Rice had relied on information provided by intelligence agencies when she assured Senator Levin, in a letter on March 6, 2003, that "United Nations inspectors have been briefed on every high or medium priority weapons of mass destruction, missile and U.A.V.-related site the U.S. intelligence community has identified." Mr. Tenet said much the same thing in testimony on Feb. 12, 2003. ...
Intelligence: C.I.A. Admits It Didn�t Give Weapon Data to the U.N.: "C.I.A. Admits It Didn't Give Weapon Data to the U.N.
By DOUGLAS JEHL and DAVID E. SANGER | Published: February 21, 2004
WASHINGTON, Feb. 20 � The Central Intelligence Agency has acknowledged that it did not provide the United Nations with information about 21 of the 105 sites in Iraq singled out by American intelligence before the war as the most highly suspected of housing illicit weapons.
The acknowledgment, in a Jan. 20 letter to Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, contradicts public statements before the war by top Bush administration officials.
Both George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said the United States had briefed United Nations inspectors on all of the sites identified as 'high value and moderate value' in the weapons hunt.
The contradiction is significant because Congressional opponents of the war were arguing a year ago that the United Nations inspectors should be given more time to complete their search before the United States and its allies began the invasion. The White House, bolstered by Mr. Tenet, insisted that it was fully cooperating with the inspectors, and at daily briefings the White House issued assurances that the administration was providing the inspectors with the best information possible.
In a telephone interview on Friday, Senator Levin said he now believed that Mr. Tenet had misled Congress, which he described as "totally unacceptable."
Senior administration officials said Friday night that Ms. Rice had relied on information provided by intelligence agencies when she assured Senator Levin, in a letter on March 6, 2003, that "United Nations inspectors have been briefed on every high or medium priority weapons of mass destruction, missile and U.A.V.-related site the U.S. intelligence community has identified." Mr. Tenet said much the same thing in testimony on Feb. 12, 2003. ...
Friday, February 20, 2004
Israel's 'Wall' Assailed by Key Civil Society Groups: [Amnesty International and Red Cross]
Yahoo! News - Israel's 'Wall' Assailed by Key Civil Society Groups: "Fri Feb 20, 8:51 AM ETAdd World - OneWorld.net to My Yahoo! | Jim Lobe, OneWorld US
WASHINGTON, D.C., Feb 20 (OneWorld) -- On the eve of the World Court's opening hearing on Israel's construction of a barrier wall along the West Bank, two of the world's oldest and most influential non-governmental organizations are calling for the dismantling of those sections that cross the pre-1967 'Green Line' into occupied territory.
On Thursday, Amnesty International said the barrier, which Israel refers to as a "fence," "is contributing to grave human rights violations" against Palestinian residents living within the West Bank. "Any measure Israel undertakes in the Occupied Territories in the name of security must comply with its obligations under international law," the London-based group argued.
The Amnesty statement followed closely on the publication by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) of a statement calling on Israel "not to plan, construct or maintain this Barrier within occupied territory."
"Where it deviates from the 'Green Line' into occupied territory, the Barrier deprives thousands of Palestinian residents of adequate access to basic services such as water, health care and education, as well as sources of income such as agriculture and other forms of employment," the Geneva-based agency said, adding that to the extent the wall deviates into occupied territory, it violates international humanitarian law (IHL).
"The Palestinian communities situated between the 'Green Line' and the Barrier are effectively cut off from the Palestinian society to which they belong. The construction of the West Bank Barrier continues to give rise to widespread appropriation of Palestinian property and extensive damage to or destruction of buildings and farmland," the ICRC said, in what observers noted was a highly unusual public statement. ...
Yahoo! News - Israel's 'Wall' Assailed by Key Civil Society Groups: "Fri Feb 20, 8:51 AM ETAdd World - OneWorld.net to My Yahoo! | Jim Lobe, OneWorld US
WASHINGTON, D.C., Feb 20 (OneWorld) -- On the eve of the World Court's opening hearing on Israel's construction of a barrier wall along the West Bank, two of the world's oldest and most influential non-governmental organizations are calling for the dismantling of those sections that cross the pre-1967 'Green Line' into occupied territory.
On Thursday, Amnesty International said the barrier, which Israel refers to as a "fence," "is contributing to grave human rights violations" against Palestinian residents living within the West Bank. "Any measure Israel undertakes in the Occupied Territories in the name of security must comply with its obligations under international law," the London-based group argued.
The Amnesty statement followed closely on the publication by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) of a statement calling on Israel "not to plan, construct or maintain this Barrier within occupied territory."
"Where it deviates from the 'Green Line' into occupied territory, the Barrier deprives thousands of Palestinian residents of adequate access to basic services such as water, health care and education, as well as sources of income such as agriculture and other forms of employment," the Geneva-based agency said, adding that to the extent the wall deviates into occupied territory, it violates international humanitarian law (IHL).
"The Palestinian communities situated between the 'Green Line' and the Barrier are effectively cut off from the Palestinian society to which they belong. The construction of the West Bank Barrier continues to give rise to widespread appropriation of Palestinian property and extensive damage to or destruction of buildings and farmland," the ICRC said, in what observers noted was a highly unusual public statement. ...
Wednesday, February 18, 2004
[Palestinian poverty] ' the result of natural calamity but of deliberate actions on the part of the government of Israel'
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Shelve Israel trade deal, say MPs: "Shelve Israel trade deal, say MPs | Commons group condemns damage to Palestinian economy and calls for suspension of EU agreement | Ewen MacAskill, diplomatic editor | Thursday February 5, 2004 | The Guardian
MPs today deliver the most damning verdict yet from a British parliamentary group on Israel's behaviour in the Palestinian occupied territories and calls for suspension of its billion-pound European Union trade agreement.
The report, by a Commons select committee which conducted a six-month inquiry last year, blames Israel's incursions, curfews, checkpoints and other restrictions - including its security wall along the West Bank - for choking the Palestinian economy.
The MPs say that what 'makes the poverty so unpalatable is the level of deprivation vis a vis Israel, and the awareness that it is not the result of natural calamity but of deliberate actions on the part of the government of Israel'.
Criticising Israeli restrictions that disrupt movement within the West Bank and Gaza, the MPs say: 'It is hard to avoid the conclusion that there is a deliberate Israeli strategy of putting the lives of ordinary Palestinians under stress as part of a strategy of bringing the population to heel.' ...
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Shelve Israel trade deal, say MPs: "Shelve Israel trade deal, say MPs | Commons group condemns damage to Palestinian economy and calls for suspension of EU agreement | Ewen MacAskill, diplomatic editor | Thursday February 5, 2004 | The Guardian
MPs today deliver the most damning verdict yet from a British parliamentary group on Israel's behaviour in the Palestinian occupied territories and calls for suspension of its billion-pound European Union trade agreement.
The report, by a Commons select committee which conducted a six-month inquiry last year, blames Israel's incursions, curfews, checkpoints and other restrictions - including its security wall along the West Bank - for choking the Palestinian economy.
The MPs say that what 'makes the poverty so unpalatable is the level of deprivation vis a vis Israel, and the awareness that it is not the result of natural calamity but of deliberate actions on the part of the government of Israel'.
Criticising Israeli restrictions that disrupt movement within the West Bank and Gaza, the MPs say: 'It is hard to avoid the conclusion that there is a deliberate Israeli strategy of putting the lives of ordinary Palestinians under stress as part of a strategy of bringing the population to heel.' ...
U.S. Commander Sees Troops Staying in Iraq for Years: "Iraqis tell us they don't want us here, but nor do they want us to go"
Excite - News: "U.S. Commander Sees Troops Staying in Iraq for Years | Feb 18, 5:50 am ET
MADRID (Reuters) - The U.S. commander in Iraq, in an interview published on Wednesday, said he sees American troops staying for years, and helping Iraqis maintain order in Baghdad for at least the coming 12 months.
'I would say we're talking about years, not months,' Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez told Spanish newspaper El Pais when asked how long the U.S. army would remain in Iraq.
'The Iraqis tell us they don't want us here, but nor do they want us to go. It's very complicated,' he said.
Asked about Baghdad, where U.S. troops are moving to the outskirts to help ease newly trained Iraqi police and soldiers into their eventual role as the capital's guardians, Sanchez said tactical control remained firmly in the coalition's hands.
'The only thing that is changing is that we are giving Iraqi police officers and Civil Defense Corps soldiers a little bit more responsibility and they are starting to operate more freely,' he was quoted as saying.
'But (the Iraqi forces) continue to operate under the tactical control of the coalition forces. It's not a case of us leaving town and leaving them on their own.'"
Excite - News: "U.S. Commander Sees Troops Staying in Iraq for Years | Feb 18, 5:50 am ET
MADRID (Reuters) - The U.S. commander in Iraq, in an interview published on Wednesday, said he sees American troops staying for years, and helping Iraqis maintain order in Baghdad for at least the coming 12 months.
'I would say we're talking about years, not months,' Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez told Spanish newspaper El Pais when asked how long the U.S. army would remain in Iraq.
'The Iraqis tell us they don't want us here, but nor do they want us to go. It's very complicated,' he said.
Asked about Baghdad, where U.S. troops are moving to the outskirts to help ease newly trained Iraqi police and soldiers into their eventual role as the capital's guardians, Sanchez said tactical control remained firmly in the coalition's hands.
'The only thing that is changing is that we are giving Iraqi police officers and Civil Defense Corps soldiers a little bit more responsibility and they are starting to operate more freely,' he was quoted as saying.
'But (the Iraqi forces) continue to operate under the tactical control of the coalition forces. It's not a case of us leaving town and leaving them on their own.'"
Tuesday, February 17, 2004
Great Powers Hold Key to Mideast Peace
Great Powers Hold Key to Mideast Peace: "February 16, 2004 | Great Powers Hold Key to Mideast Peace | EU, Russia and U.S. must be the prime movers.
By Howard M. Sachar, Howard M. Sachar, a modern history professor at George Washington University, is the author of "A History of Israel" (Alfred E. Knopf, second edition, 1995) and other volumes on the Middle East.
As the Bush administration seeks to resolve its entrapment in the Iraqi imbroglio, it has once again confined to the back burner its timorous and erratic effort to cope with a very different Middle Eastern crisis, the lethal and potentially far more destabilizing Arab-Israeli confrontation. Several weeks ago, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell virtually acknowledged that deferral when he poignantly noted that Washington still nurtured the hope of fulfilling the role of "honest broker," in order to foster "negotiations," between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
"Honest broker"? Is this the role that is needed for the mighty United States at this critical juncture of Arab-Israeli relations? It is worth recalling that the very term "honest broker" was first used by Bismarck in 1878, when the German chancellor offered his good offices in mediating an international crisis in the Balkans. But the confrontation of 1878 was not between two miniature political entities. It was essentially between two mighty empires, Russia and Britain, each of which was formidable enough in its Great Power role to tolerate the role of an "honest broker."
...
Honest broker? Negotiations? It is the caucus of heavyweights, the Great Powers themselves, and most specifically the European Union, Russia and the United States, that at long last must cease functioning as mediators and adopt instead the role of principals. Their own statesmen now face the urgent and historic responsibility of signing off on a Geneva-style blueprint for the Holy Land that reflects not only the prestige and weight of their own best collective judgment, but the tacit approval (if opinion samplings are accurate) of the "silent majority" alike of Palestinians, Israelis — and American Jews.
Could such a blueprint be enforced under American and European diplomatic and economic ultimatums? The query should be reversed. Without Great Power diplomatic benediction and economic life support, would there ever have been a Palestine or an Israel? Without an assured continuum of American and European patronage, could either of these diminutive claimants to international recognition and goodwill sustain its political credibility or financial viability beyond even the near future? Not least of all without the force majeure of uncompromising and unrelenting Great Powers pressure, could an Ariel Sharon or Arafat face the political risks of accepting so much as a pragmatic accommodation for mutual quietude, let alone a formal, official and institutionalized peace treaty? Good luck.
Great Powers Hold Key to Mideast Peace: "February 16, 2004 | Great Powers Hold Key to Mideast Peace | EU, Russia and U.S. must be the prime movers.
By Howard M. Sachar, Howard M. Sachar, a modern history professor at George Washington University, is the author of "A History of Israel" (Alfred E. Knopf, second edition, 1995) and other volumes on the Middle East.
As the Bush administration seeks to resolve its entrapment in the Iraqi imbroglio, it has once again confined to the back burner its timorous and erratic effort to cope with a very different Middle Eastern crisis, the lethal and potentially far more destabilizing Arab-Israeli confrontation. Several weeks ago, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell virtually acknowledged that deferral when he poignantly noted that Washington still nurtured the hope of fulfilling the role of "honest broker," in order to foster "negotiations," between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
"Honest broker"? Is this the role that is needed for the mighty United States at this critical juncture of Arab-Israeli relations? It is worth recalling that the very term "honest broker" was first used by Bismarck in 1878, when the German chancellor offered his good offices in mediating an international crisis in the Balkans. But the confrontation of 1878 was not between two miniature political entities. It was essentially between two mighty empires, Russia and Britain, each of which was formidable enough in its Great Power role to tolerate the role of an "honest broker."
...
Honest broker? Negotiations? It is the caucus of heavyweights, the Great Powers themselves, and most specifically the European Union, Russia and the United States, that at long last must cease functioning as mediators and adopt instead the role of principals. Their own statesmen now face the urgent and historic responsibility of signing off on a Geneva-style blueprint for the Holy Land that reflects not only the prestige and weight of their own best collective judgment, but the tacit approval (if opinion samplings are accurate) of the "silent majority" alike of Palestinians, Israelis — and American Jews.
Could such a blueprint be enforced under American and European diplomatic and economic ultimatums? The query should be reversed. Without Great Power diplomatic benediction and economic life support, would there ever have been a Palestine or an Israel? Without an assured continuum of American and European patronage, could either of these diminutive claimants to international recognition and goodwill sustain its political credibility or financial viability beyond even the near future? Not least of all without the force majeure of uncompromising and unrelenting Great Powers pressure, could an Ariel Sharon or Arafat face the political risks of accepting so much as a pragmatic accommodation for mutual quietude, let alone a formal, official and institutionalized peace treaty? Good luck.
The New York Review of Books: Israel: The Threat from Within
The New York Review of Books: Israel: The Threat from Within: "Volume 51, Number 3 � February 26, 2004 | Feature | Israel: The Threat from Within | By Henry Siegman
A recent front-page New York Times article on Condoleezza Rice's role in shaping US foreign policy reported that in the spring of 2002, when violence was escalating between Israel and the Palestinians, President Bush asked the following of Dr. Rice: Beyond the question of whether the US is "pushing this party hard enough or that party hard enough," what is the "fundamental problem" that has defeated all previous peace initiatives and continues to stand in the way of a political agreement?[1]
Dr. Rice's answer was that the fundamental problem is Yasser Arafat— his refusal to act to stop terrorism and the absence of democracy and accountability in Palestinian political institutions. She concluded, therefore, that sidelining Yasser Arafat, democratizing Palestinian institutions, and bringing to the fore a new Palestinian leadership would improve the prospects of an Israeli–Palestinian peace agreement. This insight, according to Dr. Rice, countered the "prevailing wisdom" that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict was "just about land."
Of course, the conflict has never been just about land, but what has defeated every previous peace initiative —from the Oslo Accords to the Mitchell proposals to the Tenet guidelines to the current roadmap—is the struggle over land. And what has made land the central issue is Israel's unilateral expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, an expansion that continues relentlessly even as Prime Minister Sharon speaks of disengagement, withdrawal, painful concessions, and the dismantling of settlements.
Israel's expansion into the West Bank threatens to preclude a two-state solution, the only outcome that would resolve the conflict without the disastrous result of ending either Jewish or Palestinian national existence. The settler movement, which has enjoyed the patronage of Sharon from its inception in 1967, has made no secret that it is precisely the prevention of a Palestinian state in the West Bank that is its central goal.
