Saturday, June 10, 2006

The Muslim cartoon backlash that wasn't

Four months after the controversy, Denmark is stronger than ever.
Los Angeles Times
June 10, 2006

CONTRARY TO THE FERVENT HOPES of radical Islamists, the deadly protests over a handful of cartoons published in a Copenhagen newspaper last fall have not brought Denmark to its knees. Quite the opposite. The fiery imam who helped spark the violence has left the country in a sulfurous huff, and the pro-U.S., center-right government has been strengthened.

Denmark is still feeling the effects of what Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen called its worst international crisis since World War II, but they're hardly earth shattering. The country is busily trying to repair relations with the Arab world, and a boycott of Danish goods in several Middle Eastern countries, though mostly ended, is still causing some economic pain. Denmark-based Arla Foods, Europe's second-largest dairy company, recently announced that the boycott would cost at least $65 million this year. But that won't do much damage to an economy that has seen slow but steady annual growth recently.

The fuss arose in January in reaction to cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad that were published in the daily Jyllands-Posten in September. Although the cartoons sparked some minor local protest at the time they were published, not until Ahmed abu Laban and a group of other radical Danish Muslim leaders went on a Middle Eastern hate-mongering tour in December, saying depictions of the prophet were blasphemous, did the controversy take off. Danish embassies were burned and dozens of people were killed in protests in the Arab world.

Beset by criticism in Denmark, Laban announced last month that he was leaving for the Palestinian territories. "I could have provoked a revolt, created hell in Denmark, led Muslims to react violently, but did not do so," he said, apparently wanting to be congratulated because the death and destruction he fomented were limited to the Mideast. Rasmussen, meanwhile, a key U.S. ally who arrived at Camp David for a visit with President Bush on Friday, is stronger than ever.

The protests helped focus political debate on a topic long overdue for serious discussion: better integrating Denmark's 200,000 Muslim immigrants. Even by European standards, the country's unemployment rate among non-Western Muslim men is high. One reason: Ironically, Denmark may be too generous. Its liberal policies and wide social safety net may heighten the alienation of Muslim immigrants, who often find it so easy to get government handouts that they have little incentive to look for work.

Denmark's moderate Muslims seem to be benefiting from the unrest. Naser Khader, a Syrian-born member of parliament interested in peaceful integration, is a rising political star. And last week, Muslims in Denmark's second-largest city said that the cartoon flap had helped unite them behind a long-stalled mosque project. In the end, a crisis that threatened to split the country could help draw it closer.

GRIEF



The Los Angeles Times
June 10, 2006

A Palestinian girl cries near the body of her father, one of seven people killed at a beach in northern Gaza. Palestinian officials blamed Israel, which halted strikes pending an investigation.
(Ramatan News Agency)

Friday, June 09, 2006

Other People's Blood

By BOB HERBERT
New York Times
06/08/06

For the smug, comfortable, well-off Americans, it doesn't seem to matter how long the war in Iraq goes on - as long as the agony is endured by others. If the network coverage gets too grim, viewers can always switch to the E! channel (one hand on the remote, the other burrowing into a bag of chips) to follow the hilarious antics of Paris, Britney, Brangelina et al.

The war is depressing and denial is the antidote. Why should ordinary citizens (good people, religious people, patriots) consider their role in - and responsibility for - the thunderous, unending carnage? Enough with this introspection. Let's go to the ballpark, get drunk and boo Barry Bonds. The nation is in deep denial about Iraq. For years the president and his supporting cast of arrogant, bullying characters have tried to put the best face on this war. They had no idea what they were doing when they ordered the invasion of Iraq, and they still don't. Many of the troops who were assured that the Iraqis would welcome them with open arms are now dead. And there's still no plan.

Paul Wolfowitz, who fashioned the phony intellectual underpinnings of this catastrophe, told us that Iraqi oil revenues would cover the cost of reconstruction. He was as wrong about that as the president was about the weapons of mass destruction. (And as wrong as Dick Cheney was last June when he said the insurgency was in its last throes.)

Here are the facts: The war so recklessly launched by the amateurs in the Bush White House has already taken scores of thousands of lives, and will ultimately cost the United States $1 trillion to $2 trillion.

No one has been held accountable for this. While Mr. Bush's approval ratings are low, the public has been largely indifferent to the profound suffering in Iraq. This is primarily for two reasons: Because most Americans have no immediate personal stake in the war, and because the administration and the news media keep the worst of the suffering at a safe distance from the U.S. population.

The killing of American troops is usually kissed off with a paragraph or two in the major papers, and a sentence or two, at best, on national newscasts.
(Imagine if someone in your office, sitting at a desk across from you, were suddenly blown to bits, splattering you with his or her blood. You wouldn't get over it for the rest of your life. This is what happens daily in Iraq.)

The many thousands of Iraqis who are killed - including babies and children who are shot to death, blown up, or incinerated - remain completely unknown to the American public. So not only is there very little empathy for the suffering of Iraqis, there is virtually no sense among ordinary Americans of a shared responsibility for that suffering.

Despite the frequently expressed fantasies expressed by President Bush and some of the leading politicians of both parties, the idea of a U.S. victory in Iraq is an illusion. The nightmarish violence is rising, not receding. Iraq is not being pacified. A suicide bomber blew himself up in a bustling market in Basra over the weekend, killing 27 and wounding scores. On Sunday,
20 people were stopped and pulled from their vehicles on a highway near Baquba and shot to death.

John Burns, writing in yesterday's New York Times, told us: "The death toll in one of the most grisly recent attacks, in the village of Hadid, near the Diyala provincial capital of Baquba, rose to 17 on Tuesday when the police delivered nine severed heads to the Baquba morgue in the fruit boxes in which they were found in the village."

Eight other heads had previously been found.

Instead of beginning to pull our troops out of Iraq, we are sending more in. The permanent Iraqi government, which was supposed to be the answer to everybody's prayers, is a study in haplessness. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Al Qaeda's man in Iraq, remains at large. (As does Osama bin Laden, somewhere in Pakistan.)

As was the case with Vietnam, the war in Iraq is a fool's errand. There is no clear mission for American troops in Iraq. No one can really say what the dead have died for. And yet the dying continues.

When it all finally comes to an end (according to President Bush, on somebody else's watch) we'll look around at the hideous costs in human treasure and cold hard cash and ask ourselves: What in the world were we thinking?

For the women of Iraq, the war is just beginning

By Terri Judd in Basra
Independent (UK)
08 June 2006

The women of Basra have disappeared. Three years after the US-led invasion of Iraq, women's secular freedoms - once the envy of women across the Middle East - have been snatched away because militant Islam is rising across the country.

Across Iraq, a bloody and relentless oppression of women has taken hold. Many women had their heads shaved for refusing to wear a scarf or have been stoned in the street for wearing make-up. Others have been kidnapped and murdered for crimes that are being labelled simply as "inappropriate behaviour". The insurrection against the fragile and barely functioning state has left the country prey to extremists whose notion of freedom does not extend to women.

In the British-occupied south, where Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army retains a stranglehold, women insist the situation is at its worst. Here they are forced to live behind closed doors only to emerge, concealed behind scarves, hidden behind husbands and fathers. Even wearing a pair of trousers is considered an act of defiance, punishable by death.

One Basra woman, known only as Dr Kefaya, was working in the women and children's hospital unit at the city university when she started receiving threats from extremists. She defied them. Then, one day a man walked into the building and murdered her.

Eman Aziz, one of the first women to speak publicly about the dangers, said:"There were five people on the death list with Dr Kefaya. They were threatened 'If you continue working, you will be killed'."

Many women are too afraid to complain. But, fearful that their rights will be eroded for good, some have taken the courageous step of speaking out.

Dr Kefaya was only one of many professional women murdered in recent months. Speaking to The Independent near Saddam's old palace in the middle of Basra, Mrs Aziz, reeled off the names of other dead friends. Three of her university class have been killed since the invasion. "My friend Sheda and her sister. They were threatened. One day they returned to their house with two other women. They were all shot," she said. Her language is chillingly perfunctory.

"And my friend Lubna, she was with her fiancé. They shot him in the arm and then killed her in front of him," she explained. Then there were the two sisters who worked in the laundry at Basra Palace base. With a shrug, she briefly detailed each life cut short.

Under Saddam, women played little part in political life but businesswomen and academics travelled the country unchallenged while their daughters mixed freely with male students at university.

Now, even the most emancipated woman feels cowed.

A television producer Arij Al-Soltan, 27, now exiled, said: "It is much worse for women in the south. I blame the British for not taking a strong stand."

Sajeda Hanoon Alebadi, 37, who - like Mrs Aziz - has now taken to wearing a headscarf, said: "Women are being assassinated. We know the people behind it are saying we have a fatwa, these are not good women, they should be killed."

Behind the wave of insurgent attacks, the violence against women who dare to challenge the Islamic orthodoxy is growing. Fatwas banning women from driving or being seen out alone are regularly issued.

Infiltrated by militia, the police are unwilling or unable to crack down on the fundamentalists.

Ms Alebadi said: "After the fall of the regime, the religious extremist parties came out on to the streets and threatened women. Although the extremists are in the minority, they control powerful positions, so they control Basra."

To venture on the streets today without a male relative is to risk attack, humiliation or kidnap.

A journalist, Shatta Kareem, said: "I was driving my car one day when someone just crashed into me and drove me off the road. If a woman is seen driving these days it is considered a violation of men's rights."

There is a fear that Islamic law will become enshrined in the new legislation. Ms Aziz said: "In the Muslim religion, if a man dies his money goes to a male member of the family. After the Iran-Iraq war, there were so many widows that Saddam changed the law so it would go to the women and children. Now it has been changed back."

Mrs Alebadi estimated that as many as 70 per cent of women in Basra had been widowed by the constant conflicts. "You see widows on the streets begging at the intersections."

