The Pharaoh and the Rebel

The story behind Hosni Mubarak’s persecution of Egypt’s top opposition leader—and what it means for the country’s democratic reforms.
By Rod Nordland
Newsweek
Dec. 30, 2005

Egypt’s presidential elections last September were supposed to be the highlight of the Bush administration’s campaign to promote democracy in the Middle East. Instead, they’ve become an embarrassing acknowledgement of its failure. The electoral process started out on a hopeful note. President Hosni Mubarak had never allowed his quarter-century rule to be challenged at the polls; in previous votes, he had been the only candidate in a yes/no referendum. In 2005, Mubarak decided opposition groups would be permitted to run in parliamentary elections. Meanwhile, opposition newspapers were allowed to publish, allowing some alternative to Egypt’s state-controlled print and electronic media.

No one ever thought Mubarak or his National Democratic Party (NDP) would let the reforms go so far that he’d lose his grip on power. But even the Bush administration has been chagrined at the lengths to which the regime has gone to destroy its opponents while pretending to let democracy take its course. Those measures have been especially extreme in the case of the country’s leading opposition candidate, Ayman Nour, who heads the Ghad (or Tomorrow) Party. A baby-faced lawyer 30 years Mubarak’s junior, Nour, 41, had limited funding but a flair for the dramatic: during one of the periodic bread shortages in Cairo, he got up in parliament and dared the prime minister to eat a slice of the rock-hard stuff the government was distributing to the needy. (The offer was declined.) At other times, Nour belittled Mubarak as an impotent old man afraid of his own people because the president made his campaign visits by helicopter instead of the traditional bus.

Then came the crackdown. In January 2005, authorities trumped up forgery charges against Nour based on the petitions he filed to place his name on the presidential ballot. He was even accused of forging his own name. Officials stripped him of parliamentary immunity in the middle of the night, arrested him on the steps of the Assembly and dragged him down to Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the country’s most public place. There policemen kept him kneeling with boots on his neck while they waited an hour for the prison van to arrive, a public humiliation. He was in jail for six weeks.

But then U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice delayed an official visit to Egypt in protest and later sent a deputy to visit Nour. Former U.S. secretary of State Madeline Albright came to Cairo and had dinner with him The international furor led to his release and helped buoy his public support. In the September presidential elections, Nour came in second in a crowded field. And though his vote total of 7.6 percent was far behind Mubarak’s 88.6 percent, it was a wake-up call to the regime. “I dared to challenge the pharoah,” he said. “And the pharaohs used to kill all the possible male heirs except their own. Mubarak wants to hand Egypt over to his own son, Gamal, and Gamal could never beat me in a free election.”

Gamal, 41, may well never have to face Nour . Since Nour’s quixotic presidential campaign, the Mubarak machine has gone into overdrive to destroy him—politically, personally and professionally, according to both critics and supporters of the opposition leader. After the vote, Nour was charged with forgery again, as well as a host of bribery, corruption and other charges, including insulting the president. On Dec. 24 Nour was convicted and sentenced to five years’ hard labor.

In the runup to the trial, the government took on Nour’s entire family. Attacks in the state-controlled press against Nour’s father were so vituperative that Nour claims they led to his father’s death. There were published accusations that his father had falsified his son’s birth certificates to hide an illegitimate birth—an incendiary claim in Egypt’s conservative Islamic society. “Then he was watching TV,” an Egyptian channel controlled by the state, “when there was a crawl on the screen saying I was being charged with bribery, and he had a stroke,” says Nour. “It was all too much.”

The media also published scandalous reports about Nour’s wife, Gameela Ismail, who is now a key adviser in his Ghad Party and his chief spokeswoman. (Ismail had worked as a special correspondent for NEWSWEEK but went on leave when she began working for her husband and his party.) Her unlisted number would ring after midnight when Nour was out. “If you don’t shut up, there will be no mother or father,” said the callers. Their two sons were part of an amateur teenage rock band, but it suddenly found performances canceled, with some press critics describing their music as “satanic.”

Police raided Nour’s home and his law office, taking his Rolodex. Soon, his clients began firing him and canceling contracts, saying they’d been contacted by anonymous callers who warned them of retribution if they did not do so. City authorities even cited him for the swimming pool he'd had for years on the rooftop terrace of his apartment in the fashionable Zamalek quarter of Cairo.

In the weeks before his trial, Nour and Ismail received a series of anonymous packages with threatening notes, some containing embarrassing audiotapes and doctored photographs. Nour and his wife become visibly agitated discussing the crude blackmail. “It’s a dirty, disgusting thing,” says Nour. “He [Mubarak] is so ruthless and heartless, the regime has no limits on what it’ll do.”

In an interview last month, Nour was determined not to let the persecution drive him from politics. “The Ghad Party is my last hope.” As for the effect on his family: “I fear what they may do to my sons, but I’m more afraid of my sons living in a country with no freedom.”

In November and December, during a series of parliamentary elections, Nour lost his seat to Yeyha Wahdan, a colonel in the secret police, who resigned from his job just three months before the election. (He couldn’t be reached for comment, but his brother, Sobhi, confirmed his brother’s previous job and said their father had represented that district for 25 years prior to Nour.) “Despite that, we can’t spend as much money as Ayman [Nour] did in this campaign because the source of his money is not known, said Sobhi, who also labeled Nour “a forger, a thief and a fraud” and added, “His whole life is a forgery.”

In the first two rounds of the parliamentary elections, another opposition party, the Muslim Brotherhood, won 79 out of a total of 454 parliamentary seats, despite what international monitors considered widespread voting fraud by the ruling party. Egyptian authorities became concerned, and police physically barricaded polling places throughout the country and in some places attacked voters. In the violence that ensued, most of it blamed on police, several people died. By the third round of elections, not a single additional Muslim Brotherhood candidate won, although the Islamic party did gain nine more seats in runoff elections in December. Nour’s Ghad Party carried only one seat, half a dozen less than in the previous Parliament.

By now, American officials have turned critical. “Clearly, these actions send the wrong signal about Egypt’s commitment to democracy and freedom,” says a State Department spokesman.

Nour’s lawyers expect Egypt’s relatively independent high court will eventually free him on appeal, but that may take two years. In the meantime, because he suffers from diabetes and has a heart condition, Nour, who is reportedly weakened after a two-week hunger strike to protest the trial, will likely be assigned to cleaning toilets and waiting on other inmates—mostly hardened common criminals.

But the Mubarak regime isn’t stopping there; it’s also trying to take over his Ghad Party, launching another party with the same name and publishing an identically titled party newspaper. The big difference: this ersatz Ghad Party is rabidly pro-Mubarak. It’s leader, Musa Mustafa, is suing to have himself declared the head of the party in Nour’s place, effectively sinking his opposition movement; a ruling is expected Jan. 4, and Egypt’s lower courts are unlikely to rule against the regime.

As things now stand, even if Nour is released from prison and gets his party back, there’s little chance he could be a candidate in the next presidential election in 2011 unless the country’s constitution is changed. None of the opposition parties has the 5 percent of parliamentary seats needed before a party may field a presidential candidate. That would leave the contenders as two: Mubarak, if he chooses to go for a sixth term, or his son, Gamal, now head of the NDP’s policy committee in charge of electoral reforms and widely seen as his father’s heir apparent. “They’re not content for the machine to roll over you and knock you down,” says Ismail, Nour’s wife. “They have to crush you and ground your bones into the dirt. Like the pharaohs did.”

Christian Voter Guide tracks US reps' votes on Israel

Etgar Lefkovits
THE JERUSALEM POST
Dec. 27, 2005

In an unprecedented move, a major conservative Christian advocacy group in the United States will include the voting records of American legislators on Israel in its biennial Christian voting guide.

The Christian Voter Guide, which is put out by right-wing 'Christian Coalition of America' every two years ahead of American Congressional and Presidential elections has previously only included American domestic social issues, with the guide now branching out to deal with American's foreign relations for the first time.

"It is very important for people of faith to know where our legislators stand on support for Israel," said Roberta Combs, President of the 'Christian Coalition of America' in a telephone interview Tuesday with The Jerusalem Post from her home in South Carolina. "Our heart is with Israel," she added.

Founded in 1989 by the Reverend Pat Robertson, the Christian Coalition of America is one of the largest and most active Christian organizations in the United States, boasting some 2 million supporters.

Prior to last year's presidential elections, the Christian Coalition of America distributed 70 million such voter guides throughout the United States.

Over the last decade the guide has dealt with how legislators have voted on such issues as abortion, human cloning, homosexuality, and euthanasia, all of which the group vehemently opposes, as well as school prayer, which they strongly espouse, positions which have put them at odds with the predominantly liberal mainstream American Jewish community.

Most recently, the group, which includes Christian fundamentalists, Evangelicals, Pentecostals, Roman Catholics and members of mainstream Protestant churches, was involved in ensuring that the words Christmas appear in American stores as opposed to the more nondenominational 'holiday.'

The decision to include legislator's voting records on Israel in the Christian Voter's Guide was arranged at the urging of the Knesset's increasingly-influential 'Christian Allies Caucus,' and comes at a time of increasing cooperation between Israel and Christian supporters of Israel worldwide, a goal the cross-party parliamentary lobby works to further.

Calling the move "a huge accomplishment" for the supporters of Israel, Caucus Co-chairman MK Yuri Shtern (Yisrael Beitenu) said Tuesday that the unprecedented decision to include the American legislators' voting records on Israel in the Christian voter's guide was a "statement of faith" in the State of Israel.

"We cannot only rely on those who feel that the US has to support Israel for conjectural reasons, but we want [support for] the State of Israel [to be] based on shared values," he said.

"This puts Israel at center-stage in the voting pattern of the Christian community in America," said caucus director Josh Reinstein.

Foreign Office concern at Thatcher Jewish links

This is LONDON
29/12/05

Foreign Office officials were so concerned about Margaret Thatcher's pro-Israeli sympathies when she became Tory leader they wanted her to break off links with local Jewish groups, according to newly-released official papers.

Files released to the National Archives in Kew, west London, under the 30 year rule reveal that diplomats feared she would be seen by Arab countries as a "prisoner of the Zionists".