While the physical space taken up by the inhabited areas of the Jewish settlements is not more than 3 percent of the West Bank, the municipal borders of these settlements and the infrastructure that supports them take up about 50 percent of the West Bank. ...
...
The political damage done by the settlements to the peace process has been ratcheted up several orders of magnitude by the separation fence. For Palestinians, the fence confirms Israel's intention to leave most of its settlements in place and to confine the Palestinian population within less than half of the West Bank (i.e., about 10 percent of pre-1948 Palestine). No amount of verbal acrobatics by Prime Minister Sharon will persuade any Palestinian that the purpose of this fence, in which Israel, despite its parlous economic situation, is investing billions of Israeli shekels, is anything other than the creation of South African– style bantustans to contain an emerging Arab majority.
...
In view of the American refusal to take a clear position on the illegality of Israel's unilateral confiscations of Palestinian land and on the emerging cantonization of the West Bank resulting from the path followed by the separation fence, the implication for Palestinians of Dr. Rice's comment about the need for reform that will lead to new Palestinian leadership is that the US expects this new leadership to be more accepting of Sharon's dismemberment of Palestinian territory. Ironically, this has enabled Arafat to discredit Palestinians who have opposed his corruption and authoritarianism by accusing them of collaboration with those who seek to defeat the Palestinian national enterprise.
...
Unfortunately, Secretary of State Powell's treatment of the Middle East peace process in his article in the January–February 2004 issue of Foreign Affairs can only serve to reinforce Palestinians' fears. The central point of his article is a rejection of the criticism that President Bush's foreign policy is "unilateralist by design" and biased toward preemptive action. Powell cites the Quartet—the US, Russia, the EU, and the UN—as well as the Middle East roadmap as evidence of President Bush's commitment to "partnership" with America's friends.[3] They are in fact poor examples of the Bush administration's respect for the views and expectations of its allies. The deep sense of frustration and anger felt by America's Quartet partners over President Bush's unwillingness to enforce the roadmap's provisions evenhandedly is an open secret.
...
... Instead, the expectation was that improvements in the Palestinian situation that would result from changes in Israeli policy—changes made possible by Abbas's rejection of violence and his commitment to reform—would give the new Palestinian prime minister the credibility he would need in order to prevail over Arafat. But these changes, advocated even by the IDF and Israel's intelligence services, were blocked by Sharon.
...
Many in Israel and in the West may believe Palestinian fears of their eventual confinement in a collection of bantustans to be irrational, or simply a ruse to discredit Sharon's government. But the plausibility of those fears could not have been confirmed more dramatically, or more shockingly, than by what Benny Morris, a leading Israeli historian of Israel's War of Independence, recently said in an astonishing interview in Ha'aretz on January 9, 2004.
According to Benny Morris, recently declassified documents in the archives of the IDF reveal that in 1947, Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders concluded that a Jewish state could not come into being in the territory assigned to Jews by the UN
without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians.... In the months of April–May 1948, units of the Haganah were given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, expel them and destroy the villages themselves.
...
What will make the tragedy doubly painful is that it will be happening at a time when changes in the Arab world and beyond (i.e. the Saudi initiative of 2002, the removal of Saddam Hussein, Syrian isolation, Libya's amazing opening to Israel and removal of its WMD program, and the opening of Iran's nuclear facilities to international inspection) are removing virtually every strategic security threat that for so long endangered Israel's existence. That existence is now threatened by the greed of the settlers and the political blindness of Israel's leaders.
The New York Review of Books: Israel: The Threat from Within: "Volume 51, Number 3 � February 26, 2004 | Feature | Israel: The Threat from Within | By Henry Siegman
A recent front-page New York Times article on Condoleezza Rice's role in shaping US foreign policy reported that in the spring of 2002, when violence was escalating between Israel and the Palestinians, President Bush asked the following of Dr. Rice: Beyond the question of whether the US is "pushing this party hard enough or that party hard enough," what is the "fundamental problem" that has defeated all previous peace initiatives and continues to stand in the way of a political agreement?[1]
Dr. Rice's answer was that the fundamental problem is Yasser Arafat— his refusal to act to stop terrorism and the absence of democracy and accountability in Palestinian political institutions. She concluded, therefore, that sidelining Yasser Arafat, democratizing Palestinian institutions, and bringing to the fore a new Palestinian leadership would improve the prospects of an Israeli–Palestinian peace agreement. This insight, according to Dr. Rice, countered the "prevailing wisdom" that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict was "just about land."
Of course, the conflict has never been just about land, but what has defeated every previous peace initiative —from the Oslo Accords to the Mitchell proposals to the Tenet guidelines to the current roadmap—is the struggle over land. And what has made land the central issue is Israel's unilateral expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, an expansion that continues relentlessly even as Prime Minister Sharon speaks of disengagement, withdrawal, painful concessions, and the dismantling of settlements.
Israel's expansion into the West Bank threatens to preclude a two-state solution, the only outcome that would resolve the conflict without the disastrous result of ending either Jewish or Palestinian national existence. The settler movement, which has enjoyed the patronage of Sharon from its inception in 1967, has made no secret that it is precisely the prevention of a Palestinian state in the West Bank that is its central goal.
While the physical space taken up by the inhabited areas of the Jewish settlements is not more than 3 percent of the West Bank, the municipal borders of these settlements and the infrastructure that supports them take up about 50 percent of the West Bank. ...
...
The political damage done by the settlements to the peace process has been ratcheted up several orders of magnitude by the separation fence. For Palestinians, the fence confirms Israel's intention to leave most of its settlements in place and to confine the Palestinian population within less than half of the West Bank (i.e., about 10 percent of pre-1948 Palestine). No amount of verbal acrobatics by Prime Minister Sharon will persuade any Palestinian that the purpose of this fence, in which Israel, despite its parlous economic situation, is investing billions of Israeli shekels, is anything other than the creation of South African– style bantustans to contain an emerging Arab majority.
...
In view of the American refusal to take a clear position on the illegality of Israel's unilateral confiscations of Palestinian land and on the emerging cantonization of the West Bank resulting from the path followed by the separation fence, the implication for Palestinians of Dr. Rice's comment about the need for reform that will lead to new Palestinian leadership is that the US expects this new leadership to be more accepting of Sharon's dismemberment of Palestinian territory. Ironically, this has enabled Arafat to discredit Palestinians who have opposed his corruption and authoritarianism by accusing them of collaboration with those who seek to defeat the Palestinian national enterprise.
...
Unfortunately, Secretary of State Powell's treatment of the Middle East peace process in his article in the January–February 2004 issue of Foreign Affairs can only serve to reinforce Palestinians' fears. The central point of his article is a rejection of the criticism that President Bush's foreign policy is "unilateralist by design" and biased toward preemptive action. Powell cites the Quartet—the US, Russia, the EU, and the UN—as well as the Middle East roadmap as evidence of President Bush's commitment to "partnership" with America's friends.[3] They are in fact poor examples of the Bush administration's respect for the views and expectations of its allies. The deep sense of frustration and anger felt by America's Quartet partners over President Bush's unwillingness to enforce the roadmap's provisions evenhandedly is an open secret.
...
... Instead, the expectation was that improvements in the Palestinian situation that would result from changes in Israeli policy—changes made possible by Abbas's rejection of violence and his commitment to reform—would give the new Palestinian prime minister the credibility he would need in order to prevail over Arafat. But these changes, advocated even by the IDF and Israel's intelligence services, were blocked by Sharon.
...
Many in Israel and in the West may believe Palestinian fears of their eventual confinement in a collection of bantustans to be irrational, or simply a ruse to discredit Sharon's government. But the plausibility of those fears could not have been confirmed more dramatically, or more shockingly, than by what Benny Morris, a leading Israeli historian of Israel's War of Independence, recently said in an astonishing interview in Ha'aretz on January 9, 2004.
According to Benny Morris, recently declassified documents in the archives of the IDF reveal that in 1947, Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders concluded that a Jewish state could not come into being in the territory assigned to Jews by the UN
without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians.... In the months of April–May 1948, units of the Haganah were given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, expel them and destroy the villages themselves.
...
What will make the tragedy doubly painful is that it will be happening at a time when changes in the Arab world and beyond (i.e. the Saudi initiative of 2002, the removal of Saddam Hussein, Syrian isolation, Libya's amazing opening to Israel and removal of its WMD program, and the opening of Iran's nuclear facilities to international inspection) are removing virtually every strategic security threat that for so long endangered Israel's existence. That existence is now threatened by the greed of the settlers and the political blindness of Israel's leaders.
A Jewish state, or a democracy? Zionist concludes that two states no longer are possible because the massive intrusion of Jewish settlers
A Jewish state, or a democracy?: "A Jewish state, or a democracy? | Frank Wright, Second of three articles | Published February 16, 2004WRIGHT0216
JERUSALEM -- Israel is embarking on a national struggle that goes to the very heart and soul of what kind of country it will be in the future.
Along the way, its often-chaotic political system, featuring as many as 15 parties, may be streamlined and fundamentally realigned.
The issue confronting the people is stated simply: Will Israel continue to proclaim itself a Jewish state, the home of the Jews, and be forced to give up its prized claim to being the only democracy in the Middle East? Or, in the interests of democracy, will Israel's Jews acknowledge they are becoming a minority in the land they control and agree to give up their prized claim to being the Jewish state, the home of the Jews?
Israel soon will no longer be able to claim it is both a democracy and a Jewish state. The two propositions are fast becoming mutually exclusive. Not an easy choice for a proud nation.
...
The latest official numbers are telling. Israel's population at the end of 2002 was 6.6 million. Of that, 5.1 million were Jews. The rest, 1.5 million, were almost all Arab citizens. Add about 3.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and you have 5 million Palestinians/Arabs. Little wonder that Jews are feeling the pressure.
All the trends are against them.
...
As prospects for a two-state solution dwindle, Palestinians not surprisingly talk more about a single state in which they would have equal citizenship with Jews. The Palestinians obviously have a certain moral case. After 36 years of military occupation, they ought to be entitled to something. But it is not their choice.
In Israel, where the moral reckoning will be made, discussion grows. "There is more talk of a one-state solution, of one man, one vote," according to Hirsh Goodman, a noted Israeli journalist and now a fellow at the prestigious Jaffee Center for Strategic Planning.
...
Even some of Israel's hardest-core Zionists are changing their minds. Among them is author Daniel Gavron, who created a stir with his new book, "The Other Side of Despair: Jews and Arabs in the Promised Land."
He concludes that two states no longer are possible because the massive intrusion of Jewish settlers onto Palestinian land makes separation impossible. Thus, "We are left with only one alternative: Israeli-Palestinian coexistence in one nation."
Better to do it now, Gavron says, while Jews are still in charge and can write new rules of governance that Palestinians will consider fair when they take over -- and thus be less inclined to seek revenge. ...
A Jewish state, or a democracy?: "A Jewish state, or a democracy? | Frank Wright, Second of three articles | Published February 16, 2004WRIGHT0216
JERUSALEM -- Israel is embarking on a national struggle that goes to the very heart and soul of what kind of country it will be in the future.
Along the way, its often-chaotic political system, featuring as many as 15 parties, may be streamlined and fundamentally realigned.
The issue confronting the people is stated simply: Will Israel continue to proclaim itself a Jewish state, the home of the Jews, and be forced to give up its prized claim to being the only democracy in the Middle East? Or, in the interests of democracy, will Israel's Jews acknowledge they are becoming a minority in the land they control and agree to give up their prized claim to being the Jewish state, the home of the Jews?
Israel soon will no longer be able to claim it is both a democracy and a Jewish state. The two propositions are fast becoming mutually exclusive. Not an easy choice for a proud nation.
...
The latest official numbers are telling. Israel's population at the end of 2002 was 6.6 million. Of that, 5.1 million were Jews. The rest, 1.5 million, were almost all Arab citizens. Add about 3.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and you have 5 million Palestinians/Arabs. Little wonder that Jews are feeling the pressure.
All the trends are against them.
...
As prospects for a two-state solution dwindle, Palestinians not surprisingly talk more about a single state in which they would have equal citizenship with Jews. The Palestinians obviously have a certain moral case. After 36 years of military occupation, they ought to be entitled to something. But it is not their choice.
In Israel, where the moral reckoning will be made, discussion grows. "There is more talk of a one-state solution, of one man, one vote," according to Hirsh Goodman, a noted Israeli journalist and now a fellow at the prestigious Jaffee Center for Strategic Planning.
...
Even some of Israel's hardest-core Zionists are changing their minds. Among them is author Daniel Gavron, who created a stir with his new book, "The Other Side of Despair: Jews and Arabs in the Promised Land."
He concludes that two states no longer are possible because the massive intrusion of Jewish settlers onto Palestinian land makes separation impossible. Thus, "We are left with only one alternative: Israeli-Palestinian coexistence in one nation."
Better to do it now, Gavron says, while Jews are still in charge and can write new rules of governance that Palestinians will consider fair when they take over -- and thus be less inclined to seek revenge. ...
Group Blames Israel in Palestinian Exodus
Yahoo! News - Group Blames Israel in Palestinian Exodus: "Mon Feb 16, 1:34 PM ET | By PETER ENAV, Associated Press Writer
JERUSALEM - Israeli policies have led to an exodus of Palestinians out of parts of the West Bank city of Hebron, an official of an international monitoring group based in the city said Monday.
Roar Sorensen of the Temporary International Presence in Hebron, said difficult conditions in the area of the city under Israeli control had caused many Palestinians to leave, but he did not have exact figures.
B'tselem, an Israeli group that specializes in Palestinian human rights issues, estimates as many as 15,000 of its 35,000 Palestinian residents have left the Israeli-controlled zone. Altogether, about 130,000 Palestinians live in Hebron.
In a lengthy response, the Israeli military insisted soldiers take pains not to harm civilians but did not address the claim that many Palestinians have left parts of Hebron under Israeli control.
The Palestinian governor of the Hebron area, Arif Jaabari, said many Palestinians have fled because of Israeli curfews and other harsh security measures. "People always feel afraid," he said. "Anyone who has an opportunity to leave the area will leave."
The monitoring group was established with Israeli and Palestinian consent after an Israeli settler killed 29 Palestinians at a Hebron holy site in 1994. It has 71 unarmed observers from Norway, Italy, Denmark, Turkey and Switzerland who seek to minimize friction between Israelis and Palestinians in the city.
The Jewish enclave, known as "H-2" was left under Israeli control as part of a 1997 agreement with the Palestinian Authority (news - web sites). It is home to about 500 Jewish settlers, considered among the most militant in the West Bank.
"Palestinians are moving out because it is difficult to live in H-2," Sorensen said. "It's hard to do business, hard to move around, and the area is extremely tense."
In its written response, the military admitted that its operations against militants "have caused unpleasantness and have harmed the civilian population," but it blamed the militant groups for operating in civilian areas. ...
Yahoo! News - Group Blames Israel in Palestinian Exodus: "Mon Feb 16, 1:34 PM ET | By PETER ENAV, Associated Press Writer
JERUSALEM - Israeli policies have led to an exodus of Palestinians out of parts of the West Bank city of Hebron, an official of an international monitoring group based in the city said Monday.
Roar Sorensen of the Temporary International Presence in Hebron, said difficult conditions in the area of the city under Israeli control had caused many Palestinians to leave, but he did not have exact figures.
B'tselem, an Israeli group that specializes in Palestinian human rights issues, estimates as many as 15,000 of its 35,000 Palestinian residents have left the Israeli-controlled zone. Altogether, about 130,000 Palestinians live in Hebron.
In a lengthy response, the Israeli military insisted soldiers take pains not to harm civilians but did not address the claim that many Palestinians have left parts of Hebron under Israeli control.
The Palestinian governor of the Hebron area, Arif Jaabari, said many Palestinians have fled because of Israeli curfews and other harsh security measures. "People always feel afraid," he said. "Anyone who has an opportunity to leave the area will leave."
