June 16, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Iran on a Razor’s Edge
By ROGER COHEN
TEHRAN — In silence they moved, a vast throng, hundreds of thousands of people, down the street called Revolution. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had called his opponents mere “dust.” Well, said one student, “We will blind him with our dust.”
This was the day followers of Mir Hussein Moussavi, the reformist candidate defeated in Iran’s disputed presidential elections, rose up en masse to protest the theft of their votes. “Quiet! Quiet!” they shouted, arms raised and fingers forming a “V” for victory that they pointed at a lonely police helicopter overhead.
Moussavi himself, not seen since the night of the election, appeared on Revolution Square, answering a question much debated here in recent days: Will he lead what he started?
For the first time, I saw traffic police smiling at the crowd. Even the black-clad elite riot police were impassive. “Raise your arms, raise your arms,” one man murmured to them.
If the regime had hoped to quell Iran’s powerful democratic stirring with a massive show of force since last Friday’s vote, it failed to do so.
For the first time, in that crowd, it seemed to me that the forces of change, the deeper Iran of civility and courage that I first encountered several months ago, might prevail. Seldom has silence been more eloquent or potent.
Sunday had been a different story, full of violence and confrontation. Out in the streets, a doctor, Mahdi Alizadeh, had stopped to tell me about the bravery of President Ahmadinejad, his glorious electoral victory, and how Iran was “the most democratic country in the world,” when a woman named Yassamin approached and demanded: “If your side won, why are you doing this?”
“This” meant the beatings. She said she had just seen women and children being struck by the baton-wielding police. I had, too. The image of a slender woman outside Tehran University, her face contorted in pain, clutching her upper arm where the blow fell, had lodged in my mind. There’s nothing more repugnant than seeing women being hit by big men armed with clubs and the license of the state.
Black smoke was rising from the main gate of the university when that grief-stricken woman crossed my path. Police were massed outside the campus, faced by stone-throwing students yelling “Savages, get lost!”
The thugs-for-hire of the Basij militia, clad in sleeveless camouflage shirts, had arrived en masse on government-issue scooters. Their demeanor suggested Iran’s prison gates had been flung open.
To witness these passions is to witness an Iran close to the brink — a place where it has been on other occasions since the 1979 revolution, but without finding any resolution of its long quest for a form of governance reflecting the country’s democratic yearning, Islamic faith and proud independence.
It’s one thing to steal an election, another to steal it with the effrontery and ruthlessness apparent here in recent days. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, said “the miraculous hand of God” was evident in the “great epic” of the election. I guess that’s one way of explaining results of an implausible strangeness. Later, perhaps playing for time, Khamenei said the Guardian Council, which oversees elections, should seriously investigate claims of irregularities.
Certainly, millions of Iranians are questioning the result. Rather than the hand of God, they see the hand of a regime that perceived its most dreaded specter — “velvet revolution” — in the green banners of the opposition and opted for fraud and force.
But Iranians have not been cowed. When Alizadeh and Yassamin confronted each other before me on the street Sunday, as tens of thousands of Ahmadinejad supporters streamed by, the argument quickly escalated, watched by a growing cluster of people.
The real violence, Alizadeh declared, was America’s, invading Iraq and Afghanistan. The only way to talk to people like him, Yassamim retorted was to agree, because otherwise you get beaten.
Now Alizadeh’s mother started screaming: “You are blind! Let God and light come into your life.” Yassamin, a documentary movie maker, turned away.
“We need a Gandhi,” she said to me. “We need Moussavi to risk his life and stand there.”
I received this note from an Iranian-American with family here: “The bottom line right now is whose violence threshold is higher? How much are the hard-liners willing to inflict to suppress the population and tell yet another generation to shut up? And how much are Moussavi and his supporters willing to stand to fulfill their dreams? It sounds so inhuman, but that’s what it comes down to. It’s very scary.”
Many women are trying quietly to bridge the chasm and avoid the worst. I’ve heard them whispering to the Basij and the police that “We are all Iranians,” urging them to hold back. They remind me of those who placed flowers in the barrels of soldiers’ guns during the 1979 revolution.
At this critical juncture, what should the Obama administration do? I think it’s still right to pursue engagement, but America must now do so with a far greater skepticism over the good faith of a government so apparently ready to steal and lie.
The United States should also, with its European allies, find stronger means to register repugnance at Ahmadinejad’s use of violence and demand some credible accounting of the election result, including an answer to the question of where the ballots are now. Having Vice President Joe Biden say “There is real doubt” about the result is not quite enough.
Calibrating a response that does not give ammunition to the regime by suggesting American interference is delicate — and President Obama has been suitably restrained. But the air of business as usual at the White House is off-key. Millions of defrauded Iranians are thirsting for a little more.
As dusk comes, people gather on the roofs of their apartment buildings and the haunting sound of “Allah-u-Akbar” — God is great — and “Death to the dictator” echoes across the megalopolis.
The Iranian yearning in these cries is immense, a measure of all that was not delivered by the 1979 revolution, when the same cries went up and liberation was promised.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/opini ... nted=print
*****
June 16, 2009
News Analysis
In Iran, an Iron Cleric, Now Blinking
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
For two decades, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has remained a shadowy presence at the pinnacle of power in Iran, sparing in his public appearances and comments. Through his control of the military, the judiciary and all public broadcasts, the supreme leader controlled the levers he needed to maintain an iron if discreet grip on the Islamic republic.
But in a rare break from a long history of cautious moves, he rushed to bless President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for winning the election, calling on Iranians to line up behind the incumbent even before the standard three days required to certify the results had passed.
Then angry crowds swelled in cities around Iran, and he backpedaled, announcing Monday that the 12-member Council of Guardians, which vets elections and new laws, would investigate the vote.
“After congratulating the nation for having a sacred victory, to say now that there is a possibility that it was rigged is a big step backward for him,” said Abbas Milani, the director of Stanford University’s Iranian studies program.
Few suggest yet that Ayatollah Khamenei’s hold on power is at risk. But, analysts say, he has opened a serious fissure in the face of Islamic rule and one that may prove impossible to patch over, particularly given the fierce dispute over the election that has erupted amid the elite veterans of the 1979 revolution. Even his strong links to the powerful Revolutionary Guards — long his insurance policy — may not be decisive as the confrontation in Iran unfolds.
“Khamenei would always come and say, ‘Shut up; what I say goes,’ ” said Azar Nafisi, the author of two memoirs about Iran, including “Reading Lolita in Tehran.” “Everyone would say, ‘O.K., it is the word of the leader.’ Now the myth that there is a leader up there whose power is unquestionable is broken.”
Those sensing that important change may be afoot are quick to caution that Ayatollah Khamenei, as a student of the revolution that swept the shah from power, could still resort to overwhelming force to crush the demonstrations.
In calling for the Guardian Council to investigate the vote, he has bought himself a 10-day grace period for the anger to subside, experts note. The outcome is not likely to be a surprise. Ayatollah Ahmed Jannati, the council’s chairman, is one of Ayatollah Khamenei’s few staunch allies among powerful clerics. In addition, Ayatollah Khamenei appoints half the members, while the other half are nominated by the head of the judiciary, another appointee of the supreme leader.
“It is simply a faux investigation to quell the protests,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Ayatollah Khamenei was an unlikely successor to the patriarch of the revolution, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and his elevation to the post of supreme leader in 1989 might have sown the seeds for the political crisis the country is facing today.
The son of a cleric from the holy city of Mashhad, Ayatollah Khamenei was known as something of an open-minded mullah, if not exactly liberal. He had a good singing voice; played the tar, a traditional Iranian stringed instrument; and wrote poetry. His circle of friends included some of the country’s most accomplished poets.
In the violence right after the overthrow of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, a bomb hidden in a tape recorder permanently crippled his right arm, and he was elevated to president in 1981 after another bomb killed the incumbent. He managed to attract the ire of Ayatollah Khomeini himself once, ironically, by publicly questioning some aspects of having a vilayat-e-faqih, or supreme leader system.
He also clashed repeatedly with Mir Hussein Moussavi, the powerful prime minister at the time. After being trounced in the official election results by Mr. Ahmadinejad, Mr. Moussavi, the reformist presidential candidate, challenged Ayatollah Khamenei in the one area where he has always been vulnerable: his religious credentials.
Mr. Moussavi wrote an open letter to the clergy in the holy city of Qom about the election results. By appealing to the grand clerics, he was effectively saying Ayatollah Khamenei’s word as supreme leader lacked sufficient weight.
Ayatollah Khamenei was elevated from the middle clerical rank, hojatolislam, to ayatollah overnight in what was essentially a political rather than a religious decision. He earned undying scorn from many keepers of Shiite tradition, even though Iran’s myth-making machinery cranked up, with a witness professing he saw a light pass from Ayatollah Khomeini to Ayatollah Khamenei much the way the imams of centuries past were anointed.
Still, lacking a political base of his own, he set about creating one in the military. It was the end of the Iran-Iraq war, and many senior officers returning from the front demanded a role in politics or the economy for their sacrifices. Ayatollah Khamenei became a source of patronage for them, giving them important posts in broadcasting or as leaders of the vast foundations that had confiscated much of the pre-revolution private sector.
“By empowering them, he got power,” said Mehdi Khalaji of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
In the wake of the election debacle, questions are being raised about who controls whom. But over the years, Ayatollah Khamenei gradually surmounted expectations that he would be eclipsed.
“He is a weak leader, who is extremely smart in allying himself, or in maneuvering between centers of power,” said one expert at New York University, declining to use his name because he travels to Iran frequently. “Because of the factionalism of the state, he seems to be the most powerful person.”
But many analysts say the differences between factions have never been quite so pronounced nor public as in the past few days. Former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, once a close Khamenei ally who helped him become supreme leader, sent an open letter to him in the days before the election warning that any fraud would backfire, Mr. Milani noted. If he allowed the military to ignore the public will and to destroy senior revolutionary veterans, the decision would haunt him, Mr. Rafsanjani warned: “Tomorrow it is going to be you.”
Everyone speaking of Ayatollah Khamenei tends to use the word “cautious,” a man who never gambles. But he now faces a nearly impossible choice. If he lets the demonstrations swell, it could well change the system of clerical rule. If he uses violence to stamp them out, the myth of a popular mandate for the Islamic revolution will die.
“The Iranian leadership is caught in a paradox,” said Ms. Nafisi, the author of memoirs about Iran.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/world ... nted=print
THE MIDDLE EAST
There is a related video linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/world ... ?th&emc=th
June 17, 2009
Iran’s Latest Protests Are Seen as the Toughest to Stop
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
In an iconic photograph of antigovernment demonstrations in Iran, a student with flowing black hair and a headband held aloft the bloody T-shirt of a wounded protester. After his face appeared on the cover of The Economist magazine in July 1999, Ahmad Batebi paid dearly for it, enduring nearly a decade of imprisonment and torture before fleeing into exile.
On Tuesday, as he watched the swelling antigovernment protests in Iran from suburban Virginia, Mr. Batebi described a sense of dread mixing with happiness. “Every society has to make their own version of freedom and democracy, and that is what the Iranian people are doing right now,” he said through a translator. “But I know that people are being beaten, some are going to jail and some will be killed.”
The Iranian government tolerated student-led uprisings in 1999 and 2003 for only a few days before unleashing fearsome crackdowns, sending Basij vigilantes onto campuses, where they flung a few students from the windows; bloodied as many heads as they could with bricks, chains or truncheons; and jailed scores.
Similar intimidation tactics have been on display over the past few days with little result, as Iranian state news reports of seven people killed in various cities did not deter another major antigovernment rally on Tuesday. This time, analysts say, the government will have trouble bringing about a swift, sharp end to the demonstrations over the contested presidential election results in the same way it had shut down previous eruptions.
First, there is the sheer size of these demonstrations, with protests that are not limited to students, but cut across generations and economic classes. Second, there is a more pronounced, if still nebulous, leadership centered around the leading opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, who has adopted an openly hard-edged attitude toward the government. Third, the current crisis was inspired by common anger over a national election, not the more narrow issues students took to heart.
****
June 17, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Virtual Mosque
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Watching events unfolding in Tehran raises three intriguing questions for me: Is Facebook to Iran’s Moderate Revolution what the mosque was to Iran’s Islamic Revolution? Is Twitter to Iranian moderates what muezzins were to Iranian mullahs? And, finally, is any of this good for the Jews — particularly Israel’s prime minister, Bibi Netanyahu?
Here is why I ask. During the past eight years, in Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, and, to a lesser extent, Egypt, spaces were opened for more democratic elections. Good news. Unfortunately, the groups that had the most grass-roots support and mobilization capabilities — and the most energized supporters — to take advantage of this new space were the Islamists. That is, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank, the various Sunni and Shiite Islamist parties in Iraq and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The centrist mainstream was nowhere.
One of the most important reasons that the Islamists were able to covertly organize and mobilize, and be prepared when the lids in their societies were loosened a bit, was because they had the mosque — a place to gather, educate and inspire their followers — outside the total control of the state.
In almost every one of these cases, the Islamists overplayed their hands. In Lebanon, Hezbollah took the country into a disastrous and unpopular war. Ditto Hamas in Gaza. The Sunni and Shiite Islamists in Iraq tried to impose a religious lifestyle on their communities, and the mullahs in Iran quashed the reformists. In the last year, though, the hard-liners in all these countries have faced a backlash by the centrist majorities, who detest these Islamist groups.
Hezbollah was defeated in the Lebanese elections. Hamas is facing an energized Fatah in the West Bank and is increasingly unpopular in Gaza. Iraqi Sunnis have ousted the jihadists thanks to the tribal Awakening movement, while the biggest pro-Iranian party in Iraq got trounced in the recent provincial runoff. And in Iran, millions of Iranians starving for more freedom rallied to the presidential candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi, forcing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to steal the election. (If he really won the Iranian election, as Ahmadinejad claims, by a 2-to-1 margin, wouldn’t he invite the whole world in to recount the votes? Why hasn’t he?)
What is fascinating to me is the degree to which in Iran today — and in Lebanon — the more secular forces of moderation have used technologies like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, blogging and text-messaging as their virtual mosque, as the place they can now gather, mobilize, plan, inform and energize their supporters, outside the grip of the state.
For the first time, the moderates, who were always stranded between authoritarian regimes that had all the powers of the state and Islamists who had all the powers of the mosque, now have their own place to come together and project power: the network. The Times reported that Moussavi’s fan group on Facebook alone has grown to more than 50,000 members. That’s surely more than any mosque could hold — which is why the government is now trying to block these sites.
But while that puts the moderate mainstream on par with the Islamists in communications terms, we should not get carried away. First, “moderates” is a relative term. Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, while more secular and nationalist than the extreme Iraqi Islamists, nonetheless wants to centralize power and solidify his Dawa group as the ruling party.
Second, even if defeated electorally, the Islamists and their regimes have a trump card: guns. Guns trump cellphones. Bang-bang beats tweet-tweet. The Sunni Awakening in Iraq succeeded because the moderates there were armed. I doubt Ahmadinejad will go peacefully.
And that brings me to Netanyahu. Israel was taken by surprise by events in Lebanon and Iran. And Israeli officials have been saying they would much prefer that Ahmadinejad still wins in Iran — not because Israelis really prefer him but because they believe his thuggish, anti-Semitic behavior reflects the true and immutable character of the Iranian regime. And Israelis fear that if a moderate were to take over, it would not herald any real change in Iran, or its nuclear ambitions, but simply disguise it better.
But there are signals — still weak — that another trend may be stirring in the region. The Iranian regime appears to be splitting at the top. This could challenge Netanyahu’s security framework. Israel needs to be neither seduced by these signals nor indifferent to them. It has to be open to them and must understand that how it relates to Palestinians and settlements can help these trends — at the margins. But a lot starts at the margins.
“The rise of these moderate forces, if it is real and sustained, would be the most significant long-term contribution to Israeli national security,” argued Gidi Grinstein, the president of the Reut Institute, a think tank. “If some of these moderate forces started to converge, then the overall status of Israeli security would improve radically.” It is still way too early to know, he said, “but Israel needs to be alive to this process and not simply rely on its old framework.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/opini ... nted=print
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/world ... ?th&emc=th
June 17, 2009
Iran’s Latest Protests Are Seen as the Toughest to Stop
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
In an iconic photograph of antigovernment demonstrations in Iran, a student with flowing black hair and a headband held aloft the bloody T-shirt of a wounded protester. After his face appeared on the cover of The Economist magazine in July 1999, Ahmad Batebi paid dearly for it, enduring nearly a decade of imprisonment and torture before fleeing into exile.
On Tuesday, as he watched the swelling antigovernment protests in Iran from suburban Virginia, Mr. Batebi described a sense of dread mixing with happiness. “Every society has to make their own version of freedom and democracy, and that is what the Iranian people are doing right now,” he said through a translator. “But I know that people are being beaten, some are going to jail and some will be killed.”
The Iranian government tolerated student-led uprisings in 1999 and 2003 for only a few days before unleashing fearsome crackdowns, sending Basij vigilantes onto campuses, where they flung a few students from the windows; bloodied as many heads as they could with bricks, chains or truncheons; and jailed scores.
Similar intimidation tactics have been on display over the past few days with little result, as Iranian state news reports of seven people killed in various cities did not deter another major antigovernment rally on Tuesday. This time, analysts say, the government will have trouble bringing about a swift, sharp end to the demonstrations over the contested presidential election results in the same way it had shut down previous eruptions.
First, there is the sheer size of these demonstrations, with protests that are not limited to students, but cut across generations and economic classes. Second, there is a more pronounced, if still nebulous, leadership centered around the leading opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, who has adopted an openly hard-edged attitude toward the government. Third, the current crisis was inspired by common anger over a national election, not the more narrow issues students took to heart.
****
June 17, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Virtual Mosque
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Watching events unfolding in Tehran raises three intriguing questions for me: Is Facebook to Iran’s Moderate Revolution what the mosque was to Iran’s Islamic Revolution? Is Twitter to Iranian moderates what muezzins were to Iranian mullahs? And, finally, is any of this good for the Jews — particularly Israel’s prime minister, Bibi Netanyahu?
Here is why I ask. During the past eight years, in Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, and, to a lesser extent, Egypt, spaces were opened for more democratic elections. Good news. Unfortunately, the groups that had the most grass-roots support and mobilization capabilities — and the most energized supporters — to take advantage of this new space were the Islamists. That is, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank, the various Sunni and Shiite Islamist parties in Iraq and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The centrist mainstream was nowhere.
One of the most important reasons that the Islamists were able to covertly organize and mobilize, and be prepared when the lids in their societies were loosened a bit, was because they had the mosque — a place to gather, educate and inspire their followers — outside the total control of the state.
In almost every one of these cases, the Islamists overplayed their hands. In Lebanon, Hezbollah took the country into a disastrous and unpopular war. Ditto Hamas in Gaza. The Sunni and Shiite Islamists in Iraq tried to impose a religious lifestyle on their communities, and the mullahs in Iran quashed the reformists. In the last year, though, the hard-liners in all these countries have faced a backlash by the centrist majorities, who detest these Islamist groups.
Hezbollah was defeated in the Lebanese elections. Hamas is facing an energized Fatah in the West Bank and is increasingly unpopular in Gaza. Iraqi Sunnis have ousted the jihadists thanks to the tribal Awakening movement, while the biggest pro-Iranian party in Iraq got trounced in the recent provincial runoff. And in Iran, millions of Iranians starving for more freedom rallied to the presidential candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi, forcing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to steal the election. (If he really won the Iranian election, as Ahmadinejad claims, by a 2-to-1 margin, wouldn’t he invite the whole world in to recount the votes? Why hasn’t he?)
What is fascinating to me is the degree to which in Iran today — and in Lebanon — the more secular forces of moderation have used technologies like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, blogging and text-messaging as their virtual mosque, as the place they can now gather, mobilize, plan, inform and energize their supporters, outside the grip of the state.
For the first time, the moderates, who were always stranded between authoritarian regimes that had all the powers of the state and Islamists who had all the powers of the mosque, now have their own place to come together and project power: the network. The Times reported that Moussavi’s fan group on Facebook alone has grown to more than 50,000 members. That’s surely more than any mosque could hold — which is why the government is now trying to block these sites.
But while that puts the moderate mainstream on par with the Islamists in communications terms, we should not get carried away. First, “moderates” is a relative term. Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, while more secular and nationalist than the extreme Iraqi Islamists, nonetheless wants to centralize power and solidify his Dawa group as the ruling party.
Second, even if defeated electorally, the Islamists and their regimes have a trump card: guns. Guns trump cellphones. Bang-bang beats tweet-tweet. The Sunni Awakening in Iraq succeeded because the moderates there were armed. I doubt Ahmadinejad will go peacefully.
And that brings me to Netanyahu. Israel was taken by surprise by events in Lebanon and Iran. And Israeli officials have been saying they would much prefer that Ahmadinejad still wins in Iran — not because Israelis really prefer him but because they believe his thuggish, anti-Semitic behavior reflects the true and immutable character of the Iranian regime. And Israelis fear that if a moderate were to take over, it would not herald any real change in Iran, or its nuclear ambitions, but simply disguise it better.
But there are signals — still weak — that another trend may be stirring in the region. The Iranian regime appears to be splitting at the top. This could challenge Netanyahu’s security framework. Israel needs to be neither seduced by these signals nor indifferent to them. It has to be open to them and must understand that how it relates to Palestinians and settlements can help these trends — at the margins. But a lot starts at the margins.
“The rise of these moderate forces, if it is real and sustained, would be the most significant long-term contribution to Israeli national security,” argued Gidi Grinstein, the president of the Reut Institute, a think tank. “If some of these moderate forces started to converge, then the overall status of Israeli security would improve radically.” It is still way too early to know, he said, “but Israel needs to be alive to this process and not simply rely on its old framework.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/opini ... nted=print
July 15, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Goodbye Iraq, and Good Luck
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Kirkuk, Iraq
I’m in the provincial headquarters building in downtown Kirkuk — the oil-rich district of northern Iraq that is the most disputed corner of this country. The provincial leaders — Sunnis, Kurds, Turkmen and Christians — have come to meet America’s top military officer, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with whom I am tagging along. All 11 Iraqi leaders are seated on one side of a conference table and local U.S. officials have provided me a color-coded guide, identifying each Iraqi politician, their political tendencies and religious affiliation. Each Iraqi leader tells the admiral, through an Arabic translator, why his or her community deserves to have this or that slice of Kirkuk, until it comes to a Kurdish representative, who announces in English: “I want to tell a joke.”
It’s my lucky day.
“After Saddam was ousted in 2003,” said Deputy Provincial Council Chairman Rebwar Talabani, “there was an elderly citizen who wanted to write a letter to the new government to explain all his sufferings from the Saddam era to get compensation. But he was illiterate. As you may know, outside our government offices we have professional letter-writers for illiterate people. So the man told the letter-writer all of his problems. ‘In the ’50s, they destroyed my house,’ he said. ‘In the ’60s, they killed two of my sons. In the ’70s, they confiscated my properties,’ and so on, right up to today. The letter-writer wrote it all down. When he was done, the man asked the letter-writer to read it back to him before he handed it to the governor. So the letter-writer read it aloud. When he got done, the man hit himself on the head and said, ‘That is so beautifully done. I had no idea all this happened to me.’ ”
Talabani’s joke seemed to have been directed as much to his fellow Iraqis as to Admiral Mullen. My translation: “Everyone here has a history, and it’s mostly painful. We Iraqis love to tell our histories. And the more we do, the better they get. But with you Americans leaving, we need to decide: Do we keep telling our stories, or do we figure out how to settle our differences?”
And that is my take-away from this visit: Iraqis know who they were, and they don’t always like it, but they still have not figured out whom they want to be as a country. They are exhausted from years of civil strife and really don’t want to go there again. Yet on the big unresolved issues — how will power be shared in Kirkuk, how will the Sunnis who joined the “awakening” be absorbed into the government, how will oil wealth and power be shared between provinces and the central government — the different ethnic communities still don’t want to compromise much either.
I am amazed in talking to U.S. Army officers here as to how much they’ve learned from and about Iraqis. It has taken way too long, but our soldiers understand this place. But what about Iraqis? There are now many Iraqis embedded with U.S. forces in Kirkuk. In the dining hall on the main base, I like to watch the Iraqi officers watching the melting pot of U.S. soldiers around them — men, women, blacks, whites, Asians, Hispanics — and wonder: What have they learned from us? We left some shameful legacies here of torture and Abu Ghraib, but we also left a million acts of kindness and a profound example of how much people of different backgrounds can accomplish when they work together.
We are going to find out just what Iraqis have learned soon. As Admiral Mullen told the Iraqi leaders around that table: “The U.S. is not going to solve” Iraq’s problems. That is the job “of a sovereign nation.” So Iraqis better get to work, because “on the current withdrawal plan, coalition forces will not be here in 18 months.”
That’s an important message — otherwise Iraqis will delay forever resolving their big, nation-shaping disputes. We can’t do it for them — but our diplomats could do more to help them forge those compromises. We have special envoys for Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Arab-Israeli affairs, but for Iraq — a country key to the Middle East in which we have lost so many lives and are spending a trillion dollars — there is no special envoy, or secretary of state, totally focused on securing a decent outcome here. Vice President Joe Biden is overseeing Iraq policy, but he has too many other things to do. Iraq needs a big, tough, full-time mediator.
Senior Iraqi officials are too proud to ask for our help and would probably publicly resist it, but privately Iraqis will tell you that they want it and need it. We are the only trusted player here — even by those who hate us. They need a U.S. mediator so they can each go back to their respective communities and say: “I never would have made these concessions, but those terrible Americans made me do it.”
After we invaded and stabilized Bosnia, we didn’t just toss their competing factions the keys. President Bill Clinton organized the Dayton peace talks and Richard Holbrooke brokered a deal that has lasted to this day. Why are we not doing in Iraq what we did in Bosnia — when the outcome here is 100 times more important?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/15/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
Goodbye Iraq, and Good Luck
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Kirkuk, Iraq
I’m in the provincial headquarters building in downtown Kirkuk — the oil-rich district of northern Iraq that is the most disputed corner of this country. The provincial leaders — Sunnis, Kurds, Turkmen and Christians — have come to meet America’s top military officer, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with whom I am tagging along. All 11 Iraqi leaders are seated on one side of a conference table and local U.S. officials have provided me a color-coded guide, identifying each Iraqi politician, their political tendencies and religious affiliation. Each Iraqi leader tells the admiral, through an Arabic translator, why his or her community deserves to have this or that slice of Kirkuk, until it comes to a Kurdish representative, who announces in English: “I want to tell a joke.”
It’s my lucky day.
“After Saddam was ousted in 2003,” said Deputy Provincial Council Chairman Rebwar Talabani, “there was an elderly citizen who wanted to write a letter to the new government to explain all his sufferings from the Saddam era to get compensation. But he was illiterate. As you may know, outside our government offices we have professional letter-writers for illiterate people. So the man told the letter-writer all of his problems. ‘In the ’50s, they destroyed my house,’ he said. ‘In the ’60s, they killed two of my sons. In the ’70s, they confiscated my properties,’ and so on, right up to today. The letter-writer wrote it all down. When he was done, the man asked the letter-writer to read it back to him before he handed it to the governor. So the letter-writer read it aloud. When he got done, the man hit himself on the head and said, ‘That is so beautifully done. I had no idea all this happened to me.’ ”
Talabani’s joke seemed to have been directed as much to his fellow Iraqis as to Admiral Mullen. My translation: “Everyone here has a history, and it’s mostly painful. We Iraqis love to tell our histories. And the more we do, the better they get. But with you Americans leaving, we need to decide: Do we keep telling our stories, or do we figure out how to settle our differences?”
And that is my take-away from this visit: Iraqis know who they were, and they don’t always like it, but they still have not figured out whom they want to be as a country. They are exhausted from years of civil strife and really don’t want to go there again. Yet on the big unresolved issues — how will power be shared in Kirkuk, how will the Sunnis who joined the “awakening” be absorbed into the government, how will oil wealth and power be shared between provinces and the central government — the different ethnic communities still don’t want to compromise much either.
I am amazed in talking to U.S. Army officers here as to how much they’ve learned from and about Iraqis. It has taken way too long, but our soldiers understand this place. But what about Iraqis? There are now many Iraqis embedded with U.S. forces in Kirkuk. In the dining hall on the main base, I like to watch the Iraqi officers watching the melting pot of U.S. soldiers around them — men, women, blacks, whites, Asians, Hispanics — and wonder: What have they learned from us? We left some shameful legacies here of torture and Abu Ghraib, but we also left a million acts of kindness and a profound example of how much people of different backgrounds can accomplish when they work together.
We are going to find out just what Iraqis have learned soon. As Admiral Mullen told the Iraqi leaders around that table: “The U.S. is not going to solve” Iraq’s problems. That is the job “of a sovereign nation.” So Iraqis better get to work, because “on the current withdrawal plan, coalition forces will not be here in 18 months.”
That’s an important message — otherwise Iraqis will delay forever resolving their big, nation-shaping disputes. We can’t do it for them — but our diplomats could do more to help them forge those compromises. We have special envoys for Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Arab-Israeli affairs, but for Iraq — a country key to the Middle East in which we have lost so many lives and are spending a trillion dollars — there is no special envoy, or secretary of state, totally focused on securing a decent outcome here. Vice President Joe Biden is overseeing Iraq policy, but he has too many other things to do. Iraq needs a big, tough, full-time mediator.
Senior Iraqi officials are too proud to ask for our help and would probably publicly resist it, but privately Iraqis will tell you that they want it and need it. We are the only trusted player here — even by those who hate us. They need a U.S. mediator so they can each go back to their respective communities and say: “I never would have made these concessions, but those terrible Americans made me do it.”