One official even suggested that she should give up her Finchley parliamentary seat in north London - with its large Jewish community - for somewhere more palatable to Arab opinion.

The issue of Thatcher's membership of groups such as the Anglo-Israel Friendship League of Finchley and Conservative Friends of Israel was raised during a visit by shadow foreign secretary Lord Carrington to Jordan in 1975.

"He asked the ambassador's advice on this and was assured that such a connection, which would inevitably do much harm in the Arab world, should if at all practicable be severed," noted Michael Tait, an official in the British embassy.

"Carrington agreed that Mrs Thatcher might most painlessly and with some justification get herself off the hook by resigning from all constituency obligations of this sort on the grounds of the rather wider obligations she has now to assume.

"Such a stratagem might resolve the problem in Finchley but if Mrs Thatcher is indeed a prime mover in a wider parliamentary grouping of pro-Israeli MPs then the difficulty would be trickier to bypass.

"While we as Government and not opposition officials may have no particular brief on Mrs Thatcher's behalf it is presumably in the national interest to do what we can to counter Arab fears and suspicions that the leader of HM opposition is already a prisoner of the Zionists."

The Foreign Office in London was sympathetic, noting Conservative Central Office was "well aware of the problems which these links might pose".

One official added however: "We do not think there is anything we can, or should, do about Mrs Thatcher's membership of pro-Israeli organisations."

Beyond "Munich": The Ten Movies Steven Spielberg Has Yet To Make

Imagine if we were in a parallel universe in which Hollywood gave Arabs and Muslims a fair shake. Here are ten films (all based on true stories) that are just waiting for Spielberg's magic.
By Mas'ood Cajee
alt.muslim
December 8, 2005

Hollywood mogul Steven Spielberg's latest film "Munich" focuses on Israel's efforts to avenge the tragic killings of its athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. Although the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is ripe with great ideas for potential blockbuster films, Hollywood flicks about the conflict have tended to remain formulaic and dehumanizing.

Spielberg hopes "Munich" will be different, and claims he didn't want to make "a Charles Bronson movie — good guys vs. bad guys and Jews killing Arabs without any context." Critics say Spielberg is too pro-Israel to make a fair film about the conflict.

Imagine for a second it is Opposite Day. Imagine we're in some kind of Twilight Zone parallel universe in which Hollywood gives Arabs and Muslims a fair shake. What kind of movies about the Middle East would we then be chomping Goobers, Junior Mints, and popcorn to at the local twenty screen multiplex?

Maybe these movies might actually be made by some of the 125 Palestinian kids Spielberg is giving video cameras to document their lives. Perhaps a talented few will go on to become big-time Hollywood directors. Here are ten potential films — all inspired by actual events — that are just waiting for the magic of Spielberg & his wannabes:

1. King David Hotel: The bombing of the King David Hotel, which served as headquarters of the British administration in Palestine, killed 91 Arabs, Jews, and Brits in 1946. Two future Prime Ministers of Israel, David Ben Gurion and Menachem Begin, masterminded the attack. Disguised as Arabs, members of Begin's Irgun placed 350kg of explosives inside the building. In this action-packed thriller, David (Pierce Brosnan) — a British officer ordered to hunt down the killers — falls for Margaret (Uma Thurman), an American journalist working for Life Magazine. But is Margaret really in love or is she a secret Zionist assassin out to stop David in his tracks?

2. Nakba: A story of innocent love in a time of war and tragedy. Layla (Penelope Cruz) & Salam (Orlando Bloom) are a Romeo & Juliet against the backdrop of the 1948 Nakba, the Palestinian national catastrophe. During the Nakba, over 700,000 Palestinians fled — voluntarily & involuntarily — their homes. Can their love survive conflict?

3. USS Liberty: When Israeli boats and fighter jets attack the US Navy intelligence ship USS Liberty in the middle of the 1967 Six Day War, 34 US servicemen are killed and 173 are wounded. The official word from Washington and Tel Aviv is that the attack was a mistake. But Brad Pitt & Tom Cruise, who play surviving officers from the Liberty, swear vengeance after discovering that the attack was actually part of a plot to start World War III.

4. Sabra & Shatila: It's 1982 and the war in Lebanon rages on. British war correspondent Robert Fisk (Star Wars star Ewan MacGregor) hides in the camps of Sabra & Shatilla, while a Lebanese militia aided and abetted by Israel slaughters thousands of Palestinian refugees. Sahar (Sandra Bullock) is a Palestinian mother determined to protect her family at any cost.

5. Vanunu: A political thriller set in Israel, Australia, Thailand, England, and Italy. "Syriana" star George Clooney plays Mordechai Vanunu, the nuclear technician who exposes Israel's nuclear weapons program and pays the ultimate price. Nicole Kidman plays Cheryl Bentov, the American Mossad agent who seduces and kidnaps him.

6. Hebron: A story of tragedy and torn loyalties. In 1994, Brooklyn Jewish doctor Baruch Goldstein opened fire on Muslim worshippers in Hebron, killing 29. Palestinian American Mazen Khalili (Tom Hanks), a State Department official assigned to investigate the massacre, struggles with his job responsibilities and his roots. Leah Rabinowitz (Meg Ryan) is a Jewish American journalist who discovers a dark family secret that will change her life forever.

7. Qana: On April 18, 1996, Israeli shelling of a UN Compound that shelters Lebanese refugees kills more than 100 & injures over 300 men, women, and children. Jessica (Angelina Jolie) is a UN worker determined to let the world know what happened after witnessing the atrocity. Yossi (Robert De Niro) is a Mossad agent assigned to kill Jolie.

8. Gaza: Chris Hedges (Harrison Ford), a New York Times correspondent in Jerusalem, files stories from his hotel room. Hedges reaches a turning point when he witnesses Israeli soldiers killing young Palestinian boys for sport, then defies his editors by writing stories that humanize Palestinians. David Schwimmer & Sarah Jessica Parker make cameo appearances as the parents of Muhammad al-Durra, the 12 year old Palestinian boy killed by Israeli troops in 2000.

9. Rachel: Rachel Corrie (Gwyneth Paltrow) is the idealistic young American activist crushed to death by the Israeli army with a Caterpillar bulldozer. Sally Field, well-known for her role in "Not Without My Daughter", plays Rachel's mother.

10. Refuseniks: When a fellow soldier commits suicide after killing an unarmed pregnant Palestinian woman (played by Natalie Portman) in cold blood, two young Israeli soldiers (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck) decide that the occupation and the killing of Palestinians is immoral and unjust.

Mas'ood Cajee lives in San Joaquin County, California.

HECK OF A JOB, BUSHIE

Paul Krugman
New York Times
December 30, 2005

A year ago, everyone expected President Bush to get his way on Social Security. Pundits warned Democrats that they were making a big political mistake by opposing plans to divert payroll taxes into private accounts.

A year ago, everyone thought Congress would make Mr. Bush's tax cuts permanent, in spite of projections showing that doing so would lead to budget deficits as far as the eye can see. But Congress hasn't acted, and most of the cuts are still scheduled to expire by the end of 2010.

A year ago, Mr. Bush made many Americans feel safe, because they believed that he would be decisive and effective in an emergency. But Mr. Bush was apparently oblivious to the first major domestic emergency since 9/11.

According to Newsweek, aides to Mr. Bush finally decided, days after Hurricane Katrina struck, that they had to show him a DVD of TV newscasts to get him to appreciate the seriousness of the situation.

A year ago, before "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job" became a national punch line, the rising tide of cronyism in government agencies and the rapid replacement of competent professionals with unqualified political appointees attracted hardly any national attention.

A year ago, hardly anyone outside Washington had heard of Jack Abramoff, and Tom DeLay's position as House majority leader seemed unassailable.

A year ago, Dick Cheney, who repeatedly cited discredited evidence linking Saddam to 9/11, and promised that invading Americans would be welcomed as liberators - although he hadn't yet declared that the Iraq insurgency was in its "last throes" - was widely admired for his "gravitas."

A year ago, Howard Dean - who was among the very few prominent figures to question Colin Powell's prewar presentation to the United Nations, and who warned, while hawks were still celebrating the fall of Baghdad, that the occupation of Iraq would be much more difficult than the initial invasion - was considered flaky and unsound.

A year ago, it was clear that before the Iraq war, the administration suppressed information suggesting that Iraq was not, in fact, trying to build nuclear weapons.

Yet few people in Washington or in the news media were willing to say that the nation was deliberately misled into war until polls showed that most Americans already believed it.

A year ago, the Washington establishment treated Ayad Allawi as if he were Nelson Mandela. Mr. Allawi's triumphant tour of Washington, back in September 2004, provided a crucial boost to the Bush-Cheney campaign.

So did his claim that the insurgents were "desperate." But Mr. Allawi turned out to be another Ahmad Chalabi, a hero of Washington conference rooms and cocktail parties who had few supporters where it mattered, in Iraq.

A year ago, when everyone respectable agreed that we must "stay the course," only a handful of war critics suggested that the U.S. presence in Iraq might be making the violence worse, not better.

It would have been hard to imagine the top U.S. commander in Iraq saying, as Gen. George Casey recently did, that a smaller foreign force is better "because it doesn't feed the notion of occupation."

A year ago, Mr. Bush hadn't yet openly reneged on Scott McClellan's 2003 pledge that "if anyone in this administration was involved" in the leaking of Valerie Plame's identity, that person "would no longer be in this administration." Of course, some suspect that Mr. Bush has always known who was involved.

A year ago, we didn't know that Mr. Bush was lying, or at least being deceptive, when he said at an April 2004 event promoting the Patriot Act that "a wiretap requires a court order. ...When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so.

"It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution."

A year ago, most Americans thought Mr. Bush was honest.

A year ago, we didn't know for sure that almost all the politicians and pundits who thundered, during the Lewinsky affair, that even the president isn't above the law have changed their minds. But now we know when it comes to presidents who break the law, it's O.K. if you're a Republican.