Optimists say the very fact that 25 per cent of Iraq's Provincial Council is composed of women proves women have been empowered since the invasion. But the people of Basra say it is a smokescreen. Any woman who becomes a part of the system, they say, is incapable of engineering any change for the better. Posters around the city promoting the constitution graphically illustrate that view. The faces of the women candidates have been blacked out, the accompanying slogan, "No women in politics," a stark reminder of the opposition they face.

Ms Aziz said: "Women members of the Provincial Council had many dreams but they were told 'With respect, you don't know anything. This is a world of men. Your view is good but not better.' More and more they just agreed to sign whatever they were told. We have got women in power, who are powerless."

Many of the British officers in Basra say they feel "uncomfortable" with the situation but a spokesman for the Foreign Office would only say: "As part of the new government's programme, they do say in their top 10 items to be looked at that women constitute half of society and are nurturers of the other half and, therefore, must take an active role in building the society and the state. Their rights should be respected in all fields."

In the villages around Basra, the shy women who peer round doorways are uncomplaining. For one Marsh Arab, Makir Jafar, the fact she has been given enough education to help her 10-year-old son with his homework is enough. "Life is nice. There is the river. I do not want for anything," she said.

There is a growing fear among educated women, however, that the extreme dangers of daily life will allow the issue of women's oppression to remain unchallenged. In Mrs Kareem's words: "Men have been given a voice. But women will not get their part in building this country."

The women of Basra have disappeared. Three years after the US-led invasion of Iraq, women's secular freedoms - once the envy of women across the Middle East - have been snatched away because militant Islam is rising across the country.

Across Iraq, a bloody and relentless oppression of women has taken hold. Many women had their heads shaved for refusing to wear a scarf or have been stoned in the street for wearing make-up. Others have been kidnapped and murdered for crimes that are being labelled simply as "inappropriate behaviour". The insurrection against the fragile and barely functioning state has left the country prey to extremists whose notion of freedom does not extend to women.

In the British-occupied south, where Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army retains a stranglehold, women insist the situation is at its worst. Here they are forced to live behind closed doors only to emerge, concealed behind scarves, hidden behind husbands and fathers. Even wearing a pair of trousers is considered an act of defiance, punishable by death.

One Basra woman, known only as Dr Kefaya, was working in the women and children's hospital unit at the city university when she started receiving threats from extremists. She defied them. Then, one day a man walked into the building and murdered her.

Eman Aziz, one of the first women to speak publicly about the dangers, said:"There were five people on the death list with Dr Kefaya. They were threatened 'If you continue working, you will be killed'."

Many women are too afraid to complain. But, fearful that their rights will be eroded for good, some have taken the courageous step of speaking out.

Dr Kefaya was only one of many professional women murdered in recent months. Speaking to The Independent near Saddam's old palace in the middle of Basra, Mrs Aziz, reeled off the names of other dead friends. Three of her university class have been killed since the invasion. "My friend Sheda and her sister. They were threatened. One day they returned to their house with two other women. They were all shot," she said. Her language is chillingly perfunctory.

"And my friend Lubna, she was with her fiancé. They shot him in the arm and then killed her in front of him," she explained. Then there were the two sisters who worked in the laundry at Basra Palace base. With a shrug, she briefly detailed each life cut short.

Under Saddam, women played little part in political life but businesswomen and academics travelled the country unchallenged while their daughters mixed freely with male students at university.

Now, even the most emancipated woman feels cowed.

A television producer Arij Al-Soltan, 27, now exiled, said: "It is much worse for women in the south. I blame the British for not taking a strong stand."

Sajeda Hanoon Alebadi, 37, who - like Mrs Aziz - has now taken to wearing a headscarf, said: "Women are being assassinated. We know the people behind it are saying we have a fatwa, these are not good women, they should be killed."

Behind the wave of insurgent attacks, the violence against women who dare to challenge the Islamic orthodoxy is growing. Fatwas banning women from driving or being seen out alone are regularly issued.

War, War and More War is What Bush Really Wants

By BILL CHRISTISON, Former CIA analyst
CounterPunch
June 8, 2006

George W. Bush. "Dubya." In the media, the practice of using the W to distinguish the current president from his father is common. George Senior has two middle initials -- H and W -- but few media flacks seem to use them. Nevertheless, two beats one, and adding to the fetid miasma constantly enveloping Washington these days is the old but oft-repeated rumor about a dominating motivation of Bush Junior -- that he would do almost anything to assure that his own reputation surpasses that of his father in historians' future rankings of presidents. It seems to me that we might in common courtesy push him a little more quickly than might otherwise occur, at least in the name game, toward equality with (though not superiority over) his father -- by giving him the honor and dignity of two middle initials. We should decree that henceforth the son shall be known as George P. W. ("Perpetual War") Bush. Instead of just "Dubya," how about calling him "Pee Dubya?"

Is it unfair to label the current president "Pee Dubya?" No, it is not. Let's look at a little background. Back on March 16, 2006, the White House published a new document, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America. This replaces or, more properly, supplements an earlier document with the same title that the White House put out in 2002.

Most people in the U.S. and elsewhere did not pay much attention to the new version of this document, because it is loaded with clichés and much of it reads like the propaganda put out by far too many current Bush administration spokesmen these days. It is not an inspired piece of writing. The first two pages contain a cover letter from George W. Bush to "My fellow Americans" that seems particularly propagandistic. In these two pages, the words "democracy" or "democratic" appear seven times; the words "freedom" or "free," eleven times.

But the document is nonetheless important. Perhaps the major difference between the 2006 and the 2002 version is the greater bluntness with which the new version proclaims that the U.S. is in a struggle that will last for many years and defines who our alleged principal enemy is. Several recent speeches of Bush had already presaged this bluntness, but the new White House document puts the same thoughts into the most prestigious and official foreign policy pronouncement that the present administration makes public.

In the very beginning of the paper, immediately following Bush's covering letter, the "ultimate goal" of the U.S. is described as "ending tyranny in our world." A cliché? Of course, but noteworthy for its arrogance. The paper then continues, "Achieving this goal is the work of generations. The United States is in the early years of a long struggle. . . . The 20th century witnessed the triumph of freedom over the threats of fascism and communism. Yet a new totalitarian ideology now threatens, an ideology grounded not in secular philosophy but in the perversion of a proud religion." Later in the document, this statement appears: "The struggle against militant Islamic radicalism is the great ideological conflict of the early years of the 21st century." This comparison of 20th century threats with 21st century threats makes it quite clear that the Bush administration foresees new world wars in the 21st century that may be every bit as bad as the world wars of the 20th. And there are no statements that the U.S. will make any great efforts to avoid such wars. "Pee Dubya" just doesn't seem to care.

Nowhere in the 2002 version of The National Security Strategy were such comparisons of 20th century fascism and communism with 21st century "militant Islamic radicalism" made, although a formulation almost as blunt did appear in a very high-level U.S. publication (for the first time that this writer can recall) -- in the 9/11 Commission Report released in July 2004.

The 9/11 Commission, consisting of both Republicans and Democrats appointed by the leaders of both parties, issued a report that contained absolutely no dissents or even hints of disagreements. The commissioners unanimously concluded, in what was a key passage of the report, that "the enemy is not just 'terrorism,' some generic evil. . . . It is the threat posed by Islamist terrorism. . . . Bin Ladin and Islamist terrorists mean exactly what they say: to them America is the font of all evil, the 'head of the snake,' and it must be converted or destroyed. . . . [This] is not a position with which Americans can bargain or negotiate. With it there is no common ground -- not even respect for life -- on which to begin a dialogue. It can only be destroyed or utterly isolated. . . . This process is likely to be measured in decades, not years." The only things missing from this diatribe were the comparisons with fascism and communism.

So, from 2002 to 2004 and then to 2006, there was a progression -- a gradually increasing willingness at top levels of the government to talk explicitly about Islamic extremism as the cause of all our troubles and to talk more openly and bluntly about a conflict lasting for "decades" or "generations." At lower levels around Washington, among mid-level neocon officials and media representatives of the neocons such as Charles Krauthammer, such bluntness has been in evidence for a considerably longer period. But by 2006 the bluntness was also an open part of the presidentially-approved dogma in the highest level U.S. documents.

All this seems intended to provide Bush a stronger reason to support the "clash of civilization" notion originally conceived by the neocons and long backed by many Christian fundamentalist leaders in the U.S., as well as by Israeli right-wingers. And since this conflict will last for "generations," won't it also promise great profits for those arms-makers who are among Bush's strongest supporters and largest contributors? And isn't it also intended to make it easier for the Bush administration to continue giving its close ally Israel a free hand to do whatever it wants to those "Muslim extremists" who recently won a democratic election in the West Bank?

Let's look more closely at this picture of a conflict lasting for decades that the Bush administration wants to drag us into. Some among us, including me, would argue the contrary case, that if the U.S. actually changed its foreign policies, ceased its drive for political and economic domination over areas of the world that Arabs and Muslims consider to be theirs, and seriously addressed their legitimate grievances on the Palestine-Israel issue, we could reduce the threat of terrorism against us and our allies in far less time. Taking a moral stand for a change, if only by backing away from imperialism, would have the dual benefit of being moral -- a nice change of pace -- and pragmatically of vastly enhancing the U.S. image around the world and undermining the terrorists' anti-American case.

Let's look more closely also at the claim that Islamist terrorism is the great danger of the present. Danger to whom? If you were a Muslim, might you not figure instead that the greatest danger to you was U.S. and Israeli aggression and Christian fundamentalist extremism, given some of the statements certain fundamentalist leaders in the U.S. have made about Islam? Put another way, might you not see the greatest danger to you arising from the alliance of Christian and Jewish fundamentalism arrayed against your world?