After we invaded and stabilized Bosnia, we didn’t just toss their competing factions the keys. President Bill Clinton organized the Dayton peace talks and Richard Holbrooke brokered a deal that has lasted to this day. Why are we not doing in Iraq what we did in Bosnia — when the outcome here is 100 times more important?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/15/opini ... nted=print
July 26, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Losers Hang On
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Jalozai Camp, Pakistan
After spending a week traveling the frontline of the “war on terrorism” — from the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Ronald Reagan in the seas off Iran, to northern Iraq, to Afghanistan and into northwest Pakistan — I can comfortably report the following: The bad guys are losing.
Yes, the dominos you see falling in the Muslim world today are the extremist Islamist groups and governments. They have failed to persuade people by either their arguments or their performances in power that their puritanical versions of Islam are the answer. Having lost the argument, though, the radicals still hang on thanks to gun barrels and oil barrels — and they can for a while.
Because, while the radicals have failed miserably, our allies — the pro-Americans, the Muslim modernists, the Arab moderates — have not really filled the void with reform and good government of their own. They are winning by default. More on that later.
For now, though, it is obvious that everywhere they have won or seized power, the Islamists — in Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Algeria, Lebanon or Gaza — have overplayed their hands, dragged their societies into useless wars or engaged in nihilistic violence that today is producing a broad backlash from mainstream Muslims.
Think of this: In the late-1970s, two leaders made historic trips — President Anwar Sadat flew from Egypt to Israel and Ayatollah Khomeini flew from Paris to Tehran. For the last 30 years, politics in the Middle East and the Muslim world has, in many ways, been a struggle between their competing visions.
Sadat argued that the future should bury the past and that Arabs and Muslims should build their future based on peace with Israel, integration with the West and embracing modernity. Khomeini argued that the past should bury the future and that Persians and Muslims should build their future on hostility to Israel, isolation from the West and subordinating modernity to a puritanical Islam.
In 2009, the struggle between those two trends tipped toward the Sadatists. The fact that Iran’s ruling theocrats had to steal their election to stay in power and forcibly suppress dissent by millions of Iranians — according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Iran has surpassed China as the world’s leading jailer of journalists, with 41 now behind bars — is the most visible sign of this. The Taliban’s burning down of secular schools that compete with its mosques, and its peddling of heroin to raise cash, are also not exactly signs of intellectual triumph.
The same day that President Obama spoke to the Muslim world from Cairo University, Osama bin Laden released a long statement on Islamic Web sites and on Al Jazeera. As the Egyptian Middle East expert Mamoun Fandy noted: “Obama beat Osama hands down. Ask anyone about the content of Obama’s speech and they will tell you. Ask them what Osama said and most people will say, ‘Did he give a speech?’ ”
In Iraq’s elections last January, nationalist and moderate Muslim parties defeated the sectarian, radical religious parties, while in Lebanon, a pro-Western coalition defeated one led by Hezbollah.
Here in Pakistan, the backlash against the Taliban has been building among the rising middle class. It started in March when a mobile-phone video of a teenage girl being held down and beaten outside her home by a Taliban commander in Pakistan’s Swat Valley spread virally across this country. In May, the Pakistani Army began an offensive against Taliban militants who had taken control of key towns in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), and appeared to be moving toward the capital, Islamabad.
I followed Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, when he visited a vast, choking-hot and dust-covered refugee tent camp in Jalozai, where some 116,000 refugees have fled the NWFP, as the Pakistani Army moved into their hometowns to smash the Taliban in a popular operation.
“People are totally against them, but the Taliban don’t care,” a Pakistani teacher, Abdul Jalil, 41, told me while taking a break from teaching the Urdu alphabet to young boys in a sweltering tent. “They are very cruel. They chopped people’s heads off.”
To the extent that the radical Islamists have any energy today, it comes not from the power of their ideas or examples of good governance, but by stoking sectarian feuds. In Afghanistan, the Taliban play on Pashtun nationalist grievances, and in Iraq, the Sunni jihadists draw energy from killing Shiites.
The only way to really dry up their support, though, is for the Arab and Muslim modernists to actually implement better ideas by producing less corrupt and more consensual governance, with better schools, more economic opportunities and a vision of Islam that is perceived as authentic yet embracing of modernity. That is where “our” allies in Egypt, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan have so consistently failed. Until that happens, the Islamist radicals will be bankrupt, but not out of business.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
The Losers Hang On
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Jalozai Camp, Pakistan
After spending a week traveling the frontline of the “war on terrorism” — from the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Ronald Reagan in the seas off Iran, to northern Iraq, to Afghanistan and into northwest Pakistan — I can comfortably report the following: The bad guys are losing.
Yes, the dominos you see falling in the Muslim world today are the extremist Islamist groups and governments. They have failed to persuade people by either their arguments or their performances in power that their puritanical versions of Islam are the answer. Having lost the argument, though, the radicals still hang on thanks to gun barrels and oil barrels — and they can for a while.
Because, while the radicals have failed miserably, our allies — the pro-Americans, the Muslim modernists, the Arab moderates — have not really filled the void with reform and good government of their own. They are winning by default. More on that later.
For now, though, it is obvious that everywhere they have won or seized power, the Islamists — in Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Algeria, Lebanon or Gaza — have overplayed their hands, dragged their societies into useless wars or engaged in nihilistic violence that today is producing a broad backlash from mainstream Muslims.
Think of this: In the late-1970s, two leaders made historic trips — President Anwar Sadat flew from Egypt to Israel and Ayatollah Khomeini flew from Paris to Tehran. For the last 30 years, politics in the Middle East and the Muslim world has, in many ways, been a struggle between their competing visions.
Sadat argued that the future should bury the past and that Arabs and Muslims should build their future based on peace with Israel, integration with the West and embracing modernity. Khomeini argued that the past should bury the future and that Persians and Muslims should build their future on hostility to Israel, isolation from the West and subordinating modernity to a puritanical Islam.
In 2009, the struggle between those two trends tipped toward the Sadatists. The fact that Iran’s ruling theocrats had to steal their election to stay in power and forcibly suppress dissent by millions of Iranians — according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Iran has surpassed China as the world’s leading jailer of journalists, with 41 now behind bars — is the most visible sign of this. The Taliban’s burning down of secular schools that compete with its mosques, and its peddling of heroin to raise cash, are also not exactly signs of intellectual triumph.
The same day that President Obama spoke to the Muslim world from Cairo University, Osama bin Laden released a long statement on Islamic Web sites and on Al Jazeera. As the Egyptian Middle East expert Mamoun Fandy noted: “Obama beat Osama hands down. Ask anyone about the content of Obama’s speech and they will tell you. Ask them what Osama said and most people will say, ‘Did he give a speech?’ ”
In Iraq’s elections last January, nationalist and moderate Muslim parties defeated the sectarian, radical religious parties, while in Lebanon, a pro-Western coalition defeated one led by Hezbollah.
Here in Pakistan, the backlash against the Taliban has been building among the rising middle class. It started in March when a mobile-phone video of a teenage girl being held down and beaten outside her home by a Taliban commander in Pakistan’s Swat Valley spread virally across this country. In May, the Pakistani Army began an offensive against Taliban militants who had taken control of key towns in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), and appeared to be moving toward the capital, Islamabad.
I followed Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, when he visited a vast, choking-hot and dust-covered refugee tent camp in Jalozai, where some 116,000 refugees have fled the NWFP, as the Pakistani Army moved into their hometowns to smash the Taliban in a popular operation.
“People are totally against them, but the Taliban don’t care,” a Pakistani teacher, Abdul Jalil, 41, told me while taking a break from teaching the Urdu alphabet to young boys in a sweltering tent. “They are very cruel. They chopped people’s heads off.”
To the extent that the radical Islamists have any energy today, it comes not from the power of their ideas or examples of good governance, but by stoking sectarian feuds. In Afghanistan, the Taliban play on Pashtun nationalist grievances, and in Iraq, the Sunni jihadists draw energy from killing Shiites.
The only way to really dry up their support, though, is for the Arab and Muslim modernists to actually implement better ideas by producing less corrupt and more consensual governance, with better schools, more economic opportunities and a vision of Islam that is perceived as authentic yet embracing of modernity. That is where “our” allies in Egypt, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan have so consistently failed. Until that happens, the Islamist radicals will be bankrupt, but not out of business.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/opini ... nted=print
August 5, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Green Shoots in Palestine
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Ramallah, West Bank
In 2002, the U.N. Development Program released its first ever Arab Human Development Report, which bluntly detailed the deficits of freedom, women’s empowerment and knowledge-creation holding back the Arab world. It was buttressed with sobering statistics: Greece alone translated five times more books every year from English to Greek than the entire Arab world translated from English to Arabic; the G.D.P. of Spain was greater than that of all 22 Arab states combined; 65 million Arab adults were illiterate. It was a disturbing picture, bravely produced by Arab academics.
Coming out so soon after 9/11, the report felt like a diagnosis of all the misgovernance bedeviling the Arab world, creating the pools of angry, unemployed youth, who become easy prey for extremists. Well, the good news is that the U.N. Development Program and a new group of Arab scholars last week came out with a new Arab Human Development report. The bad news: Things have gotten worse — and many Arab governments don’t want to hear about it.
This new report was triggered by a desire to find out why the obstacles to human development in the Arab world have “proved so stubborn.” What the roughly 100 Arab authors of the 2009 study concluded was that too many Arab citizens today lack “human security — the kind of material and moral foundation that secures lives, livelihoods and an acceptable quality of life for the majority.” A sense of personal security — economic, political and social — “is a prerequisite for human development, and its widespread absence in Arab countries has held back their progress.”
The authors cite a variety of factors undermining human security in the Arab region today — beginning with environmental degradation — the toxic combination of rising desertification, water shortages and population explosion. In 1980, the Arab region had 150 million people. In 2007, it was home to 317 million people, and by 2015 its population is projected to be 395 million. Some 60 percent of this population is under the age of 25, and they will need 51 million new jobs by 2020.
Another persistent source of Arab human insecurity is high unemployment. “For nearly two and half decades after 1980, the region witnessed hardly any economic growth,” the report found. Despite the presence of oil money (or maybe because of it), there is a distinct lack of investment in scientific research, development, knowledge industries and innovation. Instead, government jobs and contracts dominate. Average unemployment in the Arab region in 2005 was 14.4 percent, compared with 6.3 percent for the rest of the world. A lot of this is because of a third source of human insecurity: autocratic and unrepresentative Arab governments, whose weaknesses “often combine to turn the state into a threat to human security, instead of its chief support.”
The whole report would have left me feeling hopeless had I not come to Ramallah, the seat of Palestinian government in the West Bank, to find some good cheer. I’m serious.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to the wider Middle East what off-Broadway is to Broadway. It is where all good and bad ideas get tested out first. Well, the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, a former I.M.F. economist, is testing out the most exciting new idea in Arab governance ever. I call it “Fayyadism.”
Fayyadism is based on the simple but all-too-rare notion that an Arab leader’s legitimacy should be based not on slogans or rejectionism or personality cults or security services, but on delivering transparent, accountable administration and services.
Fayyad, a former finance minister who became prime minister after Hamas seized power in Gaza in June 2007, is unlike any Arab leader today. He is an ardent Palestinian nationalist, but his whole strategy is to say: the more we build our state with quality institutions — finance, police, social services — the sooner we will secure our right to independence. I see this as a challenge to “Arafatism,” which focused on Palestinian rights first, state institutions later, if ever, and produced neither.
Things are truly getting better in the West Bank, thanks to a combination of Fayyadism, improved Palestinian security and a lifting of checkpoints by Israel. In all of 2008, about 1,200 new companies registered for licenses here. In the first six months of this year, almost 900 have registered. According to the I.M.F., the West Bank economy should grow by 7 percent this year.
Fayyad, famous here for his incorruptibility, says his approach is “to tell people who you are, what you are about and what you intend to do and then actually do it.” At a time when all the big ideologies have failed to deliver for Arabs, Fayyad says he wants a government based on “legitimacy by achievement.”
Something quite new is happening here. And given the centrality of the Palestinian cause in Arab eyes, if Fayyadism works, maybe it could start a trend in this part of the world — one that would do the most to improve Arab human security — good, accountable government.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/05/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
Green Shoots in Palestine
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Ramallah, West Bank
In 2002, the U.N. Development Program released its first ever Arab Human Development Report, which bluntly detailed the deficits of freedom, women’s empowerment and knowledge-creation holding back the Arab world. It was buttressed with sobering statistics: Greece alone translated five times more books every year from English to Greek than the entire Arab world translated from English to Arabic; the G.D.P. of Spain was greater than that of all 22 Arab states combined; 65 million Arab adults were illiterate. It was a disturbing picture, bravely produced by Arab academics.
Coming out so soon after 9/11, the report felt like a diagnosis of all the misgovernance bedeviling the Arab world, creating the pools of angry, unemployed youth, who become easy prey for extremists. Well, the good news is that the U.N. Development Program and a new group of Arab scholars last week came out with a new Arab Human Development report. The bad news: Things have gotten worse — and many Arab governments don’t want to hear about it.
This new report was triggered by a desire to find out why the obstacles to human development in the Arab world have “proved so stubborn.” What the roughly 100 Arab authors of the 2009 study concluded was that too many Arab citizens today lack “human security — the kind of material and moral foundation that secures lives, livelihoods and an acceptable quality of life for the majority.” A sense of personal security — economic, political and social — “is a prerequisite for human development, and its widespread absence in Arab countries has held back their progress.”
The authors cite a variety of factors undermining human security in the Arab region today — beginning with environmental degradation — the toxic combination of rising desertification, water shortages and population explosion. In 1980, the Arab region had 150 million people. In 2007, it was home to 317 million people, and by 2015 its population is projected to be 395 million. Some 60 percent of this population is under the age of 25, and they will need 51 million new jobs by 2020.
Another persistent source of Arab human insecurity is high unemployment. “For nearly two and half decades after 1980, the region witnessed hardly any economic growth,” the report found. Despite the presence of oil money (or maybe because of it), there is a distinct lack of investment in scientific research, development, knowledge industries and innovation. Instead, government jobs and contracts dominate. Average unemployment in the Arab region in 2005 was 14.4 percent, compared with 6.3 percent for the rest of the world. A lot of this is because of a third source of human insecurity: autocratic and unrepresentative Arab governments, whose weaknesses “often combine to turn the state into a threat to human security, instead of its chief support.”
The whole report would have left me feeling hopeless had I not come to Ramallah, the seat of Palestinian government in the West Bank, to find some good cheer. I’m serious.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to the wider Middle East what off-Broadway is to Broadway. It is where all good and bad ideas get tested out first. Well, the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, a former I.M.F. economist, is testing out the most exciting new idea in Arab governance ever. I call it “Fayyadism.”
Fayyadism is based on the simple but all-too-rare notion that an Arab leader’s legitimacy should be based not on slogans or rejectionism or personality cults or security services, but on delivering transparent, accountable administration and services.
Fayyad, a former finance minister who became prime minister after Hamas seized power in Gaza in June 2007, is unlike any Arab leader today. He is an ardent Palestinian nationalist, but his whole strategy is to say: the more we build our state with quality institutions — finance, police, social services — the sooner we will secure our right to independence. I see this as a challenge to “Arafatism,” which focused on Palestinian rights first, state institutions later, if ever, and produced neither.
Things are truly getting better in the West Bank, thanks to a combination of Fayyadism, improved Palestinian security and a lifting of checkpoints by Israel. In all of 2008, about 1,200 new companies registered for licenses here. In the first six months of this year, almost 900 have registered. According to the I.M.F., the West Bank economy should grow by 7 percent this year.
Fayyad, famous here for his incorruptibility, says his approach is “to tell people who you are, what you are about and what you intend to do and then actually do it.” At a time when all the big ideologies have failed to deliver for Arabs, Fayyad says he wants a government based on “legitimacy by achievement.”
Something quite new is happening here. And given the centrality of the Palestinian cause in Arab eyes, if Fayyadism works, maybe it could start a trend in this part of the world — one that would do the most to improve Arab human security — good, accountable government.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/05/opini ... nted=print
August 9, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Green Shoots in Palestine II
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Ramallah, West Bank
Ever since the collapse of the Oslo peace accords in 2000, and the horror-show violence that followed, there has been only one thing to say about the West Bank: Nothing ever changes here, except for the worst. That is just not the case anymore — much to my surprise.
For Palestinians, long trapped between burgeoning Israeli settlements and an Israeli occupation army, subject to lawlessness in their own cities and the fecklessness of their own political leadership, life has clearly started to improve a bit, thanks to a new virtuous cycle: improved Palestinian policing that has led to more Palestinian investment and trade that has led to the Israeli Army dismantling more checkpoints in the West Bank that has led to more Palestinian travel and commerce.
Because the West Bank today is largely hidden from Israelis by a wall, Israelis are just starting to learn from their own press what is going on there. On July 31, many Israelis were no doubt surprised to read this quote in the Maariv daily from Omar Hashim, deputy chairman of the Chamber of Commerce of Nablus, the commercial center of the West Bank: “Traders here are satisfied,” said Hashim. “Their sales are rising. They feel that life is returning to normal. There is a strong sense of optimism.”
Make no mistake: Palestinians still want the Israeli occupation to end, and their own state to emerge, tomorrow. That is not going to happen. But for the first time since Oslo, there is an economic-security dynamic emerging on the ground in the West Bank that has the potential — the potential — to give the post-Yasir Arafat Palestinians another chance to build the sort of self-governing authority, army and economy that are prerequisites for securing their own independent state. A Palestinian peace partner for Israel may be taking shape again.
The key to this rebirth was the recruitment, training and deployment of four battalions of new Palestinian National Security Forces — a move spearheaded by President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad of the Palestinian Authority. Trained in Jordan in a program paid for by the U.S., three of these battalions have fanned out since May 2008 and brought order to the major Palestinian towns: Nablus, Jericho, Hebron, Ramallah, Jenin and Bethlehem.
These N.S.F. troops, who replaced either Israeli soldiers or Palestinian gangs, have been warmly received by the locals. Recently, N.S.F. forces wiped out a Hamas cell in Qalqilya, and took losses themselves. The death of the Hamas fighters drew nary a peep, but a memorial service for the N.S.F. soldiers killed drew thousands of people. For the first time, I’ve heard top Israeli military officers say these new Palestinian troops are professional and for real.
The Israeli Army’s chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, has backed that up by taking down roughly two-thirds of the 41 manned checkpoints Israel set up around the West Bank, many since 2000, to stifle Palestinian suicide bombers. Those checkpoints — where Palestinians often had to wait for two hours to just pass from one city to the next and often could not drive their own cars through but had to go from cab to cab — choked Palestinian commerce. Israel is also again letting Israeli Arabs drive their own cars into the West Bank on Saturdays to shop.
“You can feel the movement,” said Olfat Hammad, the associate director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, who lives in Nablus and works in Ramallah. “It is not a burden anymore to move around to Ramallah for business meetings and social meetings.” Nablus recently opened its first multiplex, “Cinema City,” as well as a multistory furniture mart designed to cater to Israelis. Ramallah’s real estate prices have skyrocketed.
“I have had a 70 percent increase in sales,” Maariv quoted a Nablus shoe store owner as saying. “People are coming from the villages nearby, and from other cities in the West Bank and from Israel.”
But men and women do not live by shoe sales alone. The only way the Palestinian leadership running this show can maintain its legitimacy is if it is eventually given political authority, not just policing powers, over the West Bank — or at least a map that indicates they are on a pathway there.
“Our people need to see we are governing ourselves and are not simply subcontractors for Israeli security,” Prime Minister Fayyad told me. Khalil Shikaki, a leading Palestinian pollster, added that Abbas and Fayyad want “to be seen as building a Palestinian state — not security without a state.” That is why “there has to be political progress alongside the security progress. Without it, it hurts them very much.”
America must nurture this virtuous cycle: more money to train credible Palestinian troops, more encouragement for Israel’s risk-taking in eliminating checkpoints, more Palestinian economic growth and quicker negotiations on the contours of a Palestinian state in the West Bank. Hamas and Gaza can join later. Don’t wait for them. If we build it, they will come.
Op-Ed Columnist
Green Shoots in Palestine II
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Ramallah, West Bank
Ever since the collapse of the Oslo peace accords in 2000, and the horror-show violence that followed, there has been only one thing to say about the West Bank: Nothing ever changes here, except for the worst. That is just not the case anymore — much to my surprise.
For Palestinians, long trapped between burgeoning Israeli settlements and an Israeli occupation army, subject to lawlessness in their own cities and the fecklessness of their own political leadership, life has clearly started to improve a bit, thanks to a new virtuous cycle: improved Palestinian policing that has led to more Palestinian investment and trade that has led to the Israeli Army dismantling more checkpoints in the West Bank that has led to more Palestinian travel and commerce.
Because the West Bank today is largely hidden from Israelis by a wall, Israelis are just starting to learn from their own press what is going on there. On July 31, many Israelis were no doubt surprised to read this quote in the Maariv daily from Omar Hashim, deputy chairman of the Chamber of Commerce of Nablus, the commercial center of the West Bank: “Traders here are satisfied,” said Hashim. “Their sales are rising. They feel that life is returning to normal. There is a strong sense of optimism.”
Make no mistake: Palestinians still want the Israeli occupation to end, and their own state to emerge, tomorrow. That is not going to happen. But for the first time since Oslo, there is an economic-security dynamic emerging on the ground in the West Bank that has the potential — the potential — to give the post-Yasir Arafat Palestinians another chance to build the sort of self-governing authority, army and economy that are prerequisites for securing their own independent state. A Palestinian peace partner for Israel may be taking shape again.
The key to this rebirth was the recruitment, training and deployment of four battalions of new Palestinian National Security Forces — a move spearheaded by President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad of the Palestinian Authority. Trained in Jordan in a program paid for by the U.S., three of these battalions have fanned out since May 2008 and brought order to the major Palestinian towns: Nablus, Jericho, Hebron, Ramallah, Jenin and Bethlehem.
These N.S.F. troops, who replaced either Israeli soldiers or Palestinian gangs, have been warmly received by the locals. Recently, N.S.F. forces wiped out a Hamas cell in Qalqilya, and took losses themselves. The death of the Hamas fighters drew nary a peep, but a memorial service for the N.S.F. soldiers killed drew thousands of people. For the first time, I’ve heard top Israeli military officers say these new Palestinian troops are professional and for real.
The Israeli Army’s chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, has backed that up by taking down roughly two-thirds of the 41 manned checkpoints Israel set up around the West Bank, many since 2000, to stifle Palestinian suicide bombers. Those checkpoints — where Palestinians often had to wait for two hours to just pass from one city to the next and often could not drive their own cars through but had to go from cab to cab — choked Palestinian commerce. Israel is also again letting Israeli Arabs drive their own cars into the West Bank on Saturdays to shop.
“You can feel the movement,” said Olfat Hammad, the associate director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, who lives in Nablus and works in Ramallah. “It is not a burden anymore to move around to Ramallah for business meetings and social meetings.” Nablus recently opened its first multiplex, “Cinema City,” as well as a multistory furniture mart designed to cater to Israelis. Ramallah’s real estate prices have skyrocketed.
“I have had a 70 percent increase in sales,” Maariv quoted a Nablus shoe store owner as saying. “People are coming from the villages nearby, and from other cities in the West Bank and from Israel.”
But men and women do not live by shoe sales alone. The only way the Palestinian leadership running this show can maintain its legitimacy is if it is eventually given political authority, not just policing powers, over the West Bank — or at least a map that indicates they are on a pathway there.
“Our people need to see we are governing ourselves and are not simply subcontractors for Israeli security,” Prime Minister Fayyad told me. Khalil Shikaki, a leading Palestinian pollster, added that Abbas and Fayyad want “to be seen as building a Palestinian state — not security without a state.” That is why “there has to be political progress alongside the security progress. Without it, it hurts them very much.”
America must nurture this virtuous cycle: more money to train credible Palestinian troops, more encouragement for Israel’s risk-taking in eliminating checkpoints, more Palestinian economic growth and quicker negotiations on the contours of a Palestinian state in the West Bank. Hamas and Gaza can join later. Don’t wait for them. If we build it, they will come.
August 31, 2009
Still in Development: A Film Culture in Dubai
By BRIAN STELTER
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — When the heiress Paris Hilton traveled here in June and July to audition female friends for her show “My New BFF,” her producers had access to state-of-the-art studios and a government eager to import a touch of Hollywood glamour to the Middle East.
But to adhere to the region’s Islamic norms, many of the ingredients in reality TV were taboo: there would be no drinking, no cursing, no dramatic displays of affection. The producers thought about filming a scene at a water park, but passed on the option of dressing the contestants in religiously appropriate swimwear.
Dubai, its rival Abu Dhabi and other Persian Gulf cities face enormous hurdles as they try to diversify their economies by fostering creativity and becoming entertainment capitals. Chief among those hurdles: they operate under Islamic law. Hollywood does not. So far, the oil-rich countries have proved more able to pay for fancy media productions and to build expensive film facilities than to actually lure production to the Middle East, as economic efforts run up against their traditional values and censorship.
This month Dubai rejected the producers of the “Sex and the City” sequel, who wanted to set part of the film there. The government cited moral reasons for the decision. “Body of Lies,” a thriller about fighting terrorists, was turned down in 2007. For now, some of the region’s specially constructed studio lots lie mostly vacant, visitors say.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/busin ... ?th&emc=th
Still in Development: A Film Culture in Dubai
By BRIAN STELTER
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — When the heiress Paris Hilton traveled here in June and July to audition female friends for her show “My New BFF,” her producers had access to state-of-the-art studios and a government eager to import a touch of Hollywood glamour to the Middle East.
But to adhere to the region’s Islamic norms, many of the ingredients in reality TV were taboo: there would be no drinking, no cursing, no dramatic displays of affection. The producers thought about filming a scene at a water park, but passed on the option of dressing the contestants in religiously appropriate swimwear.
Dubai, its rival Abu Dhabi and other Persian Gulf cities face enormous hurdles as they try to diversify their economies by fostering creativity and becoming entertainment capitals. Chief among those hurdles: they operate under Islamic law. Hollywood does not. So far, the oil-rich countries have proved more able to pay for fancy media productions and to build expensive film facilities than to actually lure production to the Middle East, as economic efforts run up against their traditional values and censorship.
This month Dubai rejected the producers of the “Sex and the City” sequel, who wanted to set part of the film there. The government cited moral reasons for the decision. “Body of Lies,” a thriller about fighting terrorists, was turned down in 2007. For now, some of the region’s specially constructed studio lots lie mostly vacant, visitors say.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/busin ... ?th&emc=th
September 7, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
An Egyptian for Unesco
By ROGER COHEN
PARIS — France is aflutter with rumors that its beautiful first lady, Carla Bruni, will star in Woody Allen’s next movie. In the dog days of summer, there’s been little else to chew on. Bruni, to judge by her choice of President Nicolas Sarkozy, likes short, driven, fidgety men, so there’s logic to the idea.
Bruni has played her first-lady role with discreet aplomb. But let’s face it, she’s a star. I’d love to see her in an Allen film. All that European refinement is a Brooklyn Jewish kid’s fantasy. Sarkozy won’t object: He trades in politics as spectacle.
Speaking of culture and politics, and for that matter Jews, an “affaire” is brewing as the French return from the beaches that may even relegate the Bruni-Allen talk. It concerns the Egyptian culture minister, his candidacy to head the Paris-based United Nations cultural agency Unesco, and his past talk of burning Israeli books.
The man in question is Farouk Hosny, a 71-year-old painter who has served as President Hosni Mubarak’s cultural guru for more than two decades. He’s got the Arab League, the African Union and the Organization of the Islamic Conference behind him in his bid to succeed Koichiro Matsuura, a Japanese diplomat, as Unesco director general when voting begins on Sept. 17. Until recently, he appeared to be the favorite.
Having an Arab lead the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization for the first time since its establishment in 1945 would, on the face of it, be good. Nowhere are the cultural chasms Unesco is supposed to bridge greater than between the Muslim world and the West. President Obama made a visit to Cairo a centerpiece of his outreach to Muslims. Arab civilization, betraying its eclectic history, has lagged over decades in educational and scientific achievement, a failing with dire political consequences.
But there are shadows over Hosny. Questioned in Parliament last year about the presence of Israeli books in the Alexandria Library, the minister replied: “Let’s burn these books. If there are any, I will burn them myself before you.”
A comment summoning Germany, 1933, is not what you want on your résumé when applying to become cultural conciliator-in-chief. That’s not all. Reflecting stock thinking in Egyptian and Arab intellectual circles, Hosny has characterized Israeli culture as “aggressive” and “racist,” stalled cultural ties with Israel that might change attitudes, and peddled the old canard about “the infiltration of Jews into the international media.”
All this was cited in May by the heavyweight Jewish troika of Elie Wiesel, Claude Lanzmann and Bernard-Henri Lévy in an article called “The Shame of a Disaster Foretold” published by Le Monde. They dismissed Hosny as “a dangerous man, an inciter of hearts and minds” and called for his rejection.
Hosny responded with an apology. He “solemnly” regretted his words. The book-burning phrase was “the opposite of what I believe and what I am.” It was uttered “without intention or premeditation.”
The context of Palestinian suffering and the “profound emotion” it elicits had to be understood. Nothing, he wrote, was more foreign to him than “the desire to hurt Jewish culture.”
Lévy was scathing in rebuttal: “Palestinians suffer — therefore burning books written in Hebrew is proposed.”
Case closed? Not quite. This is an important political appointment, behind which Mubarak has put all his weight, so let’s think coolly about it. Hosny, within a grim and repressive Egyptian political spectrum, has shown some openness — taking heat to get Daniel Barenboim to conduct the Cairo Symphony Orchestra, daring to criticize women in headscarves, and pledging to translate the Israeli writers Amos Oz and David Grossman (although this move is being contested). He brooks debate, at least.
The Obama administration, which needs Mubarak for its Middle East peace plans, is keeping quiet. So is Sarkozy, who needs Mubarak for his dreams of a Mediterranean Union. So, most surprisingly, is Israel.
