Why Did Bush Blink on Iran? (Ask Condi)

By Richard Perle
The Washington Post
Sunday, June 25, 2006; B01

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran knows what he wants: nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them; suppression of freedom at home and the spread of terrorism abroad; and the "shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems."

President Bush, too, knows what he wants: an irreversible end to Iran's nuclear weapons program, the "expansion of freedom in all the world" and victory in the war on terrorism.

The State Department and its European counterparts know what they want: negotiations.

For more than five years, the administration has dithered. Bush gave soaring speeches, the Iranians issued extravagant threats and, in 2003, the State Department handed the keys to the impasse to the British, French and Germans (the "E.U.-3"), who offered diplomatic valet parking to an administration befuddled by contradiction and indecision. And now, on May 31, the administration offered to join talks with Iran on its nuclear program.

How is it that Bush, who vowed that on his watch "the worst weapons will not fall into the worst hands," has chosen to beat such an ignominious retreat?

Proximity is critical in politics and policy. And the geography of this administration has changed. Condoleezza Rice has moved from the White House to Foggy Bottom, a mere mile or so away. What matters is not that she is further removed from the Oval Office; Rice's influence on the president is undiminished. It is, rather, that she is now in the midst of -- and increasingly represents -- a diplomatic establishment that is driven to accommodate its allies even when (or, it seems, especially when) such allies counsel the appeasement of our adversaries.

The president knows that the Iranians are undermining us in Iraq. He knows that the mullahs are working to sink any prospect of peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, backing Hamas and its goal of wiping Israel off the map. He knows that for years Iran has concealed and lied about its nuclear weapons program. He knows that Iran leads the world in support for terrorism. And he knows that freedom and liberty in Iran are brutally suppressed.

The president knew all this in 2003 when he learned of Natanz, Arak and other concealed Iranian nuclear facilities. After the International Atomic Energy Agency became aware of Iran's hidden infrastructure in June of that year, we could have referred the matter to the U.N. Security Council and demanded immediate action. But neither our allies nor our diplomats nor the State Department experts assigned to the White House desired confrontation. It would be better, they argued (as always) to buy time, even though diplomatic time for them was weapons-building time for Iran.

So, after declaring that a nuclear Iran was "unacceptable," Bush blinked and authorized the E.U.-3 to approach Tehran with proposals to reward the mullahs if they promised to end their nuclear weapons program.

During these three years, the Iranians have advanced steadily toward acquiring nuclear weapons, defiantly announcing milestones along the way. At the end of May, with Ahmadinejad stridently reiterating Iran's "right" to enrich the uranium necessary for nuclear weapons, the administration blinked again.

The mullahs don't blink -- they glare. Two weeks ago, the secretary of Iran's Expediency Council, dismissing the United States as a paper tiger, said: "Something very important is happening. . . . The Americans are no longer saying that Iran must be deprived of its nuclear rights forever. Iran has accomplished a great thing."

The "great thing" Mohsen Rezai sees is a weakened U.S. position, with Washington backing away from the brave words of the past, and Rice offering to substitute the United States for the E.U.-3. Just last week, Ahmadinejad said that Iran will need nearly three months to respond to our latest offer. (How time flies when you're having fun.)

Twenty years ago, I watched U.S. diplomats conspire with their diffident European counterparts to discourage President Ronald Reagan from a political, economic and moral assault on the Soviet Union aimed at, well, regime change. Well-meaning diplomats pleaded for flexibility at the negotiating table, hoping to steer U.S. policy back toward d?tente. But Reagan knew a slippery slope when he saw one. At the defining moments, he refused the advice of the State Department and intelligence community and earned his place in history.

It is not clear whether Bush recognizes the perils of the course he has been persuaded to take. What has been presented to Ahmadinejad as a simple take-it-or-leave-it deal -- stop the activities that could enable you to acquire nuclear weapons and we will reward you, or continue them and we will punish you -- is nothing of the sort. Neither the activities nor the carrots and sticks are clearly defined or settled with our allies, much less with Russia and China. If the punishments require approval by the U.N. Security Council, the United States would need an unlikely combination of approvals and abstentions from council members. The new policy, undoubtedly pitched to the president as a means of enticing the E.U.-3 to support ending Iran's program, is likely to diminish pressure on Iran and allow the mullahs more time to develop the weapons they have paid dearly to pursue.