Let's take one more example. One of the action recommendations in the 9/11 Commission's report is this: "The problems in the U.S.-Saudi relationship must be confronted, openly. . . . [An effort should be made to work toward] a shared interest in greater tolerance and cultural respect, translating into a commitment to fight the violent extremists who foment hatred." If we say that about the U.S.-Saudi relationship, should we not ask that problems in the U.S.-Israeli-Muslim relationship be confronted just as openly? If you were a Muslim, would you not regard it as equally important to global peace that the U.S. work for tolerance and cultural respect in both America and Israel as well, and work toward translating that into a commitment to fight extremists who foment hatred of Islam in both nations?

The new 2006 version of the National Security Strategy paper also deals with U.S. policy toward Iraq, Iran, and Syria. It will not be news to readers that there is nothing in the document about the timing of even a partial withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. Every reference to Iraq is written in a manner intended to persuade readers that U.S. forces will remain in the country indefinitely. Nor will it be news that the administration plans to continue employing preemptive military action in the region whenever and wherever it decides to do so. The paper contains no serious restrictions on any future U.S. preemptive military actions.

Syria and Iran are lumped together as "allies of terror" in the 2006 version, and they are told that "the world must hold these regimes to account." The document contains nothing on specific U.S. plans for Syria, but Iran receives considerably more detailed treatment. The U.S. alleges that Iran "has violated its Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) safeguards obligations" and says that "we may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran." The paper threatens "confrontation" if diplomatic efforts do not succeed and goes on to say that the U.S. also has "broader concerns. . . . The Iranian regime sponsors terrorism; threatens Israel; seeks to thwart Middle East peace; disrupts democracy in Iraq; and denies the aspirations of its people for freedom." How much of this is bluff and how much is not is impossible to know for sure, but at the least, the document intentionally leaves the impression that some form of U.S., or U.S.-Israeli, military action against Iran, possibly involving nuclear weapons, is likely in coming months.

A digression is necessary here. This writer's belief is that the only long-term hope the world has of avoiding a quite widespread further proliferation of nuclear weapons to additional nations in the coming decade is for the U.S. to undertake honest and serious multilateral negotiations aimed at eliminating nuclear weapons everywhere. In the specific case of Iran, if we in the U.S., without launching a war, seriously want that country to forgo nuclear weapons, we should understand that Iran, despite its present denials, almost certainly wants a capability to acquire such weapons in the future, just as the Bush administration believes. Iran wants them, or will want them, first, because Israel has them; second, because the U.S. has them; and third, because numerous other nations have them. As a proud country, Iran believes it is equally entitled to them, and that belief will not change. Furthermore, in the eyes of most Muslims around the world and many other people too, Iran, with a population of close to 70 million, clearly has as much right as Israel, with a population less than one-tenth as large, to have nuclear weapons.

To reemphasize the essential point, in a world where the dominant system of governance continues to be based on sovereign nation-states, the only hope, without a war, of persuading Iran to stop its nuclear weapons program is for the U.S. to end its own monumental hypocrisy on nuclear weapons. The U.S. government itself would have to undertake a major change of policy. It would have to accept the proposition, very publicly, that until the U.S. is willing to eliminate its own nuclear weapons, other nation-states around the world, including Iran, have just as much right to them as the U.S., Israel, Russia, China, England, France, India, Pakistan -- and yes, North Korea. Then, as already mentioned, the U.S. would have to begin negotiations to eliminate nuclear weapons everywhere, and it would have to stop immediately all planning to expand the varieties of weapons in its own nuclear arsenal. It would also have to stop Israel from doing the same.

From here on, what would happen next becomes even more speculative. Assuming it was possible to convince most of the major powers including the U.S. to begin multilateral talks on nuclear disarmament, the negotiations would undoubtedly require several years. In the end, the United Nations or some new international organization would most likely need a strong international military force, not dominated by the U.S., to enforce and verify any agreement, with respect to both nation-states and non-state entities. Under any circumstances, such negotiations would be exceedingly difficult.

As a simultaneous and indispensable step in this scenario, parallel negotiations on a nuclear-free zone in the entire Middle East, including Israel, would also have to be undertaken simultaneously with the global nuclear disarmament talks. Most Arab nations in the past have already supported a nuclear-free zone, while Israel has been the stumbling block. But the U.S. would have to refuse to be a partner of Israel in these negotiations, because to do so would cause the negotiations to fail miserably. Instead, we would deliberately and openly have to change our policy toward Israel and put whatever pressure on that country might be necessary to bring about a nuclear-free zone. Specifically, the U.S. would probably have to announce that future U.S. aid to Israel would be tied to the successful establishment of such a zone. Stringent enforcement and verification measures would be needed.

Now let's come down to earth. Unfortunately, it is simply impossible to envisage a situation in which any conceivable U.S. administration would at present accept even step one of this scenario -- that is, even beginning a process of negotiating away its own nuclear weapons.

Therefore, any Iranian government will in the end consider that it has as much right as the rest of us to have its own nuclear weapons, regardless of the fact that it has signed the Nonproliferation Treaty. It could quite truthfully charge that the U.S. itself had already violated the NPT, and that therefore Iran was entitled to do the same. Even if Teheran, under pressure, were to sign new agreements, now or in the future, to forgo such weapons, the new agreements would be meaningless as long as the U.S., Israel, and other nuclear nations insisted that they could keep and expand their own nuclear arsenals.

Many people are aware that the critical bargain reached in the 1970 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, as well as general and complete, disarmament, "under strict and effective international control." These provisions had no teeth, and certainly many "realists" in the U.S. foreign policy establishment thought the provisions were so unrealistic that they would not and could not be enforced. And in truth they never have been. Nevertheless, the existence of these provisions was necessary to the NPT's ratification by numerous countries, and they give any state dissatisfied with progress toward nuclear disarmament -- including Iran -- an excuse to abrogate or ignore the treaty.

While the niceties of international law on this issue may not be a major concern to most people, another question truly is vital. Which is more important -- stopping the further proliferation of nuclear weapons to Iran, or stopping the U.S. government and/or the government of Israel from instigating a war against Iran? If it is impossible to do both without military action, this question must be addressed. To this writer, the answer is crystal clear: The single most urgent objective right now is preventing a war, possibly nuclear, from being started by the U.S. and/or Israel against Iran. 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.

From 1945 until the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, the U.S. never once took military action to prevent other nations from simply acquiring nuclear weapons. And numerous other nations did in fact acquire them. Washington relied instead on deterrence and containment to prevent other nations from using such weapons after they had been developed. Deterrence and containment 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. It is also quite likely that Iran itself, whenever it decides that it must have its own nuclear weapons more quickly than it now seems to want them, will conclude that it too needs them for deterrent rather than preemptive and aggressive purposes against the U.S. and Israel. The point is that for Iran as well as the U.S., deterrence and containment turn out still to be better policies than the recklessness of preemption. We should therefore strongly reject any U.S.- or
Israeli-initiated military actions or coup attempts against Iran. The consequence of such actions would almost certainly be a new world war.

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. He is a contributor to Imperial Crusades, CounterPunch's history of the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. He can be reached at Kathy.bill@christison-santafe.com.

The New Global Arabism

By Parag Khanna
The Washington Post
June 9, 2006

Some American commentators bend over backwards to portray Arab societies as backwards or feeble. Conservatives argue that it was necessary to invade Iraq because repressive regimes and Islamic fundamentalists in the Middle East "only understand the language of force." Even liberals who oppose military interventions point to the Arab Human Development Report, which highlights the humiliating gaps between the West and the Arab world in terms of the number of publications translated, internet penetration, Nobel Prize winners, and other hallmarks of wealthy societies. The Arab world, in short, is under-globalized and seems all but cut off from the global currents of modernity.

If the Arab world is so self-contained and governed by such simplistic logic, however, then why has the West been so utterly incapable of dealing productively with it? The reason has as much to do with the condescending and specious logic outlined above as with any of the admittedly myriad flaws in Arab governance.

First, a lesson in geography and geology. The Arab world forever lies at the crossroads of Western, Eastern and African civilizations. It has been pivotal to most great historical developments and events from the Silk Road to the Crusades to World War II. For most of the twentieth century, and for the foreseeable future, the concentration of the world's oil supply in Arab hands puts them very much in control of the fuel of the global economy itself. There is no naïvite in the Arab world about its centrality in the future success or failure of globalization. It will not be -- as all too many commentators claim -- "left behind."

At all levels of international politics, economics and culture, the Arab world is not merely on the receiving end of globalization's forces, like third world countries blatantly exploited by multinational corporations. Rather, it is learning how to use and manipulate globalization to its own advantage. From Egyptian Brotherhood leader Sayyid Qutb to 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta, Islamic fundamentalists have studied in the West and developed their animating visions in part as a response to these cross-cultural encounters. They have seen their mission as global, not local. Today, Arab television networks such as Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya have also learned from Western journalist methods and turned their lenses outward, becoming globally competitive -- in Arabic and soon in English -- with their challenging interpretations of global events. Anyone can play in globalization's marketplace of ideas, and the Western account is no longer automatically privileged.

The pan-Arabism of a half-century ago had all the elements of self-serving dictatorial posturing of leaders too nervous to actually cede sovereignty to a greater Arab essence. The new Arabism requires no false center like the Arab League, nor a Nasserite socialist hero. Whereas the Arab world is widely considered fiercely nationalistic, even tribal, particularly in comparison with the postmodern European Union, a closer look suggests that due to its unique cultural circumstances, it potentially sets the pace in transcending the state system. Unlike the twenty-five members of the EU, the over twenty Arab nations already share a common language and religion, neither of which they need to debate in months of supranational constitutional wrangling. The combination of mass media and shared geopolitical grievances, alongside the painful awareness of the arbitrariness of the Western-imposed borders, are transforming the Arab political landscape into one of remarkably consistent public opinion in suspicion of American foreign policy, views on the role of religion in public life, and the diminished legitimacy of unelected rulers. Like the sense of European-ness, this sense of Arabism is rapidly accelerating among the electronically and professionally globalizing younger generation in the Arab world. Student exchanges, activist conferences, print media and internet blogs are contributing to a broad, concerted, and bottom-up push for political change, a trend not seen with any such consistency anywhere else in the world. In other words, whereas political Islam is in fact largely a national-level phenomenon, political Arabism exists strongly in the Arab consciousness.