The monitoring group was established with Israeli and Palestinian consent after an Israeli settler killed 29 Palestinians at a Hebron holy site in 1994. It has 71 unarmed observers from Norway, Italy, Denmark, Turkey and Switzerland who seek to minimize friction between Israelis and Palestinians in the city.
The Jewish enclave, known as "H-2" was left under Israeli control as part of a 1997 agreement with the Palestinian Authority (news - web sites). It is home to about 500 Jewish settlers, considered among the most militant in the West Bank.
"Palestinians are moving out because it is difficult to live in H-2," Sorensen said. "It's hard to do business, hard to move around, and the area is extremely tense."
In its written response, the military admitted that its operations against militants "have caused unpleasantness and have harmed the civilian population," but it blamed the militant groups for operating in civilian areas. ...
Saudi government calls on US to stop Israel's 'unabashed aggression'
Yahoo! News - Saudi government calls on US to stop Israel's 'unabashed aggression': "Mon Feb 16, 1:32 PM ETAdd Mideast - AFP to My Yahoo!
RIYADH (AFP) - Saudi Arabia called on the United States to help put a stop to Israel's 'unabashed aggression', which it said was 'killing any chance for peace' in the Middle East, it was reported.
"In light of Israel's unabashed aggression... we call on the international community and especially the United States to interfere immediately and firmly to confront these unilateral policies and actions that are aimed at killing any chance for peace," the Saudi Press Agency quoted Information Minister Fuad al-Farsi saying in a statement following a cabinet meeting chaired by Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz.
The Saudi government condemned "Israel's killing of innocent children, women and the elderly, its disregard for all international conventions and its determination to build a racist separation wall."
Israel is building a controversial West Bank separation barrier, which it says is necessary to keep out Palestinian suicide bombers, but Palestinians argue it is an attempt to pre-empt the borders of their promised future state. ...
Yahoo! News - Saudi government calls on US to stop Israel's 'unabashed aggression': "Mon Feb 16, 1:32 PM ETAdd Mideast - AFP to My Yahoo!
RIYADH (AFP) - Saudi Arabia called on the United States to help put a stop to Israel's 'unabashed aggression', which it said was 'killing any chance for peace' in the Middle East, it was reported.
"In light of Israel's unabashed aggression... we call on the international community and especially the United States to interfere immediately and firmly to confront these unilateral policies and actions that are aimed at killing any chance for peace," the Saudi Press Agency quoted Information Minister Fuad al-Farsi saying in a statement following a cabinet meeting chaired by Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz.
The Saudi government condemned "Israel's killing of innocent children, women and the elderly, its disregard for all international conventions and its determination to build a racist separation wall."
Israel is building a controversial West Bank separation barrier, which it says is necessary to keep out Palestinian suicide bombers, but Palestinians argue it is an attempt to pre-empt the borders of their promised future state. ...
US says Iraqis, not foreign fighters, are behind attacks
News: "US says Iraqis, not foreign fighters, are behind attacks | By Justin Huggler in Baghdad | 17 February 2004
A raid on an Iraqi police station and army base last week, in which at least 25 people died, appears to have been carried out by Iraqi guerrillas and not foreign militants, as previously reported, US occupation forces said yesterday. The admission is an indication of how powerful the Iraqi resistance has become: it can now take on American-trained Iraqi security forces head on and defeat them. The raid, in which insurgents stormed the police station, while simultaneously keeping Iraqi soldiers in a nearby base pinned down, was the most sophisticated attack yet, and has left the US occupation badly shaken.
Brigadier-General Mark Kimmitt, the US army's deputy chief of operations in Iraq, said it appeared that the insurgents killed or captured in the attack were all Iraqi citizens, but he added that this was not a final conclusion. A number of Iraqis are now being questioned in connection with the attacks.
The finding overshadowed recent efforts by the US to pin the blame for a series of suicide bombings and other attacks on foreign Islamic militants linked to al-Qa'ida. Last week the US released what it said was a letter from a leading militant in Iraq to al-Qa'ida leaders, asking for help in provoking a civil war between Sunni and Shia Muslims in Iraq. If yesterday's report is true, the US has enough to worry about from Iraq's home-grown resistance.
The military's conclusion could also embarrass Paul Bremer, the American occupation administrator, who claimed on Sunday that foreign militants had been involved in the attacks....
News: "US says Iraqis, not foreign fighters, are behind attacks | By Justin Huggler in Baghdad | 17 February 2004
A raid on an Iraqi police station and army base last week, in which at least 25 people died, appears to have been carried out by Iraqi guerrillas and not foreign militants, as previously reported, US occupation forces said yesterday. The admission is an indication of how powerful the Iraqi resistance has become: it can now take on American-trained Iraqi security forces head on and defeat them. The raid, in which insurgents stormed the police station, while simultaneously keeping Iraqi soldiers in a nearby base pinned down, was the most sophisticated attack yet, and has left the US occupation badly shaken.
Brigadier-General Mark Kimmitt, the US army's deputy chief of operations in Iraq, said it appeared that the insurgents killed or captured in the attack were all Iraqi citizens, but he added that this was not a final conclusion. A number of Iraqis are now being questioned in connection with the attacks.
The finding overshadowed recent efforts by the US to pin the blame for a series of suicide bombings and other attacks on foreign Islamic militants linked to al-Qa'ida. Last week the US released what it said was a letter from a leading militant in Iraq to al-Qa'ida leaders, asking for help in provoking a civil war between Sunni and Shia Muslims in Iraq. If yesterday's report is true, the US has enough to worry about from Iraq's home-grown resistance.
The military's conclusion could also embarrass Paul Bremer, the American occupation administrator, who claimed on Sunday that foreign militants had been involved in the attacks....
Monday, February 16, 2004
Group Blames Israel in Palestinian Exodus: 15,000 of 35,000 Palestinians have fled because of Israeli curfews and other harsh security measures
Excite News: "Group Blames Israel in Palestinian Exodus | Feb 16, 1:34 PM (ET) | By PETER ENAV
JERUSALEM (AP) - Israeli policies have led to an exodus of Palestinians out of parts of the West Bank city of Hebron, an official of an international monitoring group based in the city said Monday.
Roar Sorensen of the Temporary International Presence in Hebron, said difficult conditions in the area of the city under Israeli control had caused many Palestinians to leave, but he did not have exact figures.
B'tselem, an Israeli group that specializes in Palestinian human rights issues, estimates as many as 15,000 of its 35,000 Palestinian residents have left the Israeli-controlled zone. Altogether, about 130,000 Palestinians live in Hebron.
In a lengthy response, the Israeli military insisted soldiers take pains not to harm civilians but did not address the claim that many Palestinians have left parts of Hebron under Israeli control.
The Palestinian governor of the Hebron area, Arif Jaabari, said many Palestinians have fled because of Israeli curfews and other harsh security measures. "People always feel afraid," he said. "Anyone who has an opportunity to leave the area will leave."
The monitoring group was established with Israeli and Palestinian consent after an Israeli settler killed 29 Palestinians at a Hebron holy site in 1994. It has 71 unarmed observers from Norway, Italy, Denmark, Turkey and Switzerland who seek to minimize friction between Israelis and Palestinians in the city.
The Jewish enclave, known as "H-2" was left under Israeli control as part of a 1997 agreement with the Palestinian Authority. It is home to about 500 Jewish settlers, considered among the most militant in the West Bank.
"Palestinians are moving out because it is difficult to live in H-2," Sorensen said. "It's hard to do business, hard to move around, and the area is extremely tense." ...
Excite News: "Group Blames Israel in Palestinian Exodus | Feb 16, 1:34 PM (ET) | By PETER ENAV
JERUSALEM (AP) - Israeli policies have led to an exodus of Palestinians out of parts of the West Bank city of Hebron, an official of an international monitoring group based in the city said Monday.
Roar Sorensen of the Temporary International Presence in Hebron, said difficult conditions in the area of the city under Israeli control had caused many Palestinians to leave, but he did not have exact figures.
B'tselem, an Israeli group that specializes in Palestinian human rights issues, estimates as many as 15,000 of its 35,000 Palestinian residents have left the Israeli-controlled zone. Altogether, about 130,000 Palestinians live in Hebron.
In a lengthy response, the Israeli military insisted soldiers take pains not to harm civilians but did not address the claim that many Palestinians have left parts of Hebron under Israeli control.
The Palestinian governor of the Hebron area, Arif Jaabari, said many Palestinians have fled because of Israeli curfews and other harsh security measures. "People always feel afraid," he said. "Anyone who has an opportunity to leave the area will leave."
The monitoring group was established with Israeli and Palestinian consent after an Israeli settler killed 29 Palestinians at a Hebron holy site in 1994. It has 71 unarmed observers from Norway, Italy, Denmark, Turkey and Switzerland who seek to minimize friction between Israelis and Palestinians in the city.
The Jewish enclave, known as "H-2" was left under Israeli control as part of a 1997 agreement with the Palestinian Authority. It is home to about 500 Jewish settlers, considered among the most militant in the West Bank.
"Palestinians are moving out because it is difficult to live in H-2," Sorensen said. "It's hard to do business, hard to move around, and the area is extremely tense." ...
Joint British and American spying operation at the United Nations scuppered a last-ditch initiative to avert the invasion of Iraq
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | British spy op wrecked peace move: "Martin Bright, Peter Beaumont and Jo Tuckman in Mexico | Sunday February 15, 2004 | The Observer
A joint British and American spying operation at the United Nations scuppered a last-ditch initiative to avert the invasion of Iraq, The Observer can reveal.
Senior UN diplomats from Mexico and Chile provided new evidence last week that their missions were spied on, in direct contravention of international law.
The former Mexican ambassador to the UN, Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, told The Observer that US officials intervened last March, just days before the war against Saddam was launched, to halt secret negotiations for a compromise resolution to give weapons inspectors more time to complete their work.
Aguilar Zinser claimed that the intervention could only have come as a result of surveillance of a closed diplomatic meeting where the compromise was being hammered out. He said it was clear the Americans knew about the confidential discussions in advance. 'When they [the US] found out, they said, 'You should know that we don't like the idea and we don't like you to promote it.''
The revelations follow claims by Chile's former ambassador to the UN, Juan Valdes, that he found hard evidence of bugging at his mission in New York last March. The new claims emerged as The Observer has discovered that Government officials seriously considered dropping the prosecution against Katharine Gun, the translator at the GCHQ surveillance centre who first disclosed details of the espionage operation last March."
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | British spy op wrecked peace move: "Martin Bright, Peter Beaumont and Jo Tuckman in Mexico | Sunday February 15, 2004 | The Observer
A joint British and American spying operation at the United Nations scuppered a last-ditch initiative to avert the invasion of Iraq, The Observer can reveal.
Senior UN diplomats from Mexico and Chile provided new evidence last week that their missions were spied on, in direct contravention of international law.
The former Mexican ambassador to the UN, Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, told The Observer that US officials intervened last March, just days before the war against Saddam was launched, to halt secret negotiations for a compromise resolution to give weapons inspectors more time to complete their work.
Aguilar Zinser claimed that the intervention could only have come as a result of surveillance of a closed diplomatic meeting where the compromise was being hammered out. He said it was clear the Americans knew about the confidential discussions in advance. 'When they [the US] found out, they said, 'You should know that we don't like the idea and we don't like you to promote it.''
The revelations follow claims by Chile's former ambassador to the UN, Juan Valdes, that he found hard evidence of bugging at his mission in New York last March. The new claims emerged as The Observer has discovered that Government officials seriously considered dropping the prosecution against Katharine Gun, the translator at the GCHQ surveillance centre who first disclosed details of the espionage operation last March."
Sunday, February 15, 2004
Falluja: Iraqi assault: 23 Iraqi policemen dead (US army accused of standing by and watching the attacks)
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | 23 killed as Iraqi rebels overrun police station: "Patrick Graham in Falluja | Sunday February 15, 2004 | The Observer
Ask Hussein Saleh what happened yesterday morning and he hoarsely describes standing outside his police station when it was overrun by attackers who were firing rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns.
Ask him about the US army and he turns his head and screams: 'Shit on the Americans, shit on them.'
The 23-year-old Iraqi policeman was shot in the leg, fracturing the bone, in one of the largest and best-organised attacks of its kind since the end of the war last April.
The three other policemen standing beside him were shot dead, he says, when dozens of attackers overran Falluja's main police station and laid siege to a heavily guarded fort of the Iraqi Civil Defence Corps (ICDC) nearby.
The bold daylight assault on an Iraqi police station and a security compound met with little resistance as guerrillas shouting 'God is great' gunned down policemen and freed dozens of prisoners in a battle that killed 23 people. Most of the dead were policemen.
The same security compound was attacked two days earlier by gunmen just as the senior US commander in the Middle East, General John Abizaid, was visiting the site. Abizaid escaped unharmed. ...
...
... But it is the inactivity of the US army, which is accused of standing by and watching the attacks, that has caused fury.
'The American army watched but did not help,' said Qais Jameel, a wounded policeman. 'I don't know why. Americans don't like the people in Falluja.' ...
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | 23 killed as Iraqi rebels overrun police station: "Patrick Graham in Falluja | Sunday February 15, 2004 | The Observer
Ask Hussein Saleh what happened yesterday morning and he hoarsely describes standing outside his police station when it was overrun by attackers who were firing rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns.
Ask him about the US army and he turns his head and screams: 'Shit on the Americans, shit on them.'
The 23-year-old Iraqi policeman was shot in the leg, fracturing the bone, in one of the largest and best-organised attacks of its kind since the end of the war last April.
The three other policemen standing beside him were shot dead, he says, when dozens of attackers overran Falluja's main police station and laid siege to a heavily guarded fort of the Iraqi Civil Defence Corps (ICDC) nearby.
The bold daylight assault on an Iraqi police station and a security compound met with little resistance as guerrillas shouting 'God is great' gunned down policemen and freed dozens of prisoners in a battle that killed 23 people. Most of the dead were policemen.
The same security compound was attacked two days earlier by gunmen just as the senior US commander in the Middle East, General John Abizaid, was visiting the site. Abizaid escaped unharmed. ...
...
... But it is the inactivity of the US army, which is accused of standing by and watching the attacks, that has caused fury.
'The American army watched but did not help,' said Qais Jameel, a wounded policeman. 'I don't know why. Americans don't like the people in Falluja.' ...
Thursday, February 12, 2004
US image abroad will 'take years' to repair
Terrorism & Security | csmonitor.com: "US image abroad will 'take years' to repair | Experts tell Congress 'bottom has fallen out' for US support abroad. | By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com
In testimony last week to the House Appropriations subcommittee in Washington, The New York Times reports that Margaret Tutwiler, in her first public appearance as the State Department official in charge of public diplomacy, acknowledged that America's standing abroad had deteriorated to such an extent that 'it will take us many years of hard, focused work' to restore it.
'Unfortunately, our country has a problem in far too many parts of the world,' she said, 'a problem we have regrettably gotten into over many years through both Democrat and Republican administrations, and a problem that does not lend itself to a quick fix or a single solution or a simple plan.'
Ms. Tutwiler said she agreed with the main findings of an independent panel that American outreach to the rest of the world has suffered from budget cuts and neglect since the end of the cold war. The findings mentioned by Tutwiler were the result of a bipartisan panel headed by former US ambassador to Israel and Syria, Edward Djerejian. Mr. Djerejian, speaking after Tutwiler, told the committee that the 'bottom had fallen out' of support for the US abroad. The sub-committee's Republican chairman, Rep. Frank Wolf of Virginia, who had asked for the report (which was released last October and entitled 'Changing Minds, Winning Hearts' to be done, said the administration's overall response to it was 'lackluster' and 'disappointing.'
...