The daily Haaretz quoted a leaked Israeli Foreign Ministry cable after a meeting between Mubarak and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in May. It said that “in line with understandings with Egypt,” Israel’s position on Hosny had changed to “not-opposed.” The quid-pro-quo remains unclear. Bibi was ever a horse-trader.
I’m also in the not-opposed camp. What Hosny said was vile, a reflection of the prejudices of his compatriots — prejudices that Israel’s settlements policy does nothing to assuage. There are good alternative candidates, notably the former Austrian foreign minister Benita Ferrero-Waldner, who carry none of his baggage.
But there’s also something evasive about the alternatives. Hosny stands at the crux of the cultural challenges confronting us. Let’s get him inside the tent rather than stoke the old anti-Western, anti-imperialist flames — reminiscent of what led the United States to abandon Unesco between 1984 and 2002 — by rejecting him.
And then, with the big U.S. contribution to the Unesco budget as leverage, let’s press him relentlessly to fight the anti-Semitic bigotry poisoning young Arab psyches; favor dialogue; open Arab minds to science and education; and embrace the peace that Unesco was set up to foster by draining the poisonous well from which his own now-regretted venom was drawn.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
An Egyptian for Unesco
By ROGER COHEN
PARIS — France is aflutter with rumors that its beautiful first lady, Carla Bruni, will star in Woody Allen’s next movie. In the dog days of summer, there’s been little else to chew on. Bruni, to judge by her choice of President Nicolas Sarkozy, likes short, driven, fidgety men, so there’s logic to the idea.
Bruni has played her first-lady role with discreet aplomb. But let’s face it, she’s a star. I’d love to see her in an Allen film. All that European refinement is a Brooklyn Jewish kid’s fantasy. Sarkozy won’t object: He trades in politics as spectacle.
Speaking of culture and politics, and for that matter Jews, an “affaire” is brewing as the French return from the beaches that may even relegate the Bruni-Allen talk. It concerns the Egyptian culture minister, his candidacy to head the Paris-based United Nations cultural agency Unesco, and his past talk of burning Israeli books.
The man in question is Farouk Hosny, a 71-year-old painter who has served as President Hosni Mubarak’s cultural guru for more than two decades. He’s got the Arab League, the African Union and the Organization of the Islamic Conference behind him in his bid to succeed Koichiro Matsuura, a Japanese diplomat, as Unesco director general when voting begins on Sept. 17. Until recently, he appeared to be the favorite.
Having an Arab lead the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization for the first time since its establishment in 1945 would, on the face of it, be good. Nowhere are the cultural chasms Unesco is supposed to bridge greater than between the Muslim world and the West. President Obama made a visit to Cairo a centerpiece of his outreach to Muslims. Arab civilization, betraying its eclectic history, has lagged over decades in educational and scientific achievement, a failing with dire political consequences.
But there are shadows over Hosny. Questioned in Parliament last year about the presence of Israeli books in the Alexandria Library, the minister replied: “Let’s burn these books. If there are any, I will burn them myself before you.”
A comment summoning Germany, 1933, is not what you want on your résumé when applying to become cultural conciliator-in-chief. That’s not all. Reflecting stock thinking in Egyptian and Arab intellectual circles, Hosny has characterized Israeli culture as “aggressive” and “racist,” stalled cultural ties with Israel that might change attitudes, and peddled the old canard about “the infiltration of Jews into the international media.”
All this was cited in May by the heavyweight Jewish troika of Elie Wiesel, Claude Lanzmann and Bernard-Henri Lévy in an article called “The Shame of a Disaster Foretold” published by Le Monde. They dismissed Hosny as “a dangerous man, an inciter of hearts and minds” and called for his rejection.
Hosny responded with an apology. He “solemnly” regretted his words. The book-burning phrase was “the opposite of what I believe and what I am.” It was uttered “without intention or premeditation.”
The context of Palestinian suffering and the “profound emotion” it elicits had to be understood. Nothing, he wrote, was more foreign to him than “the desire to hurt Jewish culture.”
Lévy was scathing in rebuttal: “Palestinians suffer — therefore burning books written in Hebrew is proposed.”
Case closed? Not quite. This is an important political appointment, behind which Mubarak has put all his weight, so let’s think coolly about it. Hosny, within a grim and repressive Egyptian political spectrum, has shown some openness — taking heat to get Daniel Barenboim to conduct the Cairo Symphony Orchestra, daring to criticize women in headscarves, and pledging to translate the Israeli writers Amos Oz and David Grossman (although this move is being contested). He brooks debate, at least.
The Obama administration, which needs Mubarak for its Middle East peace plans, is keeping quiet. So is Sarkozy, who needs Mubarak for his dreams of a Mediterranean Union. So, most surprisingly, is Israel.
The daily Haaretz quoted a leaked Israeli Foreign Ministry cable after a meeting between Mubarak and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in May. It said that “in line with understandings with Egypt,” Israel’s position on Hosny had changed to “not-opposed.” The quid-pro-quo remains unclear. Bibi was ever a horse-trader.
I’m also in the not-opposed camp. What Hosny said was vile, a reflection of the prejudices of his compatriots — prejudices that Israel’s settlements policy does nothing to assuage. There are good alternative candidates, notably the former Austrian foreign minister Benita Ferrero-Waldner, who carry none of his baggage.
But there’s also something evasive about the alternatives. Hosny stands at the crux of the cultural challenges confronting us. Let’s get him inside the tent rather than stoke the old anti-Western, anti-imperialist flames — reminiscent of what led the United States to abandon Unesco between 1984 and 2002 — by rejecting him.
And then, with the big U.S. contribution to the Unesco budget as leverage, let’s press him relentlessly to fight the anti-Semitic bigotry poisoning young Arab psyches; favor dialogue; open Arab minds to science and education; and embrace the peace that Unesco was set up to foster by draining the poisonous well from which his own now-regretted venom was drawn.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/opini ... nted=print
New metro pride of dubai, but will public use it?
Thousands it was built for now gone
By Tamara Walid, Reuters
September 11, 2009
Passengers travel the dubai metro on the first run for ViPs and media after the official opening.
Photograph by: Mosab Omar, Reuters, Reuters
dubai's metro, the first in the Gulf Arab region, opened to the public on Thursday, creating a buzz in a city that has had little to celebrate in the aftermath of the global financial crisis.
Planned at the height of Dubai's boom and launched in a glitzy ceremony telecast across the Gulf, the light rail transit system comes as the emirate grapples with slowing growth and a depleted population as thousands of jobs have been cut.
"I'll never take my car ever again. . . . This is a dream come true," said an Emirates citizen.
The metro is another milestone for Dubai, which made a name for itself in the heydays of an oil-fuelled boom with lavish infrastructure projects such as the world's tallest tower and man-made islands shaped like palms.
Dubai's ruler, Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, inaugurated the metro on Wednesday night amid fireworks and a live telecast across the Gulf.
"This is an achievement for all Arabs," he said.
But it may have come too late to cope with the congestion it was built to alleviate and is unlikely to see the ridership levels--3,500 passengers per hour--projected by the transport authority for the first stage of the project.
The first segment of the light intra-city rail, the Red Line, opened Thursday with 10 out of 29 stations operational. More stations will open in clusters in coming months and a second line is expected to be operational next year.
While Dubai focused on developing its property, tourism and banking sectors, becoming the trade and tourism hub of the Middle East, its public transport lagged far behind.
The city still relies heavily on gas-guzzling cars, with an average of three cars per family, while public transport, mainly buses, struggles to service low-income workers who make up the majority of the population with average salaries of 800 dirhams ($217.
a month.
The metro, which is estimated to cost 28 billion dirhams ($7.62 billion), or 80 per cent more than originally planned, is expected to become the world's longest driverless rail system.
The cost of the metro--up to $1.76 a ride--may put off some while the idea of crossing a scorching parking lot in Dubai's summer heat when temperatures near 50 Celsius will dissuade others.
Many residents, making up Dubai's nouveau riche middle class, enjoy driving--or being driven -- in luxury vehicles and the metro may come to be seen as the blue-collar workers mode of transport.
After the opening ceremony, people scrambled to get their cars from the valet service.
Amid the roar of luxury sports cars, another VIP guest waiting for his Mercedes-Benz to be brought down, mused on the latest innovation in Dubai.
"The metro's impressive, but it's a project for the future."
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 4&sponsor=
Thousands it was built for now gone
By Tamara Walid, Reuters
September 11, 2009
Passengers travel the dubai metro on the first run for ViPs and media after the official opening.
Photograph by: Mosab Omar, Reuters, Reuters
dubai's metro, the first in the Gulf Arab region, opened to the public on Thursday, creating a buzz in a city that has had little to celebrate in the aftermath of the global financial crisis.
Planned at the height of Dubai's boom and launched in a glitzy ceremony telecast across the Gulf, the light rail transit system comes as the emirate grapples with slowing growth and a depleted population as thousands of jobs have been cut.
"I'll never take my car ever again. . . . This is a dream come true," said an Emirates citizen.
The metro is another milestone for Dubai, which made a name for itself in the heydays of an oil-fuelled boom with lavish infrastructure projects such as the world's tallest tower and man-made islands shaped like palms.
Dubai's ruler, Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, inaugurated the metro on Wednesday night amid fireworks and a live telecast across the Gulf.
"This is an achievement for all Arabs," he said.
But it may have come too late to cope with the congestion it was built to alleviate and is unlikely to see the ridership levels--3,500 passengers per hour--projected by the transport authority for the first stage of the project.
The first segment of the light intra-city rail, the Red Line, opened Thursday with 10 out of 29 stations operational. More stations will open in clusters in coming months and a second line is expected to be operational next year.
While Dubai focused on developing its property, tourism and banking sectors, becoming the trade and tourism hub of the Middle East, its public transport lagged far behind.
The city still relies heavily on gas-guzzling cars, with an average of three cars per family, while public transport, mainly buses, struggles to service low-income workers who make up the majority of the population with average salaries of 800 dirhams ($217.
a month.The metro, which is estimated to cost 28 billion dirhams ($7.62 billion), or 80 per cent more than originally planned, is expected to become the world's longest driverless rail system.
The cost of the metro--up to $1.76 a ride--may put off some while the idea of crossing a scorching parking lot in Dubai's summer heat when temperatures near 50 Celsius will dissuade others.
Many residents, making up Dubai's nouveau riche middle class, enjoy driving--or being driven -- in luxury vehicles and the metro may come to be seen as the blue-collar workers mode of transport.
After the opening ceremony, people scrambled to get their cars from the valet service.
Amid the roar of luxury sports cars, another VIP guest waiting for his Mercedes-Benz to be brought down, mused on the latest innovation in Dubai.
"The metro's impressive, but it's a project for the future."
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 4&sponsor=
September 13, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Land First, Then Peace
By TURKI al-FAISAL
Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
THE United States and other Western powers have for some time been pushing Saudi Arabia to make more gestures toward Israel. More recently, the crown prince of Bahrain urged greater communication with Israel and joint steps from Arab states to revive the peace process.
Saudi Arabia is the birthplace of Islam, the custodian of its two holy mosques, the world’s energy superpower and the de facto leader of the Arab and Muslim worlds — that is why our recognition is greatly prized by Israel. However, for all those same reasons, the kingdom holds itself to higher standards of justice and law. It must therefore refuse to engage Israel until it ends its illegal occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights as well as Shabaa Farms in Lebanon. For Saudis to take steps toward diplomatic normalization before this land is returned to its rightful owners would undermine international law and turn a blind eye to immorality.
Shortly after the Six-Day War in 1967, during which Israel occupied those territories as well as East Jerusalem and the Sinai Peninsula, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution stating that, in order to form “a just and lasting peace in the Middle East,” Israel must withdraw from these newly occupied lands. The Fourth Geneva Convention similarly notes “the occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”
Now, Israeli leaders hint that they are willing to return portions of these occupied territories to Arab control, but only if they are granted military and economic concessions first. For the Arabs to accept such a proposal would only encourage similar outrages in the future by rewarding military conquest.
After the Oslo accords of 1993, Arab states took steps to improve their relationships with Israel, allowing for recognition in the form of trade and consular agreements. Israel, however, continued to construct settlements, making its neighbors understandably unwilling to give up more without a demonstration that they would be granted something in return.
Today, supporters of Israel cite the outdated 1988 Hamas charter, which called for the destruction of Israel, as evidence of Palestine’s attitude toward a two-state solution, without considering the illegalities of Israel’s own occupation. Israel has never presented any comprehensive formulation of a peace plan. Saudi Arabia, to the contrary, has done so twice: the Fahd peace plan of 1982 and the Abdullah peace initiative of 2002. Both were endorsed by the Arab world, and both were ignored by Israel.
In order to achieve peace and a lasting two-state solution, Israel must be willing to give as well as take. A first step should be the immediate removal of all Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Only this would show the world that Israel is serious about peace and not just stalling as it adds more illegal settlers to those already occupying Palestinian land.
At the same time, the international community must pressure Israel to relinquish its grip on all Arab territory, not as a means to gain undeserved concessions but instead as an act of good faith and a demonstration that it is willing to play by the Security Council’s rules and to abide by global standards of military occupation. The Arab world, in the form of the Arab peace initiative that was endorsed by 22 countries in 2002, has offered Israel peace and normalization in return for Israeli withdrawal from all Arab territories including East Jerusalem — with the refugee issue to be solved later through mutual consent.
There have been increasing well-intentioned calls for Saudi Arabia to “do a Sadat”: King Abdullah travels to Israel and the Israelis reciprocate by making peace with Saudi Arabia. However, those urging such a move must remember that President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt went to Israel in 1977 to meet with Prime Minister Menachem Begin only after Sadat’s envoy, Hassan el-Tohamy, Sadat’s envoy, was assured by the Israeli foreign minister, Moshe Dayan, that Israel would withdraw from every last inch of Egyptian territory in return for peace. Absent a similar offer today from Israel to the leaders of Palestine, Lebanon and Syria, there is no reason to look at 1977 as a model.
President Obama’s speech in Cairo this summer gave the Arab and Muslim worlds heightened expectations. His insistence on a freeze on settlement activity was a welcome development. However, all Israeli governments have expanded settlements, even those that committed not to do so.
No country in the region wants more bloodshed. But while Israel’s neighbors want peace, they cannot be expected to tolerate what amounts to theft, and certainly should not be pressured into rewarding Israel for the return of land that does not belong to it. Until Israel heeds President Obama’s call for the removal of all settlements, the world must be under no illusion that Saudi Arabia will offer what the Israelis most desire — regional recognition. We are willing to embrace the hands of any partner in peace, but only after they have released their grip on Arab lands.
Prince Turki al-Faisal, the chairman of the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies, is a former director of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence services and ambassador to the United States.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Contributor
Land First, Then Peace
By TURKI al-FAISAL
Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
THE United States and other Western powers have for some time been pushing Saudi Arabia to make more gestures toward Israel. More recently, the crown prince of Bahrain urged greater communication with Israel and joint steps from Arab states to revive the peace process.
Saudi Arabia is the birthplace of Islam, the custodian of its two holy mosques, the world’s energy superpower and the de facto leader of the Arab and Muslim worlds — that is why our recognition is greatly prized by Israel. However, for all those same reasons, the kingdom holds itself to higher standards of justice and law. It must therefore refuse to engage Israel until it ends its illegal occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights as well as Shabaa Farms in Lebanon. For Saudis to take steps toward diplomatic normalization before this land is returned to its rightful owners would undermine international law and turn a blind eye to immorality.
Shortly after the Six-Day War in 1967, during which Israel occupied those territories as well as East Jerusalem and the Sinai Peninsula, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution stating that, in order to form “a just and lasting peace in the Middle East,” Israel must withdraw from these newly occupied lands. The Fourth Geneva Convention similarly notes “the occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”
Now, Israeli leaders hint that they are willing to return portions of these occupied territories to Arab control, but only if they are granted military and economic concessions first. For the Arabs to accept such a proposal would only encourage similar outrages in the future by rewarding military conquest.
After the Oslo accords of 1993, Arab states took steps to improve their relationships with Israel, allowing for recognition in the form of trade and consular agreements. Israel, however, continued to construct settlements, making its neighbors understandably unwilling to give up more without a demonstration that they would be granted something in return.
Today, supporters of Israel cite the outdated 1988 Hamas charter, which called for the destruction of Israel, as evidence of Palestine’s attitude toward a two-state solution, without considering the illegalities of Israel’s own occupation. Israel has never presented any comprehensive formulation of a peace plan. Saudi Arabia, to the contrary, has done so twice: the Fahd peace plan of 1982 and the Abdullah peace initiative of 2002. Both were endorsed by the Arab world, and both were ignored by Israel.
In order to achieve peace and a lasting two-state solution, Israel must be willing to give as well as take. A first step should be the immediate removal of all Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Only this would show the world that Israel is serious about peace and not just stalling as it adds more illegal settlers to those already occupying Palestinian land.
At the same time, the international community must pressure Israel to relinquish its grip on all Arab territory, not as a means to gain undeserved concessions but instead as an act of good faith and a demonstration that it is willing to play by the Security Council’s rules and to abide by global standards of military occupation. The Arab world, in the form of the Arab peace initiative that was endorsed by 22 countries in 2002, has offered Israel peace and normalization in return for Israeli withdrawal from all Arab territories including East Jerusalem — with the refugee issue to be solved later through mutual consent.
There have been increasing well-intentioned calls for Saudi Arabia to “do a Sadat”: King Abdullah travels to Israel and the Israelis reciprocate by making peace with Saudi Arabia. However, those urging such a move must remember that President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt went to Israel in 1977 to meet with Prime Minister Menachem Begin only after Sadat’s envoy, Hassan el-Tohamy, Sadat’s envoy, was assured by the Israeli foreign minister, Moshe Dayan, that Israel would withdraw from every last inch of Egyptian territory in return for peace. Absent a similar offer today from Israel to the leaders of Palestine, Lebanon and Syria, there is no reason to look at 1977 as a model.
President Obama’s speech in Cairo this summer gave the Arab and Muslim worlds heightened expectations. His insistence on a freeze on settlement activity was a welcome development. However, all Israeli governments have expanded settlements, even those that committed not to do so.
No country in the region wants more bloodshed. But while Israel’s neighbors want peace, they cannot be expected to tolerate what amounts to theft, and certainly should not be pressured into rewarding Israel for the return of land that does not belong to it. Until Israel heeds President Obama’s call for the removal of all settlements, the world must be under no illusion that Saudi Arabia will offer what the Israelis most desire — regional recognition. We are willing to embrace the hands of any partner in peace, but only after they have released their grip on Arab lands.
Prince Turki al-Faisal, the chairman of the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies, is a former director of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence services and ambassador to the United States.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/opini ... nted=print
September 20, 2009
Belatedly, Egypt Spots Flaws in Wiping Out Pigs
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
CAIRO — It is unlikely anyone has ever come to this city and commented on how clean the streets are. But this litter-strewn metropolis is now wrestling with a garbage problem so severe it has managed to incite its weary residents and command the attention of the president.
“The problem is clear in the streets,” said Haitham Kamal, a spokesman for the Ministry of State for Environmental Affairs. “There is a strict and intensive effort now from the state to address this issue.”
But the crisis should not have come as a surprise.
When the government killed all the pigs in Egypt this spring — in what public health experts said was a misguided attempt to combat swine flu — it was warned the city would be overwhelmed with trash.
The pigs used to eat tons of organic waste. Now the pigs are gone and the rotting food piles up on the streets of middle-class neighborhoods like Heliopolis and in the poor streets of communities like Imbaba.
Ramadan Hediya, 35, who makes deliveries for a supermarket, lives in Madinat el Salam, a low-income community on the outskirts of Cairo.
“The whole area is trash,” Mr. Hediya said. “All the pathways are full of trash. When you open up your window to breathe, you find garbage heaps on the ground.”
What started out as an impulsive response to the swine flu threat has turned into a social, environmental and political problem for the Arab world’s most populous nation.
It has exposed the failings of a government where the power is concentrated at the top, where decisions are often carried out with little consideration for their consequences and where follow-up is often nonexistent, according to social commentators and government officials.
“The main problem in Egypt is follow-up,” said Sabir Abdel Aziz Galal, chief of the infectious disease department at the Ministry of Agriculture. “A decision is taken, there is follow-up for a period of time, but after that, they get busy with something else and forget about it. This is the case with everything.”
Speaking broadly, there are two systems for receiving services in Egypt: The government system and the do-it-yourself system. Instead of following the channels of bureaucracy, most people rely on an informal system of personal contacts and bribes to get a building permit, pass an inspection, get a driver’s license — or make a living.
“The straight and narrow path is just too bureaucratic and burdensome for the rich person, and for the poor, the formal system does not provide him with survival, it does not give him safety, security or meet his needs,” said Laila Iskandar Kamel, chairwoman of a community development organization in Cairo.
Cairo’s garbage collection belonged to the informal sector. The government hired multinational companies to collect the trash, and the companies decided to place bins around the city.
But they failed to understand the ethos of the community. People do not take their garbage out. They are accustomed to seeing someone collecting it from the door.
For more than half a century, those collectors were the zabaleen, a community of Egyptian Christians who live on the cliffs on the eastern edge of the city. They collected the trash, sold the recyclables and fed the organic waste to their pigs — which they then slaughtered and ate.
Killing all the pigs, all at once, “was the stupidest thing they ever did,” Ms. Kamel said, adding, “This is just one more example of poorly informed decision makers.”
When the swine flu fear first emerged, long before even one case was reported in Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak ordered that all the pigs be killed in order to prevent the spread of the disease.
When health officials worldwide said that the virus was not being passed by pigs, the Egyptian government said that the cull was no longer about the flu, but was about cleaning up the zabaleen’s crowded, filthy, neighborhood.
That was in May.
Today the streets of the zabaleen community are as packed with stinking trash and as clouded with flies as ever before. But the zabaleen have done exactly what they said they would do: they stopped taking care of most of the organic waste.
Instead they dump it wherever they can or, at best, pile it beside trash bins scattered around the city by the international companies that have struggled in vain to keep up with the trash.
“They killed the pigs, let them clean the city,” said Moussa Rateb, a former garbage collector and pig owner who lives in the community of the zabaleen. “Everything used to go to the pigs, now there are no pigs, so it goes to the administration.”
The recent trash problem was compounded when employees of one of the multinational companies — men and women in green uniforms with crude brooms dispatched around the city — stopped working in a dispute with the city.
The government says that the dispute has been resolved, but nothing has been done to repair the damage to the informal system that once had the zabaleen take Cairo’s trash home.
The garbage is only the latest example of the state’s struggling to meet the needs of its citizens, needs as basic as providing water, housing, health care and education.
The government announced last week that schools would not be opened until the first week of October to give the government time to prepare for a potential swine flu outbreak, a decision that could have been made anytime over the past three months, while schools were closed for summer break, critics said.
Officials in the Ministry of Health and other government ministries said they had not made this decision — and that they had counseled against pre-emptive school closings.
It appears to have been ordered by the presidency and carried out by the governors, who also ordered that all private schools, already in class, be shut down as well.
“We did not propose or call for postponing schools, so the reason is not with us,” said an official in the Ministry of Health who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak to the news media.
The heads of three large governorates, or states, in Egypt announced Wednesday that their strategy for keeping schoolchildren safe was to take classes, which on average are crowded with more than 60 students, and split them in half and have children attend school only three days a week, another decision that was criticized. There have been more than 800 confirmed cases of H1N1 in Egypt, and two flu-related deaths.
“The state is troubled; as a result the system of decision making is disintegrating,” said Galal Amin, an economist, writer and social critic. “They are ill-considered decisions taken in a bit of a hurry, either because you’re trying to please the president or because you are a weak government that is anxious to please somebody.”
Cairo’s streets have always been busy with children and littered with trash.
Now, with the pigs gone, and the schools closed, they are even more so.
“The Egyptians are really in a mess,” Mr. Amin said.
Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/world ... ?th&emc=th
Belatedly, Egypt Spots Flaws in Wiping Out Pigs
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
CAIRO — It is unlikely anyone has ever come to this city and commented on how clean the streets are. But this litter-strewn metropolis is now wrestling with a garbage problem so severe it has managed to incite its weary residents and command the attention of the president.
“The problem is clear in the streets,” said Haitham Kamal, a spokesman for the Ministry of State for Environmental Affairs. “There is a strict and intensive effort now from the state to address this issue.”
But the crisis should not have come as a surprise.
When the government killed all the pigs in Egypt this spring — in what public health experts said was a misguided attempt to combat swine flu — it was warned the city would be overwhelmed with trash.
The pigs used to eat tons of organic waste. Now the pigs are gone and the rotting food piles up on the streets of middle-class neighborhoods like Heliopolis and in the poor streets of communities like Imbaba.
Ramadan Hediya, 35, who makes deliveries for a supermarket, lives in Madinat el Salam, a low-income community on the outskirts of Cairo.
“The whole area is trash,” Mr. Hediya said. “All the pathways are full of trash. When you open up your window to breathe, you find garbage heaps on the ground.”
What started out as an impulsive response to the swine flu threat has turned into a social, environmental and political problem for the Arab world’s most populous nation.
It has exposed the failings of a government where the power is concentrated at the top, where decisions are often carried out with little consideration for their consequences and where follow-up is often nonexistent, according to social commentators and government officials.
“The main problem in Egypt is follow-up,” said Sabir Abdel Aziz Galal, chief of the infectious disease department at the Ministry of Agriculture. “A decision is taken, there is follow-up for a period of time, but after that, they get busy with something else and forget about it. This is the case with everything.”
Speaking broadly, there are two systems for receiving services in Egypt: The government system and the do-it-yourself system. Instead of following the channels of bureaucracy, most people rely on an informal system of personal contacts and bribes to get a building permit, pass an inspection, get a driver’s license — or make a living.
“The straight and narrow path is just too bureaucratic and burdensome for the rich person, and for the poor, the formal system does not provide him with survival, it does not give him safety, security or meet his needs,” said Laila Iskandar Kamel, chairwoman of a community development organization in Cairo.
Cairo’s garbage collection belonged to the informal sector. The government hired multinational companies to collect the trash, and the companies decided to place bins around the city.
But they failed to understand the ethos of the community. People do not take their garbage out. They are accustomed to seeing someone collecting it from the door.
For more than half a century, those collectors were the zabaleen, a community of Egyptian Christians who live on the cliffs on the eastern edge of the city. They collected the trash, sold the recyclables and fed the organic waste to their pigs — which they then slaughtered and ate.
Killing all the pigs, all at once, “was the stupidest thing they ever did,” Ms. Kamel said, adding, “This is just one more example of poorly informed decision makers.”
When the swine flu fear first emerged, long before even one case was reported in Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak ordered that all the pigs be killed in order to prevent the spread of the disease.
When health officials worldwide said that the virus was not being passed by pigs, the Egyptian government said that the cull was no longer about the flu, but was about cleaning up the zabaleen’s crowded, filthy, neighborhood.
That was in May.
Today the streets of the zabaleen community are as packed with stinking trash and as clouded with flies as ever before. But the zabaleen have done exactly what they said they would do: they stopped taking care of most of the organic waste.
Instead they dump it wherever they can or, at best, pile it beside trash bins scattered around the city by the international companies that have struggled in vain to keep up with the trash.
“They killed the pigs, let them clean the city,” said Moussa Rateb, a former garbage collector and pig owner who lives in the community of the zabaleen. “Everything used to go to the pigs, now there are no pigs, so it goes to the administration.”
The recent trash problem was compounded when employees of one of the multinational companies — men and women in green uniforms with crude brooms dispatched around the city — stopped working in a dispute with the city.
The government says that the dispute has been resolved, but nothing has been done to repair the damage to the informal system that once had the zabaleen take Cairo’s trash home.
The garbage is only the latest example of the state’s struggling to meet the needs of its citizens, needs as basic as providing water, housing, health care and education.
The government announced last week that schools would not be opened until the first week of October to give the government time to prepare for a potential swine flu outbreak, a decision that could have been made anytime over the past three months, while schools were closed for summer break, critics said.
Officials in the Ministry of Health and other government ministries said they had not made this decision — and that they had counseled against pre-emptive school closings.
It appears to have been ordered by the presidency and carried out by the governors, who also ordered that all private schools, already in class, be shut down as well.
“We did not propose or call for postponing schools, so the reason is not with us,” said an official in the Ministry of Health who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak to the news media.
The heads of three large governorates, or states, in Egypt announced Wednesday that their strategy for keeping schoolchildren safe was to take classes, which on average are crowded with more than 60 students, and split them in half and have children attend school only three days a week, another decision that was criticized. There have been more than 800 confirmed cases of H1N1 in Egypt, and two flu-related deaths.
“The state is troubled; as a result the system of decision making is disintegrating,” said Galal Amin, an economist, writer and social critic. “They are ill-considered decisions taken in a bit of a hurry, either because you’re trying to please the president or because you are a weak government that is anxious to please somebody.”
Cairo’s streets have always been busy with children and littered with trash.
Now, with the pigs gone, and the schools closed, they are even more so.
“The Egyptians are really in a mess,” Mr. Amin said.
Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/world ... ?th&emc=th
October 1, 2009
Possibility of a Nuclear-Armed Iran Alarms Arabs
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
CAIRO — As the West raises the pressure on Iran over its nuclear program, Arab governments, especially the small, oil-rich nations in the Persian Gulf, are growing increasingly anxious. But they are concerned not only with the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran but also with the more immediate threat that Iran will destabilize the region if the West presses too hard, according to diplomats, regional analysts and former government officials.
On Thursday, Iran will meet with six world powers to discuss a variety of issues in what will be the first direct talks between Washington and Tehran since the 1979 Iranian revolution. Iran would appear to enter the discussions weakened by a bitter political dispute at home and by the recent revelation of a second, secret, nuclear enrichment plant being built near Qum.
But instead of showing contrition, Iran test-fired missiles — an example of the kind of behavior that has caused apprehension among some of its Arab neighbors. The cause and effect of conflict between Iran and the West is never experienced in Washington or London but instead plays out here, in the Middle East, where Iran has committed allies like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.