After the War

by Howard Zinn
January, 2006 issue of The Progressive

The war against Iraq, the assault on its people, the occupation of its cities, will come to an end, sooner or later. The process has already begun. The first signs of mutiny are appearing in Congress. The first editorials calling for withdrawal from Iraq are beginning to appear in the press. The anti-war movement has been growing, slowly but persistently, all over the country.

Public opinion polls now show the country decisively against the war and the Bush Administration. The harsh realities have become visible. The troops will have to come home.

And while we work with increased determination to make this happen, should we not think beyond this war? Should we begin to think, even before this shameful war is over, about ending our addiction to massive violence and instead using the enormous wealth of our country for human needs? That is, should we begin to speak about ending war—not just this war or that war, but war itself? Perhaps the time has come to bring an end to war, and turn the human race onto a path of health and healing.

A group of internationally known figures, celebrated both for their talent and their dedication to human rights (Gino Strada, Paul Farmer, Kurt Vonnegut, Nadine Gordimer, Eduardo Galeano, and others), will soon launch a worldwide campaign to enlist tens of millions of people in a movement for the renunciation of war, hoping to reach the point where governments, facing popular resistance, will find it difficult or impossible to wage war.

There is a persistent argument against such a possibility, which I have heard from people on all parts of the political spectrum: We will never do away with war because it comes out of human nature. The most compelling counter to that claim is in history: We don’t find people spontaneously rushing to make war on others. What we find, rather, is that governments must make the most strenuous efforts to mobilize populations for war. They must entice soldiers with promises of money, education, must hold out to young people whose chances in life look very poor that here is an opportunity to attain respect and status. And if those enticements don’t work, governments must use coercion: They must conscript young people, force them into military service, threaten them with prison if they do not comply.

Furthermore, the government must persuade young people and their families that though the soldier may die, though he or she may lose arms or legs, or become blind, that it is all for a noble cause, for God, for country.

When you look at the endless series of wars of this century you do not find a public demanding war, but rather resisting it, until citizens are bombarded with exhortations that appeal, not to a killer instinct, but to a desire to do good, to spread democracy or liberty or overthrow a tyrant.

Woodrow Wilson found a citizenry so reluctant to enter the First World War that he had to pummel the nation with propaganda and imprison dissenters in order to get the country to join the butchery going on in Europe.

In the Second World War, there was indeed a strong moral imperative, which still resonates among most people in this country and which maintains the reputation of World War II as “the good war.” There was a need to defeat the monstrosity of fascism. It was that belief that drove me to enlist in the Air Force and fly bombing missions over Europe.

Only after the war did I begin to question the purity of the moral crusade. Dropping bombs from five miles high, I had seen no human beings, heard no screams, seen no children dismembered. But now I had to think about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the firebombings of Tokyo and Dresden, the deaths of 600,000 civilians in Japan, and a similar number in Germany.

I came to a conclusion about the psychology of myself and other warriors: Once we decided, at the start, that our side was the good side and the other side was evil, once we had made that simple and simplistic calculation, we did not have to think anymore. Then we could commit unspeakable crimes and it was all right.

I began to think about the motives of the Western powers and Stalinist Russia and wondered if they cared as much about fascism as about retaining their own empires, their own power, and if that was why they had military priorities higher than bombing the rail lines leading to Auschwitz. Six million Jews were killed in the death camps (allowed to be killed?). Only 60,000 were saved by the war—1 percent.

A gunner on another crew, a reader of history with whom I had become friends, said to me one day: “You know this is an imperialist war. The fascists are evil. But our side is not much better.” I could not accept his statement at the time, but it stuck with me.

War, I decided, creates, insidiously, a common morality for all sides. It poisons everyone who is engaged in it, however different they are in many ways, turns them into killers and torturers, as we are seeing now. It pretends to be concerned with toppling tyrants, and may in fact do so, but the people it kills are the victims of the tyrants. It appears to cleanse the world of evil, but that does not last, because its very nature spawns more evil. Wars, like violence in general, I concluded, is a drug. It gives a quick high, the thrill of victory, but that wears off and then comes despair.

I acknowledge the possibility of humanitarian intervention to prevent atrocities, as in Rwanda. But war, defined as the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of people, must be resisted.

Whatever can be said about World War II, understanding its complexity, the situations that followed—Korea, Vietnam—were so far from the kind of threat that Germany and Japan had posed to the world that those wars could be justified only by drawing on the glow of “the good war.” A hysteria about communism led to McCarthyism at home and military interventions in Asia and Latin America—overt and covert—justified by a “Soviet threat” that was exaggerated just enough to mobilize the people for war.

Vietnam, however, proved to be a sobering experience, in which the American public, over a period of several years, began to see through the lies that had been told to justify all that bloodshed. The United States was forced to withdraw from Vietnam, and the world didn’t come to an end. One half of one tiny country in Southeast Asia was now joined to its communist other half, and 58,000 American lives and millions of Vietnamese lives had been expended to prevent that. A majority of Americans had come to oppose that war, which had provoked the largest anti-war movement in the nation’s history.

The war in Vietnam ended with a public fed up with war. I believe that the American people, once the fog of propaganda had dissipated, had come back to a more natural state. Public opinion polls showed that people in the United States were opposed to send troops anywhere in the world, for any reason.

The Establishment was alarmed. The government set out deliberately to overcome what it called “the Vietnam syndrome.” Opposition to military interventions abroad was a sickness, to be cured. And so they would wean the American public away from its unhealthy attitude, by tighter control of information, by avoiding a draft, and by engaging in short, swift wars over weak opponents (Grenada, Panama, Iraq), which didn’t give the public time to develop an anti-war movement.

I would argue that the end of the Vietnam War enabled the people of the United States to shake the “war syndrome,” a disease not natural to the human body. But they could be infected once again, and September 11 gave the government that opportunity. Terrorism became the justification for war, but war is itself terrorism, breeding rage and hate, as we are seeing now.

The war in Iraq has revealed the hypocrisy of the “war on terrorism.” And the government of the United States, indeed governments everywhere, are becoming exposed as untrustworthy: that is, not to be entrusted with the safety of human beings, or the safety of the planet, or the guarding of its air, its water, its natural wealth, or the curing of poverty and disease, or coping with the alarming growth of natural disasters that plague so many of the six billion people on Earth.

I don’t believe that our government will be able to do once more what it did after Vietnam—prepare the population for still another plunge into violence and dishonor. It seems to me that when the war in Iraq ends, and the war syndrome heals, that there will be a great opportunity to make that healing permanent.

My hope is that the memory of death and disgrace will be so intense that the people of the United States will be able to listen to a message that the rest of the world, sobered by wars without end, can also understand: that war itself is the enemy of the human race.

Governments will resist this message. But their power is dependent on the obedience of the citizenry. When that is withdrawn, governments are helpless. We have seen this again and again in history.

The abolition of war has become not only desirable but absolutely necessary if the planet is to be saved. It is an idea whose time has come.

Howard Zinn is the co-author, with Anthony Arnove, of “Voices of a People’s History of the United States.”

A Pentagon of Loyalists and Enforcers

Rumsfeld Versus the Military
By RALPH NADER
CounterPunch
December 31, 2005

Civilian control over the military is a long established democratic tradition in our country. It was the military that was believed by our founding fathers to be susceptible to plunging our country into foreign adventure. Presently, however, the boondoggles, crimes and recklessness of draft-dodging George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and former Air Force pilot, Donald Rumsfeld, together with their draft-dodging neo-con associates, have turned this expectation upside down. The civilians are the war-mongers.

Probably the least told story of the Iraq war-quagmire is the extent to which the Pentagon military, especially the U.S. Army brass, disagrees with and despises these civilian superiors. Donald Rumsfeld, one of the most disliked of the Secretaries of Defense, has spent much energy making sure that high level dissent in the military is muzzled and overlayered by his loyalists.

Just last week Rumsfeld demoted three military service chiefs in the Pentagon hierarchy and replaced them with three loyalists who previously worked for his buddy Dick Cheney.

Right from the beginning the U.S. Army brass opposed the invasion of Iraq for both military and strategic reasons. They believed such an attack would absorb massive human and material resources that would divert from the chase after the 9/11 terrorists and the resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. They disagreed with the paucity of soldiers that Bush/Cheney and Rumsfeld were to send there. They were appalled by the lack of post-war planning directives by the Administration.

At the 4 star general level, the Army brass knew Saddam Hussein was a tottering dictator, embargoed, surrounded and contained by the U.S., Britain, Turkey, and Israel, and unable to field an army equipped with minimum loyalty and equipment. They also knew that going to Iraq would be the gigantic equivalent of batting a large bee hive. To this day Army commanders in Iraq, most recently General George Casey, recognize that the U.S. military occupation is a magnet for more and more terrorists from inside and outside Iraq. CIA Director Porter Goss was more explicit before Congress last February testifying that occupied Iraq is a recruiting and training ground for more terrorists who will return to their countries for more disruption.

When Colin Powell was at the Pentagon, he developed what came to be known as the Powell Doctrine-know clearly what your military and political objectives are, follow up with overwhelming force and have a clear exit plan. Bush/Cheney, Rumsfeld violated this Doctrine. Their only objective was to topple their former ally, in the Eighties, Saddam Hussein. After that, they were clueless and surprised by the insurgency.

To top Army officers, the worst of all worlds is Iraq. Their Chief of Staff, General Eric Shinseki, after testifying before Congress about the need for over 300,000 soldiers for any such invasion, found his retirement accelerated. Draft-dodger Paul Wolfowitz, then number two in the Pentagon, rejected his estimate and recommended less than half that number.

Retired high military officers, diplomats and intelligence officials, with good sources inside the Department of Defense, say that the military is furious with Bush/Cheney. The latter orders torture with thinly veiled instructions and dubious legal memos and when disclosed, as at Abu Gharib, the Army takes the rap to its reputation.

Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld start these so-called commando groups, which included ex-Saddam toughs, and their predictable atrocities against young Sunni men becomes the U.S. Army's headache to restrain. The idea behind these outlaw, death squads, reported/ The/ /New York Times Magazine/ last year, was to enable summary destruction of arbitrary 'suspects' and terrorization of the Sunni population. The Army kept telling Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld that such Administration-approved mayhem was backfiring and fueling more hatred by the Sunnis against the U.S., its troops, and these hired gangs.