Writing in the Asia Times, Ehsan Ahrari, an Alexandria, Virginia, independent strategic analyst, writes that slick marketing messages will not change America's image abroad. Changing important policies about the region, he says, would help more. And Frad Bishara, writing in The Daily Trojan, the student newspaper of the University of Southern California (a university with a large number of Arab-American and Muslim American students), says that it's silly to think that anti-American sentiment in the Arab world stems from anti-American broadcasts. Arabs, he continues are already very discriminating consumers of media with many choices.
What is more naïve, however, is to think that Arabs don't already have access to pro-American broadcasts. Reportedly, anyone with a satellite dish will be able to view the channel. But let us consider what else those in the region with a satellite dish are able to view: CNN, BBC, MTV, VH1, the Paramount Channel, the Orbit news and entertainment network, Sky News, European programming. The list goes on and on. When presented with more subtle purveyors of pro-Americanism, it makes no sense that the Arabs would venture to watch Al Hurra.
...
Terrorism & Security | csmonitor.com: "US image abroad will 'take years' to repair | Experts tell Congress 'bottom has fallen out' for US support abroad. | By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com
In testimony last week to the House Appropriations subcommittee in Washington, The New York Times reports that Margaret Tutwiler, in her first public appearance as the State Department official in charge of public diplomacy, acknowledged that America's standing abroad had deteriorated to such an extent that 'it will take us many years of hard, focused work' to restore it.
'Unfortunately, our country has a problem in far too many parts of the world,' she said, 'a problem we have regrettably gotten into over many years through both Democrat and Republican administrations, and a problem that does not lend itself to a quick fix or a single solution or a simple plan.'
Ms. Tutwiler said she agreed with the main findings of an independent panel that American outreach to the rest of the world has suffered from budget cuts and neglect since the end of the cold war. The findings mentioned by Tutwiler were the result of a bipartisan panel headed by former US ambassador to Israel and Syria, Edward Djerejian. Mr. Djerejian, speaking after Tutwiler, told the committee that the 'bottom had fallen out' of support for the US abroad. The sub-committee's Republican chairman, Rep. Frank Wolf of Virginia, who had asked for the report (which was released last October and entitled 'Changing Minds, Winning Hearts' to be done, said the administration's overall response to it was 'lackluster' and 'disappointing.'
...
Writing in the Asia Times, Ehsan Ahrari, an Alexandria, Virginia, independent strategic analyst, writes that slick marketing messages will not change America's image abroad. Changing important policies about the region, he says, would help more. And Frad Bishara, writing in The Daily Trojan, the student newspaper of the University of Southern California (a university with a large number of Arab-American and Muslim American students), says that it's silly to think that anti-American sentiment in the Arab world stems from anti-American broadcasts. Arabs, he continues are already very discriminating consumers of media with many choices.
What is more naïve, however, is to think that Arabs don't already have access to pro-American broadcasts. Reportedly, anyone with a satellite dish will be able to view the channel. But let us consider what else those in the region with a satellite dish are able to view: CNN, BBC, MTV, VH1, the Paramount Channel, the Orbit news and entertainment network, Sky News, European programming. The list goes on and on. When presented with more subtle purveyors of pro-Americanism, it makes no sense that the Arabs would venture to watch Al Hurra.
...
Is a two-state solution now beyond reach? if Mr Sharon goes ahead, what will be left ... dysfunctional bantustan or rump homeland
Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Vanishing solutions: "Vanishing solutions | Leader | Thursday February 12, 2004 | The Guardian
Recent developments on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide raise a fundamental question that the international community is reluctant to confront: is a two-state solution now beyond reach?
... Nearly 60 years on, a two-state solution remains, with variations, the basis of the current Middle East "road map" - the latest of many international peace plans - and of the unofficial Geneva Accord proposals. The UN, the EU, Russia and nearly all Arab states now back such an outcome. George Bush became the first US president publicly to endorse the creation of a Palestinian state. Officially, a two-state settlement is still the aim of both Ariel Sharon's government and Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority. Yet despite this consensus, such an agreed, negotiated solution seems to be slipping further and further away. Always elusive, it is now in danger of growing illusory.
...
... If there are no negotiations, no real prospect of a two-state solution, the PA surely faces collapse. And if Mr Sharon goes ahead, what will be left, comprising Gaza and perhaps 50% of the West Bank, will not amount to a viable state. The dream of independent Palestine may be replaced by a dysfunctional bantustan or rump homeland, by penned-in, impoverished cantons of misery, by a slum fiefdom run by Islamist bombers bent on unending war.
These are not outcomes for which any sane person would wish. But they are the destinations towards which current developments lead. Effective international intervention, both diplomatic and possibly physical - perhaps in the initial form of an international protectorate in Gaza - is becoming a matter of grave urgency. Without it, the old hope of secure, peaceful coexistence may not survive.
Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Vanishing solutions: "Vanishing solutions | Leader | Thursday February 12, 2004 | The Guardian
Recent developments on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide raise a fundamental question that the international community is reluctant to confront: is a two-state solution now beyond reach?
... Nearly 60 years on, a two-state solution remains, with variations, the basis of the current Middle East "road map" - the latest of many international peace plans - and of the unofficial Geneva Accord proposals. The UN, the EU, Russia and nearly all Arab states now back such an outcome. George Bush became the first US president publicly to endorse the creation of a Palestinian state. Officially, a two-state settlement is still the aim of both Ariel Sharon's government and Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority. Yet despite this consensus, such an agreed, negotiated solution seems to be slipping further and further away. Always elusive, it is now in danger of growing illusory.
...
... If there are no negotiations, no real prospect of a two-state solution, the PA surely faces collapse. And if Mr Sharon goes ahead, what will be left, comprising Gaza and perhaps 50% of the West Bank, will not amount to a viable state. The dream of independent Palestine may be replaced by a dysfunctional bantustan or rump homeland, by penned-in, impoverished cantons of misery, by a slum fiefdom run by Islamist bombers bent on unending war.
These are not outcomes for which any sane person would wish. But they are the destinations towards which current developments lead. Effective international intervention, both diplomatic and possibly physical - perhaps in the initial form of an international protectorate in Gaza - is becoming a matter of grave urgency. Without it, the old hope of secure, peaceful coexistence may not survive.
Israel's move is merely a ploy: Sharon will call upon his American Jewish and Christian Zionist supporters help him persuade Bush: US will be stuck
Israel's move is merely a ploy: "Israel's move is merely a ploy | By Norton Mezvinsky | Feb 12, 2004
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is fooling no one into believing that by dismantling a few settlements he's actually working toward peace.
He knows that the Jewish settlements in Gaza have little strategic value for Israel and yet are costly to maintain. ...
Gaza is one thing. The West Bank is another. ...
... But he may move some of those settlers to the West Bank instead. ...
Sharon is no doubt confident that he can convince President Bush, especially in a tight election year, to finance this evacuation without pressuring the Israeli government to halt its settlement expansion and change the route of its wall in the West Bank. Despite verbally protesting at times, the Bush administration in the recent past consistently has supported Sharon and his actions. Both Sharon and Bush simply will revert to blaming everything on the Palestinians.
No doubt, Sharon will call upon his American Jewish and Christian Zionist supporters to help him persuade Bush. And in addition to retaining Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank, Sharon will devise ways to keep control over Gaza.
Sharon now will be linked inextricably with Bush and will intensify Palestinian antagonism. And the United States will be stuck with the results
Israel's move is merely a ploy: "Israel's move is merely a ploy | By Norton Mezvinsky | Feb 12, 2004
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is fooling no one into believing that by dismantling a few settlements he's actually working toward peace.
He knows that the Jewish settlements in Gaza have little strategic value for Israel and yet are costly to maintain. ...
Gaza is one thing. The West Bank is another. ...
... But he may move some of those settlers to the West Bank instead. ...
Sharon is no doubt confident that he can convince President Bush, especially in a tight election year, to finance this evacuation without pressuring the Israeli government to halt its settlement expansion and change the route of its wall in the West Bank. Despite verbally protesting at times, the Bush administration in the recent past consistently has supported Sharon and his actions. Both Sharon and Bush simply will revert to blaming everything on the Palestinians.
No doubt, Sharon will call upon his American Jewish and Christian Zionist supporters to help him persuade Bush. And in addition to retaining Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank, Sharon will devise ways to keep control over Gaza.
Sharon now will be linked inextricably with Bush and will intensify Palestinian antagonism. And the United States will be stuck with the results
Palestinian security chief accuses Sharon of seeking war: powerless to rein in "militias" as long as Israel raids the Palestinian territories
Yahoo! News - Palestinian security chief accuses Sharon of seeking war: "Thu Feb 12,10:19 AM ETAdd Mideast - AFP to My Yahoo!
RAMALLAH, West Bank (AFP) - Palestinian security chief Jibril Rajub accused Israel of trying to provoke a bloody reaction from militant groups, a day after Israeli troops killed 15 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip (news - web sites).
Rajub also said he was powerless to rein in "militias" as long as Israel raids the Palestinian territories.
"He who invaded Gaza and killed those innocent peole is trying to attract a reaction inside against Israelis in order to justify a unilateral war against the Palestinians," Rajub told AFP in an interview at his West Bank offices.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel "Sharon and his government are inciting Palestinians to react," he said Thursday.
The radical Hamas and Islamic Jihad movements have vowed revenge after six of their members were among the 15 people killed Wednesday.
Another Hamas activist was shot dead in the Ramallah region on Thursday.
Rajub, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat (news - web sites)'s national security advisor, described the security situation in the occupied territories as "a mess" as he acknowledged the presence of gunmen in Gaza and in other places on the West Bank.
"If we have militias, if we have illegal weapons I think it is the responsibility of the Palestinian Authority (news - web sites) to deal with these things," he said.
"But we can't do anything as long as the Israelis are attacking daily and killing." ...
Yahoo! News - Palestinian security chief accuses Sharon of seeking war: "Thu Feb 12,10:19 AM ETAdd Mideast - AFP to My Yahoo!
RAMALLAH, West Bank (AFP) - Palestinian security chief Jibril Rajub accused Israel of trying to provoke a bloody reaction from militant groups, a day after Israeli troops killed 15 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip (news - web sites).
Rajub also said he was powerless to rein in "militias" as long as Israel raids the Palestinian territories.
"He who invaded Gaza and killed those innocent peole is trying to attract a reaction inside against Israelis in order to justify a unilateral war against the Palestinians," Rajub told AFP in an interview at his West Bank offices.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel "Sharon and his government are inciting Palestinians to react," he said Thursday.
The radical Hamas and Islamic Jihad movements have vowed revenge after six of their members were among the 15 people killed Wednesday.
Another Hamas activist was shot dead in the Ramallah region on Thursday.
Rajub, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat (news - web sites)'s national security advisor, described the security situation in the occupied territories as "a mess" as he acknowledged the presence of gunmen in Gaza and in other places on the West Bank.
"If we have militias, if we have illegal weapons I think it is the responsibility of the Palestinian Authority (news - web sites) to deal with these things," he said.
"But we can't do anything as long as the Israelis are attacking daily and killing." ...
Israel Hems In a Sacred City (washingtonpost.com)
Israel Hems In a Sacred City (washingtonpost.com): "Encircling of Jerusalem Complicates Prospects for Peace | By John Ward Anderson | Washington Post Foreign Service | Tuesday, February 10, 2004; Page A01
JERUSALEM -- Israel is close to finishing a decades-long effort to surround Jerusalem with Jewish settlements, walls, fences and roads that will severely restrict Palestinian access to the city and could reduce the chance of its becoming the capital of a Palestinian state, according to documents, maps and interviews with Israelis, Palestinians and foreign diplomats.
The status of Jerusalem -- a city sacred to Jews, Muslims and Christians -- is one of the most divisive issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Both sides claim Jerusalem as their religious and political capital, but most countries do not officially recognize it as such, and the United States and others keep their embassies in Tel Aviv. Under past Israeli-Palestinian accords, neither side is supposed to take any action to change the city's status, which is to be resolved through negotiation.
Projects to cut off access to Jerusalem to Palestinians living in the West Bank, which borders the city on three sides, have accelerated since the start of the current Palestinian uprising in September 2000. Today, Jewish settlements outside the city have been integrated with the urban core, redrawing the map of Jerusalem and complicating any negotiations over its future and the future of West Bank settlements, Israeli and Palestinian experts say.
The web of projects includes 13 settlements to the north of the city that are being linked with each other and with Jerusalem by access roads that act as physical barriers to Palestinian communities. To the east, Israel has approved expansion of the West Bank's largest settlement, Maleh Adumim, to absorb a swath of Palestinian land between the community and East Jerusalem. To the south, access and bypass roads and Jewish settlements have carved Palestinian lands into a checkerboard.
At the same time, a new barrier combining trenches, walls, electronic sensors and steel fences is being built around Jerusalem. The project, part of a large fence that is designed to cordon off the West Bank, has split some Palestinian neighborhoods and separated many Palestinians from their schools, jobs, families and lands. ...
Israel Hems In a Sacred City (washingtonpost.com): "Encircling of Jerusalem Complicates Prospects for Peace | By John Ward Anderson | Washington Post Foreign Service | Tuesday, February 10, 2004; Page A01
JERUSALEM -- Israel is close to finishing a decades-long effort to surround Jerusalem with Jewish settlements, walls, fences and roads that will severely restrict Palestinian access to the city and could reduce the chance of its becoming the capital of a Palestinian state, according to documents, maps and interviews with Israelis, Palestinians and foreign diplomats.
The status of Jerusalem -- a city sacred to Jews, Muslims and Christians -- is one of the most divisive issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Both sides claim Jerusalem as their religious and political capital, but most countries do not officially recognize it as such, and the United States and others keep their embassies in Tel Aviv. Under past Israeli-Palestinian accords, neither side is supposed to take any action to change the city's status, which is to be resolved through negotiation.
Projects to cut off access to Jerusalem to Palestinians living in the West Bank, which borders the city on three sides, have accelerated since the start of the current Palestinian uprising in September 2000. Today, Jewish settlements outside the city have been integrated with the urban core, redrawing the map of Jerusalem and complicating any negotiations over its future and the future of West Bank settlements, Israeli and Palestinian experts say.
The web of projects includes 13 settlements to the north of the city that are being linked with each other and with Jerusalem by access roads that act as physical barriers to Palestinian communities. To the east, Israel has approved expansion of the West Bank's largest settlement, Maleh Adumim, to absorb a swath of Palestinian land between the community and East Jerusalem. To the south, access and bypass roads and Jewish settlements have carved Palestinian lands into a checkerboard.
At the same time, a new barrier combining trenches, walls, electronic sensors and steel fences is being built around Jerusalem. The project, part of a large fence that is designed to cordon off the West Bank, has split some Palestinian neighborhoods and separated many Palestinians from their schools, jobs, families and lands. ...
Wednesday, February 11, 2004
HoustonChronicle.com - Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs
HoustonChronicle.com - Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs: "Feb. 5, 2004, 8:20PM | By SCOTT RITTER
We were all wrong,' David Kay, the Bush administration's top weapons sleuth in Iraq, recently told members of Congress after acknowledging that there were probably no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and contradicting President Bush's pre-war claims to the contrary.
Despite the deaths of more than 525 American service members in Iraq, David Kay insisted that the blame for the failure to find the expected weapons lies not with the president and his administration -- which had relentlessly pushed for war -- but rather with the U.S. intelligence community, which had, according to Kay, provided inaccurate assessments.
The Kay remarks appear to be an attempt to spin potentially damaging data in a way that is to the president's political advantage. President Bush's decision to create an 'independent commission' to investigate the intelligence failure reinforces this suspicion, since such a commission would only be given the mandate to examine intelligence data, and not the policies and decision-making processes that made use of that data. More disturbing, the proposed commission's findings would be delayed until late fall, after the November 2004 presidential election.
...
The fact is, regardless of the findings of any commission, not everyone was wrong. I, for one, wasn't, having done my level best to demand facts from the Bush administration to back up its unsustained allegations ...