No U.S. administration since 1979 has had a serious political strategy regarding Iran. That has been especially evident in the past decade, when the bloom was off the rose of the Islamic revolution, the Revolutionary Guard joined the baby boomers in middle age and the Islamic republic sank into political, economic and social decline. Opponents of the regime have been calling for a referendum on whether to continue as an Islamic theocracy or join the world of modern, secular democracies. They are sure of the outcome.

The failure of successive U.S. administrations, including this one, to give moral and political support to the regime's opponents is a tragedy. Iran is a country of young people, most of whom wish to live in freedom and admire the liberal democracies that Ahmadinejad loathes and fears. The brave men and women among them need, want and deserve our support. They reject the jaundiced view of tired bureaucrats who believe that their cause is hopeless or that U.S. support will worsen their situation.

In his second inaugural address, Bush said, "All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: The United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for liberty, we will stand with you."

Iranians were heartened by those words, much as the dissidents of the Soviet Union were heartened by Reagan's "evil empire" speech in 1983. A few days ago, I spoke with Amir Abbas Fakhravar, an Iranian dissident student leader who escaped first from Tehran's notorious Evin prison, then, after months in hiding, from Iran.

Fakhravar heard this president's words, and he took them to heart. But now, as he pleads for help for his fellow citizens, he is apprehensive. He wonders whether the administration's new approach to the mullahs will silence the president's voice, whether the proponents of accommodation with Tehran will regard the struggle for freedom in Iran as an obstacle to their new diplomacy.

Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) tried two weeks ago to pass the Iran Freedom Support Act, which would have increased the administration's too-little-too-late support for democracy and human rights in Iran. But the State Department opposed it, arguing that it "runs counter to our efforts . . . it would limit our diplomatic flexibility."

I hope it is not too late for Fakhravar and his friends. I know it is not too late for us, not too late to give substance to Bush's words, not too late to redeem our honor.

rperle@aei.org

Richard Perle, former chairman of the Defense Policy Board and assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, is an American Enterprise Institute fellow.

Clampdown raises fears over first glimmers of democracy

By Richard Beeston
The Times (UK)
June 23, 2006

Egypt seems to have forsaken reform in an attempt to stop radical Islamists gaining strength

THE Arab world’s tentative experiment with democracy has been dealt a serious blow by a backlash in the region’s largest and most influential country against elections, human rights and multiparty politics.

In the space of a few months President Mubarak of Egypt has dismayed his American allies and cowed his opponents with an unsubtle display of state authority that has included clamping down on the press, challenging the independence of the judiciary and jailing hundreds of opponents.

The atmosphere in Cairo today is in stark contrast to last year when, under pressure from the Bush Administration, Egypt held a referendum to change the constitution, its first multicandidate presidential race and three rounds of parliamentary elections in which record numbers of opposition MPs were elected.

For the first time since he took power a quarter of a century ago Mr Mubarak allowed his opponents to criticise him and campaign for alternative parties. But his regime has been shaken by the growing support for radical Islamic groups.

In Egypt the banned Muslim Brotherhood emerged as the largest opposition group in parliament, with 88 MPs who stood as independents. Soon afterwards the organisation’s soulmate, Hamas, the militant Palestinian movement, swept to power in a landslide victory in Gaza and the West Bank.

Western diplomats in Cairo said that the results led to a dramatic turnabout in Egypt, with the authorities reverting to the draconian measures that have kept Mr Mubarak in power since 1981.

Today Cairo is like a city suffering a collective hangover after a wild party. In some of the highest offices in the land, officials roll their eyes at the very mention of elections and many seem relieved that the pace of change has been slowed right down.

In the past few weeks hundreds of opposition supporters have been arrested and riot police have also cracked down on everyone from internet bloggers to outspoken judges. Local elections scheduled for this year have been postponed until 2008 and stern emergency laws extended for another two years.

Gamal Mubarak, the President’s son and a key figure in the ruling National Democratic Party, insists that Egypt is still committed to democratic reform and economic liberalisation.

“There is a perception that we are backtracking and reneging on our commitments of 2005, but that is not true,” he told The Times. He said that Egypt had an ambitious programme to reform the constitution and turn the country into a functioning democracy over the coming years.