The Administration finally responded by telling the Army to assign more men to advise and monitor these gangs which the U.S. is equipping and paying.

Other sources of irritation within the military is Bush/Cheney making sure that the fallen soldiers and the injured soldiers are returned in stealth fashion at Dover Air Force base and Andrews Air Force base outside of Washington, D.C. Bush/Cheney do this for political reasons, knowing opposition to the war increases as U.S. casualties mount.

Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld still refuse to count officially U.S. soldiers who are injured outside a combat situation, again for political reasons. This keeps the official injury count at about one third of the real total. Career Army officers do not like their solders being used this way.

The Army is also upset over the loss of some of their senior officers and non-commissioned officers to the giant corporate contractors operating in this cost-plus environment of maximum profit for less than maximum service. These companies are hiring away these experienced soldiers with offers that double or triple their salaries to do the very privatized jobs which the Army used to do for itself. In a tight skilled manpower situation, the Army finds this drain to be undermining its mission.

On the surface, Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld are heavy on their photo opportunities with the troops, heavy with the flattery that these political tricksters heap on the soldiers and alert to any potential public dissent.

There was a recent slip up though. At a Pentagon news conference, November 29^th , a reporter asked General Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, what should American soldiers in Iraq do if they witness Iraqi security forces abusing prisoners. The General's reply: "It is absolutely the responsibility of every U.S. service member, if they see inhumane treatment being conducted, to intervene and stop it."

Standing next to him, the calculating conniver, Donald Rumsfeld tried to distort the words of the forthright Pace by saying that American soldiers only had an obligation to report any mistreatment.

In a nutshell, that is the difference between the Pentagon military and their arrogant civilian superiors who have disrespected their judgment and ordered them to shut up and follow unlawful policies. Meanwhile the quagmire bleeding Iraq continues in its way to bleed America. Speak up military. Remember the Nuremberg principles.

Polarization in Iraqi military could lead to civil war, analysts say

By Tom Lasseter
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Dec. 30, 2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq - By allowing Iraq's new military to be organized largely along ethnic and religious lines, the United States may inadvertently be deepening the divisions among the country's Kurdish north, Shiite Muslim south and Sunni Muslim Arab west and leaving the sects to fight over the heart of the country.

The creation of a national army to help unify and pacify Iraq is key to U.S. plans to begin significant withdrawals of American troops from Iraq in 2006, and President Bush and other top officials frequently cite the growing number of trained Iraqi troops as evidence of progress.

Iraqi officials and political leaders, however, said the dominance of Shiite and Kurdish militia members in many Iraqi army units had given Sunni insurgents a broader base of support and turned more Sunnis against the U.S. effort in Iraq.

The Sunnis "see them (insurgent fighters) as the only shield that can save them from what they think are official, militia-linked security forces," said Saleem Abdul Kareem, a political analyst at Karbala University in southern Iraq.

Thiab Abdul Hadi, a city council member in the western Sunni city of Fallujah, said that sentiment was held by most people in his town.

"It is our duty to resist the (American) occupation because this occupier helped the militias enter our country," Hadi said. "The resistance is fighting the Americans because they back these militias."

The polarization of the Iraqi army began during the summer of 2003, when American officials in Baghdad disbanded it and left more than 200,000 troops, many of them Sunnis, out of work.

The Sunnis, who'd dominated the officer corps under Saddam Hussein's Baath party, were replaced largely by Shiites and Kurds, many of them former members of religious or ethnic militias. Some militia units were transplanted nearly wholesale into the new army.

The perception that different army units are tools of Shiite or Kurdish ambitions has been reinforced during the past two years as U.S. troops conducting offensives in western Iraq and in Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad teamed up with Iraqi soldiers and Interior Ministry police commandos who were mostly Shiites or Kurds.

American military commanders say the ranks of the Iraqi army are roughly representative of the national population - about 60 percent Shiite, 20 percent Sunni and 15 to 20 percent Kurdish - but the Iraqi army's top spokesman confirmed this week that a disproportionate number of the soldiers are Shiites.

"The majority of soldiers are from the south and they are Shiite," said Maj. Gen. Salih Sarhan, a Shiite himself, who added that intimidation from Abu Musab al Zarqawi, an ally of al-Qaida, and others has discouraged Sunnis from signing up. "In the areas where the majority of people are Sunni we would like to have them, but they don't want to join because of threats from terrorists like Zarqawi and the Baathists."

Nearly all the new army's recruits have come from southern Shiite cities such as Basra and Nasiriyah where unemployment is high, Sarhan said.

Those cities, and many others like them, are home to thousands of Shiites who are loyal to militias such as the Badr Organization, the armed wing of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of Iraq's leading Shiite political parties. To make matters worse, Badr and other Shiite and Kurdish militias have been supported by Iran, the archenemy of Iraq's Sunnis.

Badr also has infiltrated the intelligence sections of the Interior Ministry and many of its police commando units in Baghdad, where Sunni groups have documented dozens of cases in which uniformed men have raided Sunni neighborhoods and detained men who've later been found dead.

Earlier in December, a senior U.S. military officer in Baghdad said dismantling the militias wouldn't be easy and that doing it would be up to the Iraqi government.

"The question is how do they disband this organization," said the officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. "There's the exact same danger with precipitously disbanding them like we did the Iraqi army ... where will they all go? What will they do when you take their jobs from them?"

For now, the Shiites and Kurds dominate the nation's army.

In the south, the army's 8th and 10th divisions are almost entirely Shiite, Sarhan said. In the northern Kurdish areas, the 2nd and 4th divisions are overwhelmingly Kurdish. The 3rd Division is also in the north, and its units in Kurdish territory are mostly Kurds, though Iraqi commanders said the units in Sunni Arab areas had larger percentages of Arabs.

Sarhan said the two army divisions in Baghdad were more evenly split. But when a Knight Ridder reporter visited a brigade of one of those divisions earlier this year, the soldiers were almost all Shiites, and many of them spoke of exacting violent revenge on the Sunni population.

Similar ethnic and religious polarization virtually destroyed Lebanon's armed forces more than two decades ago, and it isn't just Sunnis who are worried about the divide in Iraq's armed forces.

Watching an Iraqi army patrol pass his cell phone shop recently in Baghdad's Shiite neighborhood of Kadhemiya, Shifa Hamad shook his head. Several of the trucks had Shiite religious stickers on their windshields.

"I don't want sectarianism in our army; this will lead us to a crossroads and, God forbid, there could be civil war," said Hamad, who's also a Shiite. "If the government continues to do this, the division will continue and the north and the south could break away from the country."

During a Knight Ridder interview with the Iraqi general who commands the army's 4th Division in the northern city of Mosul, U.S. Col. Mike Cloy sat on a sofa and, lighting a Romeo and Juliet cigar, listened to the conversation. Cloy was visiting the general as part of his duties with the American military assistance team assigned to the 4th Division.

Looking over at Cloy, Maj. Gen. Jamal Khalid, a Kurd, chose his words carefully. The general said exactly what Cloy wanted to hear.

"We do not keep militias inside the Iraqi army," Khalid said. "We as the army take nobody's side. We take the government's side."

Asked if he had any worries about the presence of Kurdish militiamen in the Iraqi army, Cloy said, "I have no concerns in that regard."

"You don't ever hear any of that discussion amongst the ranks," said Cloy, who's from Columbia, S.C. "I am impressed with the focus the leadership and the soldiers have ... they are not, from what I can tell, concerned with the larger politics."

Afterward, Cloy met with several of Khalid's brigade commanders.

On the ride out of Mosul in a convoy of sport utility vehicles, one of them, Brig. Gen. Abdullah Ramadan, laughed when he was asked about the presence of the Kurdish militia - the Peshmerga - in the Iraqi army.

"I am a Kurd and I have a long history with the Peshmerga," said Ramadan, who commands an army brigade in the northern city of Irbil, where he was formerly the deputy commander of a Peshmerga brigade. "My loyalty is to the ... Peshmerga."

Forceful Evacuation Of Thousands Of Sudanese Refugees

46 Guantanamo Detainees Join Hunger Strike

US says increase since Christmas brings total to 84
By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff
Boston Globe
December 30, 2005

WASHINGTON -- The US military said yesterday that a long-running hunger strike among detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison underwent a ''very significant increase" starting on Christmas Day, more than doubling the number of prisoners who are protesting their indefinite detention without trial by refusing to eat.

A bloc of 46 prisoners began refusing meals on Dec. 25, the military said, bringing the total number of participants in the hunger strike to 84.

A spokesman at the base said yesterday that 32 of the longer-term strikers have been hospitalized and are being force-fed through nasal tubes and the rest are under close medical observation.

''The numbers had more or less stayed at the same levels -- in the mid to high 30s -- for several weeks," said Army Lieutenant Colonel Jeremy Martin, a spokesman for the prison. ''Then we had this very significant increase in the number of hunger strikers all of a sudden."

The abrupt surge renewed attention to a simmering protest among a portion of the roughly 500 prisoners the military is holding at its Navy base in Cuba.

Most of the prisoners were arrested in Afghanistan or Pakistan on suspicion of being supporters of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and they have been held for four years without trials.

Attorneys for the prisoners reported over the summer that between 100 and 200 detainees had launched a hunger strike in July to protest their continued detention without trial and their living conditions.

Officials persuaded the detainees to start eating again at the end of that month after promising to upgrade their conditions, such as providing more bottled drinking water.

But the hunger strike resumed on Aug. 8, amid new tensions over rumors that a guard had manhandled a prisoner.

Attorneys who visited the detainees have said their clients are willing to die if they do not receive an independent hearing to determine whether they are terrorists. Military policy is to force-feed people on hunger strikes.

Since August, Martin said in a telephone interview, the number of detainees refusing meals has fluctuated between 131 at its peak and around two dozen. A detainee must refuse nine consecutive meals for the military to consider him as being on a hunger strike.

Martin said he did not know what might have triggered the 46 prisoners to join the hunger strike on Dec. 25.