“If the West puts pressure on Iran, regardless of the means of this pressure, additional pressure, increased pressure, do you think the Iranians will retaliate or stand idly by and wait for their fate to fall on their head?” said Ambassador Hossam Zaki, spokesman for Egypt’s Foreign Ministry. “The most likely answer is they will retaliate. Where do you think they will retaliate?”
Among Iran’s Persian Gulf neighbors there is growing resignation that Iran cannot be stopped from developing nuclear arms, though Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful uses. Some analysts have predicted that a regional arms race will begin and that vulnerable states, like Bahrain, may be encouraged to invite nuclear powers to place weapons on their territories as a deterrent. The United States already has a Navy base in Manama, Bahrain’s capital.
“I think the gulf states are well advised now to develop strategies on the assumption that Iran is about to become a nuclear power,” said Abdul Khaleq Abdullah, a political science professor at United Arab Emirates University. “It’s a whole new ballgame. Iran is forcing everyone in the region now into an arms race.”
This realization, in turn, is raising new anxieties and shaking old assumptions.
Writing in the pan-Arab newspaper Al Quds Al Arabi, for instance, the editor, Abdel-Beri Atwan, said that with recent developments “the Arab regimes, and the gulf ones in particular, will find themselves part of a new alliance against Iran alongside Israel.”
The head of a prominent research center in Dubai said that it might even be better if the West — or Israel — staged a military strike on Iran, rather than letting it emerge as a nuclear power. That kind of talk from Arabs was nearly unheard of before the revelation of the second enrichment plant, and while still rare, it reflects growing alarm.
“Israel can start the attack but they can’t sustain it; the United States can start it and sustain it,” said Abdulaziz Sager, a Saudi businessman and former diplomat who is chairman of the Gulf Research Center in the United Arab Emirates. “The region can live with a limited retaliation from Iran better than living with a permanent nuclear deterrent. I favor getting the job done now instead of living the rest of my life with a nuclear hegemony in the region that Iran would like to impose.”
The Middle East is a region defined by many competing interests, among regional capitals, foreign governments and religious sects, and between people and their leaders. An action by one, in this case Iran, inevitably leads to a chain reaction of consequences. It is too early to say how the latest revelation will play out.
Some regional analysts have said that fear of a nuclear Iran could yield positive results, possibly inspiring officials in Saudi Arabia and Egypt to work harder at reconciling with leaders in Syria, which has grown closer to Iran in recent years as its ties have frayed with Arab states.
The report in Al Quds Al Arabi by Mr. Atwan said gulf states were taking measures to try to persuade Russia and China to stop supporting Iran. The report said that Saudi Arabia had offered to purchase billions of dollars of weapons from Russia if it agreed not to sell Iran sophisticated missiles. And it said gulf states might join together to offer China one million visas for its citizens to work in the region.
The latest conflict over Iran’s nuclear program has also allayed some longstanding fears. Arab capitals aligned with the West are now less worried, for example, that President Obama will strike a deal with Tehran that might undermine Arab interests, analysts, diplomats and regional experts said.
“It was a concern that, well, maybe the West was going to try to appease Iran on a number of regional issues in return for something,” Mr. Zaki said.
But that is a relatively small consolation, given concerns that Iran might develop nuclear weapons or, if pushed, activate its allies, Hezbollah or Hamas, political analysts here said. Arab capitals already have accused Iran of fueling the recent fighting between Shiite rebels and the government in Yemen, and of inciting conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims in places like Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait — charges Iran has flatly denied. Egypt has accused Iran of using its ties with Hamas to undermine Palestinian reconciliation and negotiations with Israel, as well.
“There is no doubt, given the recent events, that the degree of threat and amount of fear has increased,” said Anwar Majid Eshki, director of the Middle East Center for Strategic and Legal Studies in Jidda, Saudi Arabia.
But Arab analysts are also not sure how the United States and its allies should proceed. Mr. Zaki and others offered little advice, other than to call on Washington to press to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which many see as the root cause of regional instability.
“No one said it was an easy situation,” Mr. Zaki said.
Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/01/world ... nted=print
Possibility of a Nuclear-Armed Iran Alarms Arabs
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
CAIRO — As the West raises the pressure on Iran over its nuclear program, Arab governments, especially the small, oil-rich nations in the Persian Gulf, are growing increasingly anxious. But they are concerned not only with the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran but also with the more immediate threat that Iran will destabilize the region if the West presses too hard, according to diplomats, regional analysts and former government officials.
On Thursday, Iran will meet with six world powers to discuss a variety of issues in what will be the first direct talks between Washington and Tehran since the 1979 Iranian revolution. Iran would appear to enter the discussions weakened by a bitter political dispute at home and by the recent revelation of a second, secret, nuclear enrichment plant being built near Qum.
But instead of showing contrition, Iran test-fired missiles — an example of the kind of behavior that has caused apprehension among some of its Arab neighbors. The cause and effect of conflict between Iran and the West is never experienced in Washington or London but instead plays out here, in the Middle East, where Iran has committed allies like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.
“If the West puts pressure on Iran, regardless of the means of this pressure, additional pressure, increased pressure, do you think the Iranians will retaliate or stand idly by and wait for their fate to fall on their head?” said Ambassador Hossam Zaki, spokesman for Egypt’s Foreign Ministry. “The most likely answer is they will retaliate. Where do you think they will retaliate?”
Among Iran’s Persian Gulf neighbors there is growing resignation that Iran cannot be stopped from developing nuclear arms, though Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful uses. Some analysts have predicted that a regional arms race will begin and that vulnerable states, like Bahrain, may be encouraged to invite nuclear powers to place weapons on their territories as a deterrent. The United States already has a Navy base in Manama, Bahrain’s capital.
“I think the gulf states are well advised now to develop strategies on the assumption that Iran is about to become a nuclear power,” said Abdul Khaleq Abdullah, a political science professor at United Arab Emirates University. “It’s a whole new ballgame. Iran is forcing everyone in the region now into an arms race.”
This realization, in turn, is raising new anxieties and shaking old assumptions.
Writing in the pan-Arab newspaper Al Quds Al Arabi, for instance, the editor, Abdel-Beri Atwan, said that with recent developments “the Arab regimes, and the gulf ones in particular, will find themselves part of a new alliance against Iran alongside Israel.”
The head of a prominent research center in Dubai said that it might even be better if the West — or Israel — staged a military strike on Iran, rather than letting it emerge as a nuclear power. That kind of talk from Arabs was nearly unheard of before the revelation of the second enrichment plant, and while still rare, it reflects growing alarm.
“Israel can start the attack but they can’t sustain it; the United States can start it and sustain it,” said Abdulaziz Sager, a Saudi businessman and former diplomat who is chairman of the Gulf Research Center in the United Arab Emirates. “The region can live with a limited retaliation from Iran better than living with a permanent nuclear deterrent. I favor getting the job done now instead of living the rest of my life with a nuclear hegemony in the region that Iran would like to impose.”
The Middle East is a region defined by many competing interests, among regional capitals, foreign governments and religious sects, and between people and their leaders. An action by one, in this case Iran, inevitably leads to a chain reaction of consequences. It is too early to say how the latest revelation will play out.
Some regional analysts have said that fear of a nuclear Iran could yield positive results, possibly inspiring officials in Saudi Arabia and Egypt to work harder at reconciling with leaders in Syria, which has grown closer to Iran in recent years as its ties have frayed with Arab states.
The report in Al Quds Al Arabi by Mr. Atwan said gulf states were taking measures to try to persuade Russia and China to stop supporting Iran. The report said that Saudi Arabia had offered to purchase billions of dollars of weapons from Russia if it agreed not to sell Iran sophisticated missiles. And it said gulf states might join together to offer China one million visas for its citizens to work in the region.
The latest conflict over Iran’s nuclear program has also allayed some longstanding fears. Arab capitals aligned with the West are now less worried, for example, that President Obama will strike a deal with Tehran that might undermine Arab interests, analysts, diplomats and regional experts said.
“It was a concern that, well, maybe the West was going to try to appease Iran on a number of regional issues in return for something,” Mr. Zaki said.
But that is a relatively small consolation, given concerns that Iran might develop nuclear weapons or, if pushed, activate its allies, Hezbollah or Hamas, political analysts here said. Arab capitals already have accused Iran of fueling the recent fighting between Shiite rebels and the government in Yemen, and of inciting conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims in places like Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait — charges Iran has flatly denied. Egypt has accused Iran of using its ties with Hamas to undermine Palestinian reconciliation and negotiations with Israel, as well.
“There is no doubt, given the recent events, that the degree of threat and amount of fear has increased,” said Anwar Majid Eshki, director of the Middle East Center for Strategic and Legal Studies in Jidda, Saudi Arabia.
But Arab analysts are also not sure how the United States and its allies should proceed. Mr. Zaki and others offered little advice, other than to call on Washington to press to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which many see as the root cause of regional instability.
“No one said it was an easy situation,” Mr. Zaki said.
Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/01/world ... nted=print
Saudi king sacks cleric critic of university
By Abeer Allam in Riyadh
Published: October 6 2009 03:00 |
Last updated: October 6 2009 03:00
In a rare public showdown between Saudi Arabia's monarch and the religious establishment, King Abdullah has dismissed a top cleric who said mixing male and female students at a new flagship university was "evil'' and a "great sin".
Saudi state television reported late on Sunday that the king "relieved'' Sheikh Saad al-Shethri of his duties as a member of the influential Council of Religious Scholars, a body that shapes the religious discourse of the oil-rich kingdom.
Sheikh Saad, answering a question from a caller on a television interview last week, said scholars should vet the curriculum at the new King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (Kaust) to make sure that it was sharia-compliant and to prevent the teaching of alien notions such as -evolution.
His remarks drew condemnation from almost all Saudi newspaper editors. In lengthy editorials, they accused him of ignoring the scientific role of the university and of trying to foment sedition and damage Saudi national pride.
King Abdullah inaugurated the $7bn (€4.8bn, £4.4bn) postgraduate university on September 23, the Saudi national day, as a showcase of his modernisation drive. It is the first university in Saudi Arabia where men and women mix freely and study under the same roof.
Although the backlash from the religious establishment was expected, the king's swift reaction took many people by surprise and may signal that he is running out of patience with the clerics.
Since King Abdullah succeeded his half-brother in 2005, senior clerics have resisted his proposals for judicial, educational and social reforms.
The religious establishment imposes its austere interpretation of Islam on all aspects of life in the kingdom and enforces its social mores in the public arena via religious police or mutawa . Strict segregation between unrelated men and women is kept in the workplace, restaurants, government offices and schools. At universities, male professors cannot stand before a classroom of Saudi women, and classes taught by male lecturers are given via closed circuit television.
Many Saudi reformists, frustrated with the slow pace of reform, complain that the king is too lenient with the conservative forces. But the king has to strike a balance between reformist and the conservative powers in Saudi Arabia, with the balance tipping most of the time towards the conservatives.
The royal family derives its legitimacy from the historical alliance between Al Saud family and the clerics who helped establish the kingdom in 1932. They preach obedience to the king, and in return they control the religious and social aspects of the Saudi society.
Kaust, located on the Red Sea north of Jeddah, is part of King Abdullah's vision for his country to join the top ranks of advanced science research. The university has attracted scientists from all over the world, sup-ported by an endowment of $10bn.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e5042676-b20f ... ab49a.html
By Abeer Allam in Riyadh
Published: October 6 2009 03:00 |
Last updated: October 6 2009 03:00
In a rare public showdown between Saudi Arabia's monarch and the religious establishment, King Abdullah has dismissed a top cleric who said mixing male and female students at a new flagship university was "evil'' and a "great sin".
Saudi state television reported late on Sunday that the king "relieved'' Sheikh Saad al-Shethri of his duties as a member of the influential Council of Religious Scholars, a body that shapes the religious discourse of the oil-rich kingdom.
Sheikh Saad, answering a question from a caller on a television interview last week, said scholars should vet the curriculum at the new King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (Kaust) to make sure that it was sharia-compliant and to prevent the teaching of alien notions such as -evolution.
His remarks drew condemnation from almost all Saudi newspaper editors. In lengthy editorials, they accused him of ignoring the scientific role of the university and of trying to foment sedition and damage Saudi national pride.
King Abdullah inaugurated the $7bn (€4.8bn, £4.4bn) postgraduate university on September 23, the Saudi national day, as a showcase of his modernisation drive. It is the first university in Saudi Arabia where men and women mix freely and study under the same roof.
Although the backlash from the religious establishment was expected, the king's swift reaction took many people by surprise and may signal that he is running out of patience with the clerics.
Since King Abdullah succeeded his half-brother in 2005, senior clerics have resisted his proposals for judicial, educational and social reforms.
The religious establishment imposes its austere interpretation of Islam on all aspects of life in the kingdom and enforces its social mores in the public arena via religious police or mutawa . Strict segregation between unrelated men and women is kept in the workplace, restaurants, government offices and schools. At universities, male professors cannot stand before a classroom of Saudi women, and classes taught by male lecturers are given via closed circuit television.
Many Saudi reformists, frustrated with the slow pace of reform, complain that the king is too lenient with the conservative forces. But the king has to strike a balance between reformist and the conservative powers in Saudi Arabia, with the balance tipping most of the time towards the conservatives.
The royal family derives its legitimacy from the historical alliance between Al Saud family and the clerics who helped establish the kingdom in 1932. They preach obedience to the king, and in return they control the religious and social aspects of the Saudi society.
Kaust, located on the Red Sea north of Jeddah, is part of King Abdullah's vision for his country to join the top ranks of advanced science research. The university has attracted scientists from all over the world, sup-ported by an endowment of $10bn.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e5042676-b20f ... ab49a.html
October 16, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
An Ordinary Israel
By ROGER COHEN
NEW YORK — Is Israel just a nation among nations?
On one level, it is indeed an ordinary place. People curse the traffic, follow their stocks, Blackberry, go to the beach and pay their mortgages. Stroll around in the prosperous North Tel Aviv suburbs and you find yourself California dreaming.
On another, it’s not. More than 60 years after the creation of the modern state, Israel has no established borders, no constitution, no peace. Born from exceptional horror, the Holocaust, it has found normality elusive.
The anxiety of the diaspora Jews has ceded not to tranquility but to another anxiety. The escape from walls has birthed new walls. The annihilation psychosis has not disappeared but taken new form.
For all Israel’s successes — it is the most open, creative and dynamic society in the region — this is a gnawing failure. Can anything be done about it?
Perhaps a good place to start that inquiry is by noting that Israel does not see itself as normal. Rather it lives in a perpetual state of exceptionalism.
I understand this: Israel is a small country whose neighbors are enemies or cold bystanders. But I worry when Israel makes a fetish of its exceptional status. It needs to deal with the world as it is, however discomfiting, not the world of yesterday.
The Holocaust represented a quintessence of evil. But it happened 65 years ago. Its perpetrators are dead or dying. A Holocaust prism may be distorting. History illuminates — and blinds.
These reflections stirred on reviewing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the U.N. last month. The first 30 paragraphs were devoted to an inflammatory conflation of Nazi Germany (the word “Nazi” appears five times), modern Iran, Al Qaeda (a Sunni ideology foreign to Shiite Iran) and global terrorism, with lonely and exceptional Israel standing up against them all.
Here’s Netanyahu’s summary of the struggle of our age: “It pits civilization against barbarism, the 21st century against the 9th century, those who sanctify life against those who glorify death.”
That’s facile, resonant — and unhelpful. Sure, it’s an outlook that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s unacceptable Holocaust denial and threats comfort. (Several Iranian leaders have also spoken of accepting any deal on Israel that the Palestinians agree to.)
There’s another way of looking at the ongoing struggle in the Middle East — less dramatic and more accurate.
That is to see it as a fight for a different balance of power — and possibly greater stability — between a nuclear-armed Israel (an estimated 80 to 200 never-acknowledged weapons), a proud but uneasy Iran and an increasingly sophisticated and aware (if repressed) Arab world.
Some of Israel’s enemies contest its very existence, however powerless they are to end it. But the death-cult terrorists-versus-reasonable-Israelis paradigm falls short. There are various civilizations in the Middle East, whose attitudes toward religion and modernism vary, but who all quest for some accommodation between them.
One casualty of this view, of course, is Israeli exceptionalism. The Jewish state becomes more like any other nation fighting for influence and treasure. I think President Obama, himself talking down American exceptionalism, is trying to nudge Israel toward a more prosaic, realistic self-image.
Hence the U.S. abstention last month at a U.N. nuclear assembly vote calling on all states in the Middle East to “accede to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear weapons” (N.P.T.) and create a nuclear-weapon-free Middle East — an idea Obama administration officials have supported in line with a nuclear disarmament agenda.
A shift is perceptible in the decades-old tacit American endorsement of Israel’s undeclared nuclear arsenal. This is logical. To deal effectively with the nuclear program of Iran, an N.P.T. member, while ignoring the nuclear status of non-N.P.T. Israel is to invite accusations of double standards. President Obama doesn’t like them.
I’d say there’s a tenable case for Israel ending its nuclear exceptionalism, coming clean on its arsenal and joining the N.P.T. as part of any U.S.-endorsed regional security arrangement that stops Iran short of weaponization.
It’s also worth noting the sensible tone of Defense Secretary Robert Gates — in flagrant contrast to Netanyahu. “The only way you end up not having a nuclear capable Iran is for the Iranian government to decide that their security is diminished by having those weapons as opposed to strengthened,” Gates says.
In other words, as I’ve long argued, Iran makes rational decisions. Rather than invoking the Holocaust — a distraction — Israel should view Iran coolly, understand the hesitancy of Tehran’s nuclear brinksmanship, and see how it can gain from U.S.-led diplomacy.
Cut the posturing and deal with reality. This can be painful — as with Justice Richard Goldstone’s recent U.N. report finding that both Israeli forces and Palestinian militants committed possible crimes against humanity during Israel’s military operations in Gaza.
But it’s also instructive. Goldstone is a measured man — I’ve known him a long time. The Israeli response to his findings strikes me as an example of the blinding effect of exceptionalism unbound. Ordinary nations have failings.
The Middle East has changed. So must Israel. “Never again” is a necessary but altogether inadequate way of dealing with the modern world.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/16/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
An Ordinary Israel
By ROGER COHEN
NEW YORK — Is Israel just a nation among nations?
On one level, it is indeed an ordinary place. People curse the traffic, follow their stocks, Blackberry, go to the beach and pay their mortgages. Stroll around in the prosperous North Tel Aviv suburbs and you find yourself California dreaming.
On another, it’s not. More than 60 years after the creation of the modern state, Israel has no established borders, no constitution, no peace. Born from exceptional horror, the Holocaust, it has found normality elusive.
The anxiety of the diaspora Jews has ceded not to tranquility but to another anxiety. The escape from walls has birthed new walls. The annihilation psychosis has not disappeared but taken new form.
For all Israel’s successes — it is the most open, creative and dynamic society in the region — this is a gnawing failure. Can anything be done about it?
Perhaps a good place to start that inquiry is by noting that Israel does not see itself as normal. Rather it lives in a perpetual state of exceptionalism.
I understand this: Israel is a small country whose neighbors are enemies or cold bystanders. But I worry when Israel makes a fetish of its exceptional status. It needs to deal with the world as it is, however discomfiting, not the world of yesterday.
The Holocaust represented a quintessence of evil. But it happened 65 years ago. Its perpetrators are dead or dying. A Holocaust prism may be distorting. History illuminates — and blinds.
These reflections stirred on reviewing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the U.N. last month. The first 30 paragraphs were devoted to an inflammatory conflation of Nazi Germany (the word “Nazi” appears five times), modern Iran, Al Qaeda (a Sunni ideology foreign to Shiite Iran) and global terrorism, with lonely and exceptional Israel standing up against them all.
Here’s Netanyahu’s summary of the struggle of our age: “It pits civilization against barbarism, the 21st century against the 9th century, those who sanctify life against those who glorify death.”
That’s facile, resonant — and unhelpful. Sure, it’s an outlook that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s unacceptable Holocaust denial and threats comfort. (Several Iranian leaders have also spoken of accepting any deal on Israel that the Palestinians agree to.)
There’s another way of looking at the ongoing struggle in the Middle East — less dramatic and more accurate.
That is to see it as a fight for a different balance of power — and possibly greater stability — between a nuclear-armed Israel (an estimated 80 to 200 never-acknowledged weapons), a proud but uneasy Iran and an increasingly sophisticated and aware (if repressed) Arab world.
Some of Israel’s enemies contest its very existence, however powerless they are to end it. But the death-cult terrorists-versus-reasonable-Israelis paradigm falls short. There are various civilizations in the Middle East, whose attitudes toward religion and modernism vary, but who all quest for some accommodation between them.
One casualty of this view, of course, is Israeli exceptionalism. The Jewish state becomes more like any other nation fighting for influence and treasure. I think President Obama, himself talking down American exceptionalism, is trying to nudge Israel toward a more prosaic, realistic self-image.
Hence the U.S. abstention last month at a U.N. nuclear assembly vote calling on all states in the Middle East to “accede to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear weapons” (N.P.T.) and create a nuclear-weapon-free Middle East — an idea Obama administration officials have supported in line with a nuclear disarmament agenda.
A shift is perceptible in the decades-old tacit American endorsement of Israel’s undeclared nuclear arsenal. This is logical. To deal effectively with the nuclear program of Iran, an N.P.T. member, while ignoring the nuclear status of non-N.P.T. Israel is to invite accusations of double standards. President Obama doesn’t like them.
I’d say there’s a tenable case for Israel ending its nuclear exceptionalism, coming clean on its arsenal and joining the N.P.T. as part of any U.S.-endorsed regional security arrangement that stops Iran short of weaponization.
It’s also worth noting the sensible tone of Defense Secretary Robert Gates — in flagrant contrast to Netanyahu. “The only way you end up not having a nuclear capable Iran is for the Iranian government to decide that their security is diminished by having those weapons as opposed to strengthened,” Gates says.
In other words, as I’ve long argued, Iran makes rational decisions. Rather than invoking the Holocaust — a distraction — Israel should view Iran coolly, understand the hesitancy of Tehran’s nuclear brinksmanship, and see how it can gain from U.S.-led diplomacy.
Cut the posturing and deal with reality. This can be painful — as with Justice Richard Goldstone’s recent U.N. report finding that both Israeli forces and Palestinian militants committed possible crimes against humanity during Israel’s military operations in Gaza.
But it’s also instructive. Goldstone is a measured man — I’ve known him a long time. The Israeli response to his findings strikes me as an example of the blinding effect of exceptionalism unbound. Ordinary nations have failings.
The Middle East has changed. So must Israel. “Never again” is a necessary but altogether inadequate way of dealing with the modern world.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/16/opini ... nted=print
October 20, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Rights Watchdog, Lost in the Mideast
By ROBERT L. BERNSTEIN
AS the founder of Human Rights Watch, its active chairman for 20 years and now founding chairman emeritus, I must do something that I never anticipated: I must publicly join the group’s critics. Human Rights Watch had as its original mission to pry open closed societies, advocate basic freedoms and support dissenters. But recently it has been issuing reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict that are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.
At Human Rights Watch, we always recognized that open, democratic societies have faults and commit abuses. But we saw that they have the ability to correct them — through vigorous public debate, an adversarial press and many other mechanisms that encourage reform.
That is why we sought to draw a sharp line between the democratic and nondemocratic worlds, in an effort to create clarity in human rights. We wanted to prevent the Soviet Union and its followers from playing a moral equivalence game with the West and to encourage liberalization by drawing attention to dissidents like Andrei Sakharov, Natan Sharansky and those in the Soviet gulag — and the millions in China’s laogai, or labor camps.
When I stepped aside in 1998, Human Rights Watch was active in 70 countries, most of them closed societies. Now the organization, with increasing frequency, casts aside its important distinction between open and closed societies.
Nowhere is this more evident than in its work in the Middle East. The region is populated by authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records. Yet in recent years Human Rights Watch has written far more condemnations of Israel for violations of international law than of any other country in the region.
Israel, with a population of 7.4 million, is home to at least 80 human rights organizations, a vibrant free press, a democratically elected government, a judiciary that frequently rules against the government, a politically active academia, multiple political parties and, judging by the amount of news coverage, probably more journalists per capita than any other country in the world — many of whom are there expressly to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Meanwhile, the Arab and Iranian regimes rule over some 350 million people, and most remain brutal, closed and autocratic, permitting little or no internal dissent. The plight of their citizens who would most benefit from the kind of attention a large and well-financed international human rights organization can provide is being ignored as Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division prepares report after report on Israel.
Human Rights Watch has lost critical perspective on a conflict in which Israel has been repeatedly attacked by Hamas and Hezbollah, organizations that go after Israeli citizens and use their own people as human shields. These groups are supported by the government of Iran, which has openly declared its intention not just to destroy Israel but to murder Jews everywhere. This incitement to genocide is a violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
Leaders of Human Rights Watch know that Hamas and Hezbollah chose to wage war from densely populated areas, deliberately transforming neighborhoods into battlefields. They know that more and better arms are flowing into both Gaza and Lebanon and are poised to strike again. And they know that this militancy continues to deprive Palestinians of any chance for the peaceful and productive life they deserve. Yet Israel, the repeated victim of aggression, faces the brunt of Human Rights Watch’s criticism.
The organization is expressly concerned mainly with how wars are fought, not with motivations. To be sure, even victims of aggression are bound by the laws of war and must do their utmost to minimize civilian casualties. Nevertheless, there is a difference between wrongs committed in self-defense and those perpetrated intentionally.
But how does Human Rights Watch know that these laws have been violated? In Gaza and elsewhere where there is no access to the battlefield or to the military and political leaders who make strategic decisions, it is extremely difficult to make definitive judgments about war crimes. Reporting often relies on witnesses whose stories cannot be verified and who may testify for political advantage or because they fear retaliation from their own rulers. Significantly, Col. Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan and an expert on warfare, has said that the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza “did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.”
Only by returning to its founding mission and the spirit of humility that animated it can Human Rights Watch resurrect itself as a moral force in the Middle East and throughout the world. If it fails to do that, its credibility will be seriously undermined and its important role in the world significantly diminished.
Robert L. Bernstein, the former president and chief executive of Random House, was the chairman of Human Rights Watch from 1978 to 1998.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Contributor
Rights Watchdog, Lost in the Mideast
By ROBERT L. BERNSTEIN
AS the founder of Human Rights Watch, its active chairman for 20 years and now founding chairman emeritus, I must do something that I never anticipated: I must publicly join the group’s critics. Human Rights Watch had as its original mission to pry open closed societies, advocate basic freedoms and support dissenters. But recently it has been issuing reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict that are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.
At Human Rights Watch, we always recognized that open, democratic societies have faults and commit abuses. But we saw that they have the ability to correct them — through vigorous public debate, an adversarial press and many other mechanisms that encourage reform.
That is why we sought to draw a sharp line between the democratic and nondemocratic worlds, in an effort to create clarity in human rights. We wanted to prevent the Soviet Union and its followers from playing a moral equivalence game with the West and to encourage liberalization by drawing attention to dissidents like Andrei Sakharov, Natan Sharansky and those in the Soviet gulag — and the millions in China’s laogai, or labor camps.
When I stepped aside in 1998, Human Rights Watch was active in 70 countries, most of them closed societies. Now the organization, with increasing frequency, casts aside its important distinction between open and closed societies.
Nowhere is this more evident than in its work in the Middle East. The region is populated by authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records. Yet in recent years Human Rights Watch has written far more condemnations of Israel for violations of international law than of any other country in the region.
Israel, with a population of 7.4 million, is home to at least 80 human rights organizations, a vibrant free press, a democratically elected government, a judiciary that frequently rules against the government, a politically active academia, multiple political parties and, judging by the amount of news coverage, probably more journalists per capita than any other country in the world — many of whom are there expressly to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Meanwhile, the Arab and Iranian regimes rule over some 350 million people, and most remain brutal, closed and autocratic, permitting little or no internal dissent. The plight of their citizens who would most benefit from the kind of attention a large and well-financed international human rights organization can provide is being ignored as Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division prepares report after report on Israel.
Human Rights Watch has lost critical perspective on a conflict in which Israel has been repeatedly attacked by Hamas and Hezbollah, organizations that go after Israeli citizens and use their own people as human shields. These groups are supported by the government of Iran, which has openly declared its intention not just to destroy Israel but to murder Jews everywhere. This incitement to genocide is a violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
Leaders of Human Rights Watch know that Hamas and Hezbollah chose to wage war from densely populated areas, deliberately transforming neighborhoods into battlefields. They know that more and better arms are flowing into both Gaza and Lebanon and are poised to strike again. And they know that this militancy continues to deprive Palestinians of any chance for the peaceful and productive life they deserve. Yet Israel, the repeated victim of aggression, faces the brunt of Human Rights Watch’s criticism.
The organization is expressly concerned mainly with how wars are fought, not with motivations. To be sure, even victims of aggression are bound by the laws of war and must do their utmost to minimize civilian casualties. Nevertheless, there is a difference between wrongs committed in self-defense and those perpetrated intentionally.
But how does Human Rights Watch know that these laws have been violated? In Gaza and elsewhere where there is no access to the battlefield or to the military and political leaders who make strategic decisions, it is extremely difficult to make definitive judgments about war crimes. Reporting often relies on witnesses whose stories cannot be verified and who may testify for political advantage or because they fear retaliation from their own rulers. Significantly, Col. Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan and an expert on warfare, has said that the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza “did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.”
Only by returning to its founding mission and the spirit of humility that animated it can Human Rights Watch resurrect itself as a moral force in the Middle East and throughout the world. If it fails to do that, its credibility will be seriously undermined and its important role in the world significantly diminished.