In this I was not alone. Rolf Ekeus, the former executive chairman of the U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq, acknowledged that under his direction, Iraq had been "fundamentally disarmed" as early as 1996. Hans Blix, who headed U.N. weapons inspections in Iraq in the months before the invasion started in March 2003 stated that his inspectors had found no evidence of either WMD or WMD-related programs in Iraq. And officials familiar with Iraq, like Ambassador Joseph Wilson and State Department intelligence analyst Greg Theilmann, exposed the unsubstantiated nature of the Bush administration's claims regarding Iraq's nuclear capability.
...
The fact is, Ray McGovern and I, and the scores of intelligence professionals, retired or still in service, who studied Iraq and its WMD capabilities, are reasonable men. We got it right. The Bush administration, in its rush toward war, ignored our advice and the body of factual data we used, and instead relied on rumor, speculation, exaggeration and falsification to mislead the American people and their elected representatives into supporting a war that is rapidly turning into a quagmire. We knew the truth about Iraq's WMD.
Sadly, no one listened.
HoustonChronicle.com - Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs: "Feb. 5, 2004, 8:20PM | By SCOTT RITTER
We were all wrong,' David Kay, the Bush administration's top weapons sleuth in Iraq, recently told members of Congress after acknowledging that there were probably no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and contradicting President Bush's pre-war claims to the contrary.
Despite the deaths of more than 525 American service members in Iraq, David Kay insisted that the blame for the failure to find the expected weapons lies not with the president and his administration -- which had relentlessly pushed for war -- but rather with the U.S. intelligence community, which had, according to Kay, provided inaccurate assessments.
The Kay remarks appear to be an attempt to spin potentially damaging data in a way that is to the president's political advantage. President Bush's decision to create an 'independent commission' to investigate the intelligence failure reinforces this suspicion, since such a commission would only be given the mandate to examine intelligence data, and not the policies and decision-making processes that made use of that data. More disturbing, the proposed commission's findings would be delayed until late fall, after the November 2004 presidential election.
...
The fact is, regardless of the findings of any commission, not everyone was wrong. I, for one, wasn't, having done my level best to demand facts from the Bush administration to back up its unsustained allegations ...
In this I was not alone. Rolf Ekeus, the former executive chairman of the U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq, acknowledged that under his direction, Iraq had been "fundamentally disarmed" as early as 1996. Hans Blix, who headed U.N. weapons inspections in Iraq in the months before the invasion started in March 2003 stated that his inspectors had found no evidence of either WMD or WMD-related programs in Iraq. And officials familiar with Iraq, like Ambassador Joseph Wilson and State Department intelligence analyst Greg Theilmann, exposed the unsubstantiated nature of the Bush administration's claims regarding Iraq's nuclear capability.
...
The fact is, Ray McGovern and I, and the scores of intelligence professionals, retired or still in service, who studied Iraq and its WMD capabilities, are reasonable men. We got it right. The Bush administration, in its rush toward war, ignored our advice and the body of factual data we used, and instead relied on rumor, speculation, exaggeration and falsification to mislead the American people and their elected representatives into supporting a war that is rapidly turning into a quagmire. We knew the truth about Iraq's WMD.
Sadly, no one listened.
Bush budget cuts out bioharzard detection for the US Post Office
The New Republic Online: 9/10 President Watch: "9/10 President Watch | Post date 02.11.04 | Issue date 02.16.04 E-mail this article
According to The Wall Street Journal's lead editorial on February 4, the ricin-laden envelope delivered to Senator Bill Frist's office this week justifies the Iraq war: 'There's been a lot of talk lately that the failure to discover any stockpiles of [weapons of mass destruction] in Iraq proves that the terror threat isn't 'imminent' and that we can return to our pre-9/11 way of countering it. Is ricin's arrival in a Senate mailroom imminent enough?' We're not sure who exactly believes terrorism isn't an imminent threat, nor do we understand what role the Journal thinks Saddam Hussein played in germing the Senate. But we're most confused by the implication that President Bush's security priorities are emblematic of post-September 11 thinking. The Journal's editors ought to read the president's new budget, which took a $779 million request from the U.S. Post Office for a new biohazard detection system--which, sniffing the air hundreds of times each hour, could detect a single granule of ricin--and cut it to $37 million. We're not sure Saddam's lack of weapons of mass destruction proves that there is an imminent terrorist threat to the United States, but we're quite certain the 2001 anthrax attacks did. [... it certainly shows a terrorist threat, but not necessarily a foreign one. Many reports point back to an Army research station in the US as the source of the anthrax. ed.]
The New Republic Online: 9/10 President Watch: "9/10 President Watch | Post date 02.11.04 | Issue date 02.16.04 E-mail this article
According to The Wall Street Journal's lead editorial on February 4, the ricin-laden envelope delivered to Senator Bill Frist's office this week justifies the Iraq war: 'There's been a lot of talk lately that the failure to discover any stockpiles of [weapons of mass destruction] in Iraq proves that the terror threat isn't 'imminent' and that we can return to our pre-9/11 way of countering it. Is ricin's arrival in a Senate mailroom imminent enough?' We're not sure who exactly believes terrorism isn't an imminent threat, nor do we understand what role the Journal thinks Saddam Hussein played in germing the Senate. But we're most confused by the implication that President Bush's security priorities are emblematic of post-September 11 thinking. The Journal's editors ought to read the president's new budget, which took a $779 million request from the U.S. Post Office for a new biohazard detection system--which, sniffing the air hundreds of times each hour, could detect a single granule of ricin--and cut it to $37 million. We're not sure Saddam's lack of weapons of mass destruction proves that there is an imminent terrorist threat to the United States, but we're quite certain the 2001 anthrax attacks did. [... it certainly shows a terrorist threat, but not necessarily a foreign one. Many reports point back to an Army research station in the US as the source of the anthrax. ed.]
Shijaia, Gaza City: Israeli tank, troop raid: 13 Palestinians dead, 40+ wounded [another raid when the US is making peace moves?]
Excite - News: "Israeli Troops Kill 13 Palestinians in Gaza | Feb 11, 6:21 am ET | By Nidal al-Mughrabi
GAZA (Reuters) - Israeli troops killed at least 13 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday in gunbattles during what Israel called raids to root out militants behind attacks on Jewish settlements.
Israel launched its deadliest strike into Gaza for months amid signs of unease among the military over a shock announcement by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon last week that he planned to pull all the settlers out of the Gaza Strip.
Palestinian witnesses said soldiers backed by tanks entered the Shijaia neighborhood of densely packed Gaza City around dawn, opening fire and drawing a response from gunmen in the militant stronghold.
Medics said 12 Palestinians, including at least five gunmen and one policeman, were killed in the city. Another was shot dead during an Israeli raid in the southern Gaza refugee camp of Rafah. Scores were wounded.
Ambulance sirens wailed in Shijaia as masked gunmen shot at Israeli tanks, which returned heavy fire.
Among the dead were Hani Abu Skhaila, a senior activist of the Hamas faction, at the forefront of suicide bombings during three years of conflict, and the 17-year-old son of Ahmed Helles, a leader of President Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement.
The violence dealt a fresh blow to hopes of reviving talks on a U.S.-backed peace plan and Hamas militants urged "major suicide bombings" on Israel in revenge.
Israel's army denied opening fire on police and said Palestinian "terror cells" had attacked with anti-tank missiles, bombs and gunfire. The army said it hit at least 10 gunmen. ...
Excite - News: "Israeli Troops Kill 13 Palestinians in Gaza | Feb 11, 6:21 am ET | By Nidal al-Mughrabi
GAZA (Reuters) - Israeli troops killed at least 13 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday in gunbattles during what Israel called raids to root out militants behind attacks on Jewish settlements.
Israel launched its deadliest strike into Gaza for months amid signs of unease among the military over a shock announcement by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon last week that he planned to pull all the settlers out of the Gaza Strip.
Palestinian witnesses said soldiers backed by tanks entered the Shijaia neighborhood of densely packed Gaza City around dawn, opening fire and drawing a response from gunmen in the militant stronghold.
Medics said 12 Palestinians, including at least five gunmen and one policeman, were killed in the city. Another was shot dead during an Israeli raid in the southern Gaza refugee camp of Rafah. Scores were wounded.
Ambulance sirens wailed in Shijaia as masked gunmen shot at Israeli tanks, which returned heavy fire.
Among the dead were Hani Abu Skhaila, a senior activist of the Hamas faction, at the forefront of suicide bombings during three years of conflict, and the 17-year-old son of Ahmed Helles, a leader of President Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement.
The violence dealt a fresh blow to hopes of reviving talks on a U.S.-backed peace plan and Hamas militants urged "major suicide bombings" on Israel in revenge.
Israel's army denied opening fire on police and said Palestinian "terror cells" had attacked with anti-tank missiles, bombs and gunfire. The army said it hit at least 10 gunmen. ...
Tuesday, February 10, 2004
Palestinians Decry Convoy Attack Arrests: making the arrests in response to American pressure? PA confident that the men were involved in the attack.
Excite News: "Palestinians Decry Convoy Attack Arrests | Feb 10, 9:56 AM (ET) | By IBRAHIM BARZAK
GAZA CITY, Gaza (AP) - Hundreds of Palestinians on Tuesday, including dozens of gunmen firing in the air, protested the arrests of four men on charges of planting explosives that may have ripped apart a U.S. diplomatic convoy last October, killing three Americans.The suspects' indictment over the weekend was met with skepticism by many Palestinians and in Washington.
The charges were announced days after the United States publicized a $5 million reward for information about the attackers. The bombing killed three American security guards.
Washington has repeatedly criticized the lack of progress in the Palestinian investigation. The U.S. ambassador to Israel, Daniel Kurtzer, was quoted Tuesday as questioning the latest arrests.
"We are frankly not satisfied to date that we have seen enough results," Kurtzer told a conference of Conservative rabbis. His comments were reported by The Jerusalem Post daily.
Scores of armed men firing in the air led Tuesday's protest. Some marchers hoisted black flags of the Popular Resistance Committees, an umbrella group that has attacked Israeli tanks with roadside bombs in the past.
A local leader of the resistance committees accused Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority of making the arrests in response to American pressure.
"This trial is a farce, and the Palestinian Authority should release those detainees immediately and they issue a public apology," said the leader, who would only identify himself as Abu Huzifa. He said Tuesday's march was a "preliminary step ... which could escalate for the sake of releasing the four men."
A senior Palestinian official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the timing had nothing to do with U.S. pressure. He said the suspects had been under investigation for three months, and that Palestinian officials were confident that the men were involved in the attack.
Excite News: "Palestinians Decry Convoy Attack Arrests | Feb 10, 9:56 AM (ET) | By IBRAHIM BARZAK
GAZA CITY, Gaza (AP) - Hundreds of Palestinians on Tuesday, including dozens of gunmen firing in the air, protested the arrests of four men on charges of planting explosives that may have ripped apart a U.S. diplomatic convoy last October, killing three Americans.The suspects' indictment over the weekend was met with skepticism by many Palestinians and in Washington.
The charges were announced days after the United States publicized a $5 million reward for information about the attackers. The bombing killed three American security guards.
Washington has repeatedly criticized the lack of progress in the Palestinian investigation. The U.S. ambassador to Israel, Daniel Kurtzer, was quoted Tuesday as questioning the latest arrests.
"We are frankly not satisfied to date that we have seen enough results," Kurtzer told a conference of Conservative rabbis. His comments were reported by The Jerusalem Post daily.
Scores of armed men firing in the air led Tuesday's protest. Some marchers hoisted black flags of the Popular Resistance Committees, an umbrella group that has attacked Israeli tanks with roadside bombs in the past.
A local leader of the resistance committees accused Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority of making the arrests in response to American pressure.
"This trial is a farce, and the Palestinian Authority should release those detainees immediately and they issue a public apology," said the leader, who would only identify himself as Abu Huzifa. He said Tuesday's march was a "preliminary step ... which could escalate for the sake of releasing the four men."
A senior Palestinian official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the timing had nothing to do with U.S. pressure. He said the suspects had been under investigation for three months, and that Palestinian officials were confident that the men were involved in the attack.
Monday, February 09, 2004
Mr. Bush's Iraq: Is he is capable of distinguishing real threats from false alarms? Nothing in the interview offered much hope in that direction
Mr. Bush�s Version: "Mr. Bush's Version | Published: February 9, 2004
When Americans choose a president, their most profound consideration is whether a candidate can make the wisest possible decisions when it comes to war. In the case of George W. Bush, they will not only judge whether the invasion of Iraq was the right decision, but what our president has brought away from that experience. If there were misjudgments about the nature of Iraq's weapons programs or in the ways the administration presented that intelligence to the public, we need to know whether he recognizes them and has learned from them. Yesterday, in an interview with NBC's Tim Russert, after a week in which it became obvious to most Americans that the justifications for the war were based on flawed intelligence, Mr. Bush offered his reflections, and they were far from reassuring. The only clarity in the president's vision appears to be his own perfect sense of self-justification.
...
Right now, the questions average Americans are asking about Iraq seem much clearer than the ones Mr. Bush is willing to confront. People want to know why American intelligence was so wrong about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Mr. Bush didn't have a consistent position on this pivotal issue. At some points during his Oval Office interview, he seemed to be admitting that he had been completely wrong when he told the public just before the war started that the intelligence left "no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." At other moments he suggested the weapons might still be hidden somewhere, or that they may have been transported to another country. At times he depicted himself as having been misled by intelligence reports. But he insisted that George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, was doing a good job and deserved to keep his job.
...
Mr. Bush's explanation of how he reconciled the current activities in Iraq with his 2000 campaign rejection of "nation building" was simply silly. (American troops are building a nation in Iraq, he said, but they are also "fighting a war so that they can build a nation.") And it's very hard to take seriously Mr. Bush's contention that he was not surprised by the intensity of the resistance in Iraq.
...
The president was doing far more yesterday than rolling out the administration's spin for the next campaign. He was demonstrating how he is likely to think if confronted with a similar crisis in the future. The fuzziness and inconsistency of his comments suggest he is still relying on his own moral absolutism, that in a dangerous world the critical thing is to act decisively, and worry about connecting the dots later. Mr. Bush said repeatedly that he went to the United Nations seeking a diplomatic alternative to war. In fact, the United States rejected all diplomatic alternatives at the time, severely damaging relations with some of its most important and loyal allies. "I believe it is essential that when we see a threat, we deal with those threats before they become imminent," he said. "It's too late if they become imminent."
Another question average Americans will be asking themselves this election year is whether the Bush administration, which wanted to invade Iraq even before Sept. 11, manipulated the intelligence reports to frighten Congress and the public into supporting the idea. The president's claim yesterday that Congress had access to exactly the same intelligence he had was inaccurate, and his comments about the new commission he has appointed to look into intelligence gathering made it clear that he has no intention of having his administration's actions included in the probe.
Some of Mr. Bush's comments yesterday raise questions even more disturbing than the idea that senior administration members might have misled the nation about the intelligence on Iraq. ... In the coming campaign, Mr. Bush, who described himself as a "war president," is going to have to show the country that he is capable of distinguishing real threats from false alarms, and has the courage to tell the nation the truth about something as profound as war. Nothing in the interview offered much hope in that direction.
Mr. Bush�s Version: "Mr. Bush's Version | Published: February 9, 2004
When Americans choose a president, their most profound consideration is whether a candidate can make the wisest possible decisions when it comes to war. In the case of George W. Bush, they will not only judge whether the invasion of Iraq was the right decision, but what our president has brought away from that experience. If there were misjudgments about the nature of Iraq's weapons programs or in the ways the administration presented that intelligence to the public, we need to know whether he recognizes them and has learned from them. Yesterday, in an interview with NBC's Tim Russert, after a week in which it became obvious to most Americans that the justifications for the war were based on flawed intelligence, Mr. Bush offered his reflections, and they were far from reassuring. The only clarity in the president's vision appears to be his own perfect sense of self-justification.