In its statement, the military said that refusing meals ''is consistent with Al Qaeda training and reflects detainee attempts to elicit media attention and bring pressure on the United States government to release them."

Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, a volunteer attorney who represents several Bahraini detainees who were arrested in Pakistan, said he had no information about the Christmas Day protest.

In general, he said, the detainees use the tactic out of desperation.

''At this point, none of this surprises me, considering the conditions that people are held under and the indefinite nature of their detention," he said. ''If at a particular time, more detainees choose to protest in what they see as the only effective manner, that seems consistent with a general sense of despair and frustration and hopelessness."

Just before the latest strike, Congress approved a defense appropriations bill with a provision that will curtail the Guantanamo Bay detainees' ability to challenge their imprisonment and their prison conditions in federal court.

About 160 detainees have sued the government since the Supreme Court ruled in June 2004 that the Guantanamo prison is under the jurisdiction of civilian courts.

Lawyers for the detainees say they expect the White House to ask the courts to throw out the lawsuits based on the new rules Congress approved, setting up a new series of court battles.

Although the courts have not ordered the military to release any detainees, federal judges have held several hearings on detainee treatment that provided some oversight to the prison.

In October, lawyers for detainees told a judge that medics tried to persuade those on a hunger strike to start eating on their own by force-feeding them with unusually large feeding tubes inserted through their noses -- without painkillers.

In addition, another federal judge ruled earlier this month that it was illegal for the Bush administration to continue imprisoning several Chinese Muslims at the base, although the judge also said he was powerless to order the military to let the men go.

A military tribunal had determined nine months earlier that the Chinese Muslims were not enemy combatants and should be released.

But because China has a history of persecuting Muslims, US law forbids the military from repatriating them, and no other country has been willing to take the men in.

U.S. Oil Firms Reach Deal With Libya

By Jeffrey Ball
Wall Street Journal
December 30, 2005

Three U.S. oil companies said they will pay a total of $1.83 billion to Libya's national oil company to resume producing oil there, the latest sign of a warming of relations between the U.S. and the North African nation.

ConocoPhillips, Marathon Oil Corp. and Amerada Hess Corp. said they reached an agreement with Libya to resume operations there for the first time since 1986, when the U.S. imposed sanctions on the country and forced the oil companies to abandon their production.

The announcement marks the latest move into the country for U.S. oil companies, at a time when the world's best remaining energy reserves are located in countries that are politically turbulent or closed to Western firms. Over the course of this year, Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and Occidental Petroleum Corp., in addition to Amerada Hess, have won bids for exploration licenses in Libya's first oil and natural-gas licensing rounds since sanctions against the country were lifted last year.

Yesterday's announcement means Conoco, Marathon and Amerada Hess are free to resume production in an area that produces about 350,000 barrels of oil per day and is believed to hold big additional stores of oil and natural gas. Under the deal, Conoco and Marathon each will hold about a 16% interest in the project, Amerada will hold an 8% interest, and Libyan National Oil Corp. will hold the remaining 59%.

Marathon, based in Houston, said it expects its re-entry to Libya to add 40,000 to 45,000 barrels per day of production during 2006. It said it also expects the move to add more than 160 million barrels of oil equivalent to its proven reserves.

Amerada Hess, based in New York, said the re-entry will add 20,000 to 25,000 barrels per day of production, and more than 85 million barrels of oil equivalent to proven reserves.

Conoco, based in Houston, said the move will add about 45,000 barrels per day of production. It said it doesn't disclose reserve levels in individual countries.

No special permissions from the U.S. government were needed for yesterday's announced deal. Although the White House has lifted all sanctions on nonmilitary trade, Libya remains on the U.S. terrorism list. That means companies are either banned or restricted from selling military equipment and so-called dual-use items with potential military applications.

The production region to which the companies are returning encompasses nearly 13 million acres in Libya's Sirte Basin. Since the U.S. oil companies -- which operated in the area as a joint venture called the Oasis group -- were forced to abandon the region nearly two decades ago, their assets have been in escrow and the area has been operated by Waha Oil Co., a unit of Libyan National Oil Corp.

Under the agreement, the three companies' licenses will be extended for an additional 25 years. In addition to getting the majority of the oil, Libyan National Oil Corp. will get a payment from the three companies totaling $1.3 billion, and an additional payment of $530 million to cover costs that the Libyan company incurred since 1986 in keeping up the fields.

Of the $1.3 billion, Conoco and Marathon each will pay $520 million and Amerada Hess will pay $260 million. Of the $530 million payment, Conoco and Marathon each will pay $212 million and Amerada Hess will pay $106 million.

Libya has been moving toward improved relations with the West since the late 1990s. The rapprochement has been particularly rapid over the past two years. In summer 2003, Libya accepted blame for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 and agreed to compensate relatives of the victims. That led the United Nations to lift its sanctions, but the U.S. demanded that Libya abandon its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, a step Libya took in December 2003. Two months later, the White House announced it was giving U.S. companies that still held oil concessions in Libya permission to start negotiating their return to the country, subject to "further U.S. approval for implementation." Later in 2004, the U.S. formally lifted sanctions, clearing the way for a return by the U.S. companies.

Following a Libyan bid round this past January in which Occidental, Chevron and Amerada Hess, among others, won licenses, Libya announced a second round of exploration-license winners in October. Among them: Exxon and Italy's Eni SpA.

Yesterday, Conoco, Marathon and Amerada Hess all said in statements that they were pleased with the agreement and expressed hope that they would find additional stores of oil and gas in the region.

Libya, a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, has said it hopes to boost its oil-production capacity to three million barrels a day by the end of the decade. Years of sanctions and underinvestment have pushed production down well below the country's 1970 peak of 3.3 million barrels a day. Libya had 36 billion barrels of proved oil reserves -- the world's eighth largest -- and 45.5 trillion cubic feet of natural-gas reserves as of January 2005.

HARRIS POLL: Many Americans Still Believe Hussein Had Links to al Qaeda

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
December 29, 2005

Sizeable minorities of Americans still believe Saddam Hussein had "strong links to al Qaeda," a Harris Interactive poll shows, though the number has fallen substantially this year.

About 22% of U.S. adults believe Mr. Hussein helped plan 9/11, the poll shows, and 26% believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded. Another 24% believe several of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqis, according to the online poll of 1,961 adults.

However, all of these beliefs have declined since February of this year, when 64% of those polled believed Mr. Hussein had strong links to al Qaeda and 46% said Mr. Hussein helped plan 9/11. At that time, more than a third said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and 44% said several of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqis.

Currently, 56% of adults believe Iraqis are better off now than they were under Mr. Hussein, down from 76% in February. Nearly half of those polled say they believe Iraq, under Mr. Hussein, was a threat to U.S. security, down from 61% in February.

Uranium Suspected in Iraq Merc's Death

United Press International (UPI)
December 29, 2005

BAGHDAD - The death of a Peruvian security guard who had worked in Iraq may have been caused by exposure to depleted uranium.

Wilder Gutierrez Rubio, 38, died a few hours after arriving in Lima, Peru, on Dec. 6. Days before, he had been diagnosed with severe leukemia at Ibn Sina Hospital in Baghdad and immediately flown back to his home country, World Socialist Web Site.Org reported Wednesday.

WSWS.org said Gutierrez was part of a 200-man Peruvian contingent sent to Iraq in early October to provide security for Baghdad's Green Zone. It is widely suspected in Peru that Gutierrez's leukemia was the result of exposure to high levels of uranium in Iraq, the site said.

Gutierrez was one of more than 1,000 Latin Americans recruited by U.S. private security contractors to work in different countries.

Since the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, about 20,000 people have been hired to work as private security contractors, WSWS.org said. This figure represented one private security guard for every seven uniformed American soldiers in these regions. In all, $30 billion was spent by the U.S. Government on private security contractors in 2004, the Web site said.

Let's Stop a US/Israeli War on Iran

It's More Important Than Halting Nuclear Proliferation
By BILL and KATHLEEN CHRISTISON
Former CIA analysts
CounterPunch
December 29, 2005

The peace movements of the entire world should be in crisis mode right now, working non-stop to prevent the U.S. and Israel from starting a war against Iran. (See the James Petras article in CounterPunch on December 24, 2005 titled Iran in the Crosshairs for the best summary of the present situation.) The reckless and unnecessary dangers arising from such a war are so obvious that one wonders why normal political forces in the two aggressor countries -- both of whom love to glorify themselves as democracies -- would not prevent such a war from happening.

But the "normal political forces" in both the U.S. and Israel have become badly distorted. Democracy has been seriously undermined in both. The cowboy-like personalities and aggressive tendencies of both countries' leaders tend to feed on each other. Domestic political difficulties and coming elections in both countries probably add to the macho inclination of the ruling elites to use force to remove any problems facing them. The glue binding these tendencies together is the ever-strengthening institutional link between defense establishments and military-industrial complexes in both countries, as well as, in the U.S, the growing power and influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) over both major political parties. The entire mix increases the probability, against all common sense, that this absurd war will actually happen.

Nothing else more dangerous to the world, to the Middle East, to the oppressed Palestinians, or to the true interests of the United States is happening today -- anywhere. Americans who do not want an eruption of a new world war, started by our own government, ought to be strongly lobbying the Bush administration and all members of Congress against supporting any military action by the U.S. and Israel against Iran. Globally, people who oppose such a war should be lobbying their own governments in similar fashion.

Background

It is worthwhile to discuss briefly the broader context of why a war with Iran today seems a real possibility. During his all-out public relations effort in late 2005 to regain support for his policies in the Middle East, Bush has made it clear that he plans to continue his drive for complete victory in the "War on Terrorism," without making significant changes in his own, very aggressive, foreign policies. Those policies will make this planet a less safe, more unjust place to live for most people around the world, as well as for most of us living in the U.S. The special relationship between the U.S. and Israel has long played an important role in these aggressive policies.

Outside the United States, it is widely understood that one of the true motives -- not the exclusive motive but a real and significant one -- behind the Bush administration's 2003 invasion of Iraq was the desire of the neocons in Washington to conquer Iraq in order to benefit Israel. Although a few of the big-name neocons (Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Lewis "Scooter" Libby) have left high-visibility positions for various reasons, many remain, and it is clear that Bush himself, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice have taken as their own the main tenets of neocon beliefs.