The Arab world is itself so vast -- stretching from Morocco to the Persian Gulf -- that its internal globalization is actually more revealing about globalization trends than its relations with the outside world. At the top level, countless billions in investment are flowing from Arab oil to non-oil economies, building the manufacturing and service sectors across the region; FDI/GDP ratios are rising in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon. In the bottom tier, countless Arab migrants have moved from the non-oil to the booming oil economies in the Gulf and to Iraq in search of quick personal profit. Furthermore, the speed and efficiency of the Islam consistent hawala system is a case study in transferring capital through networks rather than hierarchical institutions, one of the paradigmatic shifts globalization embodies. The very Islam which is construed as a repressive, pre-modern force has been since its inception one of the drivers of global commerce.

*******

Though for millions of Arabs in the Middle East life carries on today as it has for centuries, a visit to Arab cities such as Cairo, Beirut and Dubai radically alters one's impression of Arabs as untouched by globalized modernity. If anything, the Arab world is a testing ground for the impact globalization forces have on economies, religion and politics.

Cairo does not conform to the popular conception of a lugubrious Arab culture in which mint tea and nargeela-smoking provide sufficient disincentive for the common man to work or vote. During rush hour, Cairo has a bruising edginess, its residents so hectically in pursuit of meetings and deals that pedestrians easily out-pacing cars jammed on the Zamalek bridge. One wishes that drivers would all stop honking and heed the mizzoun's call to prayer, to seize the chance to pause and reflect, something so necessary in this frenetic age of break-neck globalization. In a society with under-developed institutions like Egypt, Islam may be the only continuous force keeping people centered and giving meaning to the plethora of choices globalization brings.

Beirut, too, is a strikingly forward example of where globalization is carrying the world. As state institutions lose leverage around the world, in Lebanon they have been essentially absent for decades. As a result, it is political philanthropy -- such as that of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri, a political Donald Trump until his assassination last year -- which dictates status and influence. Short-term special interests and inter-connected black markets have trumped any notion of normal Lebanese politics. Like so much of Latin America and East Asia, pockets of next year's Porsches and disco music coexist with an under-class service economy -- both fueled by a wealthy global diaspora four times larger than the country's own population.

Finally, Dubai has become the epitome of the 24/7 global economic city. By day it is an emerging model of technology and media clusters (such as the Internet City and Media City) driving innovation and serving regional markets, an economy diversified almost completely away from oil and into global financial center. A New York skyline now exists where just ten years ago the Arabian desert and the Persian Gulf met uninterrupted. This would never have been possible if Dubai did not lie half-way between -- and thus borrow equally from -- first world European engineering and abundant third world, South Asian labor. By night Dubai is perhaps the world's hub of the global sin industry, so embodying raw capitalism that it tests the notion that anything can indeed be bought. Russian, Arab, and Chinese businessmen stridently indulge in the global meat market at clubs such as Cyclone where they would elsewhere sheepishly remain in the shadows. Dubai is so divorced from its own cultural surroundings that many Arab men go there to forget they are in a Muslim country.

The increasingly confident Arab world has many dysfunctionalities which are well documented and polemicized. But it needs to be viewed not as a realm apart from globalized modernity, but very much a proving ground for it.

Parag Khanna is a Fellow at the New America Foundation and author of The Second World, forthcoming from Random House.

White House Sees Diplomatic, Political Opportunities

By Michael Abramowitz and Glenn Kessler
Washington Post
June 9, 2006

The killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi opened an opportunity yesterday for the White House to show that its military mission can still prevail in Iraq, and administration officials moved quickly to try to seize the diplomatic and political initiative.

In an early-morning appearance in the Rose Garden to hail Zarqawi's death, President Bush announced that he was summoning his top advisers to an unusual meeting at Camp David on Monday and Tuesday to chart a way forward in Iraq, with the focus on how to deploy American resources to bolster the fledgling government. Troop reductions are not on the agenda, the White House press secretary said.

Administration officials said a range of issues will be on the table, including developing a new security plan for violence-ridden Baghdad, spurring reconciliation between warring Sunni and Shiite populations -- perhaps with some kind of amnesty plan for insurgents -- and the possibility of new international economic assistance for Iraq.

White House officials were clearly elated by the good news from Iraq, which also included the announcement from Baghdad that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had filled critical security posts in the new government. With support for Bush on Iraq at a low ebb, and much of the news in recent weeks dominated by grim reports of sectarian violence and deaths, the day's developments seemed to present a chance to change the story line, bolster public support at home and have a strong launch for the new government.

The Iraq enterprise is now largely in the hands of that country's untested political leaders, and administration officials believe that a successful start -- after six months of bickering and rising violence after the December elections -- is their last reasonable chance to steady Iraq for the foreseeable future.

"There's going to be a window of opportunity for this new government to sink or swim," White House counselor Dan Bartlett said. "They are going to have to demonstrate to the Iraqis and the rest of the world that they are competent leaders who can meet the needs of the Iraqi people."

While Bartlett offered no specific window, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, has put the time frame at six months. In an interview this week with Der Spiegel, a German magazine, Khalilzad said, "The next six months will be critical in terms of reining in the danger of civil war. If the government fails to achieve this, it will have lost its opportunity."

Past opportunities to change the story in Iraq, such as the capture of Saddam Hussein in December 2003, have proved fleeting. Support for Bush on Iraq bumped up after that news, but it quickly receded -- and administration officials were careful yesterday to gird the public for more setbacks, even without Zarqawi in Iraq. "We can expect the terrorists and insurgents to carry on without him," Bush said at the Rose Garden. "We can expect the sectarian violence to continue."

On Capitol Hill, rhetoric was less restrained. "The military has chopped off the head of the snake, and I think we're all going to be much safer as a result," said House Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio).

Boehner also told reporters that the House will consider some kind of resolution next week supporting the mission in Iraq, setting up a vote aimed at embarrassing antiwar Democrats. The Senate could also take up a defense spending bill, and Democrats may look to that as a vehicle to criticize the administration.

Politics aside, lawmakers in both parties expressed satisfaction with the turn of events. "I think any day the headline is anything but another car bombing is a good day," said Senate Majority Whip Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). "Taking out the second-best-known terrorist killer in the world and getting the Ministries of Defense and Interior settled, thereby completing the government, is a good day. Even the most bitter critics of the war have to concede that these are important developments."

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the killing of Zarqawi is "not a turning point, but the administration could take advantage of it."

Biden said the administration needs to use the opportunity created by Zarqawi's death and the completion of the government to take three steps: push Maliki to put together a plan to purge the ministries of sectarian militias; insist that Iraq take advantage of a 120-day window available to amend the constitution; and go back to the international community and obtain financial and diplomatic support for Iraq.

If the administration does not take such steps, Biden said, the killing of Zarqawi could be "as transitory as the capture of Saddam Hussein."

Administration officials said the Camp David meeting will be about how the administration can help the Iraqis move quickly. In a planned videoconference with Iraqi leaders, Bush and his Cabinet members will emphasize that the Iraqis need to come up with ideas for running their country and that the U.S. government is ready to support the implementation of those plans, according to one senior official who requested anonymity to discuss internal administration deliberations. The key issues, this source said, are reconciliation of religious and ethnic groups, economic reform and international support.

The administration is not pressing the new government to adopt a particular solution, such as amending the constitution to accommodate Sunni grievances, but it wants the Iraqi leaders to make decisions, the official said. "We are pushing everyone to come up with solutions," the official said. "The last thing we can do is dictate a solution."

The administration is exploring the idea of an international aid compact, much like Afghanistan has. The compact, established with the United Nations and international donors, set a five-year plan to build security, rule of law, and economic and social development in the war-torn country in order to attract pledges of international support.

Iraq has secured $14 billion in pledges since 2003 but has had trouble collecting the money, with about $3.5 billion provided thus far, the official said. The administration is especially targeting Arab states in the Persian Gulf area, flush with oil revenue, to forgive Iraqi debts and make good on previous pledges.

The Camp David meeting will include such officials as the secretaries of agriculture and energy and their Iraqi counterparts, looking at what technical expertise the administration can offer on problems such as pipeline security and electricity, long a sore point for Iraqis. "It's really bringing all elements of national power to bear to make this transition successful," Bartlett said.

White House national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley was told by Khalilzad at about 3:45 p.m. on Wednesday that Zarqawi may have been killed, according to White House press secretary Tony Snow. A little after 9 p.m., Snow added, the White House was told that tattoos, scars and fingerprints on the body matched those of Zarqawi.

But the White House held back on announcing the news, preferring that Maliki make the announcement in Baghdad yesterday morning.

Eliot A. Cohen, an expert on military strategy at Johns Hopkins University who has close ties to some officials in the administration, said the significance of Zarqawi's demise may be greatest for White House officials who have been emotionally drained by the Iraq ordeal.

"This is probably as important for their morale as anything else," Cohen said. "I think where this really counts is it makes them feel a lot better. The news has not been so good from Iraq. Now, the danger is that they will fool themselves into thinking this is a bigger deal than it is."

Jeremy Rosner, a former Clinton administration official who is an authority on public opinion and foreign policy, said the Zarqawi strike has helped Bush, but only to a point, given the unpopularity of the war.

"He's at the edge of public tolerance and probably congressional tolerance," Rosner said. "He's still got room to operate -- he's not at the point where his hands are tied. This gives him a stronger data point to argue to stay the course."