However, opposition leaders are sceptical. Hamdy Hassan, an MP and member of the Muslim Brotherhood, said that the Government wanted democracy without the participation of the main opposition. “Seven hundred of our members have been arrested for participating in street demonstrations. Eight out of twelve members of our politburo are behind bars. The Government is trying to reduce the space in which we can move,” he said.

Mounir Fakhry Abdel Nour, the head of the liberal Wafd party, said that the pace of reform was now so slow that it might never produce democracy.

“The real political strength in this country lies with the army,” he said. “Egypt has been in transition for 30 years. If it continues at this pace, reform may never happen.”

Western governments have been openly critical of Egypt’s backsliding and its human rights abuses. But as America and the European Union struggle to deal with a Hamas Government in Palestine, there appears to be very little real pressure on Cairo to accelerate its experiment in democracy.

Washington is well on the way to approving Egypt’s annual £1 billion in economic and military aid for this year with few strings attached.

However, some believe that Mr Mubarak may find it impossible to turn the clock back.

Georgette Subhy, an independent MP, said that in spite of the recent setbacks democracy would eventually flourish in Egypt. “The genie is out of the bottle,” she said. “Once democracy has taken hold, it is impossible to turn the clock back. Egypt cannot exist in a bubble. States no longer have the luxury of isolating themselves from the rest of the world.”

Certainly the Mubarak regime cannot rule for ever. The Egyptian leader is 78 and has five years left to rule with no clear successor.

His son, often talked about as a possible future leader, insisted that he did not want the job. “I am playing a leading role on the policy side,” Gamal Mubarak said. “But, as I have said over and over again, I do not have any ambitions to become president.”

KEEPING CONTROL

February 12 Egyptian parliament postpones local elections for two years

April 24 Riot police break up protest by judges over prosecution of two colleagues

April 30 Egypt extends emergency laws giving authorities right to arrest and detain without charge for another two years

May 7 Alaa Seif al-Islam, pro-reform blogger, arrested and held for six weeks charged with insulting President Mubarak

May 11 Thousands of riot police beat opposition protesters in Cairo

May 18 Court upholds five-year prison sentence against Ayman Nour, the opposition leader, for fraud

May 20 President Mubarak vows to be “firm and severe” against anyone threatening Egyptian interests

May 25 Riot police attack meeting of Journalists’ Syndicate

June 12 Police arrest 220 members of Muslim Brotherhood at protest rally

June 19 37 Muslim Brotherhood members arrested at coastal resort town of Marsa Matruh

Needed: A new policy on Islam

BY PATRICK J. BUCHANAN
Creators Syndicate Inc.
06/23/06

In 1938, the year of Anschluss and Munich, a perceptive British Catholic looked beyond the continent over which war clouds hung and saw another cloud forming.

"It has always seemed to me ... probable," wrote Hilaire Belloc, "that there would be a resurrection of Islam and that our sons or our grandsons would see the renewal of that tremendous struggle between the Christian culture and what has been for more than a thousand years its greatest opponent."

Belloc was prophetic. Even as Christianity seems to be dying in Europe, Islam is rising to shake the 21st century as it did so many previous centuries.

Indeed, as one watches U.S. Armed Forces struggle against Sunni insurgents, Shia militias and jihadists in Iraq, and a resurgent Taliban, all invoking Allah, Victor Hugo's words return to mind: No army is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

The idea for which many of our adversaries fight is a compelling one. They believe there is but one God, Allah, that Muhammad is his prophet, that Islam, or submission to the Quran, is the only path to paradise and that a godly society should be governed according to the Shariah, the law of Islam. Having tried other ways and failed, they are coming home to Islam.

What idea do we have to offer? Americans believe that freedom comports with human dignity, that only a democratic and free-market system can ensure the good life for all, as it has done in the West and is doing in Asia.

From Ataturk on, millions of Islamic peoples have embraced this Western alternative. But today, tens of millions of Muslims appear to be rejecting it, returning to their roots in a more pure Islam.

Indeed, the endurance of the Islamic faith is astonishing.