Inside the U.S., on the other hand, the pressure of the neocons for war on Israel's behalf, or any hint that Bush himself participates in that pressure, is hardly ever mentioned. This taboo on discussing the Israeli link to the war in Iraq, enforced by the threat of being labeled anti-Semitic, introduces major distortions into practically every effort to examine and change policies that are causing massive hatred of the U.S. around the world.

But right now, three of the long-existing "problems" in the Middle East (i.e., situations that have been made problems largely by our own actions) have reached critical stages that may, if Washington's policies do not change quite quickly, result in our losing even the remnants of stability and peace that remain in that region today. The world could face instead nuclear warfare or, at a minimum, a practically unending "clash of civilizations" and conventional warfare at a much higher level than exists now. The first, and the most important right now, of the three problems is the main subject of this article: the problem that arises from the determined U.S. and Israeli policy of preventing Iran from ever acquiring nuclear weapons. The second and third problems, also situations brought on by the U.S. itself, have to do with Syria and the Palestinians. In the long run, they are also very important, but they are less urgent for now. These other problems will be considered briefly at the end of this article.

As was the case with the U.S. invasion of Iraq, one of the underlying causes of all these "problems" in the Middle East has been the success of the neocons in persuading the Bush administration to support aggressively the goals of the Israeli government throughout the area. And here again, the fear of being charged with anti-Semitism causes many Americans quietly to accept the taboo on discussing the Israeli link to the Bush administration's foreign policies. This is an absurd situation. Criticizing Israeli (or U.S.) policies and urging specific changes in those policies is not anti-Semitic (or anti-American). The arrogance of anyone who suggests the contrary is appalling. The following paragraphs contain suggestions on how we should work to remedy those aspects of this absurdity that bear on Iran and nuclear weapons.

What should be done to change U.S. policy on Iran's nuclear program?

First of all, don't fall into the trap of accepting Iran's public claims that it is not attempting to acquire nuclear weapons. Many of the nations that now have such weapons made similar claims while they were developing the weapons. Israel did so throughout the first half of the 1960s, engaging in elaborate subterfuges even when dealing with U.S. inspectors who occasionally came looking for weapons work. The Israeli claims were so much garbage (see Israeli author Avner Cohen's book, Israel and the Bomb). Then, after it acquired its first nuclear explosive device almost 40 years ago now, Israel simply adopted a well publicized policy of ambiguity and stopped talking publicly about whether it had any weapons. India and Pakistan also both claimed not to be working on weapons when in fact they were. Their claims were garbage too, which they quickly threw away once they joined the nuclear club and possessed their own deterrent. Iran almost certainly intends to do the same, and its public claims to the contrary are also almost certainly worthless.

The principal point to start with is that, unless the U.S. and Israel (and other nations as well) all agree to work seriously toward eliminating their own nuclear weapons, any Iranian government will consider that it has as much right as the rest of us to such weapons. Essentially, even if Iran, under pressure, were to sign new agreements, now or in the future, to forgo nuclear weapons, the new agreements would be meaningless unless the U.S., Israel, and other nuclear nations ended their own monumental hypocrisy of insisting that they can keep and expand their nuclear arsenals, while non-nuclear nations may not acquire such arsenals. In the eyes of most Muslims around the world and many other people too, Iran, with a population of close to 70 million, has at least as much right as Israel, with a population less than one-tenth as large, to have nuclear weapons

Most supporters of the global peace movements by definition oppose the solving of international problems through warfare, and they also oppose the further proliferation of nuclear weapons. Most are also aware that the critical bargain reached in the 1970 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) -- the bargain that made the treaty possible -- was a trade-off: the acceptance of continued non-nuclear-weapons status by states without those weapons, in return for the simultaneous agreement by states possessing nuclear weapons to pursue good-faith negotiations on nuclear, and complete and general, disarmament. This latter provision had no teeth, and certainly many "realists" in the U.S. foreign policy establishment expected that it would not and could not be enforced. Nevertheless, the existence of this provision was necessary to the NPT's ratification by numerous countries, and it gives any state dissatisfied with progress toward nuclear disarmament an excuse to abrogate or ignore the treaty.

Most people will not bother to make the niceties of international law an issue in this matter, but the question of which is more important, stopping the further proliferation of nuclear weapons to Iran or stopping our own side from instigating a war against Iran, is vital. The answer should be clear: The single most urgent objective we should have right now is to prevent a war, possibly nuclear, from being started by the U.S. and/or Israel against Iran. To repeat, such a war would be disastrous, and we should be doing whatever we can, with the highest possible priority, to prevent it from ever happening.

Every peace activist on the globe ought to be in the streets and elsewhere lobbying in support of something very simple: do not attack Iran, even if this means allowing Iran to develop its own nuclear weapons. We should put out the message that it is simply not worth a war, with consequences impossible to foresee, to prevent Iran from obtaining such weapons. From 1945 until we invaded Iraq in 2003, we never once took military action to prevent other nations from developing nuclear weapons. We relied instead on deterrence and containment (to prevent other nations from using such weapons after they had been developed). These may not be perfect policies, but they have a successful track record and can probably be applied more successfully than other policies to subnational groups as well as nation-states. The point is that these are still better policies than the recklessness of preemption, and we should use these policies in lobbying against U.S involvement of any kind in military actions or coup attempts against Iran. We should also very definitely support an effort to tie future U.S. aid to Israel to Israel's not engaging in military action against Iran.

We are talking here about supporting (by our silence), or opposing (by vociferous lobbying), what could become major, serious warfare -- warfare that could easily become global, and also could easily cause greater difficulties for the peoples of the Middle East than any they have yet faced from U.S. policies. With an election campaign intensifying the political volatilities of Israeli politics, with possibly fast-moving new uncertainties and vulnerabilities arising among both Republicans and Democrats jousting for advantage in a U.S. election year, and with a new, inexperienced president in Iran who, so far at least, believes aggressive speech strengthens his political position, the dangers in the situation are evident. As each week passes and no movement occurs anywhere -- particularly in Washington -- to reduce tensions by changing policies, the risk grows of a mistake that will lead to new hostilities, and possibly nuclear warfare. How many Iranians might we and the Israelis kill? How many Israelis might die? How many Americans?

How should the U.S. change its policies with respect to Syria?

The issues of Syria and Palestine are related to U.S. policy toward Iran. Policy on Syria today is to put constant pressure on that country's ruler, Bashar al-Assad, with the ultimate objective of ousting and replacing him with someone (not yet named by the Americans) who would be even more subservient to U.S. and Israeli desires. Assad himself has moved a considerable way toward subservience, giving the U.S. considerable help on intelligence matters and accepting certain U.S. prisoners "rendered" to his regime for purposes of torture, but the U.S., unsatisfied, keeps intensifying the pressure. The U.S. and Israel have succeeded in making it more difficult for Syria to provide support for the Palestinian resistance against Israel's occupation, but Damascus still provides some refuge for Hezbollah personnel.

The recent assassinations of anti-Syrian leaders in Lebanon have provided new opportunities for the Bush administration to ratchet up its criticism of Syria still further, although the evidence of Syrian involvement in the assassinations is weak. It is at least possible that other groups, such as the Israel's Mossad or the CIA, are responsible.

Whatever the truth behind events in Lebanon, the events themselves could offer a U.S. president who is in some trouble at home the possibility of a low-cost, low-risk foreign policy victory if he could pull off, perhaps with the help of Mossad, a quick covert action that ousted Assad. Act II of a grand show might then proceed -- another U.S. occupation installed, another nation in the Middle East "democratized," elections held a year or two later and a puppet government set up, step-by-step takeovers of the economy implemented by U.S. and Israeli interests, further isolation of the Palestinians from other Arabs -- all in all, another great victory for the U.S-Israeli partnership.

Or so Bush, at least, might believe. In reality, the situation might turn into another morass like Iraq. But months might pass and the U.S. congressional election of November 2006 might be history before we knew that for sure. Might not a man like Bush who revels in chance-taking consider this a pretty good gamble? Meanwhile, how many Syrians would we kill? How many badly wounded Americans would come home to a questionable quality of life because bulletproof vests saved their lives? If Israeli military units moved into Syria (to help us, of course), how many Israelis would die?

We should all be lobbying members of Congress not to cast any votes in favor of aggressive U.S. policies toward Syria. Such votes cannot help, and will only take resources from, a majority of the world's peoples and a majority of Americans. Syria (and Lebanon) are not places where the United States benefits in any way from being a global policeman. While the neocons and probably some present top Israeli officials do see benefits to be gained from U.S. intervention in Syria, other senior and many ordinary Israelis do not. We also should urge members of Congress to tie further aid to Israel to Israel's not becoming involved in any military actions against Syria.

How should the U.S. change its policies with respect to the Palestinians?

We should make it as clear as we possibly can to members of Congress that the Palestine-Israel problem is the most central long-term issue to the peoples of the Middle East. Most Arab leaders have been so co-opted by the U.S. that they no longer object to our support for Israel's oppression of the Palestinians, but the peoples of the area are a different story. They do care about and object strenuously to that oppression.

Regardless of what happens anywhere in the Middle East, we will never end the "War on Terrorism" without, first, a solution to the Palestine-Israel issue that provides as much justice to the Palestinians as to the Israelis. Although many supporters of Israel try to compare the several-centuries-long U.S. conquest of American Indians to the Israeli attempt to conquer the Palestinians, there is no valid comparison. Quite apart from the immorality of any attempt to emulate the U.S. atrocity against its indigenous population, there are practical reasons why the comparison cannot be made. The population balances, for instance, are entirely different; there are proportionately far more Palestinians than there were American Indians.

Nevertheless, Israeli and U.S. policy in the West Bank, semi-hidden by a bogus withdrawal from Gaza, continues to seek permanent conquest of more and more territory. The daily injustices and cruelties imposed by Israel and the U.S. on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are today worse than they have been in the previous 38 years of occupation. This is not only a major human rights issue facing the United States. It is also a very large cause of the hatred against the U.S. throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds.