Thursday, June 08, 2006

Korans At Center Of Clash At Prison Camp

Detainees at Guantánamo told their lawyers that a melee was sparked by a dispute over inspection of the Koran. Commanders say captives tried to ambush guards.
By Carol Rosenberg
Miami Herald
June 8, 2006

Captives at Guantánamo asserted through their lawyers Wednesday that a brawl broke out in a barracks last month after guards breached an agreement and tried to rifle through Korans at the Navy base in Cuba.

Prison camp commanders flatly disputed the allegations.

Defense attorneys for five Yemeni captives relayed the first detainee account after the military declassified their notes of conversations with the men on May 25-26.

''The Korans being holy to them, it was something they didn't want the guards pawing through,'' said Atlanta attorney John A. Chandler, who added that one captive he represents was a party to the melee -- and maintains he was a victim of military force.

``The riot squad came in to force the inspection; the men in the camp took that as a hostile act toward them and fought back. It is a guard-provoked situation.''

Commanders cast last month's fight between 10 guards and 10 captives as the worst outbreak of violence among alleged al Qaeda and Taliban members and sympathizers at the 4-year-old prison complex.

It broke out May 18, commanders said, after guards discovered two captives unconscious from overdoses of other detainees' hoarded anti-anxiety pills. The guards were systematically searching the camps for contraband.

Navy Cmdr. Robert Durand insisted Wednesday that the guards ''did not deviate from procedures'' that prohibit them from touching the Koran. He called the defense attorneys' version of events ``blatantly false.''

Under camp rules, he said, a guard can order a detainee to open his Koran for a no-touch inspection. Or he can instruct a Muslim translator to inspect the holy book with his hands.

''We handle the Koran with the utmost respect, even during the urgent searches,'' Durand said. ``Our guard force does not handle the Koran. Period.''

The Pentagon published the procedures a year ago to quell anti-American riots across the globe in response to a since-retracted Newsweek report that a Guantánamo guard had flushed a Koran down a toilet.

Six detainees were injured in the May 18 melee in Camp 4, a prisoner-of-war style camp capable of housing up to 175 so-called compliant captives in barracks that allow 10 men to sleep in the same room.

As a result of the outburst, 66 captives were moved out of Camp 4; Chandler said his client was among them.

Four other Yemeni clients held in other portions of the sprawling complex of prison camps related identical accounts, he said.

''One was a witness to all of this,'' Chandler said. ``The other four either saw pieces of what happened or heard it from others.''

Commanders maintain that an already edgy guard force alerted to the earlier suicide attempts spotted a detainee in one 10-man bay arranging a sheet as though he was going to hang himself -- and called in the riot force.

As they charged through the door, the military said, two soldiers went down on a concoction of feces, urine and soap that the captives had spread on the floor. The 10 men allegedly ambushed the soldiers with fan parts and a camera torn from a wall mount and other improvised weapons.

Soldiers let loose with pepper spray, rubber bullets and a sponge grenade to stop the fight, the first ever use of the external Quick Reaction Force at Guantánamo.

Wednesday, June 07, 2006

Picnic



A painting entitled 'Picnic' by artist Muayad Muhsin, who was both inspired and enraged by a photo of Donald H. Rumsfeld slumped on an airplane seat with his army boots up in front of him, is displayed in Baghdad, Iraq Monday, June 5, 2006. The painting, which is expected to be unveiled at an exhibition in Baghdad next week, illustrates the simmering anger of Iraqis with the United States three years after it rid them of Saddam Hussein, whose ouster has been followed by an enduring wave of violence, sectarian tensions and crime. (AP Photo/Samir Mizban)

U.S. Values Push Alienates Muslim Women

By Katie Stuhldreher
Washington Times
June 7, 2006

Muslim women are potentially important allies in the war on terrorism, but the United States must avoid pushing Western values to win their support, according to data presented yesterday at the Gallup Organization.

The Bush administration has promoted women's rights throughout the Muslim world to gain support in the region, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan. But a worldwide Gallup project found that many Muslim women are not as concerned about changing their status as Westerners might think.

In Lebanon and Turkey, 9 percent to 11 percent of women said sexual inequality was a major problem, but negligible concern about the issue was found elsewhere. Jordanian women did not mention it when asked what aspects of society they disliked, and 2 percent of women cited the issue in Egypt and Morocco.

Far more often, Muslim women were worried about the same things as Muslim men -- lack of unity, extremism and political corruption.

Dalia Mogahed, a Gallup Organization analyst, said a majority of men and women expressed opposition to extremism and terrorism and said they were conscious of the rights that women deserved. The key, she said, is how the United States approaches the issue.

"The imposition of Western values alienates both men and women, because it is strongly associated with colonialism, like the British policies of unveiling in Egypt," Mrs. Mogahed said.

"Westerners need to understand how to reach Muslim women through their own value systems, by using the positive aspects of their own beliefs to encourage increased rights."

Mrs. Mogahed noted that Muslim women admired women's legal rights in Western countries, but thought that Western society degrades women by tolerating pornography and encouraging promiscuity. Muslim women do not want to adopt Western values because they think moral decay is present in these societies, she said.

Andrea Rugh, an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute, said in a telephone interview: "We need to understand that we have very different concepts of rights than Muslims do.

"In the Muslim world, the focus is on the role within the group, not the individual. A Muslim man will receive more of an inheritance than a woman, for example, but the woman has the right to be taken care of by a man."

Another aspect of the Gallup project highlighted this lack of understanding between the two cultures. When interviewers asked Americans what they most admired about Muslim societies, more than 50 percent answered "Nothing" or "I don't know."

Ms. Rugh said too many Americans rely on outdated information about the Muslim world and have difficulty understanding how those societies work.

"When I worked with Afghan women after the fall of the Taliban, they often said that they didn't understand why we wanted them to go out and work," she said.

"Most of them were not educated, so work meant construction work or hard labor. Improvement in the education system for both males and females should be the focus here, not imposition of our model of right."

Our Failure In Somalia

U.S. Counterterrorism Policy Is Empowering Islamist Militias
By John Prendergast
Washington Post
June 7, 2006

It was before "Black Hawk Down," before Somalia became the only country in the world without a government, that I took my first trip there. It changed my life. This was in the mid-1980s, when the United States was underwriting a warlord dictator in support of our Cold War interests, at the clear expense of basic human rights. As a young, wide-eyed activist-in-training, I couldn't accept the idea that my government would use defenseless Somali civilians as pawns on its strategic chessboard -- in a strategy that ultimately produced only state collapse, civil war and famine.

Twenty years later the enemy has changed, but the plot is hauntingly similar. In recent trips to the capital, Mogadishu, I have seen evidence of U.S. support to warlord militia leaders in the name of counterterrorism operations. Since the beginning of the year, pitched battles between U.S.-backed warlords and Islamist militias in Mogadishu have claimed hundreds of lives and displaced thousands of families.

Now "our" warlords -- and by extension our counterterrorism strategy -- have been dealt a crushing defeat by the Islamists, as the latter have consolidated control of Mogadishu. Our short-term interest in locating al-Qaeda suspects has thus been undermined, and the risk of a new safe haven being created for international terrorists has been greatly increased.

The statelessness in Somalia has already been allowing al-Qaeda and other destructive forces to operate there. The president of a neighboring country told me recently that the "governance vacuum is growing larger, with very negative implications for Somalia. It increases the potential for international terrorists to use the structures that are filling the vacuum for safe haven and logistical purposes."

It was partly from Somali soil that al-Qaeda organized and carried out two serious terrorist attacks, in Kenya and Tanzania, against U.S. embassies and a foreign-owned hotel, and narrowly missed bringing down an Israeli passenger jet with two surface-to-air missiles. A plot to crash an airplane into the U.S. Embassy in Kenya was foiled. "Soft" targets are legion throughout East Africa, and intelligence indicates that new attacks are being planned.

Somalia is an al-Qaeda recruiter's dream -- with rampant unemployment, travel restrictions, and no government or foreign investment -- and young Somalis will turn to terrorism for money and, occasionally, because of shared ideology. Schools run by Islamic charities are graduating large numbers of students, many of whom are being taught in Arabic instead of Somali and who have no prospect of meaningful work. Drug dealers and militias looking to restart conflict over economic interests find easy recruits, further destabilizing the area and sowing the seeds of radicalism.

The U.S. counterterrorism approach in Somalia isn't working: The al-Qaeda leaders sought by the United States there remain at large, and the Islamists who protect them are gaining ground against U.S.-backed militias, as this week's events show. With a growing chorus of voices, rightly or wrongly, blaming the United States and the warlords for the fighting, public opinion in Mogadishu has been swinging in favor of the Islamists.

In April the United States tried a different tack, inviting clan and political leaders to Kenya for talks and to enlist their support in dismantling the al-Qaeda safe haven. But fighting broke out as soon as the leaders returned to Mogadishu, making it seem as though one hand of the U.S. government didn't know what the other was doing.

A successful counterterrorism effort would require the United States to pull the political and military threads together into a coherent strategy of broader engagement. U.S. officials and those from other governments throughout the region uniformly have told me that long-term counterterrorism objectives can be achieved only by American investment in the Somali peace process. Yet the State Department has just one full-time political officer working on Somalia -- from neighboring Kenya, and he was just transferred out of the region for dissenting from the policy on proxy warlords. Somalia's ineffectual transitional government remains confined to the shaky central town of Baidoa, where it is still struggling to overcome internal divisions.

A functioning government that could ensure security would be a win-win scenario for Somalis and the United States, enabling the state apparatus to address the criminality and extremism that undermine progress in the country. This would provide a real partner for the war on terrorism in an area that has a track record for exporting trouble.