Islam survived two centuries of defeats and humiliations of the Ottoman Empire and Ataturk's abolition of the caliphate. It endured generations of Western rule. It outlasted the pro-Western monarchs in Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Ethiopia and Iran. Islam easily fended off communism, survived the rout of Nasserism in 1967 and has proven more enduring than the nationalism of Arafat or Saddam. Now, it is resisting the world's last superpower.

What occasioned this column was a jolting report in the June 20 Washington Times, by James Brandon, alerting us to a new front.

"Arrests Spark Fear of Armed Islamist Takeover" headlined the story about the arrest, since May, of 500 militants who had allegedly plotted the overthrow of the king of Morocco and establishment of an Islamic state that would sever all ties to the infidel West – to end the poverty and corruption they blame on the West.

The arrests raised fears that Al Adl wa al Ihsane, or Justice and Charity, was preparing to take up arms to fulfill the predictions of the group's mystics that the monarchy would fall in 2006. Though illegal, Al Adl wa al Ihsane is Morocco's largest Islamic movement, which boycotts elections, but has hundreds of thousands of followers and has taken over the universities and is radicalizing the young.

Its founder is Sheik Abdessalam Yassine, who has declared its purpose is to reunite mosque and state: "Politics and spirituality have been kept apart by the Arab elites. And we have been able to reconnect these two aspects of Islam – and that is why people fear us."

And, one might add, why people embrace them.

If Morocco is now in play in the struggle between militant Islam and the West, how looks the correlation of forces in June 2006?

Islamists are taking over in Somalia. They are in power in Sudan. The Muslim Brotherhood won 60 percent of the races it contested in Egypt. Hezbollah swept the board in southern Lebanon. Hamas seized power from Fatah on the West Bank and Gaza. The Shia parties, which hearken to Ayatollah Sistani, brushed aside our favorites, Chalabi and Iyad Allawi, in the Iraqi elections. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the most admired Iranian leader since Khomeini. In Afghanistan, the Taliban is staging a comeback.

This has all happened in the last year. And where are we winning?

What is the appeal of militant Islam? It is, first, its message: As all else has failed us, why not live the faith and law God gave us?

Second, it is the Muslim rage at the present condition where pro-Western regimes are seen as corruptly enriching themselves, while the poor suffer.

Third, it is a vast U.S. presence that Islamic peoples are taught is designed to steal their God-given resources and assist the Israelis in humiliating them and persecuting the Palestinians.

Lastly, Islamic militants are gaining credibility because they show a willingness to share the poverty of the poor and fight the Americans.

What America needs to understand is something unusual for us: From Morocco to Pakistan, we are no longer seen by the majority as the good guys.

If Islamic rule is an idea taking hold among the Islamic masses, how does even the best army on earth stop it? Do we not need a new policy?

African War Games Test New NATO Force

An amphibious landing on a remote Cape Verde beach marked the launch of 'Steadfast Jaguar,' a two-week exercise for the new elite NATO Response Force.
By Paul Ames, Associated Press
Miami Herald
June 23, 2006

MINDELO, Cape Verde - Spanish marines rappelled from helicopters as German frigates provided a covering bombardment and U.S. fighters blasted a hidden terrorist base -- all in a fictional scenario in which NATO tested its elite new rapid reaction force.

''You see here the new NATO,'' alliance Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said Thursday of NATO's first African war games.

The amphibious landing on Cape Verde's remote Flamingo Beach was the centerpiece of ''Steadfast Jaguar,'' a two-week exercise for the NATO Response Force that the alliance is struggling to declare fully ready on Oct. 1 as the 25,000-strong spearhead of a modernized military pact.

Holding the exercise in the Cape Verde islands, west of Senegal on the African mainland, is designed to emphasize NATO's switch away from its traditional role defending territory in Europe to focus on managing threats around the world.

''In the 21st century you have to be prepared to project stability over long distances,'' de Hoop Scheffer told reporters. ``NATO is prepared for any threat.''

The new force is designed to take on tasks ranging from humanitarian relief to full-scale combat.

Apart from the fictional attack on a terrorist base, the exercise that started June 15 has the 7,800 soldiers, sailors and air crew confronting an imaginary fight between rival factions battling for control of island energy resources and rescuing civilians from a volcanic eruption.

Getting the troops and their equipment from bases in Europe and North America to Cape Verde has been a major logistical operation. NATO had to enlist the help of Russian cargo planes to fly in equipment.