Robert L. Bernstein, the former president and chief executive of Random House, was the chairman of Human Rights Watch from 1978 to 1998.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/opini ... nted=print
October 25, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Eyes on the Prize
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
BAGHDAD, Aug. 25, 2012 — President Obama flew into Baghdad today on his end-of-term tour to highlight successes in U.S. foreign policy. At a time when the Arab-Israel negotiations remain mired in deadlock and Afghanistan remains mired in quagmire, Mr. Obama hailed the peaceful end of America’s combat presence in Iraq as his only Middle East achievement. Speaking to a gathering of Iraqi and U.S. officials under the banner “Mission Actually Accomplished,” written in Arabic and English, Mr. Obama took credit for helping Iraq achieve a decent — albeit hugely costly — end to the war initiated by President Bush. Aides said Mr. Obama would highlight the progress in Iraq in his re-election campaign.
Could we actually read such a news article in three years? I wouldn’t bet on it. But I wouldn’t rule it out either. Six years after the U.S. invasion, Iraq continues to unnerve and tantalize. Watching Iraqi politics is like watching a tightrope artist crossing a dangerous cavern. At every step it looks as though he is going to fall into the abyss, and yet, somehow, he continues to wobble forward. Nothing is easy when trying to transform a country brutalized by three decades of cruel dictatorship. It is one step, one election, one new law, at a time. Each is a struggle. Each is crucial.
This next step is particularly important, which is why we cannot let Afghanistan distract U.S. diplomats from Iraq. Remember: Transform Iraq and it will impact the whole Arab-Muslim world. Change Afghanistan and you just change Afghanistan.
Specifically, the Obama team needs to make sure that Iraq’s bickering politicians neither postpone the next elections, scheduled for January, nor hold them on the basis of the 2005 “closed list” system that is dominated by the party leaders. We must insist, with all our leverage, on an “open list” election, which creates more room for new faces by allowing Iraqis to vote for individual candidates and not just a party. This is what Iraq’s spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, is also demanding. It is a much more accountable system.
If we can get open list voting, the next big step would be the emergence of Iraqi parties in this election running for office on the basis of nonsectarian coalitions — where Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds run together. This would be significant: Iraq is a microcosm of the whole Middle East, and if Iraq’s sects can figure out how to govern themselves — without an iron-fisted dictator — democracy is possible in this whole region.
What is tantalizing is that the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who emerged from the Shiite Dawa Party, has decided to run this time with what he calls “The State of Law Coalition,” a pan-Iraqi, nationalist alliance of some 40 political parties, including Sunni tribal leaders and other minorities.
Mr. Maliki was in Washington last week, and I interviewed him at the Willard Hotel, primarily to ask about his new party. “Iraq cannot be ruled by one color or religion or sect,” he explained. “We clearly saw that sectarianism and ethnic grouping threatened our national unity. Therefore, I believe we should bring all these different colors together and establish Iraq as a country built on rule of law and equity and citizenship. The Iraqi people encouraged us. They want this. Other parties are also organizing themselves like this. No one can run anymore as a purely sectarian bloc. ... Our experiment is very unique in this region.”
That’s for sure. The Iranians want pro-Tehran Shiite parties to dominate Iraq. Also, the Iranian dictatorship hates the idea of “inferior” Iraq holding real elections while Iran limits voting to preselected candidates and then rigs the outcome. Most Arab leaders fear any real multisectarian democracy taking root in the neighborhood.
“The most dangerous thing that would threaten others is that if we really create success in building a democratic state in Iraq,” said Maliki, whose country today now has about 100 newspapers. “The countries whose regimes are built on one party, sect or ethnic group will feel endangered.”
Maliki knows it won’t be easy: “Saddam ruled for more than 35 years,” he said. “We need one or two generations brought up on democracy and human rights to get rid of this orientation.”
If this election comes off, it will still be held with U.S. combat troops on hand. The even bigger prize and test will be four years hence, if Iraq can hold an election in which multiethnic coalitions based on differing ideas of governance — not sectarianism — vie for power, and the reins are passed from one government to another without any U.S. military involvement. That would be the first time in modern Arab history where true multisectarian coalitions contest power, and cede power, without foreign interference. That would shake up the whole region.
Yes, let’s figure out Afghanistan. But let’s not forget that something very important — but so fragile and tentative — is still playing out in Iraq, and we and our allies still need to help bring it to fruition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
Eyes on the Prize
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
BAGHDAD, Aug. 25, 2012 — President Obama flew into Baghdad today on his end-of-term tour to highlight successes in U.S. foreign policy. At a time when the Arab-Israel negotiations remain mired in deadlock and Afghanistan remains mired in quagmire, Mr. Obama hailed the peaceful end of America’s combat presence in Iraq as his only Middle East achievement. Speaking to a gathering of Iraqi and U.S. officials under the banner “Mission Actually Accomplished,” written in Arabic and English, Mr. Obama took credit for helping Iraq achieve a decent — albeit hugely costly — end to the war initiated by President Bush. Aides said Mr. Obama would highlight the progress in Iraq in his re-election campaign.
Could we actually read such a news article in three years? I wouldn’t bet on it. But I wouldn’t rule it out either. Six years after the U.S. invasion, Iraq continues to unnerve and tantalize. Watching Iraqi politics is like watching a tightrope artist crossing a dangerous cavern. At every step it looks as though he is going to fall into the abyss, and yet, somehow, he continues to wobble forward. Nothing is easy when trying to transform a country brutalized by three decades of cruel dictatorship. It is one step, one election, one new law, at a time. Each is a struggle. Each is crucial.
This next step is particularly important, which is why we cannot let Afghanistan distract U.S. diplomats from Iraq. Remember: Transform Iraq and it will impact the whole Arab-Muslim world. Change Afghanistan and you just change Afghanistan.
Specifically, the Obama team needs to make sure that Iraq’s bickering politicians neither postpone the next elections, scheduled for January, nor hold them on the basis of the 2005 “closed list” system that is dominated by the party leaders. We must insist, with all our leverage, on an “open list” election, which creates more room for new faces by allowing Iraqis to vote for individual candidates and not just a party. This is what Iraq’s spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, is also demanding. It is a much more accountable system.
If we can get open list voting, the next big step would be the emergence of Iraqi parties in this election running for office on the basis of nonsectarian coalitions — where Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds run together. This would be significant: Iraq is a microcosm of the whole Middle East, and if Iraq’s sects can figure out how to govern themselves — without an iron-fisted dictator — democracy is possible in this whole region.
What is tantalizing is that the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who emerged from the Shiite Dawa Party, has decided to run this time with what he calls “The State of Law Coalition,” a pan-Iraqi, nationalist alliance of some 40 political parties, including Sunni tribal leaders and other minorities.
Mr. Maliki was in Washington last week, and I interviewed him at the Willard Hotel, primarily to ask about his new party. “Iraq cannot be ruled by one color or religion or sect,” he explained. “We clearly saw that sectarianism and ethnic grouping threatened our national unity. Therefore, I believe we should bring all these different colors together and establish Iraq as a country built on rule of law and equity and citizenship. The Iraqi people encouraged us. They want this. Other parties are also organizing themselves like this. No one can run anymore as a purely sectarian bloc. ... Our experiment is very unique in this region.”
That’s for sure. The Iranians want pro-Tehran Shiite parties to dominate Iraq. Also, the Iranian dictatorship hates the idea of “inferior” Iraq holding real elections while Iran limits voting to preselected candidates and then rigs the outcome. Most Arab leaders fear any real multisectarian democracy taking root in the neighborhood.
“The most dangerous thing that would threaten others is that if we really create success in building a democratic state in Iraq,” said Maliki, whose country today now has about 100 newspapers. “The countries whose regimes are built on one party, sect or ethnic group will feel endangered.”
Maliki knows it won’t be easy: “Saddam ruled for more than 35 years,” he said. “We need one or two generations brought up on democracy and human rights to get rid of this orientation.”
If this election comes off, it will still be held with U.S. combat troops on hand. The even bigger prize and test will be four years hence, if Iraq can hold an election in which multiethnic coalitions based on differing ideas of governance — not sectarianism — vie for power, and the reins are passed from one government to another without any U.S. military involvement. That would be the first time in modern Arab history where true multisectarian coalitions contest power, and cede power, without foreign interference. That would shake up the whole region.
Yes, let’s figure out Afghanistan. But let’s not forget that something very important — but so fragile and tentative — is still playing out in Iraq, and we and our allies still need to help bring it to fruition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/opini ... nted=print
November 1, 2009
Thirsty Plant Dries Out Yemen
By ROBERT F. WORTH
JAHILIYA, Yemen — More than half of this country’s scarce water is used to feed an addiction.
Even as drought kills off Yemen’s crops, farmers in villages like this one are turning increasingly to a thirsty plant called qat, the leaves of which are chewed every day by most Yemeni men (and some women) for their mild narcotic effect. The farmers have little choice: qat is the only way to make a profit.
Meanwhile, the water wells are running dry, and deep, ominous cracks have begun opening in the parched earth, some of them hundreds of yards long.
“They tell us it’s because the water table is sinking so fast,” said Muhammad Hamoud Amer, a worn-looking farmer who has lost two-thirds of his peach trees to drought in the past two years. “Every year we have to drill deeper and deeper to get water.”
Across Yemen, the underground water sources that sustain 24 million people are running out, and some areas could be depleted in just a few years. It is a crisis that threatens the very survival of this arid, overpopulated country, and one that could prove deadlier than the better known resurgence of Al Qaeda here.
Water scarcity afflicts much of the Middle East, but Yemen’s poverty and lawlessness make the problem more serious and harder to address, experts say. The government now supplies water once every 45 days in some urban areas, and in much of the country there is no public water supply at all. Meanwhile, the market price of water has quadrupled in the past four years, pushing more and more people to drill illegally into rapidly receding aquifers.
“It is a collapse with social, economic and environmental aspects,” said Abdul Rahman al-Eryani, Yemen’s minister of water and environment. “We are reaching a point where we don’t even know if the interventions we are proposing will save the situation.”
Making matters far worse is the proliferation of qat trees, which have replaced other crops across much of the country, taking up a vast and growing share of water, according to studies by the World Bank. The government has struggled to limit drilling by qat farmers, but to no effect. The state has little authority outside the capital, Sana.
Already, the lack of water is fueling tribal conflicts and insurgencies, Mr. Eryani said. Those conflicts, including a widening armed rebellion in the north and a violent separatist movement in the south, in turn make it more difficult to address the water crisis in an organized way. Many parts of the country are too dangerous for government engineers or hydrologists to venture into.
Climate change is deepening the problem, making seasonal rains less reliable and driving up average temperatures in some areas, said Jochen Renger, a water resources specialist with the German government’s technical assistance arm, who has been advising the water ministry for five years.
Unlike some other arid countries in the region, like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Yemen lacks the money to invest heavily in desalination plants. Even wastewater treatment has proved difficult in Yemen. The plants have been managed poorly, and some clerics have declared the reuse of wastewater to be a violation of Islamic principles.
At the root of the water crisis — as with so many of the ills affecting the Middle East — is rapid population growth, experts say. The number of Yemenis has quadrupled in the last half century, and is expected to triple again in the next 40 years, to about 60 million.
In rural areas, people can often be seen gathering drinking water from cloudy, stagnant cisterns where animals drink. Even in parts of Sana, the poor cluster to gather runoff from privately owned local wells as their wealthier neighbors pay the equivalent of $10 for a 3,000 liter-truckload of water.
“At least 1,000 people depend on this well,” said Hassan Yahya al-Khayari, 38, as he stood watching water pour from a black rubber tube into a tanker truck near his home in Sana. “But the number of people is rising, and the water is growing less and less.”
For millenniums, Yemen preserved traditions of careful water use. Farmers depended mostly on rainwater collection and shallow wells. In some areas they built dams, including the great Marib dam in northern Yemen, which lasted for more than 1,000 years until it collapsed in the sixth century A.D.
But traditional agriculture began to fall apart in the 1960s after Yemen was flooded with cheap foreign grain, which put many farmers out of business. Qat began replacing food crops, and in the late 1960s, motorized drills began to proliferate, allowing farmers and villagers to pump water from underground aquifers much faster than it could be replaced through natural processes. The number of drills has only grown since they were outlawed in 2002.
Despite the destructive effects of qat, the Yemeni government supports it, through diesel subsidies, loans and customs exemptions, Mr. Eryani said. It is illegal to import qat, and powerful growers known here as the “qat mafia” have threatened to shoot down any planes bringing in cheaper qat from abroad.
Still, the water crisis could be eased substantially through a return to rainwater collection and better management, Mr. Renger said. Between 20 and 30 percent of Yemen’s water is lost through waste, he said, compared with 7 to 9 percent in Europe.
In Jahiliya and other areas around the capital, the World Bank is leading a project to change wasteful irrigation patterns.
Mr. Amer, the farmer based here, proudly showed visitors his efforts to irrigate fruit and tomato fields using rubber tubes, instead of just funneling it through earthen ditches that allow most of the water to evaporate unused. Little hoses spray the crops with water instead of wastefully soaking them.
But he also pointed out two local wells where the water is dropping at the astonishing rate of almost 60 feet a year, causing the land to subside. Nearby, sinkholes in the arid soil of his property are growing longer and deeper every year.
“We have been suffering for years from this,” he said, gesturing at a cast-off drill rig that broke after going down too deep into the earth.
The Yemeni engineers working on the World Bank project concede they have had tremendous difficulty convincing other farmers — and even government agencies — to take their efforts seriously.
“There is no coordination with other parts of the government, even after we explain the dangers,” said Ali Hassan Awad. “Prosecutors don’t understand that drilling is a serious problem.”
Mr. Eryani, the water minister, takes the long view. Yemen has suffered ecological crises before and survived. The collapse of the Marib dam, for instance, led to a famine that pushed vast numbers of people to migrate abroad, and their descendants are now scattered across the Middle East.
“But that was before national borders were established,” Mr. Eryani added. “If we face a similar catastrophe now, who will allow us to move?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/world ... nted=print
Thirsty Plant Dries Out Yemen
By ROBERT F. WORTH
JAHILIYA, Yemen — More than half of this country’s scarce water is used to feed an addiction.
Even as drought kills off Yemen’s crops, farmers in villages like this one are turning increasingly to a thirsty plant called qat, the leaves of which are chewed every day by most Yemeni men (and some women) for their mild narcotic effect. The farmers have little choice: qat is the only way to make a profit.
Meanwhile, the water wells are running dry, and deep, ominous cracks have begun opening in the parched earth, some of them hundreds of yards long.
“They tell us it’s because the water table is sinking so fast,” said Muhammad Hamoud Amer, a worn-looking farmer who has lost two-thirds of his peach trees to drought in the past two years. “Every year we have to drill deeper and deeper to get water.”
Across Yemen, the underground water sources that sustain 24 million people are running out, and some areas could be depleted in just a few years. It is a crisis that threatens the very survival of this arid, overpopulated country, and one that could prove deadlier than the better known resurgence of Al Qaeda here.
Water scarcity afflicts much of the Middle East, but Yemen’s poverty and lawlessness make the problem more serious and harder to address, experts say. The government now supplies water once every 45 days in some urban areas, and in much of the country there is no public water supply at all. Meanwhile, the market price of water has quadrupled in the past four years, pushing more and more people to drill illegally into rapidly receding aquifers.
“It is a collapse with social, economic and environmental aspects,” said Abdul Rahman al-Eryani, Yemen’s minister of water and environment. “We are reaching a point where we don’t even know if the interventions we are proposing will save the situation.”
Making matters far worse is the proliferation of qat trees, which have replaced other crops across much of the country, taking up a vast and growing share of water, according to studies by the World Bank. The government has struggled to limit drilling by qat farmers, but to no effect. The state has little authority outside the capital, Sana.
Already, the lack of water is fueling tribal conflicts and insurgencies, Mr. Eryani said. Those conflicts, including a widening armed rebellion in the north and a violent separatist movement in the south, in turn make it more difficult to address the water crisis in an organized way. Many parts of the country are too dangerous for government engineers or hydrologists to venture into.
Climate change is deepening the problem, making seasonal rains less reliable and driving up average temperatures in some areas, said Jochen Renger, a water resources specialist with the German government’s technical assistance arm, who has been advising the water ministry for five years.
Unlike some other arid countries in the region, like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Yemen lacks the money to invest heavily in desalination plants. Even wastewater treatment has proved difficult in Yemen. The plants have been managed poorly, and some clerics have declared the reuse of wastewater to be a violation of Islamic principles.
At the root of the water crisis — as with so many of the ills affecting the Middle East — is rapid population growth, experts say. The number of Yemenis has quadrupled in the last half century, and is expected to triple again in the next 40 years, to about 60 million.
In rural areas, people can often be seen gathering drinking water from cloudy, stagnant cisterns where animals drink. Even in parts of Sana, the poor cluster to gather runoff from privately owned local wells as their wealthier neighbors pay the equivalent of $10 for a 3,000 liter-truckload of water.
“At least 1,000 people depend on this well,” said Hassan Yahya al-Khayari, 38, as he stood watching water pour from a black rubber tube into a tanker truck near his home in Sana. “But the number of people is rising, and the water is growing less and less.”
For millenniums, Yemen preserved traditions of careful water use. Farmers depended mostly on rainwater collection and shallow wells. In some areas they built dams, including the great Marib dam in northern Yemen, which lasted for more than 1,000 years until it collapsed in the sixth century A.D.
But traditional agriculture began to fall apart in the 1960s after Yemen was flooded with cheap foreign grain, which put many farmers out of business. Qat began replacing food crops, and in the late 1960s, motorized drills began to proliferate, allowing farmers and villagers to pump water from underground aquifers much faster than it could be replaced through natural processes. The number of drills has only grown since they were outlawed in 2002.
Despite the destructive effects of qat, the Yemeni government supports it, through diesel subsidies, loans and customs exemptions, Mr. Eryani said. It is illegal to import qat, and powerful growers known here as the “qat mafia” have threatened to shoot down any planes bringing in cheaper qat from abroad.
Still, the water crisis could be eased substantially through a return to rainwater collection and better management, Mr. Renger said. Between 20 and 30 percent of Yemen’s water is lost through waste, he said, compared with 7 to 9 percent in Europe.
In Jahiliya and other areas around the capital, the World Bank is leading a project to change wasteful irrigation patterns.
Mr. Amer, the farmer based here, proudly showed visitors his efforts to irrigate fruit and tomato fields using rubber tubes, instead of just funneling it through earthen ditches that allow most of the water to evaporate unused. Little hoses spray the crops with water instead of wastefully soaking them.
But he also pointed out two local wells where the water is dropping at the astonishing rate of almost 60 feet a year, causing the land to subside. Nearby, sinkholes in the arid soil of his property are growing longer and deeper every year.
“We have been suffering for years from this,” he said, gesturing at a cast-off drill rig that broke after going down too deep into the earth.
The Yemeni engineers working on the World Bank project concede they have had tremendous difficulty convincing other farmers — and even government agencies — to take their efforts seriously.
“There is no coordination with other parts of the government, even after we explain the dangers,” said Ali Hassan Awad. “Prosecutors don’t understand that drilling is a serious problem.”
Mr. Eryani, the water minister, takes the long view. Yemen has suffered ecological crises before and survived. The collapse of the Marib dam, for instance, led to a famine that pushed vast numbers of people to migrate abroad, and their descendants are now scattered across the Middle East.
“But that was before national borders were established,” Mr. Eryani added. “If we face a similar catastrophe now, who will allow us to move?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/world ... nted=print
November 8, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Call White House, Ask for Barack
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
The Israeli-Palestinian peace process has become a bad play. It is obvious that all the parties are just acting out the same old scenes, with the same old tired clichés — and that no one believes any of it anymore. There is no romance, no sex, no excitement, no urgency — not even a sense of importance anymore. The only thing driving the peace process today is inertia and diplomatic habit. Yes, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process has left the realm of diplomacy. It is now more of a calisthenic, like weight-lifting or sit-ups, something diplomats do to stay in shape, but not because they believe anything is going to happen. And yet, as much as we, the audience, know this to be true, we can never quite abandon hope for peace in the Holy Land. It is our habit. Indeed, as I ranted about this to a Jordanian friend the other day, he said it all reminded him of an old story.
“These two guys are watching a cowboy and Indian movie. And in the opening scene, an Indian is hiding behind a rock about to ambush the handsome cowboy,” he explained. “ ‘I bet that Indian is going to kill that cowboy,’ one guy says to the other. ‘Never happen,’ his friend answers. ‘The cowboy is not going to be killed in the opening scene.’ ‘I’ll bet you $10 he gets killed,’ the guy says. ‘I’ll take that bet,’ says his friend.
“Sure enough, a few minutes later, the cowboy is killed and the friend pays the $10. After the movie is over the guy says to his friend, ‘Look, I have to give you back your $10. I’d actually seen this movie before. I knew what was going to happen.’ His friend answers: ‘No, you can keep the $10. I’d seen the movie, too. I just thought it would end differently this time.’ ”
This peace process movie is not going to end differently just because we keep playing the same reel. It is time for a radically new approach. And I mean radical. I mean something no U.S. administration has ever dared to do: Take down our “Peace-Processing-Is-Us” sign and just go home.
Right now we want it more than the parties. They all have other priorities today. And by constantly injecting ourselves we’ve become their Novocain. We relieve all the political pain from the Arab and Israeli decision-makers by creating the impression in the minds of their publics that something serious is happening. “Look, the U.S. secretary of state is here. Look, she’s standing by my side. Look, I’m doing something important! Take our picture. Put it on the news. We’re on the verge of something really big and I am indispensable to it.” This enables the respective leaders to continue with their real priorities — which are all about holding power or pursuing ideological obsessions — while pretending to advance peace, without paying any political price.
Let’s just get out of the picture. Let all these leaders stand in front of their own people and tell them the truth: “My fellow citizens: Nothing is happening; nothing is going to happen. It’s just you and me and the problem we own.”
Indeed, it’s time for us to dust off James Baker’s line: “When you’re serious, give us a call: 202-456-1414. Ask for Barack. Otherwise, stay out of our lives. We have our own country to fix.”
The fact is, the only time America has been able to advance peace — post-Yom Kippur War, Camp David, post-Lebanon war, Madrid and Oslo — has been when the parties felt enough pain for different reasons that they invited our diplomacy, and we had statesmen — Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, George Shultz, James Baker and Bill Clinton — savvy enough to seize those moments.
Today, the Arabs, Israel and the Palestinians are clearly not feeling enough pain to do anything hard for peace with each other — a mood best summed up by a phrase making the rounds at the State Department: The Palestinian leadership “wants a deal with Israel without any negotiations” and Israel’s leadership “wants negotiations with the Palestinians without any deal.”
It is obvious that this Israeli government believes it can have peace with the Palestinians and keep the West Bank, this Palestinian Authority still can’t decide whether to reconcile with the Jewish state or criminalize it and this Hamas leadership would rather let Palestinians live forever in the hellish squalor that is Gaza than give up its crazy fantasy of an Islamic Republic in Palestine.
If we are still begging Israel to stop building settlements, which is so manifestly idiotic, and the Palestinians to come to negotiations, which is so manifestly in their interest, and the Saudis to just give Israel a wink, which is so manifestly pathetic, we are in the wrong place. It’s time to call a halt to this dysfunctional “peace process,” which is only damaging the Obama team’s credibility.
If the status quo is this tolerable for the parties, then I say, let them enjoy it. I just don’t want to subsidize it or anesthetize it anymore. We need to fix America. If and when they get serious, they’ll find us. And when they do, we should put a detailed U.S. plan for a two-state solution, with borders, on the table. Let’s fight about something big.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
Call White House, Ask for Barack
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
The Israeli-Palestinian peace process has become a bad play. It is obvious that all the parties are just acting out the same old scenes, with the same old tired clichés — and that no one believes any of it anymore. There is no romance, no sex, no excitement, no urgency — not even a sense of importance anymore. The only thing driving the peace process today is inertia and diplomatic habit. Yes, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process has left the realm of diplomacy. It is now more of a calisthenic, like weight-lifting or sit-ups, something diplomats do to stay in shape, but not because they believe anything is going to happen. And yet, as much as we, the audience, know this to be true, we can never quite abandon hope for peace in the Holy Land. It is our habit. Indeed, as I ranted about this to a Jordanian friend the other day, he said it all reminded him of an old story.
“These two guys are watching a cowboy and Indian movie. And in the opening scene, an Indian is hiding behind a rock about to ambush the handsome cowboy,” he explained. “ ‘I bet that Indian is going to kill that cowboy,’ one guy says to the other. ‘Never happen,’ his friend answers. ‘The cowboy is not going to be killed in the opening scene.’ ‘I’ll bet you $10 he gets killed,’ the guy says. ‘I’ll take that bet,’ says his friend.
“Sure enough, a few minutes later, the cowboy is killed and the friend pays the $10. After the movie is over the guy says to his friend, ‘Look, I have to give you back your $10. I’d actually seen this movie before. I knew what was going to happen.’ His friend answers: ‘No, you can keep the $10. I’d seen the movie, too. I just thought it would end differently this time.’ ”
This peace process movie is not going to end differently just because we keep playing the same reel. It is time for a radically new approach. And I mean radical. I mean something no U.S. administration has ever dared to do: Take down our “Peace-Processing-Is-Us” sign and just go home.
Right now we want it more than the parties. They all have other priorities today. And by constantly injecting ourselves we’ve become their Novocain. We relieve all the political pain from the Arab and Israeli decision-makers by creating the impression in the minds of their publics that something serious is happening. “Look, the U.S. secretary of state is here. Look, she’s standing by my side. Look, I’m doing something important! Take our picture. Put it on the news. We’re on the verge of something really big and I am indispensable to it.” This enables the respective leaders to continue with their real priorities — which are all about holding power or pursuing ideological obsessions — while pretending to advance peace, without paying any political price.
Let’s just get out of the picture. Let all these leaders stand in front of their own people and tell them the truth: “My fellow citizens: Nothing is happening; nothing is going to happen. It’s just you and me and the problem we own.”
Indeed, it’s time for us to dust off James Baker’s line: “When you’re serious, give us a call: 202-456-1414. Ask for Barack. Otherwise, stay out of our lives. We have our own country to fix.”
The fact is, the only time America has been able to advance peace — post-Yom Kippur War, Camp David, post-Lebanon war, Madrid and Oslo — has been when the parties felt enough pain for different reasons that they invited our diplomacy, and we had statesmen — Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, George Shultz, James Baker and Bill Clinton — savvy enough to seize those moments.
Today, the Arabs, Israel and the Palestinians are clearly not feeling enough pain to do anything hard for peace with each other — a mood best summed up by a phrase making the rounds at the State Department: The Palestinian leadership “wants a deal with Israel without any negotiations” and Israel’s leadership “wants negotiations with the Palestinians without any deal.”
It is obvious that this Israeli government believes it can have peace with the Palestinians and keep the West Bank, this Palestinian Authority still can’t decide whether to reconcile with the Jewish state or criminalize it and this Hamas leadership would rather let Palestinians live forever in the hellish squalor that is Gaza than give up its crazy fantasy of an Islamic Republic in Palestine.
If we are still begging Israel to stop building settlements, which is so manifestly idiotic, and the Palestinians to come to negotiations, which is so manifestly in their interest, and the Saudis to just give Israel a wink, which is so manifestly pathetic, we are in the wrong place. It’s time to call a halt to this dysfunctional “peace process,” which is only damaging the Obama team’s credibility.
If the status quo is this tolerable for the parties, then I say, let them enjoy it. I just don’t want to subsidize it or anesthetize it anymore. We need to fix America. If and when they get serious, they’ll find us. And when they do, we should put a detailed U.S. plan for a two-state solution, with borders, on the table. Let’s fight about something big.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/opini ... nted=print
THEY WILL ALWAYS REMEMBER!
THEY WILL ALWAYS REMEMBER!
As we approach the third anniversary of the murder of President Saddam Hussein by U.S. and Iranian-backed cowards, the current stooge prime minister of Iraq, Maliki, is sparing no effort in attempting to erase the memory of President Hussein and the Ba’ath Party from Iraq’s collective remembrance. Most leaders who are killed in a coup or an invasion of a foreign country usually have their corpses paraded around for the people to throw things at, or they are buried in some junk heap in a landfill and forgotten. Not so with President Saddam Hussein. His memory and his accomplishments are alive and well in the psyche of millions of Iraqis.
On December 5, 2009, Al-Jazeera News ran an article called "Longing for Saddam in Tikrit." It began:
When you see Iraqi policemen salute the grave of President Saddam Hussein, you start to realize how much more needs to be achieved before Iraq is on the road to true peace and stability. There are Iraqis who long for the past, especially in Tikrit, the hometown of the late Iraqi leader.
"...A few moments later, a family arrived at the gravesite which has become a shrine for many. A woman kissed President Hussein's grave and cried out: "Abu Oday, where are you? I wish you were here. Since you have been gone, we have been humiliated."
For a few months, Maliki has blamed every act of violence in Iraq on President Saddam Hussein's supporters, despite most being conducted by his own government. A day does not go by without Maliki denigrating President Hussein. He is obsessed. The main reason for this preoccupation is that Maliki realizes the Iraqi people are much more proud of President Saddam Hussein than himself. Jealously prevails.
Source: www.malcomlagauche.com
As we approach the third anniversary of the murder of President Saddam Hussein by U.S. and Iranian-backed cowards, the current stooge prime minister of Iraq, Maliki, is sparing no effort in attempting to erase the memory of President Hussein and the Ba’ath Party from Iraq’s collective remembrance. Most leaders who are killed in a coup or an invasion of a foreign country usually have their corpses paraded around for the people to throw things at, or they are buried in some junk heap in a landfill and forgotten. Not so with President Saddam Hussein. His memory and his accomplishments are alive and well in the psyche of millions of Iraqis.
On December 5, 2009, Al-Jazeera News ran an article called "Longing for Saddam in Tikrit." It began:
When you see Iraqi policemen salute the grave of President Saddam Hussein, you start to realize how much more needs to be achieved before Iraq is on the road to true peace and stability. There are Iraqis who long for the past, especially in Tikrit, the hometown of the late Iraqi leader.