The continuation of Washington's current approach in Somalia would ensure that U.S. interests and those of other countries in the region remain dangerously vulnerable to terrorist attacks from this collapsed state. Continued fighting between Islamist elements and the U.S.-backed warlord alliance will breed resentment, attract recruits to the extremist cause and provide a training ground for new militants. The United States can no longer afford not to engage more deeply and directly in state reconstruction efforts in Somalia. It is in our national security interest to do so.

The writer is a senior adviser to the International Crisis Group. He worked for the National Security Council during the Clinton administration.

MIDEAST: Still Some Food in the Garbage

Sanjay Suri
IPS-Inter Press Service

LONDON, Jun 2 (IPS) - Children rummage through garbage cans for discarded food for their one meal during the day. Families wait to buy discount-priced vegetables left unsold in the evening. These are not locally exaggerated accounts of the situation in Palestinian areas, but an official account by the World Food Programme.

Next month the World Food Programme (WFP), a United Nations agency, will have to feed 25 percent more people -- 600,000 in all -- in the Palestinian territories because they have no other way of finding food. But only next month; the organisation has no money left to feed people after that.

"We're going to have a pipeline break then," Kirstie Campbell from the WFP told IPS by phone from Jerusalem.

"There has been a cut in funding after withdrawal of tax payments from Israel," Campbell said. "Also, donors are not funding the Palestinian Authority."

Palestinians are evidently paying for exercising their democratic choice and voting a Hamas government into power. And it is the poorest among them who will pay the price.

"You have three categories of people in need," Campbell said. "You have the chronically poor, then you have people in institutions like the elderly, orphans and social rejects, and thirdly the new poor who have been affected by the present crisis.

It is the last of these categories that is far more likely to find help than the others "because programmes for them are being implemented by non-governmental organisations," she said. Funding to the first two categories is processed through the social affairs ministry of the Palestinian government, which is not likely to get this new funding.

And other factors are making life even worse for these poorest of the poor.

"Of about 2.2 million poultry in these areas, about 400,000 have been culled because of avian influenza," Campbell said. "And that is the cheapest source of protein."

People in Gaza are suffering also under fishing restrictions, said the WFP reporting officer. "Fishing has been allowed only between six and 10 nautical miles into the sea," she said. "But this is not the area where you can find the bigger fish. Boats are going out and trawling in the breeding area, and gathering a lot of small fish and waste."

The closure of the Karni terminal on the border between Gaza and Israel has added to the hardship, limiting the availability of goods and food, though there has been some easing of restrictions this week.

Under the weight of such pressures, survival itself is beginning to crack up.

"WFP monitors have carried out a dietary diversity study among about a thousand families, and we are seeing people affected in all sorts of ways by the poverty and unemployment," Campbell said. "Families have no money to buy food, and some are living on only bread and herbs."

This might soon have a bearing on the health of the population. The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) is now beginning a study of the nutritional aspect of the food problem in the Palestinian areas, with a combined population of about 3.5 million across Gaza, Jerusalem and the West Bank (of the Jordan river).

That study is due to begin in July -- when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians will be staring at prospects of no food at all.

In the face of this crisis "we are definitely seeing sings of unrest," Campbell said. "That is clear from so many reports from the region that you see."

Pledges and contributions fall far short of the 103 million dollars the WFP wants for a two-year period that began in September 2005. The WFP has only 29 percent of the projected need in the face of a rapidly worsening situation.

Major donors so far include the European Commission (13.9 million dollars), the United States (7.9 million), Japan (1.4 million), France (1.2 million), Norway (1.1 million) and Switzerland (1.0 million).

The annual worldwide budget of the WFP last year was about 3.1 billion dollars, and the year before, the agency reached 113 million people in 80 countries. What has been given for the Palestinian areas is a tiny fraction of the budget total, and what is being offered additionally now is selective and conditional.

According to a recent study conducted by the WFP along with the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), nearly two million Palestinians, more than half the population, are unable to meet their daily food needs without assistance.

"The situation is dragging the exhausted population into deeper poverty and debt," Arnold Vercken, WFP country director in the Palestinian territories, said in a statement. "Loss of earnings and rising unemployment coupled with increased market prices are crippling the poorest sector of society, leading to mounting despair."

Vercken added: "In Gaza we are seeing more people, especially children, begging on the streets. We are in a race against time to reach the most vulnerable with food aid and avoid an escalation of this crisis. Urgent assistance now can really make a difference."

Iraqi officials: 6,002 bodies delivered to Baghdad's main morgue in 5 months

Iraq to Release Detainees in Bid to Ease Tensions
By JOHN F. BURNS
The New York Times
June 7, 2006

BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 6 — Iraq's new government said Tuesday that it would release 2,500 detainees, nearly 10 percent of those held in Iraqi and American detention centers, and that it would adopt a "national reconciliation" plan to reintegrate former members of Saddam Hussein's ruling Baath Party into society.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki said the first 500 detainees would be released Wednesday, with others following in the next few days. An American military spokesman said the decision to free the detainees, the largest group to be released in the 38 months since the American-led invasion, had been agreed to in a joint review by Iraqi and American officials. He said those freed would not include any deemed "guilty of serious crimes such as bombings, torture, kidnapping and murder."

Mr. Maliki, in his third week in office, gave few details of the reconciliation program. But he compared it to South Africa's "truth and reconciliation" process in the 1990's, which, he said, "sent some criminals to the courts and reinstated other people in society after promising not to try and rebuild" the country's apartheid system. The Iraqi leader said his government's plan, like South Africa's, would involve a national commission, and others in Iraq's 18 provinces, that would work to "an agreed timetable and program."

At a news conference here, the 56-year-old prime minister drove home the carrot-and-stick approach he outlined in a visit last week to the southern oil city of Basra. There, he vowed to use "an iron fist" to crush Sunni Arab insurgents and sectarian militias terrorizing Basra, but promised that his government would rule in ways that would make a priority of rebuilding Iraq on the basis of justice for the communities of Shiites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds now engaged in a bitter struggle for economic and political power.

On Tuesday, Mr. Maliki's focus was on the Sunni Arab minority that was the mainstay of Mr. Hussein's rule. "We are ready to turn a new page with those who so desire it, and we will respond with force to those who want to pursue violence," he said. "Those who want to end the bitterness of the past have the way open through the process of national reconciliation, but those who choose bloodshed will find us ready to deal with them."

The detainee release, though sweeping, seemed likely to fall far short of the demands of Sunni politicians who have joined in the uneasy partnership with the dominant Shiites in the new government, the first with a full, four-year tenure since Mr. Hussein's overthrow. The Interior Ministry said Tuesday that a total of 27,800 people were being held in Iraqi and American prisons across the country — a figure that included criminals and former Baathists as well as insurgents and members of their support network.

A spokesman for the American military command, Lt. Col. Keir-Kevin Curry, said there were about 14,500 detainees in the detention centers run by the American-led forces, including several thousand at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad.

Colonel Curry said the terms of the detainees' release included a pledge to renounce violence "and to be good citizens of Iraq." He added, "All of these detainees selected for release have been found to be relatively low threats."

Similar pledges have been made by other detainees released since Iraq resumed sovereignty after the formal period of American occupation ended two years ago, including a group of nearly 1,000 men who were freed from Abu Ghraib last August. Some of those have since been killed in clashes with American and Iraqi troops, or rearrested on suspicion of involvement in the insurgency. The August release was ordered as a concession to Sunni Arab leaders then engaged in tense negotiations with Shiite and Kurdish leaders over the new Constitution.

Mr. Maliki's message on Tuesday offered assurances to Shiites and Kurds who were Mr. Hussein's principal victims, and, implicitly, to American and Iraqi troops, who with Shiites have borne the brunt of the Sunni-led insurgency that has gripped the heartland of Iraq.

The detainees being freed, he said, "are not Saddamists, terrorists or people with the blood of the Iraqi people on their hands, but people who have committed certain mistakes, cooperated in a certain manner or played some kind of role" in Mr. Hussein's repression and what has followed.

But the Iraqi leader's emphasis on reconciliation, and the detainee releases, seemed to signal a breakthrough for American officials, who have been pressing hard for new measures to placate the Sunni Arab minority. In effect, Mr. Maliki's announcements signaled to Shiites, whose religious parties secured a dominant role in the government after last December's election, that there needs to be a softening in the "de-Baathification" process that has marginalized thousands of Sunni Arabs who worked in Mr. Hussein's government and armed forces.

Strongly backed by Shiite leaders, the process won eager backing from the American occupation authority after the 2003 invasion. But American officials have all but disavowed the process now, seeing it as one of the prime causes of Sunni discontent that feeds the insurgency.

"We know that there are a lot of Baathists who want to put the heavy burden of having joined this ugly party behind them," Mr. Maliki said, and the mechanism for their doing so would lie in the reconciliations commissions and the opportunity to pledge "not to return to the party and rejoin society."

In a move that underscored the tide of violence that has many Iraqis saying they preferred life under Mr. Hussein's harsh dictatorship, Iraq's Health Ministry confirmed figures on Tuesday that showed 6,002 bodies, most victims of violence, were delivered to Baghdad's main morgue in the first five months of this year.

The figure for May, 1,375, was more than double the figure for May last year. Morgue officials have said that as many as 20 of the daily average of more than 40 bodies that arrive every day, many of them blindfolded, with tied wrists and showing signs of torture, remain unclaimed.

On Tuesday, police reported at least 25 new victims, most of them in Baghdad and in Diyala Province, east and north of the capital, which has been the center of some of the most brutal sectarian killings involving Sunnis and Shiites in recent weeks.

The death toll in one of the most grisly recent attacks, in the village of Hadid, near the Diyala provincial capital of Baquba, rose to 17 on Tuesday when the police delivered nine severed heads to the Baquba morgue in the fruit boxes in which they were found in the village.

On Saturday, eight other heads were found in the village. Notes found with the bodies indicated that the victims were Sunnis killed in retaliation for the killings of five Shiites, four of them doctors, in a earlier attack.