...
Right now, the questions average Americans are asking about Iraq seem much clearer than the ones Mr. Bush is willing to confront. People want to know why American intelligence was so wrong about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Mr. Bush didn't have a consistent position on this pivotal issue. At some points during his Oval Office interview, he seemed to be admitting that he had been completely wrong when he told the public just before the war started that the intelligence left "no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." At other moments he suggested the weapons might still be hidden somewhere, or that they may have been transported to another country. At times he depicted himself as having been misled by intelligence reports. But he insisted that George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, was doing a good job and deserved to keep his job.
...
Mr. Bush's explanation of how he reconciled the current activities in Iraq with his 2000 campaign rejection of "nation building" was simply silly. (American troops are building a nation in Iraq, he said, but they are also "fighting a war so that they can build a nation.") And it's very hard to take seriously Mr. Bush's contention that he was not surprised by the intensity of the resistance in Iraq.
...
The president was doing far more yesterday than rolling out the administration's spin for the next campaign. He was demonstrating how he is likely to think if confronted with a similar crisis in the future. The fuzziness and inconsistency of his comments suggest he is still relying on his own moral absolutism, that in a dangerous world the critical thing is to act decisively, and worry about connecting the dots later. Mr. Bush said repeatedly that he went to the United Nations seeking a diplomatic alternative to war. In fact, the United States rejected all diplomatic alternatives at the time, severely damaging relations with some of its most important and loyal allies. "I believe it is essential that when we see a threat, we deal with those threats before they become imminent," he said. "It's too late if they become imminent."
Another question average Americans will be asking themselves this election year is whether the Bush administration, which wanted to invade Iraq even before Sept. 11, manipulated the intelligence reports to frighten Congress and the public into supporting the idea. The president's claim yesterday that Congress had access to exactly the same intelligence he had was inaccurate, and his comments about the new commission he has appointed to look into intelligence gathering made it clear that he has no intention of having his administration's actions included in the probe.
Some of Mr. Bush's comments yesterday raise questions even more disturbing than the idea that senior administration members might have misled the nation about the intelligence on Iraq. ... In the coming campaign, Mr. Bush, who described himself as a "war president," is going to have to show the country that he is capable of distinguishing real threats from false alarms, and has the courage to tell the nation the truth about something as profound as war. Nothing in the interview offered much hope in that direction.
A Jewish road to war and peace
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | A Jewish road to war and peace: "Emma Klein | Saturday February 7, 2004 | The Guardian
'If the Arabs want to destroy Israel, they should make peace and leave the rest to Jewish infighting.' This, some decades ago, was the observation of my late brother, then a student at Cambridge. Provocative as they may have seemed, his words were rooted in historical precedent.
Notwithstanding the saga of persecution and menace that marked the diaspora Jewish experience for nearly 2,000 years - and still casts a shadow over the independent state of Israel - some of the key traumas in Jewish history were inflicted from within. Indeed, in a cryptic verse, (49,17), the prophet Isaiah warned of precisely that. More concretely, the Talmud speaks of sinat chinam, the causeless hatred that brought about the destruction of the Second Temple, a sin evidently as heinous as the idolatry, immorality and bloodshed that led to the First Temple being destroyed.
...
Many Jewish communities today are blighted by acute sectarian differences. ... Israeli society, too, has been riven by deep divisions, political, religious and ethnic. The most extreme manifestation of schism in recent times was the climate of quasi-mystical hatred that preceded the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin ...
...
Is peace, then, doomed to remain an illusion? Perhaps the concept of pluralism espoused by Isaiah Berlin, and described by the Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in a recent lecture as "modus vivendi liberalism", might offer a practical, non-utopian way forward.
People should be given maximum freedom to pursue conflicting ideals; ideological disagreement, none the less, should not preclude the ability to get along on an everyday level. Dr Sacks compared this to the darkei shalom , or "ways of peace", prescribed by rabbinic Judaism, which commanded the Jews of the time to concern themselves intimately with the day-to-day welfare of idolaters, although their views were totally incompatible with their own.
Such a formula, if espoused by fundamentalist bombers, political hotheads and parties to conflict and fractious peoples everywhere, could surely change the world.
· Emma Klein is the Tablet's Jewish affairs specialist
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | A Jewish road to war and peace: "Emma Klein | Saturday February 7, 2004 | The Guardian
'If the Arabs want to destroy Israel, they should make peace and leave the rest to Jewish infighting.' This, some decades ago, was the observation of my late brother, then a student at Cambridge. Provocative as they may have seemed, his words were rooted in historical precedent.
Notwithstanding the saga of persecution and menace that marked the diaspora Jewish experience for nearly 2,000 years - and still casts a shadow over the independent state of Israel - some of the key traumas in Jewish history were inflicted from within. Indeed, in a cryptic verse, (49,17), the prophet Isaiah warned of precisely that. More concretely, the Talmud speaks of sinat chinam, the causeless hatred that brought about the destruction of the Second Temple, a sin evidently as heinous as the idolatry, immorality and bloodshed that led to the First Temple being destroyed.
...
Many Jewish communities today are blighted by acute sectarian differences. ... Israeli society, too, has been riven by deep divisions, political, religious and ethnic. The most extreme manifestation of schism in recent times was the climate of quasi-mystical hatred that preceded the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin ...
...
Is peace, then, doomed to remain an illusion? Perhaps the concept of pluralism espoused by Isaiah Berlin, and described by the Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in a recent lecture as "modus vivendi liberalism", might offer a practical, non-utopian way forward.
People should be given maximum freedom to pursue conflicting ideals; ideological disagreement, none the less, should not preclude the ability to get along on an everyday level. Dr Sacks compared this to the darkei shalom , or "ways of peace", prescribed by rabbinic Judaism, which commanded the Jews of the time to concern themselves intimately with the day-to-day welfare of idolaters, although their views were totally incompatible with their own.
Such a formula, if espoused by fundamentalist bombers, political hotheads and parties to conflict and fractious peoples everywhere, could surely change the world.
· Emma Klein is the Tablet's Jewish affairs specialist
Professor who forecast collapse of Soviet Union: "America is trying to portray al-Qaida as an omnipresent terrorist threat ...
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | All this jaw about jihad is just tosh: "All this jaw about jihad is just tosh | It is crazy to confect an image of a world ravaged by violence | Peter Preston | Monday February 2, 2004 | The Guardian
One thing - subconsciously, as we now say in polite society - goes with another. Just like the CIA and George Bush. Finally on the back foot about duff Iraqi dossiers? Can't understand how all those pesky WMD got lost? Then here comes another babble of awful warnings, rubbishing British Airways and Air France schedules (with Continental as an afterthought) but leaving United, American and the rest magically untouched. Does Osama have a frequent flyer deal with BA? Why can't Halliburton run airlines too?
It is all pretty desperate stuff - even by the standards of this White House and the chattering chorus of mystic messages they rely on whenever the political heat turns sweaty. Sure, Baghdad is a bit of a bust. But look what we got on those al-Qaida guys!
...
... Emmanuel Todd forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union in clearest terms. ...
Al-Qaida, Todd concludes, "is a band of mentally disturbed but ingenious terrorists". No more; no less. "It emerged from within a relatively small and circumscribed part of the planet, Saudi Arabia, even if Bin Laden recruited a few Egyptian turncoats and a handful of lost souls from the poor suburbs of western Europe.
"However, America is trying to portray al-Qaida as an omnipresent terrorist threat, as evil as it is widespread - from Bosnia to the Philippines, from Chechnya to Pakistan, from Libya to Yemen - thus legitimising any punitive action it might take anywhere at any time. This elevation of terrorism into a universal force institutionalises a permanent state of war across the globe."
...
Todd's basic case - the case which told him that Soviet communism was in terminal trouble - puts history and demography together. It holds that rising literacy and then falling birthrates are key, the vital shifts within society which precipitate change and democracy, and destroy dictatorships and choking peasant autocracies. There is turbulence in the change, to be sure. Bin Laden is turbulence. But it passes. And there's a true (political and media) craziness in confecting an "image of the world organised by hatred and ravaged by violence".
Between 1980 and 2000, he says, the percentage of people over 15 who can read has soared: from 33% to 64% in Nigeria, 28% to 56% in India, and 51% to 77% in Iran. The tide is general, worldwide. Even Mali has gone from 14% to 40% in two decades.
That makes a huge difference to fertility rates. India from 5.3 children per woman in 1981 to 3.2 in 2001; Brazil from 4.4 to 2.4; Vietnam from 5.8 to 2.3. And the trend in most Muslim countries is similar: Tunisia from 5 to 2.3, Iran from 5.3 to 2.6, Indonesia from 4.1 to 2.7. Demographic transformations are well under way. Good, good news for us all - but nothing to make a headline out of, nothing to ripple across George W's blank screen.
...
Where, please, is the evidence of universal threat that underpins this all-justifying "war on terror"? We may - in any halfway decent investigation - trace some of the Baghdad blatherers: Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress exile gang, for instance, telling the White House what it rejoiced to hear, laying a magic carpet of assumption for Downing Street's finest. ...
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | All this jaw about jihad is just tosh: "All this jaw about jihad is just tosh | It is crazy to confect an image of a world ravaged by violence | Peter Preston | Monday February 2, 2004 | The Guardian
One thing - subconsciously, as we now say in polite society - goes with another. Just like the CIA and George Bush. Finally on the back foot about duff Iraqi dossiers? Can't understand how all those pesky WMD got lost? Then here comes another babble of awful warnings, rubbishing British Airways and Air France schedules (with Continental as an afterthought) but leaving United, American and the rest magically untouched. Does Osama have a frequent flyer deal with BA? Why can't Halliburton run airlines too?
It is all pretty desperate stuff - even by the standards of this White House and the chattering chorus of mystic messages they rely on whenever the political heat turns sweaty. Sure, Baghdad is a bit of a bust. But look what we got on those al-Qaida guys!
...
... Emmanuel Todd forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union in clearest terms. ...
Al-Qaida, Todd concludes, "is a band of mentally disturbed but ingenious terrorists". No more; no less. "It emerged from within a relatively small and circumscribed part of the planet, Saudi Arabia, even if Bin Laden recruited a few Egyptian turncoats and a handful of lost souls from the poor suburbs of western Europe.
"However, America is trying to portray al-Qaida as an omnipresent terrorist threat, as evil as it is widespread - from Bosnia to the Philippines, from Chechnya to Pakistan, from Libya to Yemen - thus legitimising any punitive action it might take anywhere at any time. This elevation of terrorism into a universal force institutionalises a permanent state of war across the globe."
...
Todd's basic case - the case which told him that Soviet communism was in terminal trouble - puts history and demography together. It holds that rising literacy and then falling birthrates are key, the vital shifts within society which precipitate change and democracy, and destroy dictatorships and choking peasant autocracies. There is turbulence in the change, to be sure. Bin Laden is turbulence. But it passes. And there's a true (political and media) craziness in confecting an "image of the world organised by hatred and ravaged by violence".
Between 1980 and 2000, he says, the percentage of people over 15 who can read has soared: from 33% to 64% in Nigeria, 28% to 56% in India, and 51% to 77% in Iran. The tide is general, worldwide. Even Mali has gone from 14% to 40% in two decades.
That makes a huge difference to fertility rates. India from 5.3 children per woman in 1981 to 3.2 in 2001; Brazil from 4.4 to 2.4; Vietnam from 5.8 to 2.3. And the trend in most Muslim countries is similar: Tunisia from 5 to 2.3, Iran from 5.3 to 2.6, Indonesia from 4.1 to 2.7. Demographic transformations are well under way. Good, good news for us all - but nothing to make a headline out of, nothing to ripple across George W's blank screen.
...
Where, please, is the evidence of universal threat that underpins this all-justifying "war on terror"? We may - in any halfway decent investigation - trace some of the Baghdad blatherers: Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress exile gang, for instance, telling the White House what it rejoiced to hear, laying a magic carpet of assumption for Downing Street's finest. ...
Sunday, February 08, 2004
Arab League to Oppose Israeli Barrier: "If international law is not to be respected, we will have to draw our own conclusions,"
Excite News: "AP: Arab League to Oppose Israeli Barrier | Feb 8, 5:46 PM (ET) | By ANTHONY DEUTSCH
CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - The Arab League plans to argue at the World Court that Israel is violating the Geneva Conventions on human rights by building a barrier along Palestinian territories, the organization's top official told The Associated Press on Sunday.
Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa said the 22-member organization will argue that the suffering inflicted on the Palestinians by dividing their towns and villages breaks international law. They plan to make their argument at hearings set to begin on Feb. 23 at the International Court of Justice."
...
.. But the court's opinion "will be broadcast and known to everybody," Moussa said from his office in downtown Cairo.
"If international law is not to be respected, we will have to draw our own conclusions," he said.
...
Moussa said successive Israeli governments have refused to apply the Fourth Geneva Convention to the Palestinian territories. That pact aims to ensure the protection of civilians during war or under occupation.
"I believe the International Court of Justice will uphold the law and not succumb to any pressure. I'm sure of that," he said.
...
Moussa rejected Israeli claims that taking the case before The Hague court will damage the peace process.
"This is a laughable argument. There is no process to speak of. Show me where an effective peace process is," he said, shrugging his shoulders.
Before The Hague hearings, Israel faces another legal challenge on Monday, when the Israeli Supreme Court hears a case brought by Israeli civil-rights activists challenging the barrier's route.
Excite News: "AP: Arab League to Oppose Israeli Barrier | Feb 8, 5:46 PM (ET) | By ANTHONY DEUTSCH
CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - The Arab League plans to argue at the World Court that Israel is violating the Geneva Conventions on human rights by building a barrier along Palestinian territories, the organization's top official told The Associated Press on Sunday.
Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa said the 22-member organization will argue that the suffering inflicted on the Palestinians by dividing their towns and villages breaks international law. They plan to make their argument at hearings set to begin on Feb. 23 at the International Court of Justice."
...
.. But the court's opinion "will be broadcast and known to everybody," Moussa said from his office in downtown Cairo.
"If international law is not to be respected, we will have to draw our own conclusions," he said.
...
Moussa said successive Israeli governments have refused to apply the Fourth Geneva Convention to the Palestinian territories. That pact aims to ensure the protection of civilians during war or under occupation.
"I believe the International Court of Justice will uphold the law and not succumb to any pressure. I'm sure of that," he said.
...
Moussa rejected Israeli claims that taking the case before The Hague court will damage the peace process.
"This is a laughable argument. There is no process to speak of. Show me where an effective peace process is," he said, shrugging his shoulders.
Before The Hague hearings, Israel faces another legal challenge on Monday, when the Israeli Supreme Court hears a case brought by Israeli civil-rights activists challenging the barrier's route.
Bush Offers Shifting Rationale for Iraq War [in rare TV interview]
Excite - News: "Bush Offers Shifting Rationale for Iraq War | Feb 8, 11:59 am ET | By Steve Holland
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush on Sunday offered a shifting rationale for the Iraq war -- that Saddam Hussein had the capacity to develop unconventional arms if not the actual weapons.
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was the main reason cited by Bush for the war, in which more than 500 U.S. troops and thousands of Iraqis have died, though no such arms were found and weapons hunters say pre-war intelligence was flawed.
Bush addressed the criticism on Iraq and his handling of the U.S. economy in an appearance on NBC's 'Meet the Press' as his job approval ratings continue to slide and some polls show Democratic presidential contender John Kerry could beat him in the November election.
The president defended putting off the results of a bipartisan investigation of Iraq intelligence until March 31, 2005, well after the election, and he stopped short of saying he would testify before it, saying only he would be glad to 'visit with them,' share knowledge and make recommendations.
...
Bush conceded that it was "correct" that weapons of mass destruction had not been found in Iraq but emphasized a different reason why the war was necessary.
"He had the capacity to have a weapon, make a weapon. We thought he had weapons. The international community thought he had weapons. But he had the capacity to make a weapon and then let that weapon fall into the hands of a shadowy terrorist network," Bush said.