"...A few moments later, a family arrived at the gravesite which has become a shrine for many. A woman kissed President Hussein's grave and cried out: "Abu Oday, where are you? I wish you were here. Since you have been gone, we have been humiliated."
For a few months, Maliki has blamed every act of violence in Iraq on President Saddam Hussein's supporters, despite most being conducted by his own government. A day does not go by without Maliki denigrating President Hussein. He is obsessed. The main reason for this preoccupation is that Maliki realizes the Iraqi people are much more proud of President Saddam Hussein than himself. Jealously prevails.
Source: www.malcomlagauche.com
December 14, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Dubai Grows Up
By CLAUDIA PUGH-THOMAS
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
THE morning after the United Arab Emirates turned 38, the streets were deserted but for the foreign workers dressed in orange coveralls. They swept the confetti from Dubai’s beach road, wiped Silly String from the lenses of the traffic cameras and retrieved the carcasses of rockets. Long gone were the crystal-encrusted Hummers and Escalades that had paraded up and down in their finery. A cacophony of horns and cheers and firecrackers had filled the night; now everything was quiet.
Abandoned near a bus stop, one S.U.V. still bore the signs of Dec. 2’s celebration: heart-shaped green stickers peppered the hood, streamers in the national colors fluttered at the rear window, the windshield was plastered with an image of Dubai’s ruler, Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum. His hundred-yard stare is meant, one imagines, to convey the impression of a man gazing at the glorious realization of his vision. But as the emirate teeters on the brink of economic meltdown, Sheik Mohammed’s enigmatic expression seemed more like the look of a man who is seeing his dream rapidly turn sour.
At 38, the brashest, and best-known, of the seven emirates is facing something of a midlife crisis. She has lost the blind optimism of her youth, when the oil rush brought Mercedeses and McDonald’s drive-throughs to the desert, but she has yet to gain the wisdom of old age. Despite constant, furious reinvention and desperate attempts to direct the world’s focus to her door — Come see the world’s tallest tower! A fountain visible from space! A shopping mall that sprawls across 12.1 million square feet! — this city is in danger of losing her oxygen. Without positive publicity, Dubai ceases to exist meaningfully on the world stage.
And if the money really is gone, there will be a significant demographic shift within the expatriates who constitute the majority of the population. We all come here for the money. Some choose to stay for the lifestyle, some for the lack of a better alternative. Many see life in Dubai as a welcome break from civic responsibility; the expat can skim the surface, cream off the good, ignore the bad, live the dream. As long as there’s an economy to speak of. If that fails, you have to leave. No work, no visa, goodbye.
All summer there were reports of cardboard-box shortages and serried ranks of dusty vehicles abandoned at the airport’s international terminal; there were telephone calls from concerned friends and family: “Are you O.K.?” “When are you coming home?” In the air hung the expectation that thousands would leave to ride out the global recession back in their country of origin. Surely, with the end of the academic year, families would pack up their possessions and head off.
But the fact is, many Western expatriates are less capable of escape than they like to believe. They now consider Dubai to be home, for better or worse. They have opened bank accounts and started businesses; they have mortgages on houses in incongruously named developments like the Springs, the Lakes, the Meadows. They are tied to the fate of Dubai as a viable business hub, and if they leave, they stand to lose everything.
So the registrars at the myriad schools catering to European expats say that their waiting lists are still long, their classrooms at capacity. And the mothers gathered in the playgrounds to pick up their children talk of things other than the economy — plans for Christmas, the change in the weather, Rihanna’s New Year’s concert in Abu Dhabi.
Their husbands have reassured them that it will be quite all right. It’s not as bad as has been reported, they say. All countries have financial problems. America’s debt is bigger than Dubai’s. Britain’s economy is in freefall. What we need to do is be optimistic. Abu Dhabi, Dubai’s wealthier, more conservative neighbor, has come up with a $10 billion bailout for the prodigal son. And where are you getting your turkey from this year?
Yet there are, behind the glittering facade of marble and the bright masses of bougainvillea, signs of change that are getting harder and harder to ignore. The for-rent signs that last year would have vanished in a flash as thousands came to set up a new life here now hang askew from villas and apartment blocks. Twelve months ago, you paid what you had to even if the landlords were doubling the rent overnight, but if you’re looking to move now, you can haggle, get the bathroom fixed, update the kitchen, knock thousands of dirhams off the asking price.
With the dust storms that move in this time of year, it’s hard to discern which half-constructed tower is actually still being developed and which has been abandoned. Only a matter of months ago, whole swaths of the city — the older parts, some dating back a whole 10 years — were destined for destruction; now dowdy bungalows are being repainted, reappointed and put back on the market. Behind plywood hoardings advertising the latest “integrated community” there is nothing but leveled sand.
What has undeniably changed is the relationship between the local population and the expats. It has always been an uneasy one, the inherent tensions manifest only when an accident on the road occurs and the foreigner is assumed to be in the wrong. Part of this strain is surely growing resentment that the boom, in which Western expats played such a pivotal role, is now over. We might rue the collapse and suffer the economic consequences, but our sense of national identity has not been undermined by Dubai’s rapid demise; we were just along for the ride. For the locals, there is no alternative, no moving on, not ever. The next generation of Dubaians stands to inherit a ruined legacy.
The emirate’s Islamic identity has also suffered over the past decades. How could it be otherwise? Dubai welcomed expatriates from Jersey to Japan, Ethiopia to Estonia — but turned a blind eye to the ills that such a multicultural, transitory mix can spawn, at least until that rootless diversity threatened to become the emirate’s defining trait. The locals complain, rightly in some cases, of a lack of respect for their religious sensitivities, while simultaneously openly embracing many of the less desirable elements of the secularized West.
So we, the foreign workers, are now chastised for our failure to integrate, to engage with local culture and heritage. We are urged to assimilate as best we can. “With what?” is the question. There is no need to speak Arabic in daily life; there is little indigenous culture to explore.
Last week, there was some confusion over what food my children should take into school for the National Day festivities. What exactly is local cuisine? If this were a wedding it would be roasted camel hump. But the supermarket does not stock camel, and as Dubai borrows heavily from Lebanese, Egyptian, Indian and Pakistani cuisine, it is hard to identify what dish is uniquely Dubaian. To feed a class of 7-year-olds, we yielded to the inevitable appeal of cupcakes, iced and decorated with Christmas sprinkles. In festive red, white and green, they lacked only something black to pass as representing the colors of the national flag.
Dubai has become what it is today partly through defiance of normal expectations: here are islands shaped like palm trees, the world’s only seven-star hotel, the world’s richest horse race. But the result is a place that lacks coherence, both physically and psychologically. In many ways, it resembles a glorified film set, awaiting the arrival of the swashbuckling hero to tie all the loose strands together and give this fantasy some credibility. But this most unconventional of places is not immune to reality. How Dubai negotiates this rite of passage will determine whether it will ever be taken seriously. That we are being told this is all just negative publicity, merely a marketing blip, is not a promising sign.
Meantime, the malls are decked with Christmas trees and tinsel. We are reminded to dress modestly as we shop for artificial snow at the indoor ski slope before stopping to watch the roller-skating penguins or to sip a hot chocolate in front of an open fire provided courtesy of a wall-mounted projector. The malls still hum on the weekends and if the shops are offering discounted items, who is to say whether it’s a seasonal affair or a barometer of economic collapse?
Claudia Pugh-Thomas is a writer.
This piece has been updated to reflect today's news
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/14/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Contributor
Dubai Grows Up
By CLAUDIA PUGH-THOMAS
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
THE morning after the United Arab Emirates turned 38, the streets were deserted but for the foreign workers dressed in orange coveralls. They swept the confetti from Dubai’s beach road, wiped Silly String from the lenses of the traffic cameras and retrieved the carcasses of rockets. Long gone were the crystal-encrusted Hummers and Escalades that had paraded up and down in their finery. A cacophony of horns and cheers and firecrackers had filled the night; now everything was quiet.
Abandoned near a bus stop, one S.U.V. still bore the signs of Dec. 2’s celebration: heart-shaped green stickers peppered the hood, streamers in the national colors fluttered at the rear window, the windshield was plastered with an image of Dubai’s ruler, Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum. His hundred-yard stare is meant, one imagines, to convey the impression of a man gazing at the glorious realization of his vision. But as the emirate teeters on the brink of economic meltdown, Sheik Mohammed’s enigmatic expression seemed more like the look of a man who is seeing his dream rapidly turn sour.
At 38, the brashest, and best-known, of the seven emirates is facing something of a midlife crisis. She has lost the blind optimism of her youth, when the oil rush brought Mercedeses and McDonald’s drive-throughs to the desert, but she has yet to gain the wisdom of old age. Despite constant, furious reinvention and desperate attempts to direct the world’s focus to her door — Come see the world’s tallest tower! A fountain visible from space! A shopping mall that sprawls across 12.1 million square feet! — this city is in danger of losing her oxygen. Without positive publicity, Dubai ceases to exist meaningfully on the world stage.
And if the money really is gone, there will be a significant demographic shift within the expatriates who constitute the majority of the population. We all come here for the money. Some choose to stay for the lifestyle, some for the lack of a better alternative. Many see life in Dubai as a welcome break from civic responsibility; the expat can skim the surface, cream off the good, ignore the bad, live the dream. As long as there’s an economy to speak of. If that fails, you have to leave. No work, no visa, goodbye.
All summer there were reports of cardboard-box shortages and serried ranks of dusty vehicles abandoned at the airport’s international terminal; there were telephone calls from concerned friends and family: “Are you O.K.?” “When are you coming home?” In the air hung the expectation that thousands would leave to ride out the global recession back in their country of origin. Surely, with the end of the academic year, families would pack up their possessions and head off.
But the fact is, many Western expatriates are less capable of escape than they like to believe. They now consider Dubai to be home, for better or worse. They have opened bank accounts and started businesses; they have mortgages on houses in incongruously named developments like the Springs, the Lakes, the Meadows. They are tied to the fate of Dubai as a viable business hub, and if they leave, they stand to lose everything.
So the registrars at the myriad schools catering to European expats say that their waiting lists are still long, their classrooms at capacity. And the mothers gathered in the playgrounds to pick up their children talk of things other than the economy — plans for Christmas, the change in the weather, Rihanna’s New Year’s concert in Abu Dhabi.
Their husbands have reassured them that it will be quite all right. It’s not as bad as has been reported, they say. All countries have financial problems. America’s debt is bigger than Dubai’s. Britain’s economy is in freefall. What we need to do is be optimistic. Abu Dhabi, Dubai’s wealthier, more conservative neighbor, has come up with a $10 billion bailout for the prodigal son. And where are you getting your turkey from this year?
Yet there are, behind the glittering facade of marble and the bright masses of bougainvillea, signs of change that are getting harder and harder to ignore. The for-rent signs that last year would have vanished in a flash as thousands came to set up a new life here now hang askew from villas and apartment blocks. Twelve months ago, you paid what you had to even if the landlords were doubling the rent overnight, but if you’re looking to move now, you can haggle, get the bathroom fixed, update the kitchen, knock thousands of dirhams off the asking price.
With the dust storms that move in this time of year, it’s hard to discern which half-constructed tower is actually still being developed and which has been abandoned. Only a matter of months ago, whole swaths of the city — the older parts, some dating back a whole 10 years — were destined for destruction; now dowdy bungalows are being repainted, reappointed and put back on the market. Behind plywood hoardings advertising the latest “integrated community” there is nothing but leveled sand.
What has undeniably changed is the relationship between the local population and the expats. It has always been an uneasy one, the inherent tensions manifest only when an accident on the road occurs and the foreigner is assumed to be in the wrong. Part of this strain is surely growing resentment that the boom, in which Western expats played such a pivotal role, is now over. We might rue the collapse and suffer the economic consequences, but our sense of national identity has not been undermined by Dubai’s rapid demise; we were just along for the ride. For the locals, there is no alternative, no moving on, not ever. The next generation of Dubaians stands to inherit a ruined legacy.
The emirate’s Islamic identity has also suffered over the past decades. How could it be otherwise? Dubai welcomed expatriates from Jersey to Japan, Ethiopia to Estonia — but turned a blind eye to the ills that such a multicultural, transitory mix can spawn, at least until that rootless diversity threatened to become the emirate’s defining trait. The locals complain, rightly in some cases, of a lack of respect for their religious sensitivities, while simultaneously openly embracing many of the less desirable elements of the secularized West.
So we, the foreign workers, are now chastised for our failure to integrate, to engage with local culture and heritage. We are urged to assimilate as best we can. “With what?” is the question. There is no need to speak Arabic in daily life; there is little indigenous culture to explore.
Last week, there was some confusion over what food my children should take into school for the National Day festivities. What exactly is local cuisine? If this were a wedding it would be roasted camel hump. But the supermarket does not stock camel, and as Dubai borrows heavily from Lebanese, Egyptian, Indian and Pakistani cuisine, it is hard to identify what dish is uniquely Dubaian. To feed a class of 7-year-olds, we yielded to the inevitable appeal of cupcakes, iced and decorated with Christmas sprinkles. In festive red, white and green, they lacked only something black to pass as representing the colors of the national flag.
Dubai has become what it is today partly through defiance of normal expectations: here are islands shaped like palm trees, the world’s only seven-star hotel, the world’s richest horse race. But the result is a place that lacks coherence, both physically and psychologically. In many ways, it resembles a glorified film set, awaiting the arrival of the swashbuckling hero to tie all the loose strands together and give this fantasy some credibility. But this most unconventional of places is not immune to reality. How Dubai negotiates this rite of passage will determine whether it will ever be taken seriously. That we are being told this is all just negative publicity, merely a marketing blip, is not a promising sign.
Meantime, the malls are decked with Christmas trees and tinsel. We are reminded to dress modestly as we shop for artificial snow at the indoor ski slope before stopping to watch the roller-skating penguins or to sip a hot chocolate in front of an open fire provided courtesy of a wall-mounted projector. The malls still hum on the weekends and if the shops are offering discounted items, who is to say whether it’s a seasonal affair or a barometer of economic collapse?
Claudia Pugh-Thomas is a writer.
This piece has been updated to reflect today's news
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/14/opini ... nted=print
Egypt's Muslim televangelist star
HEART AND SOUL
By Magdi Abdelhadi
Arab Affairs Analyst, BBC World Service
Amr Khaled's unique brand of Muslim preaching has made him one of the most popular preachers in the world.
Such is his appeal, he was recently named the 13th most influential person in the world by Time Magazine.
In Cairo, his DVDs stand on the top shelves reserved for best sellers in the Virgin record store, next to Bruce Willis and Charlie Chaplin.
His controversial style, comparable to the almost rock star approach of some of America's Christian evangelists, has drawn criticism from the religious establishment and he has moved away from his native Egypt.
Ironically, thanks to the proliferation of satellite channels, he is now able to reach far greater numbers than he could have ever done had his message remained within the confines of a mosque or a lecture hall.
'You're fired'
Now, following on from his hugely successful TV shows - which are watched by millions across the world - Mr Khaled plans to launch his own version of the reality television show The Apprentice.
"The aim of it is not to make money, but to make the youth ready to support the society," he told the BBC.
“ Your behaviour is what defines a good Muslim - not how many times you recite the Koran in one week, or how many times you go to the mosque ”
Geneive Abdo, author
The Apprentice began in the US with business magnate Donald Trump searching for a candidate to run one of his operations.
In the UK version of the show, the contestants compete for a six-figure salary working for multimillionaire businessman Lord Sugar. The unsuccessful candidates earn his catchphrase dismissal: "You're fired!"
But Mr Khaled said the fundamental difference between those and his own show was that the competition would not be for personal material gain, but would search out contestants who would come up with the best idea to serve his or her community.
"In one mission they will go to the villages," Mr Khaled explained, "and we'll see who can support the poor families in the villages better than the other."
The best ideas will see the team progress and, for the loser, a team member will be fired.
Fresh style
The secret of Mr Khaled's success is simple, say young women in colourful headscarves in Cairo: "He speaks our language."
Unlike traditional preachers, he wears a casual suit and uses the Egyptian vernacular in his programmes. Formally trained imams tend to use classical Arabic.
Mr Khaled, who even has his own YouTube channel, has spearheaded a growth in this style of evangelism.
But the difference goes beyond language, says Geneive Abdo, the author of a seminal book on Islamic revival in Egypt.
She believes the new breed of preachers appears to fulfil an important need.
"They have found a way to interject religion into a more modern lifestyle. In other words, your behaviour is what defines a good Muslim - not how many times you recite the Koran in one week, or how many times you go to the mosque," Ms Abdo argues.
In this sense, the young televangelists represent a paradigm shift. While the emphasis in traditional preaching is on rituals, theirs is on personal conduct and social responsibility.
"The Prophet Muhammad said to work, to support a poor family is better than to stay in a mosque 40 days," Mr Khaled has said. "How faith can help support the society, that is my way."
'Out of touch'
While preachers like Mr Khaled have angered the religious establishment - which often accuses them of not having formal training - their popularity is perhaps evidence that the old-style preachers may be out of touch with the predominantly young population.
It's a "more individualistic take on religion", says political scientist and writer Ezz El Din Shoukri when I ask him for an assessment of the phenomenon.
"It's a bit like the reform in Christianity in the Middle Ages.
"You move away from external authority to the individual's role in interpreting texts, in finding his or her way in life."
However, he says the trend is a double-edged sword.
"On TV you get the attention of tens of millions of people in the Arab world. When you have so much power, who guarantees what you are saying is not going to hurt these people? How would we know when you are wrong?
"You cannot afford as a society to give someone so much power without checking this power," Mr Shoukri warns.
Purple heart
Amr Khaled's modern style - and his success - has spawned a new wave of televangelists. Mostafa Hosni is just one of the newcomers.
The set for Mr Hosni's weekly programme looks like that of a pop music show, with the name, Love Story, drawn over a big purple heart in the background.
"The time has come to speak to the young in their language, to live in their world," he says.
And it's working. Along the banks of the Nile, huge crowds have gathered for a rock concert.
Among them are many young girls wearing the Islamic headscarf.
Do they watch the television preachers and are they influenced by them? Of course, says one.
"They are having the same thoughts as us."
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/m ... 414422.stm
Published: 2009/12/17 10:43:00 GMT
HEART AND SOUL
By Magdi Abdelhadi
Arab Affairs Analyst, BBC World Service
Amr Khaled's unique brand of Muslim preaching has made him one of the most popular preachers in the world.
Such is his appeal, he was recently named the 13th most influential person in the world by Time Magazine.
In Cairo, his DVDs stand on the top shelves reserved for best sellers in the Virgin record store, next to Bruce Willis and Charlie Chaplin.
His controversial style, comparable to the almost rock star approach of some of America's Christian evangelists, has drawn criticism from the religious establishment and he has moved away from his native Egypt.
Ironically, thanks to the proliferation of satellite channels, he is now able to reach far greater numbers than he could have ever done had his message remained within the confines of a mosque or a lecture hall.
'You're fired'
Now, following on from his hugely successful TV shows - which are watched by millions across the world - Mr Khaled plans to launch his own version of the reality television show The Apprentice.
"The aim of it is not to make money, but to make the youth ready to support the society," he told the BBC.
“ Your behaviour is what defines a good Muslim - not how many times you recite the Koran in one week, or how many times you go to the mosque ”
Geneive Abdo, author
The Apprentice began in the US with business magnate Donald Trump searching for a candidate to run one of his operations.
In the UK version of the show, the contestants compete for a six-figure salary working for multimillionaire businessman Lord Sugar. The unsuccessful candidates earn his catchphrase dismissal: "You're fired!"
But Mr Khaled said the fundamental difference between those and his own show was that the competition would not be for personal material gain, but would search out contestants who would come up with the best idea to serve his or her community.
"In one mission they will go to the villages," Mr Khaled explained, "and we'll see who can support the poor families in the villages better than the other."
The best ideas will see the team progress and, for the loser, a team member will be fired.
Fresh style
The secret of Mr Khaled's success is simple, say young women in colourful headscarves in Cairo: "He speaks our language."
Unlike traditional preachers, he wears a casual suit and uses the Egyptian vernacular in his programmes. Formally trained imams tend to use classical Arabic.
Mr Khaled, who even has his own YouTube channel, has spearheaded a growth in this style of evangelism.
But the difference goes beyond language, says Geneive Abdo, the author of a seminal book on Islamic revival in Egypt.
She believes the new breed of preachers appears to fulfil an important need.
"They have found a way to interject religion into a more modern lifestyle. In other words, your behaviour is what defines a good Muslim - not how many times you recite the Koran in one week, or how many times you go to the mosque," Ms Abdo argues.
In this sense, the young televangelists represent a paradigm shift. While the emphasis in traditional preaching is on rituals, theirs is on personal conduct and social responsibility.
"The Prophet Muhammad said to work, to support a poor family is better than to stay in a mosque 40 days," Mr Khaled has said. "How faith can help support the society, that is my way."
'Out of touch'
While preachers like Mr Khaled have angered the religious establishment - which often accuses them of not having formal training - their popularity is perhaps evidence that the old-style preachers may be out of touch with the predominantly young population.
It's a "more individualistic take on religion", says political scientist and writer Ezz El Din Shoukri when I ask him for an assessment of the phenomenon.
"It's a bit like the reform in Christianity in the Middle Ages.
"You move away from external authority to the individual's role in interpreting texts, in finding his or her way in life."
However, he says the trend is a double-edged sword.
"On TV you get the attention of tens of millions of people in the Arab world. When you have so much power, who guarantees what you are saying is not going to hurt these people? How would we know when you are wrong?
"You cannot afford as a society to give someone so much power without checking this power," Mr Shoukri warns.
Purple heart
Amr Khaled's modern style - and his success - has spawned a new wave of televangelists. Mostafa Hosni is just one of the newcomers.
The set for Mr Hosni's weekly programme looks like that of a pop music show, with the name, Love Story, drawn over a big purple heart in the background.
"The time has come to speak to the young in their language, to live in their world," he says.
And it's working. Along the banks of the Nile, huge crowds have gathered for a rock concert.
Among them are many young girls wearing the Islamic headscarf.
Do they watch the television preachers and are they influenced by them? Of course, says one.
"They are having the same thoughts as us."
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/m ... 414422.stm
Published: 2009/12/17 10:43:00 GMT
There is a photograph at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/31/world ... &th&emc=th
December 31, 2009
A Mideast Bond, Stitched of Pain and Healing
By ETHAN BRONNER
JERUSALEM — He can be impulsive. She has a touch of bossiness. Next-door neighbors for nearly a year, they talk, watch television and explore the world together, wandering into each other’s homes without a second thought. She likes his mother’s eggplant dish. He likes her father’s rice and lamb.
Friendship often starts with proximity, but Orel and Marya, both 8, have been thrust together in a way few elsewhere have. Their playground is a hospital corridor. He is an Israeli Jew severely wounded by a Hamas rocket. She is a Palestinian Muslim from Gaza paralyzed by an Israeli missile. Someone forgot to tell them that they are enemies.
“He’s a naughty boy,” Marya likes to say of Orel with an appreciative smile when he gets a little wild.
When Orel arrived here a year ago, he could not hear, see, talk or walk. Now he does them all haltingly. Half his brain is gone. Doctors were deeply pessimistic about his survival. Today they are amazed at his progress although unclear how much more can be made.
Marya’s spinal cord was broken at the neck and she can move only her head. Smart, sunny and strong-willed, she moves her wheelchair by pushing a button with her chin. Nothing escapes her gaze. She knows that Orel is starting to prefer boys as playmates and she makes room. But their bond remains strong.
In a way, a friendship between two wounded children from opposing backgrounds is not that surprising. Neither understands the prolonged fight over land and identity that so divides people here. They are kids. They play.
But for those who have spent time in their presence at Alyn Hospital in Jerusalem, it is almost more powerful to observe their parents, who do understand. They have developed a kinship that defies national struggle.
“The wounds of our children, their pain, our pain, have connected us,” noted Angela Elizarov, Orel’s mother, one recent day as she sat on a bed in the room she shares with her son. Next door is Marya, her 6-year-old brother, Momen, and their father, Hamdi Aman. “Does it matter that he is from Gaza and I am from Beersheba, that he is an Arab and I am a Jew? It has no meaning to me. He sees my child and I see his child.”
It was two weeks into Israel’s Gaza war last January when Orel was hit. After days in a shelter his mother took him out in the car. As they drove around Beersheba, a siren blared, warning of an incoming rocket. She pushed Orel to the ground, lying protectively on him. When she heard the explosion in the distance, she rose in relief. A second rocket exploded and she saw her son’s head bleeding profusely.
A surgical nurse, she flagged down a passing motorist who drove them to the hospital where she works.
“I saw his brain coming out, everything around me was burning, and I was not even scratched,” she recalled. “When I got to the emergency room, I said to the doctor: ‘You can’t kid me. I know he has no chance of survival.’ The doctor looked away. But after six operations, he is actually making some progress. God took my son from me, but he has given me another one. A year ago, he was the best in his class in sports, the best in math. Now he is learning to walk and talk.”
Her husband, Avrel, who works with children, spends much of the week at home with their 18-month-old daughter but comes often. The couple, originally from Azerbaijan, had been childless for years, and Orel’s birth, coaxed along by infertility treatments in Israel, seemed a miracle.
Their hospital neighbor, Mr. Aman, is a 32-year-old construction worker from Gaza who not only cares for his own two children but helps with Orel. He is regarded as a luminescent presence, an inspiration to staff, volunteers and fellow parents.
This is partly because the pain in his own story is hard to fathom.
More than three years ago, Mr. Aman and his uncle had split the cost of a car and, having paid for it two hours earlier, took it on the road. With them were Mr. Aman’s wife, their three children and his mother.
Prowling above, an Israeli jet fighter on an assassination mission was seeking its target, a militant leader named Ahmad Dahduh. Two missiles were fired at Mr. Dahduh’s car just as it passed Mr. Aman’s, killing Mr. Aman’s oldest son, wife and mother. Marya was thrown from the car.
He and his children have been at Alyn Hospital, which specializes in young people with serious physical disabilities, for nearly the entire time since. The Israeli government, which brought him here for emergency help, wanted him and his children either to return to Gaza or to move to the West Bank. But attention in the Israeli news media produced a bevy of volunteers to fight on his behalf. Marya would not survive in either Gaza or the West Bank. The government has backed off, supporting Mr. Aman on minimum wage and paying for Marya to go to a bilingual Arabic-Hebrew school nearby.
But Mr. Aman has no official status and is also raising a healthy and bright son in a hospital room. He wants residency or a ticket to a Western country where his children will be safe and Marya will get the care she needs.
Volunteers who help are often religious Jews performing national service. Some ask Mr. Aman how he can live among the people whose army destroyed his family.
“I have never felt there was a difference among people — Jews, Muslims, Christians — we are all human beings,” he says. “I worked in Israel for years and so did my father. We know that it is not about what you are but who you are. And that is what I have taught my children.”
Mr. Aman’s hospital door is rarely closed. Asher Franco, an Israeli Jew from Beit Shemesh who has been coming to the hospital for six months for his daughter’s treatments, was a recent visitor. They greeted each other warmly. A manual worker and former combat soldier, he was asked about their friendship.
“I was raised as a complete Zionist rightist,” he said. “The Arabs, we were told, were out to kill us. But I was living in some fantasy. Here in the hospital, all my friends are Arabs.” Ms. Elizarov, Orel’s mother, noted that in places like Alyn Hospital, political tensions do not exist. Then she said, “Do we need to suffer in order to learn that there is no difference between Jews and Arabs?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/31/world ... &th&emc=th
December 31, 2009
A Mideast Bond, Stitched of Pain and Healing
By ETHAN BRONNER
JERUSALEM — He can be impulsive. She has a touch of bossiness. Next-door neighbors for nearly a year, they talk, watch television and explore the world together, wandering into each other’s homes without a second thought. She likes his mother’s eggplant dish. He likes her father’s rice and lamb.
Friendship often starts with proximity, but Orel and Marya, both 8, have been thrust together in a way few elsewhere have. Their playground is a hospital corridor. He is an Israeli Jew severely wounded by a Hamas rocket. She is a Palestinian Muslim from Gaza paralyzed by an Israeli missile. Someone forgot to tell them that they are enemies.
“He’s a naughty boy,” Marya likes to say of Orel with an appreciative smile when he gets a little wild.
When Orel arrived here a year ago, he could not hear, see, talk or walk. Now he does them all haltingly. Half his brain is gone. Doctors were deeply pessimistic about his survival. Today they are amazed at his progress although unclear how much more can be made.
Marya’s spinal cord was broken at the neck and she can move only her head. Smart, sunny and strong-willed, she moves her wheelchair by pushing a button with her chin. Nothing escapes her gaze. She knows that Orel is starting to prefer boys as playmates and she makes room. But their bond remains strong.
In a way, a friendship between two wounded children from opposing backgrounds is not that surprising. Neither understands the prolonged fight over land and identity that so divides people here. They are kids. They play.
But for those who have spent time in their presence at Alyn Hospital in Jerusalem, it is almost more powerful to observe their parents, who do understand. They have developed a kinship that defies national struggle.
“The wounds of our children, their pain, our pain, have connected us,” noted Angela Elizarov, Orel’s mother, one recent day as she sat on a bed in the room she shares with her son. Next door is Marya, her 6-year-old brother, Momen, and their father, Hamdi Aman. “Does it matter that he is from Gaza and I am from Beersheba, that he is an Arab and I am a Jew? It has no meaning to me. He sees my child and I see his child.”
It was two weeks into Israel’s Gaza war last January when Orel was hit. After days in a shelter his mother took him out in the car. As they drove around Beersheba, a siren blared, warning of an incoming rocket. She pushed Orel to the ground, lying protectively on him. When she heard the explosion in the distance, she rose in relief. A second rocket exploded and she saw her son’s head bleeding profusely.
A surgical nurse, she flagged down a passing motorist who drove them to the hospital where she works.