On Sunday, 20 people traveling in two minibuses and a car were stopped on a highway near Baquba, pulled from their vehicles and shot. The victims included seven students on their way to final exams in the city. Mr. Maliki, at his news conference, spoke angrily of the "flood of blood" that had been spilled in similar attacks in and around Baghdad since he came to office.

He said his government had approved a plan for a security crackdown by Iraqi and American troops that would concentrate on Baghdad and Diyala, which he described as "a launching pad for terrorists and former regime elements," meaning Baathists, who use the province as a base for attacks in Baghdad.

His comments tallied with those of American military commanders, who have identified Baghdad, Diyala and Anbar Province, to the west of the capital, and particularly the provincial capital of Ramadi, where insurgents have mounted some of their boldest attacks of the war in the past month, as priorities in the next phase of the war.

Mr. Maliki's first weeks as Iraq's leader have been burdened by his failure to win approval from rival factions in the government for nominees to the cabinet's top security posts.

He told reporters that he would try again at a meeting of Parliament on Thursday, and that he would be submitting the same names — Farouk al-Araji, a Shiite who was an officer in Mr. Hussein's army until 1993, as interior minister, and Gen. Abdel Qader Mohammed Jassim, a Sunni who is a commander in the new army, as defense minister. Their names were to have been put to Parliament on Sunday, but disagreement within the government caused the session to be canceled.

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Egypt tells US institute to halt activities

Agence France Presse
Mon Jun 5, 2006

Egypt has asked an American NGO which promotes democracy to suspend its activities in the country due to interference in Cairo's internal affairs.

A foreign ministry spokesman said Monday that Egypt has called on the International Republican Institute (IRI) to halt operations in Egypt until it has received the necessary permits.

The move came after a newspaper interview with Gina London, the Cairo head of the IRI, critical of the slow pace of reform in Egypt.

"Talking of the role of the institute in speeding up what she called 'change' is a blatant interference in Egypt's internal affairs," the ministry spokesman told reporters.

The Egyptian daily Nahdet Masr on Saturday published an interview with London in which she spoke about the institute's work on democracy and the push for reform in Egypt.

Reformists in Egypt were "unable (to achieve reforms) for the past 25 years", she was quoted as saying.

A lawyer for the institute played down the controversy. "It is all just a misunderstanding ... The institute has not yet started its activities, it is still in the set-up phase," said Omar Hegazi.

"We have almost finished the registration procedures and the file will be ready soon," he said.

The IRI, with offices in more than 60 countries, was founded in April 1983 and is described on its website as "a private, non-profit organization dedicated to advancing democracy worldwide".

Monday, June 05, 2006

Olmert in Egypt



Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert shares a light moment with his Egyptian counterpart Hosni Mubarak (R) after their joint press conference in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. Olmert insisted that negotiations with the Palestinians were his top priority after a first meeting with Mubarak.(AFP/Menahem Kahana)

Sunday, June 04, 2006

"We Have No One to Talk To"

Israel's Targeted Assassination Policy
By ROSEMARY RADFORD RUETHER
CounterPunch
June 4, 2006

On May 24, 2006, Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, appeared before the U.S. Congress to decry the lack of any "genuine Palestinian partner for peace," with whom Israel could talk. Although declaring "our deepest desire to build a better future for our region, hand in hand with a Palestinian partner," Olmert warned that Israel cannot "wait forever," If such a partner fails to appear, Israel will move forward to set the borders of Israel vis á vis the Palestinians unilaterally. Olmert received the warmest ovations from the Congress and was promised support from the White House for the plan to unilaterally set Israel's borders, should no Palestinian leaders who satisfy Israel's conditions as "partners for peace" appear.

Olmert's stance should be put in the context of Israel's long standing policy of targeted assassination of Palestinian leaders. For more than thirty years it has been Israel's policy to assassinate or otherwise eliminate popular Palestinian leaders who were independent and had wide trust of the people, while seeking to construct a subservient leadership with whom it could negotiate "peace" on Israel's terms. In the 1970s, after Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in the 1967 war, Israel tried to create the "village leagues," a puppet leadership which Israel could pass off as Palestinian self-government. These pseudo-leaders were resoundingly rejected by the Palestinian people. In 1976 Palestinian municipalities were allowed to elect their own mayors. When pro-PLO candidates swept the elections, Israel sought to assassinate several of them. The mayor of Ramallah lost one leg and the mayor of Nablus both legs in car bombs. In 1982 Israel removed all the elected mayors and replaced them with Israeli military governors.

From the founding of the PLO in 1964 until 1992 Israel refused to talk to the PLO, claiming they were determined to "destroy the state of Israel," even though the PLO had accepted a two state solution by mid-1970s. Prominent leaders of Palestinian organizations were killed in rocket attacks and car bombs. In 1973 a group of Israeli commandos, led by Ehud Barak, (later Prime Minister of Israel) arrived by speedboat in Beirut. Disguised in women's clothes Barak and his men gunned down three top PLO officials in their downtown apartments. Arafat himself escaped assassination only by living constantly on the run, seldom sleeping in the same place on successive nights.

In 1993 Israel announced that it had been meeting secretly with the PLO in Norway and had reached an interim agreement for Palestinian self-government. After signing a Declaration of Principles for this plan in September, the PLO leaders were allowed to return from Tunis to head the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza as part of a "peace process" that would lead to the negotiated settlement of the conflict under the Oslo accords. But it soon became apparent that what Arafat and the PLO thought they were doing and what Israel thought they were doing were two very different things. Arafat thought he was an autonomous leader of the Palestinian people parallel to Israel's leaders who could negotiate the details of a two-state solution leading to an independent Palestinian state.

What Israel wanted was to convert the PA into a subservient tool of a permanent occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. These territories would be divided into small enclaves of Palestinian population largely cut off from agricultural resources, separated from each other and surrounded by the Israeli military, while the areas of Israeli settlement would be annexed into Israel. The PA leaders could administrate its enclaves under Israel's permanent control. Israel and the U.S. played a continual cat and mouse game with Arafat, occasionally agreeing to negotiate with him and then rejecting him as someone with whom they could "talk," when he failed to accede fully to this plan of permanent colonization.

In September of 2000 a second Intifada (Uprising) broke out after a provocative visit of Ariel Sharon with armed soldiers to the El-Haram el-Sharif in Jerusalem, in effect laying claim to this central Muslim shrine as belonging to Israel. The Intifada expressed the growing Palestinian frustration with a supposed "peace process" that was revealed as a continual betrayal of their basic demands for dignity and independence. Israel responded with extreme violence, returning to a policy of targeted killing of Palestinian militants and political leaders that had been suspended during the period of supposed peace negotiations. Israel shelled Palestinian police stations and government buildings, bulldozed Palestinian houses and crops to create barren swaths of land, tightening its control over Palestinian population enclaves and reoccupying areas that had been supposedly turned over to Palestinian control.

In 2002 Israel began the construction of a wall that would permanently separate the Palestinian population enclaves from Israel, including a significant number of Israeli settlements built in the West Bank land around east Jerusalem. Far from being built on the Green Line (the truce line of the 1948 war) the wall cut deeply into Palestinian land, to include these settlements and major aquifers in the West Bank. Although Israel denied it, the line of the wall likely represents its plan for final borders which it is ready to unilaterally impose, if no Palestinian "partner" can be "found" to agree to it.

During the Second Intifada Israel renewed a policy of indiscriminate shooting into Palestinian protest crowds, killing and wounding large numbers. From the beginning of the second Intifada (9/29/2000) until May 15, 2006 some 3394 Palestinians have been killed in the Occupied Territories by Israeli occupation forces. Among these 233 were targeted killings in which Israel either invaded a Palestinian area or targeted a house or car from the air to assassinate someone seen as a "militant." These targeted assassinations generally result in deaths of by-standers. 353 bystanders have been killed in the course of targeted killings. The targeted persons include such religious and political leaders as Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, founder and spiritual leader of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), and Abdul 'Aziz al-Rantisi, a senior political leader of Hamas. Tanya Reinhart, in her article, "Sharon's Legacy in Action," shows that during Sharon's four years in office he pursued an all-out war against Hamas, killing all its first rank military and political leaders.

In January, 2006 the Palestinians startled Israel and the world by overwhelmingly electing Hamas representatives to the Palestinian Legislative Council (76 seats to Fatah's 43). Israel returned to its rhetoric of the 80s, declaring that it would never talk to a Palestinian government run by Hamas unless it renounced armed resistance and accepted Israel's "right to exist." But the Palestinians did not elect Hamas because it rejected a two state solution (which Hamas does reject outright), but because, among other things, they were tired of the corruption of Fatah's leaders, who had made so many compromises with Israel that any genuine two-state solution had eroded to the vanishing point. Hamas leaders were seen as less corrupt, concerned with the daily welfare of increasingly impoverished Palestinians and possessing more spine to defend a real solution that would bring genuinely independent Palestinian state.

Israel and the U.S. seek to isolate Hamas worldwide, denying the Palestinian Authority any international aid and access to funds, thus undermining the fragile remnants of social, health and educational services in the territories. It has stepped up a virtual siege on all the Palestinian territories, turning both Gaza and the other Palestinian regions into open air prisons, which can be invaded at will. In the week of May 18-24 (while I have been visiting the region of Ramallah) there have been 50 incursions of Israeli Occupation Forces into the West Bank and two into the Gaza Strip. 78 Palestinian civilians have been arrested and nine have been killed.