...
"It does bother me" that the commission is not slated to complete work until March 2005," he said. But, "The commission needs to conduct its study in a serious way. It shouldn't be politically motivated or politically driven. We need to get to the bottom of this." [Bush added: "The decision to go to war was not political, the original intelligence and use of that intelligence was not politically driven, the 2002 mid-term elections were not politically driven based on the Iraqi threat, so this commission should not be either" ... ed.]
Excite - News: "Bush Offers Shifting Rationale for Iraq War | Feb 8, 11:59 am ET | By Steve Holland
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush on Sunday offered a shifting rationale for the Iraq war -- that Saddam Hussein had the capacity to develop unconventional arms if not the actual weapons.
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was the main reason cited by Bush for the war, in which more than 500 U.S. troops and thousands of Iraqis have died, though no such arms were found and weapons hunters say pre-war intelligence was flawed.
Bush addressed the criticism on Iraq and his handling of the U.S. economy in an appearance on NBC's 'Meet the Press' as his job approval ratings continue to slide and some polls show Democratic presidential contender John Kerry could beat him in the November election.
The president defended putting off the results of a bipartisan investigation of Iraq intelligence until March 31, 2005, well after the election, and he stopped short of saying he would testify before it, saying only he would be glad to 'visit with them,' share knowledge and make recommendations.
...
Bush conceded that it was "correct" that weapons of mass destruction had not been found in Iraq but emphasized a different reason why the war was necessary.
"He had the capacity to have a weapon, make a weapon. We thought he had weapons. The international community thought he had weapons. But he had the capacity to make a weapon and then let that weapon fall into the hands of a shadowy terrorist network," Bush said.
...
"It does bother me" that the commission is not slated to complete work until March 2005," he said. But, "The commission needs to conduct its study in a serious way. It shouldn't be politically motivated or politically driven. We need to get to the bottom of this." [Bush added: "The decision to go to war was not political, the original intelligence and use of that intelligence was not politically driven, the 2002 mid-term elections were not politically driven based on the Iraqi threat, so this commission should not be either" ... ed.]
Saturday, February 07, 2004
Gaza City: helicopter missile attack: 2 Pal dead, including 1 12 yr-old; 10 wounded
Excite News: "Israeli Air Strike on Car Kills Boy | Feb 7, 5:55 AM (ET) | By IBRAHIM BARZAK
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) - An Israeli air strike struck a car in Gaza City on Saturday, critically wounding the bodyguard of an Islamic Jihad leader and killing a 12-year-old boy, witnesses and doctors said.
Ten people were wounded, three of them critically, in the blast, which ripped apart the front end of a white Peugeot on a busy Gaza street. Some witnesses reported seeing a missile fired from an aircraft and heard Israeli warplanes in the sky around the time of the explosion. An army spokeswoman had no immediate comment.
Israel's military has routinely targeted Palestinian militants in air strikes throughout more than three years of fighting.
The blast critically wounded Aziz Mahmoud al-Shami, a top bodyguard and a cousin of Islamic Jihad leader Abdullah Shami, according to officials at Gaza's Shifa Hospital. The Islamic Jihad leader was not in the car.
Tarek Sousi, a 12-year-old boy on his way to school, was killed in the blast, doctors said. ...
=======
Later ... Israeli Airstrike Kills Militant Leader
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) - An Israeli helicopter fired a missile into a car traveling in a crowded Gaza City street Saturday, killing a leader of the militant Islamic Jihad group and a 12-year-old boy on his way to school. The attack wounded 10 Palestinians, three of them critically, in Israel's first targeted killing in six weeks, doctors said. ...
...
Shami was driving in a white Peugeot in a busy Gaza City street when an Israeli helicopter fired a missile, ripping apart the front of the vehicle. Witnesses also heard the roar of F-16 fighter jets breaking the sound barrier over Gaza.
The attack also killed Tarek Sousi, who was on his way to school, doctors said.
Onlooker Mohammed Taleb, 36, said he was a few yards from the car when it exploded, and was knocked to the ground. After a moment he ran to the flaming car.
"The driver had lost his leg and he was lying half in and half out of the car bleeding heavily," Taleb said. "A small boy with his school bag was covered with blood and two other boys were screaming next to him."
Three of the 10 wounded were being operated on for shrapnel wounds to the chest and legs, doctors said. ...
Excite News: "Israeli Air Strike on Car Kills Boy | Feb 7, 5:55 AM (ET) | By IBRAHIM BARZAK
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) - An Israeli air strike struck a car in Gaza City on Saturday, critically wounding the bodyguard of an Islamic Jihad leader and killing a 12-year-old boy, witnesses and doctors said.
Ten people were wounded, three of them critically, in the blast, which ripped apart the front end of a white Peugeot on a busy Gaza street. Some witnesses reported seeing a missile fired from an aircraft and heard Israeli warplanes in the sky around the time of the explosion. An army spokeswoman had no immediate comment.
Israel's military has routinely targeted Palestinian militants in air strikes throughout more than three years of fighting.
The blast critically wounded Aziz Mahmoud al-Shami, a top bodyguard and a cousin of Islamic Jihad leader Abdullah Shami, according to officials at Gaza's Shifa Hospital. The Islamic Jihad leader was not in the car.
Tarek Sousi, a 12-year-old boy on his way to school, was killed in the blast, doctors said. ...
=======
Later ... Israeli Airstrike Kills Militant Leader
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) - An Israeli helicopter fired a missile into a car traveling in a crowded Gaza City street Saturday, killing a leader of the militant Islamic Jihad group and a 12-year-old boy on his way to school. The attack wounded 10 Palestinians, three of them critically, in Israel's first targeted killing in six weeks, doctors said. ...
...
Shami was driving in a white Peugeot in a busy Gaza City street when an Israeli helicopter fired a missile, ripping apart the front of the vehicle. Witnesses also heard the roar of F-16 fighter jets breaking the sound barrier over Gaza.
The attack also killed Tarek Sousi, who was on his way to school, doctors said.
Onlooker Mohammed Taleb, 36, said he was a few yards from the car when it exploded, and was knocked to the ground. After a moment he ran to the flaming car.
"The driver had lost his leg and he was lying half in and half out of the car bleeding heavily," Taleb said. "A small boy with his school bag was covered with blood and two other boys were screaming next to him."
Three of the 10 wounded were being operated on for shrapnel wounds to the chest and legs, doctors said. ...
Friday, February 06, 2004
For This Palestinian Family, No Place Is Quite Home
Yahoo! News - For This Palestinian Family, No Place Is Quite Home: "Fri Feb 6, 7:55 AM ET | By Laura King Times Staff Writer
...
The theme of displacement runs like a brilliantly colored thread through the complex narrative of the Rahals, a far-flung yet close-knit Palestinian clan with branches in the West Bank, Jordan, Iraq (news - web sites) and the United States. Now it is the turn of this delicate-featured, dark-haired young woman to weave her own piece of the family tapestry.
The Rahals are in many ways a microcosm of the soaring aspirations of the Palestinian people — but they also reflect the wellsprings of anger and bitterness that time and again have helped to thwart peacemaking efforts in the Middle East.
...
May, whose parents are Palestinian refugees born inside what is now Israel, spent her childhood in Baghdad, where her father was an exiled functionary of Yasser Arafat (news - web sites)'s Palestine Liberation Organization (news - web sites). She passed her teenage years in Bethlehem, the hilly West Bank town where tradition holds that Jesus was born.
With her family wanting the best schooling possible for her, she returned to the Iraqi capital three years ago as a medical student. But last spring, with her two student brothers, she fled Baghdad's postwar chaos and a climate now unfriendly to formerly privileged Palestinians.
The three returned to Bethlehem — May's home in name, but no longer a real hometown to her.
The return of the three eldest Rahal children to their Palestinian roots marks the end of a tumultuous year in which they, like many of their compatriots over the past half a century, have seemed to be on the wrong side of history.
May's grandparents fled their ancestral home in 1948 during the fighting after Israel's declaration of statehood, believing like countless others that the move was temporary and would last weeks at most.
But Israel's war for independence and the creation of the Jewish state resulted in the permanent displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, whose claims to a homeland stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River are today perhaps the greatest obstacle to any enduring peace in the region.
The Rahal grandchildren, May's generation, have never seen the family's ancestral village of Artouf, west of Jerusalem. They hear dreamy tales of its bountiful orange and lemon groves, its stone-walled houses that were warm in winter and deliciously cool in summer, and its fragrant olive groves and groaning olive presses. But today it is a nondescript Israeli industrial town, with little remnant of the verdant landscape the family elders so vividly recall.
Yahoo! News - For This Palestinian Family, No Place Is Quite Home: "Fri Feb 6, 7:55 AM ET | By Laura King Times Staff Writer
...
The theme of displacement runs like a brilliantly colored thread through the complex narrative of the Rahals, a far-flung yet close-knit Palestinian clan with branches in the West Bank, Jordan, Iraq (news - web sites) and the United States. Now it is the turn of this delicate-featured, dark-haired young woman to weave her own piece of the family tapestry.
The Rahals are in many ways a microcosm of the soaring aspirations of the Palestinian people — but they also reflect the wellsprings of anger and bitterness that time and again have helped to thwart peacemaking efforts in the Middle East.
...
May, whose parents are Palestinian refugees born inside what is now Israel, spent her childhood in Baghdad, where her father was an exiled functionary of Yasser Arafat (news - web sites)'s Palestine Liberation Organization (news - web sites). She passed her teenage years in Bethlehem, the hilly West Bank town where tradition holds that Jesus was born.
With her family wanting the best schooling possible for her, she returned to the Iraqi capital three years ago as a medical student. But last spring, with her two student brothers, she fled Baghdad's postwar chaos and a climate now unfriendly to formerly privileged Palestinians.
The three returned to Bethlehem — May's home in name, but no longer a real hometown to her.
The return of the three eldest Rahal children to their Palestinian roots marks the end of a tumultuous year in which they, like many of their compatriots over the past half a century, have seemed to be on the wrong side of history.
May's grandparents fled their ancestral home in 1948 during the fighting after Israel's declaration of statehood, believing like countless others that the move was temporary and would last weeks at most.
But Israel's war for independence and the creation of the Jewish state resulted in the permanent displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, whose claims to a homeland stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River are today perhaps the greatest obstacle to any enduring peace in the region.
The Rahal grandchildren, May's generation, have never seen the family's ancestral village of Artouf, west of Jerusalem. They hear dreamy tales of its bountiful orange and lemon groves, its stone-walled houses that were warm in winter and deliciously cool in summer, and its fragrant olive groves and groaning olive presses. But today it is a nondescript Israeli industrial town, with little remnant of the verdant landscape the family elders so vividly recall.
45 minute claim referred to battlefield munitions: WMD experts complained, could not accept inclusions: came through Iraqi exiles
News: "What we were told, what we know now and the unresolved issues | By Paul Waugh, Deputy Political Editor |
06 February 2004
Michael Howard, the Tory leader,called yesterday for Tony Blair to resign after the Prime Minister admitted that he did not know the Government's claim that Saddam Hussein could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes referred simply to battlefield munitions.
As Mr Howard labelled Mr Blair's failure to ask key questions about the intelligence "a gross dereliction of duty", Downing Street revealed that Mr Blair did not know the truth until the summer, after the military conflict. Geoff Hoon, the Secretary of State for Defence, said he knew, and said the reason he had not told the Prime Minister was that there was no point of controversy about it.
...
Brian Jones, the former leading expert on WMD at the Ministry of Defence, said this week that there was widespread disquiet in the intelligence community over the representation of the claim. The controversy, which the Government hoped had been lanced after Lord Hutton exonerated it last week, is gathering pace.
WHAT WE WERE TOLD
The Government's dossier, published in September 2002, cited the 45-minute claim no fewer than four times. It was deemed so important to Tony Blair's case that it was highlighted in his own foreword, in the executive summary and twice in the body of the text.
The wording varied slightly, but the strongest formulation was in the body of the text: "The Iraqi military are able to deploy these weapons within 45 minutes of an order to do so."
...
Thanks to Andrew Gilligan's report in May last year, we learned that the intelligence came in late and was single-sourced. The Hutton inquiry discovered that David Kelly had been the source for both of these claims.
It later emerged that the information had been relayed by an Iraqi general to an exiled Iraqi opposition activist described as "reliable" by MI6.
...
The Intelligence and Security Committee, the only parliamentary body to have looked at the raw intelligence and the assessments, concluded last year that the wording "did not precisely reflect the intelligence provided" by MI6.
"The JIC did not know precisely which munitions could be deployed from where to where and the context of the intelligence was not included ... this omission was then reflected in the 24 September dossier."
Worse still, the MPs discovered that the claim was assessed by some in MI6 to refer to short-range munitions and not long-range missiles.
...
The Hutton inquiry also shed more light on the claim. We learned that Brian Jones, the head of the nuclear, biological and chemical branch of the MoD's Defence Intelligence Staff, had formally complained to his bosses that he and his staff could not accept its inclusion, as worded, in the dossier.
...
Mr Blair, Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, and a raft of ministers said yesterday that the claim was not important. But the headlines in two of Britain's most influential papers ensured the public had a stark impression of the dossier's 45-minutes point. Furthermore, it now appears that the reason Mr Blair subsequently dropped the claim on the eve of war was because he was told that MI6 suggested it referred to battlefield weapons.
...
Most crucial, why does Mr Blair insist that the 45-minute point was not important? Dr Jones has made the point that the claim is one of the few in the dossier that declares that WMD existed. The only other clear claim that WMD existed was the equally controversial intelligence that Saddam continued to produced chemical weapons.
News: "What we were told, what we know now and the unresolved issues | By Paul Waugh, Deputy Political Editor |
06 February 2004
Michael Howard, the Tory leader,called yesterday for Tony Blair to resign after the Prime Minister admitted that he did not know the Government's claim that Saddam Hussein could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes referred simply to battlefield munitions.
As Mr Howard labelled Mr Blair's failure to ask key questions about the intelligence "a gross dereliction of duty", Downing Street revealed that Mr Blair did not know the truth until the summer, after the military conflict. Geoff Hoon, the Secretary of State for Defence, said he knew, and said the reason he had not told the Prime Minister was that there was no point of controversy about it.
...
Brian Jones, the former leading expert on WMD at the Ministry of Defence, said this week that there was widespread disquiet in the intelligence community over the representation of the claim. The controversy, which the Government hoped had been lanced after Lord Hutton exonerated it last week, is gathering pace.
WHAT WE WERE TOLD
The Government's dossier, published in September 2002, cited the 45-minute claim no fewer than four times. It was deemed so important to Tony Blair's case that it was highlighted in his own foreword, in the executive summary and twice in the body of the text.
The wording varied slightly, but the strongest formulation was in the body of the text: "The Iraqi military are able to deploy these weapons within 45 minutes of an order to do so."
...
Thanks to Andrew Gilligan's report in May last year, we learned that the intelligence came in late and was single-sourced. The Hutton inquiry discovered that David Kelly had been the source for both of these claims.
It later emerged that the information had been relayed by an Iraqi general to an exiled Iraqi opposition activist described as "reliable" by MI6.
...
The Intelligence and Security Committee, the only parliamentary body to have looked at the raw intelligence and the assessments, concluded last year that the wording "did not precisely reflect the intelligence provided" by MI6.
"The JIC did not know precisely which munitions could be deployed from where to where and the context of the intelligence was not included ... this omission was then reflected in the 24 September dossier."
Worse still, the MPs discovered that the claim was assessed by some in MI6 to refer to short-range munitions and not long-range missiles.
...
The Hutton inquiry also shed more light on the claim. We learned that Brian Jones, the head of the nuclear, biological and chemical branch of the MoD's Defence Intelligence Staff, had formally complained to his bosses that he and his staff could not accept its inclusion, as worded, in the dossier.