“I saw his brain coming out, everything around me was burning, and I was not even scratched,” she recalled. “When I got to the emergency room, I said to the doctor: ‘You can’t kid me. I know he has no chance of survival.’ The doctor looked away. But after six operations, he is actually making some progress. God took my son from me, but he has given me another one. A year ago, he was the best in his class in sports, the best in math. Now he is learning to walk and talk.”
Her husband, Avrel, who works with children, spends much of the week at home with their 18-month-old daughter but comes often. The couple, originally from Azerbaijan, had been childless for years, and Orel’s birth, coaxed along by infertility treatments in Israel, seemed a miracle.
Their hospital neighbor, Mr. Aman, is a 32-year-old construction worker from Gaza who not only cares for his own two children but helps with Orel. He is regarded as a luminescent presence, an inspiration to staff, volunteers and fellow parents.
This is partly because the pain in his own story is hard to fathom.
More than three years ago, Mr. Aman and his uncle had split the cost of a car and, having paid for it two hours earlier, took it on the road. With them were Mr. Aman’s wife, their three children and his mother.
Prowling above, an Israeli jet fighter on an assassination mission was seeking its target, a militant leader named Ahmad Dahduh. Two missiles were fired at Mr. Dahduh’s car just as it passed Mr. Aman’s, killing Mr. Aman’s oldest son, wife and mother. Marya was thrown from the car.
He and his children have been at Alyn Hospital, which specializes in young people with serious physical disabilities, for nearly the entire time since. The Israeli government, which brought him here for emergency help, wanted him and his children either to return to Gaza or to move to the West Bank. But attention in the Israeli news media produced a bevy of volunteers to fight on his behalf. Marya would not survive in either Gaza or the West Bank. The government has backed off, supporting Mr. Aman on minimum wage and paying for Marya to go to a bilingual Arabic-Hebrew school nearby.
But Mr. Aman has no official status and is also raising a healthy and bright son in a hospital room. He wants residency or a ticket to a Western country where his children will be safe and Marya will get the care she needs.
Volunteers who help are often religious Jews performing national service. Some ask Mr. Aman how he can live among the people whose army destroyed his family.
“I have never felt there was a difference among people — Jews, Muslims, Christians — we are all human beings,” he says. “I worked in Israel for years and so did my father. We know that it is not about what you are but who you are. And that is what I have taught my children.”
Mr. Aman’s hospital door is rarely closed. Asher Franco, an Israeli Jew from Beit Shemesh who has been coming to the hospital for six months for his daughter’s treatments, was a recent visitor. They greeted each other warmly. A manual worker and former combat soldier, he was asked about their friendship.
“I was raised as a complete Zionist rightist,” he said. “The Arabs, we were told, were out to kill us. But I was living in some fantasy. Here in the hospital, all my friends are Arabs.” Ms. Elizarov, Orel’s mother, noted that in places like Alyn Hospital, political tensions do not exist. Then she said, “Do we need to suffer in order to learn that there is no difference between Jews and Arabs?”
January 12, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
The Tel Aviv Cluster
By DAVID BROOKS
Jews are a famously accomplished group. They make up 0.2 percent of the world population, but 54 percent of the world chess champions, 27 percent of the Nobel physics laureates and 31 percent of the medicine laureates.
Jews make up 2 percent of the U.S. population, but 21 percent of the Ivy League student bodies, 26 percent of the Kennedy Center honorees, 37 percent of the Academy Award-winning directors, 38 percent of those on a recent Business Week list of leading philanthropists, 51 percent of the Pulitzer Prize winners for nonfiction.
In his book, “The Golden Age of Jewish Achievement,” Steven L. Pease lists some of the explanations people have given for this record of achievement. The Jewish faith encourages a belief in progress and personal accountability. It is learning-based, not rite-based.
Most Jews gave up or were forced to give up farming in the Middle Ages; their descendants have been living off of their wits ever since. They have often migrated, with a migrant’s ambition and drive. They have congregated around global crossroads and have benefited from the creative tension endemic in such places.
No single explanation can account for the record of Jewish achievement. The odd thing is that Israel has not traditionally been strongest where the Jews in the Diaspora were strongest. Instead of research and commerce, Israelis were forced to devote their energies to fighting and politics.
Milton Friedman used to joke that Israel disproved every Jewish stereotype. People used to think Jews were good cooks, good economic managers and bad soldiers; Israel proved them wrong.
But that has changed. Benjamin Netanyahu’s economic reforms, the arrival of a million Russian immigrants and the stagnation of the peace process have produced a historic shift. The most resourceful Israelis are going into technology and commerce, not politics. This has had a desultory effect on the nation’s public life, but an invigorating one on its economy.
Tel Aviv has become one of the world’s foremost entrepreneurial hot spots. Israel has more high-tech start-ups per capita than any other nation on earth, by far. It leads the world in civilian research-and-development spending per capita. It ranks second behind the U.S. in the number of companies listed on the Nasdaq. Israel, with seven million people, attracts as much venture capital as France and Germany combined.
As Dan Senor and Saul Singer write in “Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle,” Israel now has a classic innovation cluster, a place where tech obsessives work in close proximity and feed off each other’s ideas.
Because of the strength of the economy, Israel has weathered the global recession reasonably well. The government did not have to bail out its banks or set off an explosion in short-term spending. Instead, it used the crisis to solidify the economy’s long-term future by investing in research and development and infrastructure, raising some consumption taxes, promising to cut other taxes in the medium to long term. Analysts at Barclays write that Israel is “the strongest recovery story” in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Israel’s technological success is the fruition of the Zionist dream. The country was not founded so stray settlers could sit among thousands of angry Palestinians in Hebron. It was founded so Jews would have a safe place to come together and create things for the world.
This shift in the Israeli identity has long-term implications. Netanyahu preaches the optimistic view: that Israel will become the Hong Kong of the Middle East, with economic benefits spilling over into the Arab world. And, in fact, there are strands of evidence to support that view in places like the West Bank and Jordan.
But it’s more likely that Israel’s economic leap forward will widen the gap between it and its neighbors. All the countries in the region talk about encouraging innovation. Some oil-rich states spend billions trying to build science centers. But places like Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv are created by a confluence of cultural forces, not money. The surrounding nations do not have the tradition of free intellectual exchange and technical creativity.
For example, between 1980 and 2000, Egyptians registered 77 patents in the U.S. Saudis registered 171. Israelis registered 7,652.
The tech boom also creates a new vulnerability. As Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic has argued, these innovators are the most mobile people on earth. To destroy Israel’s economy, Iran doesn’t actually have to lob a nuclear weapon into the country. It just has to foment enough instability so the entrepreneurs decide they had better move to Palo Alto, where many of them already have contacts and homes. American Jews used to keep a foothold in Israel in case things got bad here. Now Israelis keep a foothold in the U.S.
During a decade of grim foreboding, Israel has become an astonishing success story, but also a highly mobile one.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
The Tel Aviv Cluster
By DAVID BROOKS
Jews are a famously accomplished group. They make up 0.2 percent of the world population, but 54 percent of the world chess champions, 27 percent of the Nobel physics laureates and 31 percent of the medicine laureates.
Jews make up 2 percent of the U.S. population, but 21 percent of the Ivy League student bodies, 26 percent of the Kennedy Center honorees, 37 percent of the Academy Award-winning directors, 38 percent of those on a recent Business Week list of leading philanthropists, 51 percent of the Pulitzer Prize winners for nonfiction.
In his book, “The Golden Age of Jewish Achievement,” Steven L. Pease lists some of the explanations people have given for this record of achievement. The Jewish faith encourages a belief in progress and personal accountability. It is learning-based, not rite-based.
Most Jews gave up or were forced to give up farming in the Middle Ages; their descendants have been living off of their wits ever since. They have often migrated, with a migrant’s ambition and drive. They have congregated around global crossroads and have benefited from the creative tension endemic in such places.
No single explanation can account for the record of Jewish achievement. The odd thing is that Israel has not traditionally been strongest where the Jews in the Diaspora were strongest. Instead of research and commerce, Israelis were forced to devote their energies to fighting and politics.
Milton Friedman used to joke that Israel disproved every Jewish stereotype. People used to think Jews were good cooks, good economic managers and bad soldiers; Israel proved them wrong.
But that has changed. Benjamin Netanyahu’s economic reforms, the arrival of a million Russian immigrants and the stagnation of the peace process have produced a historic shift. The most resourceful Israelis are going into technology and commerce, not politics. This has had a desultory effect on the nation’s public life, but an invigorating one on its economy.
Tel Aviv has become one of the world’s foremost entrepreneurial hot spots. Israel has more high-tech start-ups per capita than any other nation on earth, by far. It leads the world in civilian research-and-development spending per capita. It ranks second behind the U.S. in the number of companies listed on the Nasdaq. Israel, with seven million people, attracts as much venture capital as France and Germany combined.
As Dan Senor and Saul Singer write in “Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle,” Israel now has a classic innovation cluster, a place where tech obsessives work in close proximity and feed off each other’s ideas.
Because of the strength of the economy, Israel has weathered the global recession reasonably well. The government did not have to bail out its banks or set off an explosion in short-term spending. Instead, it used the crisis to solidify the economy’s long-term future by investing in research and development and infrastructure, raising some consumption taxes, promising to cut other taxes in the medium to long term. Analysts at Barclays write that Israel is “the strongest recovery story” in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Israel’s technological success is the fruition of the Zionist dream. The country was not founded so stray settlers could sit among thousands of angry Palestinians in Hebron. It was founded so Jews would have a safe place to come together and create things for the world.
This shift in the Israeli identity has long-term implications. Netanyahu preaches the optimistic view: that Israel will become the Hong Kong of the Middle East, with economic benefits spilling over into the Arab world. And, in fact, there are strands of evidence to support that view in places like the West Bank and Jordan.
But it’s more likely that Israel’s economic leap forward will widen the gap between it and its neighbors. All the countries in the region talk about encouraging innovation. Some oil-rich states spend billions trying to build science centers. But places like Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv are created by a confluence of cultural forces, not money. The surrounding nations do not have the tradition of free intellectual exchange and technical creativity.
For example, between 1980 and 2000, Egyptians registered 77 patents in the U.S. Saudis registered 171. Israelis registered 7,652.
The tech boom also creates a new vulnerability. As Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic has argued, these innovators are the most mobile people on earth. To destroy Israel’s economy, Iran doesn’t actually have to lob a nuclear weapon into the country. It just has to foment enough instability so the entrepreneurs decide they had better move to Palo Alto, where many of them already have contacts and homes. American Jews used to keep a foothold in Israel in case things got bad here. Now Israelis keep a foothold in the U.S.
During a decade of grim foreboding, Israel has become an astonishing success story, but also a highly mobile one.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/opini ... nted=print
January 22, 2010
Dubai Memo
Entrenched Monarchy Thwarts Aspirations for Modernity
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
CAIRO — In the heady days of the Dubai gold rush, when real estate sold and resold even before a shovel hit the ground, the ambitious emirate was hailed as the model of Middle Eastern modernity, a boomtown that built an effective, efficient and accessible form of government.
Then the crash came and revealed how paper-thin that image was, political and financial analysts said. That realization, not just in Dubai but also in Abu Dhabi, the oil-rich capital of the United Arab Emirates, has cast a harsh light on an opaque, top-down decision-making process, not just in business but in matters of crime and punishment as well, political and financial analysts said.
The financial crisis and now two criminal cases that have generated critical headlines in other countries have demonstrated that the emirates remain an absolute monarchy, where institutions are far less important than royalty and where the law is particularly capricious — applied differently based on social standing, religion and nationality, political experts and human rights advocates said.
“I think what we learned here the last four months is that the government, at least on a political level, is still very undeveloped,” said a financial analyst based in Dubai who asked not to be identified to avoid compromising his ability to work in the emirates. “It’s very difficult to read or interpret or understand what is going on. The institutions have not shaped up to people’s expectations.”
The most recent of the criminal cases occurred Dec. 31, when a British tourist, a Muslim, reported to the police that she was raped in a public bathroom of a luxury hotel in Dubai. Instead of being consoled, she and her fiancé, who had gone with her to report the attack, were arrested and charged with having illegal sex because they were not yet married, and with drinking alcohol in an unauthorized location.
“Scandal Under Arab Law,” said a headline in The Sun, a British tabloid.
Then, in another case that had already provoked widespread outrage, a court acquitted a member of Abu Dhabi’s royal family, Sheik Issa bin Zayed al-Nahayan, of charges of torturing an Afghan merchant. In May, ABC News broadcast portions of a 45-minute video that showed Sheik Issa beating the man with a whip, a cattle prod and a wooden plank with a protruding nail, and firing bullets at him before driving over his legs with a sport utility vehicle.
The case went to trial under pressure from the international community, including the United States Congress, which had threatened to hold up approval of a deal that would allow the emirates to receive advanced civilian nuclear technology. The controversy eased when the emirates arrested Sheik Issa and agreed to put him on trial. The nuclear deal was signed in December.
While international human rights groups expected a conviction, residents of the emirates did not. Sheik Issa’s brother, Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahayan, is the emir of Abu Dhabi and the president of the United Arab Emirates.
The local residents proved prescient.
On Jan. 10, the judge in the case said that Sheik Issa had “diminished liability” because he had been on prescription drugs when he took the man to his farm, shoved sand in his face and mouth, pulled his pants down and beat him. The sheik was set free.
“This reminds us we are dealing with a ruling monarchy,” said Christopher Davidson, a senior lecturer at the University of Durham in England who has written several books about the emirates. “We are dealing with the deification of this one branch of the ruling family. Any son of the family is a god.”
The acquittal was especially troubling, human rights groups said, because the court sentenced to prison three others seen in the video aiding Sheik Issa. It also handed out five-year prison sentences (in absentia) to the two men who made and distributed the video, saying they were guilty of meddling with the sheik’s medication and recording and distributing an unauthorized video. The men, who live in the United States, have denied the charges.
“If the U.A.E. thinks that it is going to address the international outrage with a hush-hush trial that acquits him, they are in for a big surprise,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, director of the Middle East and North Africa division of Human Rights Watch. “There is going to be a great deal of focus on what is wrong with the U.A.E. justice system and what is wrong with impunity in the U.A.E. itself.”
A spokesman for Abu Dhabi said the ruling family had no comment on the court case.
The case of the British tourist added fuel to the fire that was already burning through the emirates’ image in the West. It was reported widely in the British news media, stoking outrage.
The couple had traveled to Dubai to celebrate New Year’s Eve. The woman was 23, Muslim and of Pakistani descent, the man 44. No other details of their identities have been made public.
The woman told the police that she was raped by a Syrian waiter who worked in the hotel. When she and her fiancé went to the Jebel Ali police department the next day to report the attack, they found themselves being questioned about their own relationship and arrested.
They were put in a holding cell, charged and released on bail. Their passports were taken, and they are being forced to remain in the emirates pending the outcome of an investigation. The National, a daily newspaper based in Abu Dhabi, reported that the police now doubt a rape occurred at all. They say hotel security video supports the suspect’s contention that he did not enter the bathroom after the woman.
“This sort of a prosecution, as a response to a claim of rape, besides striking me as grossly unfair and cruel, also is indicative of the arbitrary way in which the U.A.E. enforces its laws,” Ms. Whitson said.
Mr. Davidson, the university lecturer, said the decision to charge the couple also illustrated an old truth about Dubai’s social structure: that there were different rules for different nationalities and religions, especially on questions of morality. The woman and her fiancé probably received that treatment because she was Muslim, he said.
During the boom years, Mr. Davidson said, Westerners in particular could normally violate morality laws without fear of arrest, and prostitution was widespread, though there were exceptions. In one such case, a British couple was arrested and faced prison after having sex on a beach, but only after ignoring an earlier warning to stop. They were eventually deported, after receiving suspended three-month sentences. Lt. Col. Abdul Qadir Al Bannai, director of the Jebel Ali police station, when reached by telephone said that he had no time to speak about the couple in the rape case. But in an interview published recently in Gulf News, a newspaper in the emirates, he defended his department’s actions, saying: “Our rules are clear in the U.A.E.; illegal drinking and sexual intercourse is considered an offense, so a case was filed against the couple as well. But we didn’t ignore the rape report.” He told the newspaper that the Syrian accused of rape was in custody now.
The couple faces up to six years in prison if the case is brought to trial and they are convicted.
“It’s awful,” Mr. Davidson said, “but it’s extremely predictable.”
Mona El-Naggar contributed reporting from Dubai.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/world ... nted=print
Dubai Memo
Entrenched Monarchy Thwarts Aspirations for Modernity
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
CAIRO — In the heady days of the Dubai gold rush, when real estate sold and resold even before a shovel hit the ground, the ambitious emirate was hailed as the model of Middle Eastern modernity, a boomtown that built an effective, efficient and accessible form of government.
Then the crash came and revealed how paper-thin that image was, political and financial analysts said. That realization, not just in Dubai but also in Abu Dhabi, the oil-rich capital of the United Arab Emirates, has cast a harsh light on an opaque, top-down decision-making process, not just in business but in matters of crime and punishment as well, political and financial analysts said.
The financial crisis and now two criminal cases that have generated critical headlines in other countries have demonstrated that the emirates remain an absolute monarchy, where institutions are far less important than royalty and where the law is particularly capricious — applied differently based on social standing, religion and nationality, political experts and human rights advocates said.
“I think what we learned here the last four months is that the government, at least on a political level, is still very undeveloped,” said a financial analyst based in Dubai who asked not to be identified to avoid compromising his ability to work in the emirates. “It’s very difficult to read or interpret or understand what is going on. The institutions have not shaped up to people’s expectations.”
The most recent of the criminal cases occurred Dec. 31, when a British tourist, a Muslim, reported to the police that she was raped in a public bathroom of a luxury hotel in Dubai. Instead of being consoled, she and her fiancé, who had gone with her to report the attack, were arrested and charged with having illegal sex because they were not yet married, and with drinking alcohol in an unauthorized location.
“Scandal Under Arab Law,” said a headline in The Sun, a British tabloid.
Then, in another case that had already provoked widespread outrage, a court acquitted a member of Abu Dhabi’s royal family, Sheik Issa bin Zayed al-Nahayan, of charges of torturing an Afghan merchant. In May, ABC News broadcast portions of a 45-minute video that showed Sheik Issa beating the man with a whip, a cattle prod and a wooden plank with a protruding nail, and firing bullets at him before driving over his legs with a sport utility vehicle.
The case went to trial under pressure from the international community, including the United States Congress, which had threatened to hold up approval of a deal that would allow the emirates to receive advanced civilian nuclear technology. The controversy eased when the emirates arrested Sheik Issa and agreed to put him on trial. The nuclear deal was signed in December.
While international human rights groups expected a conviction, residents of the emirates did not. Sheik Issa’s brother, Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahayan, is the emir of Abu Dhabi and the president of the United Arab Emirates.
The local residents proved prescient.
On Jan. 10, the judge in the case said that Sheik Issa had “diminished liability” because he had been on prescription drugs when he took the man to his farm, shoved sand in his face and mouth, pulled his pants down and beat him. The sheik was set free.
“This reminds us we are dealing with a ruling monarchy,” said Christopher Davidson, a senior lecturer at the University of Durham in England who has written several books about the emirates. “We are dealing with the deification of this one branch of the ruling family. Any son of the family is a god.”
The acquittal was especially troubling, human rights groups said, because the court sentenced to prison three others seen in the video aiding Sheik Issa. It also handed out five-year prison sentences (in absentia) to the two men who made and distributed the video, saying they were guilty of meddling with the sheik’s medication and recording and distributing an unauthorized video. The men, who live in the United States, have denied the charges.
“If the U.A.E. thinks that it is going to address the international outrage with a hush-hush trial that acquits him, they are in for a big surprise,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, director of the Middle East and North Africa division of Human Rights Watch. “There is going to be a great deal of focus on what is wrong with the U.A.E. justice system and what is wrong with impunity in the U.A.E. itself.”
A spokesman for Abu Dhabi said the ruling family had no comment on the court case.
The case of the British tourist added fuel to the fire that was already burning through the emirates’ image in the West. It was reported widely in the British news media, stoking outrage.
The couple had traveled to Dubai to celebrate New Year’s Eve. The woman was 23, Muslim and of Pakistani descent, the man 44. No other details of their identities have been made public.
The woman told the police that she was raped by a Syrian waiter who worked in the hotel. When she and her fiancé went to the Jebel Ali police department the next day to report the attack, they found themselves being questioned about their own relationship and arrested.
They were put in a holding cell, charged and released on bail. Their passports were taken, and they are being forced to remain in the emirates pending the outcome of an investigation. The National, a daily newspaper based in Abu Dhabi, reported that the police now doubt a rape occurred at all. They say hotel security video supports the suspect’s contention that he did not enter the bathroom after the woman.
“This sort of a prosecution, as a response to a claim of rape, besides striking me as grossly unfair and cruel, also is indicative of the arbitrary way in which the U.A.E. enforces its laws,” Ms. Whitson said.
Mr. Davidson, the university lecturer, said the decision to charge the couple also illustrated an old truth about Dubai’s social structure: that there were different rules for different nationalities and religions, especially on questions of morality. The woman and her fiancé probably received that treatment because she was Muslim, he said.
During the boom years, Mr. Davidson said, Westerners in particular could normally violate morality laws without fear of arrest, and prostitution was widespread, though there were exceptions. In one such case, a British couple was arrested and faced prison after having sex on a beach, but only after ignoring an earlier warning to stop. They were eventually deported, after receiving suspended three-month sentences. Lt. Col. Abdul Qadir Al Bannai, director of the Jebel Ali police station, when reached by telephone said that he had no time to speak about the couple in the rape case. But in an interview published recently in Gulf News, a newspaper in the emirates, he defended his department’s actions, saying: “Our rules are clear in the U.A.E.; illegal drinking and sexual intercourse is considered an offense, so a case was filed against the couple as well. But we didn’t ignore the rape report.” He told the newspaper that the Syrian accused of rape was in custody now.
The couple faces up to six years in prison if the case is brought to trial and they are convicted.
“It’s awful,” Mr. Davidson said, “but it’s extremely predictable.”
Mona El-Naggar contributed reporting from Dubai.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/world ... nted=print
February 7, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
Postcard From Yemen
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Sana, Yemen
Yemen’s former prime minister, Abdul Karim al-Iryani, got right to the point when I arrived at his Sana home for dinner: “So, Thomas, did it take Abdulmutallab to finally get you here?” Yes, it is true, I admitted, because that young Nigerian, trained in Yemen by Al Qaeda, tried to blow up a Northwest jetliner on Christmas Day, I decided I had to see Yemen firsthand. I further confessed to Iryani: “I was a bit worried coming here. I half expected to be met at the bottom of the stairs from my Qatar Airways flight by Osama bin Laden himself.”
Fortunately, though, I found that Sana is not Kabul, and Yemen is not Afghanistan — not yet. The Walled Old City of Sana, a U.N. World Heritage site with its mud-brick buildings adorned with geometric shapes, was bustling with coffee shops at night and vendors by day. Walking through its streets with a Yemeni friend, we came upon four bearded, elderly Yemeni men — traditional daggers tucked into their belts — discussing a poster taped to a stone wall urging “fathers and mothers” to send their girls to school. When I asked what they thought of that idea, the oldest said he was “ready to give up part of a meal each day so that my girls can learn to read.” Moreover, he added, the poster had just fallen down and he had just taped it back up for others to see. Not what I expected.
Nor did I expect to find civil society organizations here staffed with young American volunteers — and, in the case of The Yemen Observer, an English-language newspaper, a whole newsroom full of them. All I could do was look around at these American college students and wonder: “Do your parents know you’re here?” They just laughed. Every shopkeeper I spoke to in Old Sana spat out the words “Al Qaeda,” which they blamed for killing tourism. Who knew Yemen had tourists? No, this is not Afghanistan.
But this ain’t Denmark, either.
Al Qaeda is like a virus. When it appears en masse, it indicates something is wrong with a country’s immune system. And something is wrong with Yemen’s. A weak central government in Sana rules over a patchwork of rural tribes, using an ad hoc system of patronage, co-optation, corruption and force. Vast areas of the countryside remain outside government control, particularly in the south and east, where 300 to 500 Qaeda fighters have found sanctuary. This “Yemeni Way” has managed to hold the country together and glacially nudge it forward, despite separatist movements in the North and the South. But that old way and pace of doing things can no longer keep pace with the negative trends.
Consider a few numbers: Yemen’s population growth rate is close to 3.5 percent, one of the highest in the world, with 50 percent of Yemen’s 23 million people under the age of 15 and 75 percent under 29. Unemployment is 35 to 40 percent, in part because Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states booted out a million Yemeni workers after Yemen backed Saddam Hussein in the 1990 gulf war.
Thanks to bad planning and population growth, Yemen could be the first country to run out of water in 10 to 15 years. Already many Yemenis experience interrupted water service, like electricity blackouts, which they also have constantly. In the countryside today, women sometimes walk up to four hours a day to find a working well. The water table has fallen so low in Sana that you need oil-drilling equipment to find it. This isn’t helped by the Yemeni tradition of chewing qat, a mild hallucinogenic leaf drug, the cultivation of which consumes 40 percent of Yemen’s water supply each year.
Roughly 65 percent of Yemeni schoolteachers have only high school degrees. Most people live on less than $2 a day — except those who don’t. A Rolls Royce was recently sold in Sana for the first time. More than 70 percent of government income comes from dwindling oil exports, while 70 percent of Yemenis are illiterate and 15 percent of kids are not in school.
Yet, at the same time, this country has some of the most interesting journalists, social activists and politicians I have met in the Arab world. I spent a morning at the Media Women Forum, an N.G.O. that trains Yemeni female journalists and promotes press freedom — part of the “young guard” of idealistic Yemeni reformers who want to serve their people but, so far, have not really been empowered by the old leadership. Founded by a Yemeni press-freedom sparkplug, Rahma Hugaira, the office was bustling with girls, whose hunger to speak their minds filtered right through the black robes that covered all but their eyes.
It’s not a secret how to fix this country, argued Mohammed al-Asaadi, a media consultant who sat in with us: “We need a revolution against the status quo. We need to build capacity, institutionalize the rule of law and build a culture of ownership and responsibility.” Added Murad Hashim, the Al Jazeera bureau chief here: “We need more education, but we have not used our educated people.” Indeed, Yemen has the resources to save itself, but they need to be mobilized by better governance. Without that, the trend lines will eventually overwhelm everything and the Qaeda virus, still controllable, will spread.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
Postcard From Yemen
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Sana, Yemen
Yemen’s former prime minister, Abdul Karim al-Iryani, got right to the point when I arrived at his Sana home for dinner: “So, Thomas, did it take Abdulmutallab to finally get you here?” Yes, it is true, I admitted, because that young Nigerian, trained in Yemen by Al Qaeda, tried to blow up a Northwest jetliner on Christmas Day, I decided I had to see Yemen firsthand. I further confessed to Iryani: “I was a bit worried coming here. I half expected to be met at the bottom of the stairs from my Qatar Airways flight by Osama bin Laden himself.”
Fortunately, though, I found that Sana is not Kabul, and Yemen is not Afghanistan — not yet. The Walled Old City of Sana, a U.N. World Heritage site with its mud-brick buildings adorned with geometric shapes, was bustling with coffee shops at night and vendors by day. Walking through its streets with a Yemeni friend, we came upon four bearded, elderly Yemeni men — traditional daggers tucked into their belts — discussing a poster taped to a stone wall urging “fathers and mothers” to send their girls to school. When I asked what they thought of that idea, the oldest said he was “ready to give up part of a meal each day so that my girls can learn to read.” Moreover, he added, the poster had just fallen down and he had just taped it back up for others to see. Not what I expected.
Nor did I expect to find civil society organizations here staffed with young American volunteers — and, in the case of The Yemen Observer, an English-language newspaper, a whole newsroom full of them. All I could do was look around at these American college students and wonder: “Do your parents know you’re here?” They just laughed. Every shopkeeper I spoke to in Old Sana spat out the words “Al Qaeda,” which they blamed for killing tourism. Who knew Yemen had tourists? No, this is not Afghanistan.
But this ain’t Denmark, either.
Al Qaeda is like a virus. When it appears en masse, it indicates something is wrong with a country’s immune system. And something is wrong with Yemen’s. A weak central government in Sana rules over a patchwork of rural tribes, using an ad hoc system of patronage, co-optation, corruption and force. Vast areas of the countryside remain outside government control, particularly in the south and east, where 300 to 500 Qaeda fighters have found sanctuary. This “Yemeni Way” has managed to hold the country together and glacially nudge it forward, despite separatist movements in the North and the South. But that old way and pace of doing things can no longer keep pace with the negative trends.
Consider a few numbers: Yemen’s population growth rate is close to 3.5 percent, one of the highest in the world, with 50 percent of Yemen’s 23 million people under the age of 15 and 75 percent under 29. Unemployment is 35 to 40 percent, in part because Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states booted out a million Yemeni workers after Yemen backed Saddam Hussein in the 1990 gulf war.
Thanks to bad planning and population growth, Yemen could be the first country to run out of water in 10 to 15 years. Already many Yemenis experience interrupted water service, like electricity blackouts, which they also have constantly. In the countryside today, women sometimes walk up to four hours a day to find a working well. The water table has fallen so low in Sana that you need oil-drilling equipment to find it. This isn’t helped by the Yemeni tradition of chewing qat, a mild hallucinogenic leaf drug, the cultivation of which consumes 40 percent of Yemen’s water supply each year.
Roughly 65 percent of Yemeni schoolteachers have only high school degrees. Most people live on less than $2 a day — except those who don’t. A Rolls Royce was recently sold in Sana for the first time. More than 70 percent of government income comes from dwindling oil exports, while 70 percent of Yemenis are illiterate and 15 percent of kids are not in school.