For example, on May 20 the occupation forces assassinated a member of the al-Quds brigade in Gaza City, by launching a missile from a helicopter at the car in which he was traveling. Three other people were killed and four wounded, all from the same family, in a passing car. On May 24 at 2:30 in the afternoon undercover agents dressed as Palestinians came into the center of Ramallah and entered an internet café to arrest a leader of the Al-Aqsa brigade and four others. Young people in the street, discovering what was happening, began to throw stones at the soldiers and to burn the car in which they had come. Fifteen military jeeps quickly drove into the center of town and opened indiscriminate fire on the crowd, wounding 35 (eight under 18) and killing four. Meanwhile check points have been continually tightened around Gaza and between enclaves in the West Bank, making travel and cultural or commercial exchange difficult to impossible.

It is this system of separated Palestinian enclaves, turned into prisons surrounded by Israeli military who invade or bomb at will - enclaves cut off from each other, whose means of daily life have become increasingly restricted and impoverished - which Israel plans to institutionalize permanently. It will do so unilaterally if necessary, if no compliant Palestinians can be founded to give it a fig leaf of legitimacy. Is the rest of the world prepared to stand by and let this happen? Where is that respect for "democracy" which the U.S. claims to champion for the Middle East and the whole world? Where are the national leaders from around the world who reject this brutal and ultimately untenable scheme? Where are those who will demand that the leaders whom the Palestinians have elected be recognized as the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people with whom Israel and the rest of the world must deal?

Dr. Rosemary Radford Ruether teaches at the Claremont Graduate University in California and is the co-author of The Wrath of Jonah: the Crisis of Religious Nationalism in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

Baghdad Morgue Reports Record Figures For May

Nearly 1,400 bodies were brought to the facility, the highest number since the war began.
By Louise Roug, Times Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times
June 4, 2006

BAGHDAD — New Iraqi government documents show that, excluding the nearly daily bombings, more Baghdad residents died in shootings, stabbings and other violence in May than in any other month since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

The numbers, and accounts from residents, depict neighborhoods descending further into violence and fear.

Last month, 1,398 bodies were brought to the central morgue, according to Ministry of Health statistics, 307 more than in April. The count doesn't include soldiers or civilian victims of explosions, on whom autopsies are not usually conducted.

Since 2003, at least 30,240 bodies have been brought to the morgue, the vast majority of them victims of gunmen who are not caught. Bodies often lie in the streets for hours.

In response, many Iraqis are closing their shops, drawing their blinds and staying home, turning once-vibrant neighborhoods into ghost towns.

Residents in some areas fear death squads and Shiite-dominated security forces. In other parts of town, they worry about religious extremists who have threatened to kill men who wear shorts and women who drive or leave their hair uncovered.

"I feel like I'm living in a prison," said Sahar Mohammed, 24, a Sunni Arab resident of west Baghdad who recently put her car in the garage and exchanged trousers for more conservative skirts. "I'm afraid of the people in my neighborhood. You don't know how people around you think nowadays."

A few days ago, violence literally came to the doorstep of Dina Ahmed, who lives in the Amiriya district. Outside her house, gunmen killed two people and stole their car. Her family tried to wash away the blood, but the sidewalk is still stained, she said.

Ahmed, 24, comes from a secular Kurdish family but covers herself with the hijab to protect herself when she goes to and from work.

In the same neighborhood, Lamya Salman, a 59-year-old Sunni, gave up driving after one of her sons brought home a leaflet he had found in the street.

"All of these things are prohibited or you will face death," the note said, listing women driving and going out with uncovered hair. The pamphlet also listed the wearing of T-shirts, shorts, jeans, gold chains and goatees.

"We were horrified," said Salman, whose neighborhood was once a safe, upper-middle class area. Despite battles and chaos, Salman and her family are staying for a simple reason.

"We have nowhere to go," she said.

Since the swearing-in of the new Iraqi government, politicians have demanded higher salaries and beefed-up security details for themselves but have failed to agree on candidates for key security posts. Prime Minister Nouri Maliki has pledged to nominate the defense and interior ministers today.

Meanwhile, authorities reported that at least 61 people were killed or found dead Saturday as violence swept the country, touching men and women, Christians and Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Shiites.

Gunmen killed a Russian Embassy official and abducted four others in a daylight attack in the upscale Mansour neighborhood in Baghdad, Iraqi and Russian authorities said. In Moscow, the Russian Foreign Ministry set up a crisis center to coordinate efforts to win the release of the kidnapped diplomats.

Russia opposed the U.S.-led invasion and has not contributed any troops to the coalition effort in Iraq.

In Basra, a suicide bomber killed 32 people and wounded 77, officials said. The explosives tore through a crowded market where people were shopping for bicycles and cellphones around dusk. A Christian man was gunned down in a separate incident; a day earlier, a Muslim cleric was killed in the city.

On Wednesday, Maliki had declared a state of emergency in the Shiite-dominated southern city, which has become increasingly volatile.

In Baqubah, a mixed city north of the capital, residents found seven heads in two banana crates. One more head, that of a Sunni cleric, was perched on top of the boxes, wrapped in plastic and paper as if it were a gift.

"This is the fate of every traitor," said a note scribbled on the paper. "Hell will be his final destination." The note said the man had killed four Shiite doctors and was slain in retaliation.

Police believe the other heads were of cousins, Sunnis who worked together driving trucks. A relative said the men were kidnapped en masse weeks ago as they drove to a Baghdad hospital to donate blood for an injured relative. Authorities have yet to find the eight bodies.

Also in Baqubah, rebels armed with machine guns and grenade launchers attacked a police checkpoint, killing six officers and a civilian and injuring five people. In a separate incident, four Shiite mechanics were slain by gunmen.

In Baghdad, police officers and U.S. soldiers recovered at least 22 bodies that had been burned, blindfolded, handcuffed, thrown into a river or dumped near a pediatric hospital.

A roadside bomb hit an ambulance in Baghdad, killing a pregnant woman and injuring the driver. Gunmen fired at another ambulance, killing the driver and injuring a medic. Two other roadside bombs injured six police officers.

In the northern city of Kirkuk, a Kurdish politician was assassinated.

It's Just Like Iraq, Only Different

By Helene Cooper
New York Times
June 4, 2006

WASHINGTON--DOES this sound familiar? The Bush administration, after months of hinting that it is considering military options to rid a certain oil-producing Middle Eastern country whose name begins with "I" of its alleged weapons program, says that it's willing to try diplomacy.

Publicly, American officials say the offer shows the United States is keen to work with other countries diplomatically to resolve the crisis. But it soon starts to look as if the public diplomacy is just a way for American officials to say they have exhausted all options and tried to play nice. In reality, American officials had already begun planning for war.

That was the chain of events playing out on Sept. 12, 2002, when President Bush, in a speech to the United Nations, committed himself to seeking an international consensus on confronting Saddam Hussein. "My nation will work with the U.N. Security Council to meet our common challenge," Mr. Bush said, calming fears that the United States would bypass the United Nations. As it turned out, that's exactly what Washington did six months later when it went to war in Iraq without the United Nations behind it.

For a lot of critics of President Bush's handling of Saddam Hussein, the announcement Wednesday that the United States is willing to join Europeans in talks with Iran over its nuclear program, provided Tehran suspends its uranium activities, was like a recurring dream:

Was the administration again using public diplomacy for political cover while preparing to use military force?

This time, all signs say no.

The world of June 2006 is fundamentally different from that of September 2002, just one year after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Back then, the United States was fresh from toppling the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, in a war viewed sympathetically at home and in many other countries.

And while a connection between the Sept. 11 attacks and Saddam Hussein was never proved, there was widespread belief that the Bush administration was correct in its determination that Mr. Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction. After a wave of anthrax attacks in the United States, the idea of ridding Iraq of chemical and biological weapons seemed a noble one. And President Bush's domestic approval rating was at 69 percent.

Fast forward to today. Thanks to the botched intelligence on Iraq's weapons program, it would be harder to rally a coalition of the willing, let alone the United Nations, for military strikes against Iran.

American troops are stretched, and polls show that most Americans think the war in Iraq is going badly.

Iran has vastly different options and resources than Iraq did. If attacked, it could retaliate in Iraq, for instance, given its close ties to Shiites who now hold power there.

But even if the military option isn't palatable to the United States and its allies now, neither is the idea of living with an Iran with nuclear weapons. If Iran gets closer to acquiring — or acquires — a bomb, policy makers could one day be tempted to think that a military clash is worth risking.

But that point hasn't been reached yet.

"The U.S. doesn't have the stomach for military invasion, and the world community is not going to stand by this time," said Abbas Milani, director of Iranian studies at Stanford University.

James B. Steinberg, who was deputy national security adviser under President Clinton, said that this time Bush administration officials "recognize they don't have a lot of unilateral options."

Mr. Steinberg and Mr. Milani praised the administration move toward Iran, saying it puts the United States in a good position no matter how Iran responds.

Iran says its uranium enrichment activity is peaceful, and it is technically correct in saying that such activity is allowed under the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. Last week, Iranian officials reiterated that their nuclear program is a sovereignty issue.

The initiative agreed to late Thursday by the United States and five major powers offers incentives if Iran suspends its pursuit of nuclear activities. But even if Iran declines the administration's offer, the United States, by making it, has broken the Security Council impasse and pushed the United Nations closer to coercive measures.

Such an outcome might not surprise the Americans, since there is at least one similarity to the events leading up to the Iraq war: American officials start out pessimistic about what can come from talks with a deceptive and mendacious adversary.

But even if this initiative proves to be a feint that only shows up the Iranians' bad faith, instead of resolving the crisis, the consequences would presumably be very different than they were with Iraq: sanctions by a united group of allies this time, rather than a war that splits American alliances.

Diplomats and analysts say that if Iran rejects the package, the United States would be in a better position to argue for sanctions. Indeed, the American move is as much directed toward the rest of the world as Iran, reflecting another lesson from the Iraq war, when the United States was accused of ignoring advice from allies and foes alike.

On Wednesday, for example, before they announced their new willingness to negotiate with Iran, senior administration officials telephoned a handful of academics and opinion makers, including Democrats, to talk through the new Iran strategy with them.