What is new in the last few months is Israeli intensification of settlement activity in the West Bank, particularly in East Jerusalem; intensification of land-confiscation (with no recompense to Palestinians); a speed-up in construction of the separation wall and of new "Israeli-citizens-only" roads, both of which also require more land-confiscation; more demolitions of Palestinian houses; and new, harsh Israeli measures of other types aimed specifically at forcing Palestinians out of areas, in which they have lived for generations, in and near Jerusalem.

All of this takes place with little Western media attention; the media devoted considerably more attention to the carefully televised "suffering" of the relatively few Israeli settlers forced to move from their luxurious homes in Gaza. The Israelis, with heavy U.S. financing, are busily establishing more "facts on the ground" that will make any peaceful solution providing equal justice to both sides less possible. That does not mean that Israel will "win." Given the determination and inexhaustibility (and large numbers) of Palestinians, it just means more terrorism, killing, and cruelty on both sides. It is a shocking waste of lives, and the U.S. is prolonging it by its one-sided support of Israel. Let's put it baldly. U.S. policy on Israel and Palestine is simply immoral in its one-sidedness. It should take no one who investigates what is actually happening to Palestinians in the West Bank more than 30 seconds to decide that the oppression and cruelties that can be seen there daily should be stopped. Here too, further U.S. aid to Israel should be directly tied to Israel's stopping the oppression and cruelties to Palestinians.

The position we should take in lobbying members of Congress is simple and obvious: Stop the one-sidedness. It is a blot that will stain all our other activities and policies in the Middle East, and probably elsewhere, for years to come. The longer we avoid changing this situation, the larger the blot will become.

Conclusion

All of these issues -- Iran, Syria, and Palestine-Israel -- are interrelated, and each issue enhances the perception around the world that the U.S. is hypocritical, oppressive, and interested only in advancing Israel's interests. All grow out of the one-sided U.S. support for Israel, and none will be resolved without a change in the U.S.-Israeli relationship. To put it baldly again, the widespread perception of the U.S. as immoral and unjust interferes in a quite serious way with the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. Neither we nor Israel "wins" if U.S. policy continues on the same path.

Bill Christison was a senior official of the CIA. He served as a National Intelligence Officer and as Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis.

Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst and has worked on Middle East issues for 30 years. She is the author of Perceptions of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession.

The Bumpy Road of Reform for Egypt

Mubarak’s government appears to be intent upon neutralizing reformers like Ayman Nour, while giving leeway to the Islamic Muslim Brotherhood
By SCOTT MACLEOD
Time Magazine
Tuesday, Dec. 27, 2005

Ayman Nour earned a place in Egyptian history in September by emerging as the strongest challenger to incumbent Hosni Mubarak in the country’s first-ever presidential contest. The 42-year-old lawyer’s populist performance made him a future star of Egyptian politics, the leader of a potentially influential liberal bloc in parliament and a serious contender to succeed Mubarak in the next election in 2011. To U.S. officials pushing democracy in the Middle East as well as to many Egyptians demanding change, Nour and his Al Ghad (Tomorrow) party offered a promising liberal, secular alternative to authoritarian Arab rulers and their Islamic fundamentalist opponents.

But Nour’s political career is now in ruins after having dared challenge a regime that is apparently determined to perpetuate itself in power. Last week, Nour was convicted on charges of forging signatures in establishing his party in 2004. The allegations surfaced soon after Nour founded his party calling for democracy and slamming Mubarak as a dictator. He had to run his presidential campaign beneath the cloud of the forgery allegations and then in elections last month lost his parliamentary seat amid widespread allegations of voter intimidation. To seal his fate, a state security court sentenced Nour to five years in prison last week and had him hauled off to begin serving his time. Even if Nour is exonerated on appeal, his lack of a parliamentary seat removes him from eligibility to run for president again in six years.

Nour’s troubles fit a longstanding pattern of government intimidation against democratic alternatives that might appeal to many Egyptians fed up with autocracy as well as to Western governments that have otherwise long done business with Mubarak’s regime. In 2000, veteran Egyptian democracy activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim was jailed on charges of accepting and misusing funds from foreign sources to support his research and monitoring work. Like Ibrahim, whose conviction was later overturned—after some pressuring from the U.S.—Nour was vilified in Egypt’s influential state-run media. Again, the U.S. is demanding that Nour be released. But the Egyptian government says that the arrest is in no way politically motivated.

Mubarak’s regime appears to be intent upon neutralizing reformers like Nour to ensure that his ruling party remains the country’s only viable force for achieving development and stability. To strengthen his position, Mubarak has adopted reform as his own agenda and promised change from within. Another part of Mubarak’s strategy seems to be to show that it is Muslim fundamentalists who pose the real challenge, and that his steady regime alone can prevent them from taking over and imposing an Islamic state.

That seemed to be the intended message in November’s parliamentary poll. As the liberal Nour was suffering his defeat, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, a party that seeks to reestablish an Islamic caliphate, was given unprecedented leeway by the regime to field its candidates. It captured nearly 20 percent of the seats, a sixfold improvement on its previous best showing, making the fundamentalists the largest opposition force in parliament. Egypt’s future has thus become a polarizing struggle between Mubarak and Islam, a contest that liberals, with Nour in jail rather than in parliament, have little hope of winning.

Quartet: No Hamas in Palestinian Cabinet

Quartet Statement on Palestinian Legislative Council Elections
28 December 2005

The Quartet welcomes the upcoming Palestinian Legislative Council elections as a positive step toward consolidation of Palestinian democracy and the goal of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Quartet calls on the Palestinian Authority and the Central Elections Commission to ensure a free, fair, and open process in accordance with Palestinian law. The Quartet noted the continued importance of security in this regard, and calls on the Palestinian Authority to take immediate steps to ensure law and order, prevent terrorist attacks and dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism. The Palestinian Authority must also assure the security of polling stations and of Central Election Commission personnel, enforce existing law, regulations, and decrees, particularly those prohibiting the public display of weapons, external financing of campaigns, and the use of religious facilities for campaign purposes.

The Quartet recalled its September 20 statement, together with the Secretary General's subsequent statement on behalf of the Quartet that ultimately those who want to be part of the political process should not engage in armed group or militia activities, for there is a fundamental contradiction between such activities and the building of a democratic state. In this regard, the Quartet calls on all participants to renounce violence, recognize Israel's right to exist, and disarm. The Quartet is encouraged by the negotiation of a Code of Conduct governing participation in the legislative council election. It calls on all parties and candidates in the Palestinian Legislative Council elections to agree and fully adhere to this Code to ensure an environment conducive to free and fair elections and international observer support. The Quartet welcomed the Palestinian Authority’s invitation to international election observers.

Furthermore, the Palestinian Authority should take additional steps to ensure the democratic process remains untainted by violence, by prohibiting political parties from pursuing their aims through violent means, and by moving expeditiously to codify this as Palestinian law. In particular, the Quartet expressed its view that a future Palestinian Authority Cabinet should include no member who has not committed to the principles of Israel’s right to exist in peace and security and an unequivocal end to violence and terrorism.

The Quartet believes it is essential that direct dialogue begin immediately between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority to coordinate preparations for the Legislative Council elections. Proactive measures are essential to the movement of voters, elections committee staff and materials, and international observers throughout the election process, as outlined in the Roadmap. Both parties should work to put in place a mechanism to allow Palestinians resident in Jerusalem to exercise their legitimate democratic rights, in conformity with existing precedent.

Austria to pull Chirac-Queen-Bush sex posters

Reuters
Thu Dec 29, 2005

The sponsors of spoof posters depicting the Queen having sex with the U.S. and French presidents have decided to remove them from Vienna's streets to quiet an outcry ahead of Austria's EU presidency, APA news agency said on Thursday.

The images on electronic rolling billboards showed two naked female models wearing masks of President George W. Bush and the Queen, and a male model with a President Jacques Chirac mask, positioned as if engaged in a sex act.

APA, the Austrian news agency, said the project's organisers together with artists Carlos Aires from Spain and Tanja Ostojic from Serbia opted to pull the images after a public furore that embarrassed the Vienna government.

Part of a series of 150 images called "euroPART", the posters were meant to "reflect on the different social, historical and political developments in Europe", said art project 25peaces, which commissioned the posters.

APA quoted Aires and Ostojic, who created an image of a woman sprawled in knickers emblazoned with the EU circle of stars emblem, as saying they felt it was better that their works should not divert attention from all the others.

Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel had appealed to the artists to withdraw the posters after opposition leaders and the media protested that they demeaned women and damaged the reputation of Austria as it prepares to take over the EU presidency on January 1.

"We regret this development that totally distorted the image of the entire project," 25 peaces said in a statement quoted by APA.

25peaces received 1 million euros (687 thousand pounds) of public funding for the works. Only three of the 150 images displayed on hundreds of billboards in prominent places across the Austrian capital had sexual overtones.

The poster series is to be shown until the end of January.

Pentagon Calls Its Pro-U.S. Websites Legal

An internal review finds that efforts aimed at the Balkans, northern Africa break no laws. But a Defense official says they might backfire.
By Mark Mazzetti, Times Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times
December 29, 2005

WASHINGTON — U.S. military websites that pay journalists to write articles and commentary supporting military activities in Europe and Africa do not violate U.S. law or Pentagon policies, a review by the Pentagon's chief investigator has concluded. But a senior Defense Department official said this week that the websites could still be shut down to avoid the appearance of impropriety.

The Pentagon inspector general's inquiry concludes that two websites targeting audiences in the Balkans and in the Maghreb region of northern Africa are consistent with U.S. laws prohibiting covert propaganda, are properly identified as U.S.-government products and are maintained in close coordination with U.S. embassies abroad, according to a previously undisclosed summary of the report's findings.

Yet a top Pentagon official, chief spokesman Lawrence DiRita, said he was concerned that a Pentagon practice of hiring news reporters to advance a U.S. government agenda could draw criticism and that an ever larger military role in shaping public opinion overseas might have negative consequences.