Yet, at the same time, this country has some of the most interesting journalists, social activists and politicians I have met in the Arab world. I spent a morning at the Media Women Forum, an N.G.O. that trains Yemeni female journalists and promotes press freedom — part of the “young guard” of idealistic Yemeni reformers who want to serve their people but, so far, have not really been empowered by the old leadership. Founded by a Yemeni press-freedom sparkplug, Rahma Hugaira, the office was bustling with girls, whose hunger to speak their minds filtered right through the black robes that covered all but their eyes.
It’s not a secret how to fix this country, argued Mohammed al-Asaadi, a media consultant who sat in with us: “We need a revolution against the status quo. We need to build capacity, institutionalize the rule of law and build a culture of ownership and responsibility.” Added Murad Hashim, the Al Jazeera bureau chief here: “We need more education, but we have not used our educated people.” Indeed, Yemen has the resources to save itself, but they need to be mobilized by better governance. Without that, the trend lines will eventually overwhelm everything and the Qaeda virus, still controllable, will spread.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/opini ... nted=print
A letter from an American to the US "embassy" in B
A letter from an American to the US "embassy" in Baghdad
To: The commanders of the US occupation tyranny in Iraq:
Subject: Release Hiba al-Shamaree
You must release Dr. Hanan Ali Ahmed Al-Mashadani, who posts a blog under the name of Hiba al-Shamaree. She was arrested in Baghdad on January 20. Evidently her opinions displeased someone in your Green Zone political process. Do not refer me to your puppets. Just tell them to do it.
She is an opthalmologist in Baghdad on a humanitarian mission under the auspices of an Indian NGO called HMOK.
You have not liberated Iraq, you have destroyed it. Please do not attempt to persuade me that you have any case against Dr. al-Mashadani. She is not the alien presence in Iraq. You are. So let her go immediately and while you are at it get out of Iraq.
You have disgraced my country. You do not represent patriotism toward, loyalty to, or protection of the United States. All you are is a bunch of people with a lot of money, a lot of armaments, a lot of soldiers and police and courts to kill and repress anyone who displeases you. But the people of Iraq are more powerful than you are. They have defeated you. Let that be a warning to you that you cannot indefinitely try the patience of the people of the United States.
David Hungerford
375 Mount Prospect Ave.
Newark, NJ 07104
USA
To: The commanders of the US occupation tyranny in Iraq:
Subject: Release Hiba al-Shamaree
You must release Dr. Hanan Ali Ahmed Al-Mashadani, who posts a blog under the name of Hiba al-Shamaree. She was arrested in Baghdad on January 20. Evidently her opinions displeased someone in your Green Zone political process. Do not refer me to your puppets. Just tell them to do it.
She is an opthalmologist in Baghdad on a humanitarian mission under the auspices of an Indian NGO called HMOK.
You have not liberated Iraq, you have destroyed it. Please do not attempt to persuade me that you have any case against Dr. al-Mashadani. She is not the alien presence in Iraq. You are. So let her go immediately and while you are at it get out of Iraq.
You have disgraced my country. You do not represent patriotism toward, loyalty to, or protection of the United States. All you are is a bunch of people with a lot of money, a lot of armaments, a lot of soldiers and police and courts to kill and repress anyone who displeases you. But the people of Iraq are more powerful than you are. They have defeated you. Let that be a warning to you that you cannot indefinitely try the patience of the people of the United States.
David Hungerford
375 Mount Prospect Ave.
Newark, NJ 07104
USA
THE SPEECH THAT STARTED THE WAR AGAINST IRAQ
THE SPEECH THAT STARTED THE WAR AGAINST IRAQ...
“…The country that exerts the greatest influence on the Arab Gulf and its oil will consolidate its superiority as an unrivaled superpower. This means that if the population of the Gulf -- and of the entire Arab world -- is not vigilant, this area will be ruled according to the wishes of the United States. If the Arabs are not alerted and the weakness persists, the situation could develop to the extent desired by the United States; that is, it would fix the amount of oil and gas produced in each country and sold to this or that country in the world. Prices would also be fixed in line with a special perspective benefitting U.S. interests and ignoring the interests of others…”
This speech was delivered by President Saddam Hussein to the Amman Summit meeting on Feb. 24, 1990. Present were the heads of state of the key Arab allies of the United States: the president of Egypt and the kings of Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The president of Syria was also present. In its sweeping proposals for Arab unity against U.S.-Zionist domination, it was a blunt challenge to imperialism. I think, it was this speech that was the flash point of the U.S.-U.N. aggression, not the Kuwaiti crisis which was engineered in response.
For the full text of the speech visit: http://www.uruknet.info/index.php?p=37825
“…The country that exerts the greatest influence on the Arab Gulf and its oil will consolidate its superiority as an unrivaled superpower. This means that if the population of the Gulf -- and of the entire Arab world -- is not vigilant, this area will be ruled according to the wishes of the United States. If the Arabs are not alerted and the weakness persists, the situation could develop to the extent desired by the United States; that is, it would fix the amount of oil and gas produced in each country and sold to this or that country in the world. Prices would also be fixed in line with a special perspective benefitting U.S. interests and ignoring the interests of others…”
This speech was delivered by President Saddam Hussein to the Amman Summit meeting on Feb. 24, 1990. Present were the heads of state of the key Arab allies of the United States: the president of Egypt and the kings of Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The president of Syria was also present. In its sweeping proposals for Arab unity against U.S.-Zionist domination, it was a blunt challenge to imperialism. I think, it was this speech that was the flash point of the U.S.-U.N. aggression, not the Kuwaiti crisis which was engineered in response.
For the full text of the speech visit: http://www.uruknet.info/index.php?p=37825
February 10, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
It’s All About Schools
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Sana, Yemen
I took part in a “qat chew” the other day at the home of a Yemeni official. Never done that before. Qat is the mildly hallucinogenic leaf drug that Yemeni men stuff in their cheek after work — and sometimes during. My hosts insisted that qat actually makes your senses sharper and that you could chew and chisel the top of a mosque minaret at the same time. I quit after 15 minutes, but the Yemeni officials, lawmakers and businessmen I was with chewed on for three hours — and they made a lot of sense along the way.
Most had been educated in America or had kids studying there, and they were all bemoaning how the decline of the Yemeni education system, the proliferation of exclusively religious schools here and the falloff in scholarships for Yemeni kids to study in America were producing a very different Yemeni generation than their own. They spoke fondly of U.S. schools that were based on merit, taught them to think freely and prepared them with the skills to thrive.
So here is my new rule of thumb: For every Predator missile we fire at an Al Qaeda target here, we should help Yemen build 50 new modern schools that teach science and math and critical thinking — to boys and girls.
If we stick to something close to that ratio of targeted killings to targeted kindergartens, we have a chance to prevent Yemen from becoming an Al Qaeda breeding ground. Because right now there are some 300,000 college-educated Yemenis out of work — partly because of poor training and partly because there are no jobs — 15,000 schoolchildren not attending any classes, 65 percent of teachers with only high school degrees and thousands of kids learning little more than religious doctrines.
And no wonder. Beginning in the 1970s, the trend in Yemen, Morocco, Egypt and the Persian Gulf “was to Islamicize education as a way to fight the left and pro-communists — with the blessing of the U.S.,” explained Lahcen Haddad, a professor at the University of Rabat in Morocco and an expert on governance with Management Systems International, a U.S. development contractor. Then, in 1979, after the Saudi ruling family was shaken by an attack in Mecca from its own Wahabi fundamentalists, the Saudi regime, to fend off the anger of its Wahabis, “gave them free rein to Islamicize education and social life in Saudi Arabia and neighboring states.”
“Missions — cultural and religious, semi-official and private — roamed Islamic countries to spread the word,” said Haddad. “Cheap books followed, and students were brought to Saudi to learn from Wahabi preachers and teachers in the different religious universities that mushroomed in the ’80s.”
Small, economically deprived Yemen was an easy target. Uncritically accepting of the “truths” of Wahabism became the core curriculum in many Yemeni schools, Haddad added, and “it destroyed the opportunity to build the basic skills necessary to train the right labor force — skills like problem-solving, communication, critical thinking, debate, organization and teamwork.”
America’s last great ideological foe, Soviet Marxism, produced its share of violent radicals, but it also produced Andrei Sakharov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — because it believed in science, physics, math and the classics of literature. Islamism is not producing any Sakharovs.
May Yamani, the author and daughter of the former Saudi oil minister Ahmad Zaki Yamani, minced no words, writing in The Beirut Daily Star: “Saudi Arabia exported both its Wahabism and Al Qaeda to Yemen by funding thousands of madrassas, where fanaticism is taught.”
Ahmed Sofan, a Yemeni parliamentarian, told me that back in the 1970s if you visited a village in his rural constituency, most of the women would be unveiled and working alongside the men. No more, he said, “because we now have this Wahabi sense of religious conservatism where women are supposed to be inside and be veiled.”
Added Abdul Karim al-Iryani, a former prime minister: Growing up, “we studied Darwinism in my high school without challenge.” Not anymore. “The East Asian miracle,” he added, “wasn’t possible without women. In the Arab world, if half our society is excluded, how will we ever catch up with those new tigers?”
The Yemeni journalist Mohammed al-Qadhi reported in The National newspaper that there may be 10,000 religious-based schools educating Yemeni youth today. He quoted a top Yemeni education official as saying, “We are now obliging these schools to teach moderation to protect our students against extremism.”
In other words, we are now fighting for the Middle East of the 2020s and 2030s. Huge chunks of this generation are lost. When I went to see Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, at his Sana palace, he was in a reflective mood: “I would wish that this arms race could end and instead we could have a race for development.”
It is the only way Yemen will have a future. So, yes, fire those Predators where we must, but help build schools and fund scholarships to America wherever we can. And please, please, let’s end our addiction to oil, which is what gives the Saudi religious ministry and charities the money to spread anti-modernist thinking across this region.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/10/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
It’s All About Schools
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Sana, Yemen
I took part in a “qat chew” the other day at the home of a Yemeni official. Never done that before. Qat is the mildly hallucinogenic leaf drug that Yemeni men stuff in their cheek after work — and sometimes during. My hosts insisted that qat actually makes your senses sharper and that you could chew and chisel the top of a mosque minaret at the same time. I quit after 15 minutes, but the Yemeni officials, lawmakers and businessmen I was with chewed on for three hours — and they made a lot of sense along the way.
Most had been educated in America or had kids studying there, and they were all bemoaning how the decline of the Yemeni education system, the proliferation of exclusively religious schools here and the falloff in scholarships for Yemeni kids to study in America were producing a very different Yemeni generation than their own. They spoke fondly of U.S. schools that were based on merit, taught them to think freely and prepared them with the skills to thrive.
So here is my new rule of thumb: For every Predator missile we fire at an Al Qaeda target here, we should help Yemen build 50 new modern schools that teach science and math and critical thinking — to boys and girls.
If we stick to something close to that ratio of targeted killings to targeted kindergartens, we have a chance to prevent Yemen from becoming an Al Qaeda breeding ground. Because right now there are some 300,000 college-educated Yemenis out of work — partly because of poor training and partly because there are no jobs — 15,000 schoolchildren not attending any classes, 65 percent of teachers with only high school degrees and thousands of kids learning little more than religious doctrines.
And no wonder. Beginning in the 1970s, the trend in Yemen, Morocco, Egypt and the Persian Gulf “was to Islamicize education as a way to fight the left and pro-communists — with the blessing of the U.S.,” explained Lahcen Haddad, a professor at the University of Rabat in Morocco and an expert on governance with Management Systems International, a U.S. development contractor. Then, in 1979, after the Saudi ruling family was shaken by an attack in Mecca from its own Wahabi fundamentalists, the Saudi regime, to fend off the anger of its Wahabis, “gave them free rein to Islamicize education and social life in Saudi Arabia and neighboring states.”
“Missions — cultural and religious, semi-official and private — roamed Islamic countries to spread the word,” said Haddad. “Cheap books followed, and students were brought to Saudi to learn from Wahabi preachers and teachers in the different religious universities that mushroomed in the ’80s.”
Small, economically deprived Yemen was an easy target. Uncritically accepting of the “truths” of Wahabism became the core curriculum in many Yemeni schools, Haddad added, and “it destroyed the opportunity to build the basic skills necessary to train the right labor force — skills like problem-solving, communication, critical thinking, debate, organization and teamwork.”
America’s last great ideological foe, Soviet Marxism, produced its share of violent radicals, but it also produced Andrei Sakharov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — because it believed in science, physics, math and the classics of literature. Islamism is not producing any Sakharovs.
May Yamani, the author and daughter of the former Saudi oil minister Ahmad Zaki Yamani, minced no words, writing in The Beirut Daily Star: “Saudi Arabia exported both its Wahabism and Al Qaeda to Yemen by funding thousands of madrassas, where fanaticism is taught.”
Ahmed Sofan, a Yemeni parliamentarian, told me that back in the 1970s if you visited a village in his rural constituency, most of the women would be unveiled and working alongside the men. No more, he said, “because we now have this Wahabi sense of religious conservatism where women are supposed to be inside and be veiled.”
Added Abdul Karim al-Iryani, a former prime minister: Growing up, “we studied Darwinism in my high school without challenge.” Not anymore. “The East Asian miracle,” he added, “wasn’t possible without women. In the Arab world, if half our society is excluded, how will we ever catch up with those new tigers?”
The Yemeni journalist Mohammed al-Qadhi reported in The National newspaper that there may be 10,000 religious-based schools educating Yemeni youth today. He quoted a top Yemeni education official as saying, “We are now obliging these schools to teach moderation to protect our students against extremism.”
In other words, we are now fighting for the Middle East of the 2020s and 2030s. Huge chunks of this generation are lost. When I went to see Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, at his Sana palace, he was in a reflective mood: “I would wish that this arms race could end and instead we could have a race for development.”
It is the only way Yemen will have a future. So, yes, fire those Predators where we must, but help build schools and fund scholarships to America wherever we can. And please, please, let’s end our addiction to oil, which is what gives the Saudi religious ministry and charities the money to spread anti-modernist thinking across this region.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/10/opini ... nted=print
February 14, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
1977 vs. 1979
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Visiting Yemen and watching the small band of young reformers there struggle against the forces of separatism, Islamism, autocracy and terrorism, reminded me that the key forces shaping this region today were really set in motion between 1977 and 1979 — and nothing much has changed since. Indeed, one could say Middle East politics today is a struggle between 1977 and 1979 — and 1979 is still winning.
How so? Following the defeat of Egypt and other Arab armies by Israel in the 1967 war, Nasserism, a k a Arab nationalism, the abiding ideology of the day, was demolished. In its wake came two broad alternatives: The first, manifested by President Anwar Sadat of Egypt in his 1977 trip to Israel, was a bid to cast the Arab world’s future with the West, economic liberalization, modernization and acceptance of Israel. The weakness of “Sadatism,” though, was that it was an elite ideology with no cultural roots. The Egyptian state made peace with Israel, but Arab societies never followed.
The second Arab-Muslim response emerged in 1979. To start, there was the takeover that year of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Islamist extremists who challenged the religious credentials of the Saudi ruling family. The Saudi rulers responded by forging a new bargain with their Islamists: Let us stay in power and we will give you a free hand in setting social norms, relations between the sexes and religious education inside Saudi Arabia — and abundant resources to spread Sunni Wahabi fundamentalism abroad.
The Saudi lurch backward coincided with Iran’s revolution in 1979, which brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power. That revolution set up a competition between Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia for who was the real leader of the Muslim world, and it triggered a surge in oil prices that gave both fundamentalist regimes the resources to export their brands of puritanical Islam, through mosques and schools, farther than ever.
“Islam lost its brakes in 1979,” said Mamoun Fandy, a Middle East expert at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London. And there was no moderate countertrend.
Finally, also in 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Arab and Muslim mujahedeen fighters flocked to the cause — financed by Saudi Arabia at America’s behest — and in the process shifted Pakistan and Afghanistan in much more Islamist directions. Once these hard-core Muslim fighters, led by the likes of Osama bin Laden, defeated the Soviets, they turned their guns on America and its Arab allies.
In a smart essay in The Wall Street Journal, titled “The Radical Legacy of 1979,” the retired U.S. diplomat Edward Djerejian, who led the political section of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in 1979, noted: “Last year we celebrated the great historic achievements marked by the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent unification of Germany. But we should also remember that events in the broader Middle East of 30 years ago have left, in sharp contrast, a bitter and dangerous legacy.”
In short, the Middle East we are dealing with today is the product of long-term trends dating back to 1979. And have no illusions, we propelled those trends. America looked the other way when Saudi Arabia Wahabi-fied itself. Ronald Reagan glorified the Afghan mujahedeen and the Europeans hailed the Khomeini revolution in Iran as a “liberation” event.
I believe the only way the forces of 1979 can be rolled back would be with another equally big bang — a new popular movement that is truly reformist, democratizing, open to the world, yet anchored in Muslim culture, not disconnected. Our best hopes are the fragile democratizing trends in Iraq, the tentative green revolution in Iran, plus the young reformers now coming of age in every Arab country. But it will not be easy.
The young reformers today “do not have a compelling story to tell,” remarked Lahcen Haddad, a political scientist at Rabat University in Morocco. “And they face a meta-narrative” — first developed by Nasser and later adopted by the Islamists — “that mobilizes millions and millions. That narrative says: ‘The Arabs and Muslims are victims of an imperialist-Zionist conspiracy aided by reactionary regimes in the Arab world. It has as its goal keeping the Arabs and Muslims backward in order to exploit their oil riches and prevent them from becoming as strong as they used to be in the Middle Ages — because that is dangerous for Israel and Western interests.’ ”
Today that meta-narrative is embraced across the Arab-Muslim political spectrum, from the secular left to the Islamic right. Deconstructing that story, and rebuilding a post-1979 alternative story based on responsibility, modernization, Islamic reformation and cross-cultural dialogue, is this generation’s challenge. I think it can happen, but it will require the success of the democratizing self-government movements in Iran and Iraq. That would spawn a whole new story.
I know it’s a long shot, but I’ll continue to hope for it. I’ve been chewing a lot of qat lately, and it makes me dreamy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
1977 vs. 1979
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Visiting Yemen and watching the small band of young reformers there struggle against the forces of separatism, Islamism, autocracy and terrorism, reminded me that the key forces shaping this region today were really set in motion between 1977 and 1979 — and nothing much has changed since. Indeed, one could say Middle East politics today is a struggle between 1977 and 1979 — and 1979 is still winning.
How so? Following the defeat of Egypt and other Arab armies by Israel in the 1967 war, Nasserism, a k a Arab nationalism, the abiding ideology of the day, was demolished. In its wake came two broad alternatives: The first, manifested by President Anwar Sadat of Egypt in his 1977 trip to Israel, was a bid to cast the Arab world’s future with the West, economic liberalization, modernization and acceptance of Israel. The weakness of “Sadatism,” though, was that it was an elite ideology with no cultural roots. The Egyptian state made peace with Israel, but Arab societies never followed.
The second Arab-Muslim response emerged in 1979. To start, there was the takeover that year of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Islamist extremists who challenged the religious credentials of the Saudi ruling family. The Saudi rulers responded by forging a new bargain with their Islamists: Let us stay in power and we will give you a free hand in setting social norms, relations between the sexes and religious education inside Saudi Arabia — and abundant resources to spread Sunni Wahabi fundamentalism abroad.
The Saudi lurch backward coincided with Iran’s revolution in 1979, which brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power. That revolution set up a competition between Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia for who was the real leader of the Muslim world, and it triggered a surge in oil prices that gave both fundamentalist regimes the resources to export their brands of puritanical Islam, through mosques and schools, farther than ever.
“Islam lost its brakes in 1979,” said Mamoun Fandy, a Middle East expert at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London. And there was no moderate countertrend.
Finally, also in 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Arab and Muslim mujahedeen fighters flocked to the cause — financed by Saudi Arabia at America’s behest — and in the process shifted Pakistan and Afghanistan in much more Islamist directions. Once these hard-core Muslim fighters, led by the likes of Osama bin Laden, defeated the Soviets, they turned their guns on America and its Arab allies.
In a smart essay in The Wall Street Journal, titled “The Radical Legacy of 1979,” the retired U.S. diplomat Edward Djerejian, who led the political section of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in 1979, noted: “Last year we celebrated the great historic achievements marked by the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent unification of Germany. But we should also remember that events in the broader Middle East of 30 years ago have left, in sharp contrast, a bitter and dangerous legacy.”
In short, the Middle East we are dealing with today is the product of long-term trends dating back to 1979. And have no illusions, we propelled those trends. America looked the other way when Saudi Arabia Wahabi-fied itself. Ronald Reagan glorified the Afghan mujahedeen and the Europeans hailed the Khomeini revolution in Iran as a “liberation” event.
I believe the only way the forces of 1979 can be rolled back would be with another equally big bang — a new popular movement that is truly reformist, democratizing, open to the world, yet anchored in Muslim culture, not disconnected. Our best hopes are the fragile democratizing trends in Iraq, the tentative green revolution in Iran, plus the young reformers now coming of age in every Arab country. But it will not be easy.
The young reformers today “do not have a compelling story to tell,” remarked Lahcen Haddad, a political scientist at Rabat University in Morocco. “And they face a meta-narrative” — first developed by Nasser and later adopted by the Islamists — “that mobilizes millions and millions. That narrative says: ‘The Arabs and Muslims are victims of an imperialist-Zionist conspiracy aided by reactionary regimes in the Arab world. It has as its goal keeping the Arabs and Muslims backward in order to exploit their oil riches and prevent them from becoming as strong as they used to be in the Middle Ages — because that is dangerous for Israel and Western interests.’ ”
Today that meta-narrative is embraced across the Arab-Muslim political spectrum, from the secular left to the Islamic right. Deconstructing that story, and rebuilding a post-1979 alternative story based on responsibility, modernization, Islamic reformation and cross-cultural dialogue, is this generation’s challenge. I think it can happen, but it will require the success of the democratizing self-government movements in Iran and Iraq. That would spawn a whole new story.
I know it’s a long shot, but I’ll continue to hope for it. I’ve been chewing a lot of qat lately, and it makes me dreamy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/opini ... nted=print
February 24, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
Iraq’s Known Unknowns, Still Unknown
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
From the very beginning of the U.S. intervention in Iraq and the effort to build some kind of democracy there, a simple but gnawing question has lurked in the background: Was Iraq the way Iraq was (a dictatorship) because Saddam was the way Saddam was, or was Saddam the way Saddam was because Iraq was the way Iraq was — a collection of warring sects incapable of self-rule and only governable with an iron fist?
Alas, some seven years after the U.S. toppled Saddam’s government, a few weeks before Iraq’s second democratic national election, and in advance of the pullout of American forces, this question still has not been answered. Will Iraq’s new politics triumph over its cultural divides, or will its cultural/sectarian divides sink its fledgling democracy? We still don’t know.
In many ways, Iraq is a test case for the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s dictum that “the central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”
Ironically, though, it was the neo-conservative Bush team that argued that culture didn’t matter in Iraq, and that the prospect of democracy and self-rule would automatically bring Iraqis together to bury the past. While many liberals and realists contended that Iraq was an irredeemable tribal hornet’s nest and we should not be sticking our hand in there; it was a place where the past would always bury the future.
But stick we did, and in so doing we gave Iraqis a chance to do something no other Arab people have ever had a chance to do: freely write their own social contract on how they would like to rule themselves and live together.
With elections set for March 7, with America slated to shrink to 50,000 troops by September — and down to zero by the end of 2011 — Iraqis will have to decide how they want to exploit this opportunity.
I met last week with Gen. Ray Odierno, the overall U.S. commander in Iraq, who along with Vice President Joe Biden has done more to coach, coax, cajole and occasionally shove Iraqis away from the abyss than anyone else. I found the general hopeful but worried. He was hopeful because he has seen Iraqis go to the brink so many times and then pull back, but worried because sectarian violence is steadily creeping back ahead of the elections and certain Shiite politicians, like the former Bush darling Ahmed Chalabi — whom General Odierno indicated is clearly “influenced by Iran” and up to no good — have been trying to exclude some key Sunni politicians from the election.
It is critical, said Odierno, that “Iraqis feel that the elections are credible and legitimate” and that the democratic process is working. “I don’t want the campaigning to lead to a sectarian divide again,” he added. “I worry that some elements will feel politically isolated and will not have the ability to influence and participate.”
How might this play out? The ideal but least likely scenario is that we see the emergence of an Iraqi Shiite Nelson Mandela. The Shiites, long suppressed by Iraq’s Baathist-led Sunni minority, are now Iraq’s ruling majority. Could Iraq produce a Shiite politician, who, like Mandela, would be a national healer — someone who would use his power to lead a real reconciliation instead of just a Shiite dominion? So far, no sign of it.
Even without a Mandela, Iraq could still hold together, and thrive, if its rival Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish communities both recognize the new balance of power — that the Shiites are now the dominant community in Iraq and, ultimately, will have the biggest say — and the new limits of power. No community can assert its will by force and, therefore, sectarian disputes have to be resolved politically.
The two scenarios you don’t want to see are: 1) Iraq’s tribal culture triumphing over politics and the country becoming a big Somalia with oil; or 2) as America fades away, Iraq’s Shiite government aligning itself more with Iran, and Iran becoming the kingmaker in Iraq the way Syria has made itself in Lebanon.
Why should we care when we’re leaving? Quite simply, so much of the turmoil in the region was stoked over the years by Saddam’s Iraq and Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran, both financed by billions in oil revenues. If, over time, a decent democratizing regime could emerge in Iraq and a similar one in Iran — so that oil wealth was funding reasonably decent regimes rather than retrograde ones — the whole Middle East would be different.
The odds, though, remain very long. In the end, it will come back to that nagging question of politics versus culture. Personally, I’m a believer in the argument Lawrence Harrison makes in his book “The Central Liberal Truth” — culture matters, a lot more than we think, but cultures can change, a lot more than we expect. But such change takes time, leadership and often pain. Which is why, I suspect, Iraqis will surprise us — for good and for ill — a lot more before they finally answer the question: Who are we and how do we want to live together?
Maureen Dowd is off today.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/24/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
Iraq’s Known Unknowns, Still Unknown
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
From the very beginning of the U.S. intervention in Iraq and the effort to build some kind of democracy there, a simple but gnawing question has lurked in the background: Was Iraq the way Iraq was (a dictatorship) because Saddam was the way Saddam was, or was Saddam the way Saddam was because Iraq was the way Iraq was — a collection of warring sects incapable of self-rule and only governable with an iron fist?
Alas, some seven years after the U.S. toppled Saddam’s government, a few weeks before Iraq’s second democratic national election, and in advance of the pullout of American forces, this question still has not been answered. Will Iraq’s new politics triumph over its cultural divides, or will its cultural/sectarian divides sink its fledgling democracy? We still don’t know.
In many ways, Iraq is a test case for the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s dictum that “the central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”
Ironically, though, it was the neo-conservative Bush team that argued that culture didn’t matter in Iraq, and that the prospect of democracy and self-rule would automatically bring Iraqis together to bury the past. While many liberals and realists contended that Iraq was an irredeemable tribal hornet’s nest and we should not be sticking our hand in there; it was a place where the past would always bury the future.
But stick we did, and in so doing we gave Iraqis a chance to do something no other Arab people have ever had a chance to do: freely write their own social contract on how they would like to rule themselves and live together.
With elections set for March 7, with America slated to shrink to 50,000 troops by September — and down to zero by the end of 2011 — Iraqis will have to decide how they want to exploit this opportunity.
I met last week with Gen. Ray Odierno, the overall U.S. commander in Iraq, who along with Vice President Joe Biden has done more to coach, coax, cajole and occasionally shove Iraqis away from the abyss than anyone else. I found the general hopeful but worried. He was hopeful because he has seen Iraqis go to the brink so many times and then pull back, but worried because sectarian violence is steadily creeping back ahead of the elections and certain Shiite politicians, like the former Bush darling Ahmed Chalabi — whom General Odierno indicated is clearly “influenced by Iran” and up to no good — have been trying to exclude some key Sunni politicians from the election.
It is critical, said Odierno, that “Iraqis feel that the elections are credible and legitimate” and that the democratic process is working. “I don’t want the campaigning to lead to a sectarian divide again,” he added. “I worry that some elements will feel politically isolated and will not have the ability to influence and participate.”
How might this play out? The ideal but least likely scenario is that we see the emergence of an Iraqi Shiite Nelson Mandela. The Shiites, long suppressed by Iraq’s Baathist-led Sunni minority, are now Iraq’s ruling majority. Could Iraq produce a Shiite politician, who, like Mandela, would be a national healer — someone who would use his power to lead a real reconciliation instead of just a Shiite dominion? So far, no sign of it.
Even without a Mandela, Iraq could still hold together, and thrive, if its rival Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish communities both recognize the new balance of power — that the Shiites are now the dominant community in Iraq and, ultimately, will have the biggest say — and the new limits of power. No community can assert its will by force and, therefore, sectarian disputes have to be resolved politically.
The two scenarios you don’t want to see are: 1) Iraq’s tribal culture triumphing over politics and the country becoming a big Somalia with oil; or 2) as America fades away, Iraq’s Shiite government aligning itself more with Iran, and Iran becoming the kingmaker in Iraq the way Syria has made itself in Lebanon.
Why should we care when we’re leaving? Quite simply, so much of the turmoil in the region was stoked over the years by Saddam’s Iraq and Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran, both financed by billions in oil revenues. If, over time, a decent democratizing regime could emerge in Iraq and a similar one in Iran — so that oil wealth was funding reasonably decent regimes rather than retrograde ones — the whole Middle East would be different.
The odds, though, remain very long. In the end, it will come back to that nagging question of politics versus culture. Personally, I’m a believer in the argument Lawrence Harrison makes in his book “The Central Liberal Truth” — culture matters, a lot more than we think, but cultures can change, a lot more than we expect. But such change takes time, leadership and often pain. Which is why, I suspect, Iraqis will surprise us — for good and for ill — a lot more before they finally answer the question: Who are we and how do we want to live together?
Maureen Dowd is off today.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/24/opini ... nted=print