...
Mr Blair, Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, and a raft of ministers said yesterday that the claim was not important. But the headlines in two of Britain's most influential papers ensured the public had a stark impression of the dossier's 45-minutes point. Furthermore, it now appears that the reason Mr Blair subsequently dropped the claim on the eve of war was because he was told that MI6 suggested it referred to battlefield weapons.
...
Most crucial, why does Mr Blair insist that the 45-minute point was not important? Dr Jones has made the point that the claim is one of the few in the dossier that declares that WMD existed. The only other clear claim that WMD existed was the equally controversial intelligence that Saddam continued to produced chemical weapons.
Inquiry Tony Blair has announced will not satisfy his opponents: way intelligence was gathered: also at how it was used by ministers
Economist.com | Intelligence: "Another week, another war inquiry | Feb 5th 2004 | From The Economist print edition
The inquiry Tony Blair has announced will not satisfy his opponents
Get article background
IF TONY BLAIR hoped that his announcement of an inquiry into intelligence failures in Iraq would defuse the argument, he must have been disappointed. Two days later, Michael Howard, the leader of the opposition, was calling for his resignation yet again. Mr Blair's offence, this time round, was to admit that he had not understood that the claim Iraq could launch WMD within 45 minutes referred only to battlefield weapons. Such weapons would not have threatened British bases. The intelligence dossier the government published in the run-up to war had implied they would.
That Mr Howard should concern himself with such minutiae shows how politically toxic the issue remains. A lot of people have an interest in keeping the story going, as the argument over setting the terms of the inquiry showed.
Until David Kay, the former head of America's Iraq Survey Group, explained that “we were almost all wrong”, Mr Blair's response to questions about the missing weapons of mass destruction was that Britain should wait for the ISG to complete its work. As a Downing Street insider put it, “After Kay, that line was starting to wear a little thin.” Once President Bush had announced an inquiry in America, a British one became inevitable.
By the time the inquiry was announced, on February 3rd, there was already a row over its terms of reference. Mr Blair's critics realised that one reason Lord Hutton had disappointed them was that his remit was narrowly drawn. They feared that the same thing was about to happen again.
In fact, the inquiry's terms of reference are a reasonable compromise. Ideally, the government would have preferred to confine the inquiry to an analysis of the discrepancies between the intelligence assessments and the reality on the ground in Iraq. But, after the backlash against Lord Hutton, a minimum political requirement was that the committee, which will report by the end of July, should have the support of the main opposition party.
At Mr Howard's insistence, the inquiry will look not just at the way intelligence was gathered and evaluated, but also at how it was used by ministers during the run-up to war. Mr Howard, who continues to support the war, is right to believe that this is a crucial addition which will cast at least some light on the behaviour of the politicians as well as the shortcomings of the intelligence agencies. ...
Economist.com | Intelligence: "Another week, another war inquiry | Feb 5th 2004 | From The Economist print edition
The inquiry Tony Blair has announced will not satisfy his opponents
Get article background
IF TONY BLAIR hoped that his announcement of an inquiry into intelligence failures in Iraq would defuse the argument, he must have been disappointed. Two days later, Michael Howard, the leader of the opposition, was calling for his resignation yet again. Mr Blair's offence, this time round, was to admit that he had not understood that the claim Iraq could launch WMD within 45 minutes referred only to battlefield weapons. Such weapons would not have threatened British bases. The intelligence dossier the government published in the run-up to war had implied they would.
That Mr Howard should concern himself with such minutiae shows how politically toxic the issue remains. A lot of people have an interest in keeping the story going, as the argument over setting the terms of the inquiry showed.
Until David Kay, the former head of America's Iraq Survey Group, explained that “we were almost all wrong”, Mr Blair's response to questions about the missing weapons of mass destruction was that Britain should wait for the ISG to complete its work. As a Downing Street insider put it, “After Kay, that line was starting to wear a little thin.” Once President Bush had announced an inquiry in America, a British one became inevitable.
By the time the inquiry was announced, on February 3rd, there was already a row over its terms of reference. Mr Blair's critics realised that one reason Lord Hutton had disappointed them was that his remit was narrowly drawn. They feared that the same thing was about to happen again.
In fact, the inquiry's terms of reference are a reasonable compromise. Ideally, the government would have preferred to confine the inquiry to an analysis of the discrepancies between the intelligence assessments and the reality on the ground in Iraq. But, after the backlash against Lord Hutton, a minimum political requirement was that the committee, which will report by the end of July, should have the support of the main opposition party.
At Mr Howard's insistence, the inquiry will look not just at the way intelligence was gathered and evaluated, but also at how it was used by ministers during the run-up to war. Mr Howard, who continues to support the war, is right to believe that this is a crucial addition which will cast at least some light on the behaviour of the politicians as well as the shortcomings of the intelligence agencies. ...
1984 in 2004: Rewriting history: C.I.A. was reviled by hawks because its analysts were reluctant to present a sufficiently alarming picture
Op-Ed Columnist: Get Me Rewrite!: "Get Me Rewrite! | By PAUL KRUGMAN | Published: February 6, 2004
Right now America is going through an Orwellian moment. On both the foreign policy and the fiscal fronts, the Bush administration is trying to rewrite history, to explain away its current embarrassments.
Let's start with the case of the missing W.M.D. Do you remember when the C.I.A. was reviled by hawks because its analysts were reluctant to present a sufficiently alarming picture of the Iraqi threat? Your memories are no longer operative. On or about last Saturday, history was revised: see, it's the C.I.A.'s fault that the threat was overstated. Given its warnings, the administration had no choice but to invade.
A tip from Joshua Marshall, of www.talkingpointsmemo.com, led me to a stark reminder of how different the story line used to be. Last year Laurie Mylroie published a book titled "Bush vs. the Beltway: How the C.I.A. and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror." Ms. Mylroie's book came with an encomium from Richard Perle; she's known to be close to Paul Wolfowitz and to Dick Cheney's chief of staff. According to the jacket copy, "Mylroie describes how the C.I.A. and the State Department have systematically discredited critical intelligence about Saddam's regime, including indisputable evidence of its possession of weapons of mass destruction."
Currently serving intelligence officials may deny that they faced any pressure — after what happened to Valerie Plame, what would you do in their place? — but former officials tell a different story. The latest revelation is from Britain. Brian Jones, who was the Ministry of Defense's top W.M.D. analyst when Tony Blair assembled his case for war, says that the crucial dossier used to make that case didn't reflect the views of the professionals: "The expert intelligence experts of the D.I.S. [Defense Intelligence Staff] were overruled." All the experts agreed that the dossier's claims should have been "carefully caveated"; they weren't.
And don't forget the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, created specifically to offer a more alarming picture of the Iraq threat than the intelligence professionals were willing to provide.
Can all these awkward facts be whited out of the historical record? Probably. Almost surely, President Bush's handpicked "independent" commission won't investigate the Office of Special Plans. Like Lord Hutton in Britain — who chose to disregard Mr. Jones's testimony — it will brush aside evidence that intelligence professionals were pressured. It will focus only on intelligence mistakes, not on the fact that the experts, while wrong, weren't nearly wrong enough to satisfy their political masters. (Among those mentioned as possible members of the commission is James Woolsey, who wrote one of the blurbs for Ms. Mylroie's book.) ...
Op-Ed Columnist: Get Me Rewrite!: "Get Me Rewrite! | By PAUL KRUGMAN | Published: February 6, 2004
Right now America is going through an Orwellian moment. On both the foreign policy and the fiscal fronts, the Bush administration is trying to rewrite history, to explain away its current embarrassments.
Let's start with the case of the missing W.M.D. Do you remember when the C.I.A. was reviled by hawks because its analysts were reluctant to present a sufficiently alarming picture of the Iraqi threat? Your memories are no longer operative. On or about last Saturday, history was revised: see, it's the C.I.A.'s fault that the threat was overstated. Given its warnings, the administration had no choice but to invade.
A tip from Joshua Marshall, of www.talkingpointsmemo.com, led me to a stark reminder of how different the story line used to be. Last year Laurie Mylroie published a book titled "Bush vs. the Beltway: How the C.I.A. and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror." Ms. Mylroie's book came with an encomium from Richard Perle; she's known to be close to Paul Wolfowitz and to Dick Cheney's chief of staff. According to the jacket copy, "Mylroie describes how the C.I.A. and the State Department have systematically discredited critical intelligence about Saddam's regime, including indisputable evidence of its possession of weapons of mass destruction."
Currently serving intelligence officials may deny that they faced any pressure — after what happened to Valerie Plame, what would you do in their place? — but former officials tell a different story. The latest revelation is from Britain. Brian Jones, who was the Ministry of Defense's top W.M.D. analyst when Tony Blair assembled his case for war, says that the crucial dossier used to make that case didn't reflect the views of the professionals: "The expert intelligence experts of the D.I.S. [Defense Intelligence Staff] were overruled." All the experts agreed that the dossier's claims should have been "carefully caveated"; they weren't.
And don't forget the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, created specifically to offer a more alarming picture of the Iraq threat than the intelligence professionals were willing to provide.
Can all these awkward facts be whited out of the historical record? Probably. Almost surely, President Bush's handpicked "independent" commission won't investigate the Office of Special Plans. Like Lord Hutton in Britain — who chose to disregard Mr. Jones's testimony — it will brush aside evidence that intelligence professionals were pressured. It will focus only on intelligence mistakes, not on the fact that the experts, while wrong, weren't nearly wrong enough to satisfy their political masters. (Among those mentioned as possible members of the commission is James Woolsey, who wrote one of the blurbs for Ms. Mylroie's book.) ...
Thursday, February 05, 2004
Bushes foreign policy creates the 'Islamic Republic of Iraq' and the 'Islamic Republic of Palestine.'? surrounded by Jewish and Christian pro-Israelis
Op-Ed Columnist: A Rude Awakening: "By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN | Published: February 5, 2004
Attention Republicans: You may think the results of the Democratic primaries indicate that Americans aren't interested in foreign policy. All they care about are domestic issues, like health care and taxes, and that's what the president should focus on. Maybe. But be careful. You could wake up in November and find that while Mr. Bush focused on the home front, his foreign policy created the 'Islamic Republic of Iraq' and the 'Islamic Republic of Palestine.' Imagine defending those on the campaign trail? Have I got your attention? As they say in the phone commercial, 'Can you hear me now?'
Let's start with the Palestinians. Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, dropped a bombshell this week when he said he was laying plans to withdraw most Israeli settlements in Gaza and to move others in the West Bank. It's not surprising that this potential breakthrough move came from Mr. Sharon, since he has the two other main players in the Arab-Israeli drama under house arrest.
That is, Mr. Sharon has the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat under house arrest in his office in Ramallah, and he's had George Bush under house arrest in the Oval Office. Mr. Sharon has Mr. Arafat surrounded by tanks, and Mr. Bush surrounded by Jewish and Christian pro-Israel lobbyists, by a vice president, Dick Cheney, who's ready to do whatever Mr. Sharon dictates, and by political handlers telling the president not to put any pressure on Israel in an election year — all conspiring to make sure the president does nothing.
Since Mr. Sharon is the only moving object, and because he has suddenly found himself under pressure to move — both to change the subject from the corruption scandal closing in on him and his family and to satisfy an Israeli electorate fed up with the bloody status quo — we may have a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. This is apparently part of a broader Sharon plan to unilaterally create an interim Palestinian state in about 50 percent of the West Bank and all of Gaza, and leave Israel with the rest.
While Mr. Sharon's decision is in the right direction, it's not all so simple. Why? Because in the past two years, Mr. Sharon has crushed Mr. Arafat's corrupt Palestinian Authority, but failed to lift a finger to empower more responsible Palestinians — like Mahmoud Abbas and Muhammad Dahlan. This has created a power vacuum in Gaza and the West Bank, filled by Hamas, the Islamist militant group. And last week, Mr. Sharon turned over 400 Palestinian prisoners to the Islamist Lebanese militia Hezbollah in a prisoner swap, something he was never ready to do with moderate Palestinian leaders.
The message he sent is: use violence, as Hamas and Hezbollah do, and you get results from Israel. Adopt moderation, and you get nothing. If Mr. Sharon just pulls out of Gaza and half of the West Bank soon, he and the Bush team that's in his pocket will reap what he's sown: a Hamas takeover in these areas or civil war.
Martin Indyk, a top Middle East adviser for President Bill Clinton, says the Bush team had better be ready with some ideas of its own when Mr. Sharon shows up at the White House to present his plans. Mr. Indyk argues that the U.S. and its NATO allies need to fill the vacuum being created by Mr. Sharon's move with their own "trusteeship" plan for building a decent, moderate political center in Gaza and the West Bank.
"When America or Israel names its enemies without strengthening its friends, it only ends up crowning its enemies as the popular leaders of their people," remarked the Middle East expert Stephen P. Cohen....
Op-Ed Columnist: A Rude Awakening: "By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN | Published: February 5, 2004
Attention Republicans: You may think the results of the Democratic primaries indicate that Americans aren't interested in foreign policy. All they care about are domestic issues, like health care and taxes, and that's what the president should focus on. Maybe. But be careful. You could wake up in November and find that while Mr. Bush focused on the home front, his foreign policy created the 'Islamic Republic of Iraq' and the 'Islamic Republic of Palestine.' Imagine defending those on the campaign trail? Have I got your attention? As they say in the phone commercial, 'Can you hear me now?'
Let's start with the Palestinians. Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, dropped a bombshell this week when he said he was laying plans to withdraw most Israeli settlements in Gaza and to move others in the West Bank. It's not surprising that this potential breakthrough move came from Mr. Sharon, since he has the two other main players in the Arab-Israeli drama under house arrest.
That is, Mr. Sharon has the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat under house arrest in his office in Ramallah, and he's had George Bush under house arrest in the Oval Office. Mr. Sharon has Mr. Arafat surrounded by tanks, and Mr. Bush surrounded by Jewish and Christian pro-Israel lobbyists, by a vice president, Dick Cheney, who's ready to do whatever Mr. Sharon dictates, and by political handlers telling the president not to put any pressure on Israel in an election year — all conspiring to make sure the president does nothing.
Since Mr. Sharon is the only moving object, and because he has suddenly found himself under pressure to move — both to change the subject from the corruption scandal closing in on him and his family and to satisfy an Israeli electorate fed up with the bloody status quo — we may have a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. This is apparently part of a broader Sharon plan to unilaterally create an interim Palestinian state in about 50 percent of the West Bank and all of Gaza, and leave Israel with the rest.
While Mr. Sharon's decision is in the right direction, it's not all so simple. Why? Because in the past two years, Mr. Sharon has crushed Mr. Arafat's corrupt Palestinian Authority, but failed to lift a finger to empower more responsible Palestinians — like Mahmoud Abbas and Muhammad Dahlan. This has created a power vacuum in Gaza and the West Bank, filled by Hamas, the Islamist militant group. And last week, Mr. Sharon turned over 400 Palestinian prisoners to the Islamist Lebanese militia Hezbollah in a prisoner swap, something he was never ready to do with moderate Palestinian leaders.
The message he sent is: use violence, as Hamas and Hezbollah do, and you get results from Israel. Adopt moderation, and you get nothing. If Mr. Sharon just pulls out of Gaza and half of the West Bank soon, he and the Bush team that's in his pocket will reap what he's sown: a Hamas takeover in these areas or civil war.
Martin Indyk, a top Middle East adviser for President Bill Clinton, says the Bush team had better be ready with some ideas of its own when Mr. Sharon shows up at the White House to present his plans. Mr. Indyk argues that the U.S. and its NATO allies need to fill the vacuum being created by Mr. Sharon's move with their own "trusteeship" plan for building a decent, moderate political center in Gaza and the West Bank.
"When America or Israel names its enemies without strengthening its friends, it only ends up crowning its enemies as the popular leaders of their people," remarked the Middle East expert Stephen P. Cohen....