The Pentagon's efforts to win hearts and minds abroad have come under intense scrutiny since it was revealed last month that the military had hired a private contractor, Lincoln Group, as part of a separate operation to pay Iraqi newspapers to print positive stories written by U.S. troops.

An investigation into that information offensive is ongoing, and Pentagon officials expect the inquiry, headed by Navy Rear Adm. Scott R. Van Buskirk, to be completed soon.

DiRita ordered a separate review of the websites and other military information operations in February, when news accounts reported the Pentagon's connection to the websites and after disclosures that U.S. agencies such as the Department of Education had paid journalists to promote Bush administration policies.

DiRita said he had not been briefed on the results of the inspector general's review, and said he had asked the National Security Council to consider whether other U.S. agencies should take over the websites, or whether the sites should be shuttered.

"If somebody comes back to me and says there's nothing wrong with the Department of Defense paying journalists, I'll say, 'Even if there's nothing wrong, does it make sense?' " DiRita said.

The two websites are run by U.S. European Command, based in Stuttgart, Germany, and maintained by Anteon Corp., a Fairfax, Va., contractor. The European Command is one of five regional U.S. military headquarters around the world and is given authority for U.S. operations in Europe and most of Africa.

The Balkans website, originally called Balkan Exchange and later renamed Southeast European Times, was a result of a secret directive signed by President Clinton in 1999. The order, called Presidential Decision Directive 68, launched an information offensive to counter Serbian propaganda during the Kosovo war.

The European Command created the Africa website in October 2004. It attempts to advance U.S. interests in a region long sympathetic to Islamic fundamentalism. The Maghreb region encompasses Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Mauritania and Morocco, countries that are in the European Command's area of responsibility.

Neither the Southeast European Times nor the African website, called Magharebia, prominently states its connection to the U.S. military, although both link to a disclaimer saying that the sites are "sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense."

The Southeast European Times aims to "offer accurate, balanced and forward-looking coverage of developments in Southeast Europe," the website reads. "Each business day, the site captures the top news from across the region as reported in local and international media. It also features analysis, interviews and commentary by paid Southeast European Times correspondents in the region."

The correspondents often are freelance reporters hired by Anteon Corp. Recent stories on the websites have highlighted a thawing of relations between Serbia and Croatia and efforts to promote female entrepreneurship in northern Africa.

Both websites feature stories culled from independent news services such as the Associated Press, UPI and Reuters. They also provide links to websites of the United Nations, the U.S. State Department, and government organizations in the Balkans and Africa.

Two other U.S. military commands — the Pacific Command, which oversees operations in Asia, and the Central Command, which is responsible for the Middle East — are developing their own versions of regional information websites.

Any decision to shut down the websites could add fuel to an ongoing debate within the Pentagon about which tactics the U.S. military should use to counter a propaganda and disinformation campaign waged by Islamic extremists worldwide. Many military officials fear that operations such as the European Command websites and Lincoln Group's campaign in Iraq blur the lines between news and propaganda and put the Pentagon into a legal gray area.

U.S. law forbids the Pentagon from conducting propaganda campaigns against American audiences. And though efforts such as the websites target foreign countries, they are available to any person with a computer.

Yet others argue that only the Pentagon has the capabilities for an aggressive campaign to counter enemy propaganda. Such efforts are far more essential to the ongoing fight against Islamic fundamentalism than multibillion-dollar tanks, jets or aircraft carriers, they argue.

"We have never been outgunned in any battle, but we are constantly being outmedia-ed," said one Pentagon official who supported an aggressive information operations campaign. "These are things we should be doing more of."

Given the Pentagon's massive budget and offices of soldiers who carry out information operations, DiRita said it was natural that the Defense Department would try to "fill the vacuum" left after the State Department's public diplomacy budget was slashed after the Cold War.

"We have a lot of skilled people, a lot of energy, and a lot of money," said DiRita, an assistant secretary of Defense. "But I question whether the DoD is the best place to be doing these things."

As part of broad assessment of Pentagon policies, doctrine and weapons systems, a Defense Department working group has been trying to develop guidelines for the proper role of information dissemination during wartime. DiRita leads the working group.

Uncle Sam Wants You To Make A Gift To Rebuild Iraq

Idea, Broached in September, Has Been a Slow Starter
By Yochi J. Dreazen, Staff Reporter Of The Wall Street Journal
Wall Street Journal
December 29, 2005

WASHINGTON -- Americans, particularly at this time of year, open their wallets to all manner of good causes. But donating to Uncle Sam's foreign-aid efforts isn't very high on the list.

In September, officials at the U.S. Agency for International Development unveiled what they considered to be an inspired idea: augment the billions of taxpayer dollars already allocated for foreign aid by asking individual Americans -- especially those with strong ties to other countries -- to give money for development projects.

The first needy case was obvious: Iraq. The oil revenue that was supposed to finance postwar rebuilding hasn't been flowing. U.S. government funds have also been slow to reach their target. Security woes, corruption, policy shifts by the U.S. reconstruction authorities and the general difficulty of doing business in Iraq have meant that just $13 billion of the $30 billion that Congress allocated for rebuilding the country and training its security forces was spent through August, according to the Government Accountability Office, a congressional watchdog.

So, on Sept. 9, Andrew Natsios, USAID's director, unveiled the Iraq Partnership in a speech to a gathering of Iraqi-American business leaders in West Bloomfield, Mich. The program, he said, would allow Americans to "contribute directly to local development projects in Iraq" and "help put desks in classrooms; provide water pumps to farmers; and improve medical services throughout the country." USAID hired a Washington nonprofit organization, GlobalGiving, to handle logistics and launch a Web site offering would-be donors choices ranging from a $1,000 project to improve leukemia treatment at an Iraqi medical center to a $10,000 effort to furnish schools with new blackboards and desks.

As of this week, though, the Iraq Partnership had raised "just north" of $1,500, according to a USAID official with direct knowledge of the program's take. Since September, fund-raising appeals for Hurricane Katrina victims led by former presidents Bush and Clinton raised more than $115 million.

Officials at USAID and GlobalGiving say that it's too early to judge the program, citing a USAID-assisted effort called Conexión Colombia that since 2003 has funneled more than $700,000 in donations from Colombians living abroad to aid groups there working in education and nutrition, according to the group's Web site. USAID officials also point out that they haven't yet done any marketing or rolled out public endorsements. "Remember, this has only been operational for 90 days," says Kevin Sheridan, a USAID spokesman. "What you're seeing is version 1.1." Mari Kuraishi, the co-founder of GlobalGiving, said that prospective donors might also be distracted by the many other causes vying for their money in recent months.

Still, the slow pace of the program's fund raising comes as a blow to USAID and its partner. USAID wants to develop similar programs targeting expatriates from Haiti and other regions who are now living in the U.S. GlobalGiving still has ambitious plans of its own. The five-year-old outfit run by two former World Bank executives wants to revolutionize the world of philanthropy by creating a catalog of aid projects and presenting specific options to donors. GlobalGiving has received approximately $1.5 million in USAID matching funds.

The Iraq Partnership's challenges also illustrate how hard it is to do aid work in Iraq, inhospitable as it is to relief workers and organizations. Most foreign-aid organizations pulled out of the country after a suicide bombing at the Baghdad headquarters of the Red Cross in late 2003 killed dozens of people. The few charities that remain work hard to keep the locations of their projects and the identities of their employees secret.

This past summer, when USAID officials were searching for creative ways to expand the pool of money available for overseas development projects, they hit on the idea of tapping the generosity of the millions of expatriates and immigrants who each year send billions of dollars back to countries including Mexico, India and China. The officials cited statistics showing that such remittances accounted for 25% of the $112.6 billion that flowed from the U.S. to the developing world in 2003, double the share made up by formal government aid.

Why not tap the Iraqi expatriate community? "The idea is that if you have one to three million Iraqis in the diaspora, there is a significant portion that has the ability to give money back to their country," Mr. Sheridan says. "Is there a way to accommodate that?"

The Web site of the Iraq Partnership is like a charitable version of Amazon.com. Visitors first choose a theme -- Democracy and Governance, Education, Economic Development -- and then select the specific project they want to add to their "Giving Cart." Clicking on the Democracy theme, for instance, brings up an open-ended project to improve wheelchair access at Iraqi government buildings.

It is very similar to the GlobalGiving Web site, but has some key differences. The nonprofit, which keeps 10% of each donation for administrative costs, currently has a list of about 2,000 projects in 60 countries. Most of the listings include extensive details about the work being done -- including the names, biographies and email addresses of those leading specific projects. Because of security concerns, the Iraq Partnership Web site, on the other hand, provides no information at all about where in the country a project is taking place or which organizations are involved. Instead, each aid project includes only a vague description of its scope and goal, along with quotes from project leaders identified only as "Anonymous." The unnamed head of the wheelchair-access project, for instance, is quoted as saying that the effort means that "all Iraqis will have the ability to participate in the building of a free and democratic Iraq."

A senior USAID official closely involved with the program acknowledged that the scarcity of information about the Iraq projects could make donors less likely to give money. But, he says, the agency is planning to soon add details about which provinces the projects are in, and later next year hopes to add specific town or city names. Down the road, the agency would like to identify the organizations and specific aid workers as well. USAID also wants to launch an Arabic-language version of the site, he says.

Convincing Iraqi-Americans, though, may be tough. Martin Manna, executive director of the Chaldean-American Chamber of Commerce in Michigan, the group of Iraqi-American businesspeople that organized the conference at which Mr. Natsios unveiled the Iraq Partnership, says many of his members initially reacted coolly because they were more interested in getting government contracts than in giving money to a charitable program. He says that many remain confused about precisely how it works.

Today, Mr. Manna says that his organization, made up of business leaders from the largest Chaldean community outside Iraq, is already looking past the Iraq Partnership. The body is hoping to fund the construction of a fruit-processing plant in northern Iraq that would create needed jobs there and also make a profit that could be reinvested into similar projects. It is in talks with USAID to receive some government funds for the idea, he says.

USAID officials are undeterred, saying they hope to replicate the effort in other countries. Ms. Kuraishi says her organization is working with USAID on sites for both Haiti and Ethiopia.