Alliance officials acknowledged they did not know the overall cost since expenses are borne individually by allied governments.

Temporary NATO bases have sprung up across Sao Vicente, an arid, mountainous island of 50,000 which is the center of the operation. Troops in the uniforms of 25 allied nations fill the bars of the brightly painted port city of Mindelo, Cape Verde's second-largest city.

The NATO force vastly outnumbers Cape Verde's entire armed forces, which total around 1,500.

Residents appear generally pleased with the extra business and international attention generated by the exercises.

The government of the stable democracy has said the maneuvers will bring vital experience for its troops and help its ambitions of drawing closer to Western organizations such as NATO and the European Union.

''This is linked to development,'' said Antao Graca, 59, administrator of the local sports club. ``NATO is very welcome here, all these soldiers will bring in business.''

America and Islam: Collision Inevitable?

BY YOUSSEF IBRAHIM
New York Sun
June 19, 2006

In its war on terror, America is unquestionably on a collision course with Islamic fundamentalism. The question is how far Islamic fundamentalism is from a collision with Islam itself, as interpreted today by the vast majority of ulemas, imams, theocratic schools, and many of its 1.1 billion followers.

Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the world has learned a great deal about politicized Islam, which has spawned Islamic fundamentalism, jihad, and jihadis. And it has become clear that Islam needs a serious self-examination.

The rejection of others - which is a basic foundation of Islam that is built into Islamic texts and practices - makes it impossible to divorce the religion from the violent impulses it inspires.

Here are some important reasons why Muslims need to re-evaluate where religious practice ends and tyranny practiced in the name of Islam begins.

1.While Islam may appear a tolerant religion in many verses of the Koran, that tolerance is highly conditional on the submission of others to Muslims' collective will. The holy book is full of references to those who are not Muslims as "infidels." The Koran speaks in incredible detail of the need to do battle with infidels, to isolate them from the masses of believers, and to persist in efforts to convert them. Thus, as the Koran repeatedly states, the good practice of Islam cannot be limited to the worship of God or service to society. It must encompass spreading the faith, even at the edge of the sword.

2.Virtually all Muslims, including self-described moderates and liberals, believe what the Koran and the Hadith affirm: that Islam was God's final monotheist revelation. As such it supersedes, indeed cancels out, all previous revelations. It follows, then, that those who belong to any other faith are in need of conversion. In its much venerated and often quoted Sura 9:29, the Koran specifically defines those who are not Muslims and live under Muslim rule as "Dhimmis," people who under Islamic law "must surrender to the pacts contracted between non-Muslims and their Muslim conquerors." That concept should absolutely be revisited and revised by Muslim scholars if we are to believe they want peace. The burden of proof of tolerance falls heavily on the nation of Islam.

3.The aggressive demarcation of Muslims and infidels runs through all Islamic religious texts and speeches communicated to the faithful in millions of mosques across the globe. It is accompanied by much lament over the loss of Spain and chunks of Europe once part of the Muslim empire. The whole notion that Islam is an umma, or nation, unto itself that cuts across borders and comes before nationalities, bears the seeds of menace. Indeed, Muslim immigrants in Western nations are encouraged by their preachers to prevail in their societies and "spread the faith."

Islam as practiced today in virtually all Muslim countries does not fashion itself merely as a spiritual value, but as a conquering force with a need to dominate - not so far from the next step of Islamic fundamentalist theology, which motivates jihadis.

This overwhelmingly hostile orientation, relayed to the faithful by texts and preachers, has led to Islamic regimes such as Saudi Arabia, which is barricaded in deep isolation but uses its huge wealth to export reactionary Wahhabi ideologies to the world, setting up madrassas, mosques, and theological seminaries across the globe.

In Europe, America, Canada, and Australia, it has been easy for Muslim fundamentalists to take over Muslim immigrant communities because Islam promotes confrontation with others. Mosques, religious schools, and the imposition of the veil are tools of domination, not assimilation.

These issues must be dealt with. Much of the task falls to Muslim scholars in Muslim nations, and the work is imperative. Darkness, fear, and xenophobia are the understudy of terror.

The West does not have to bend backward. Indeed, it is time to push back - at the edge of the sword, if need be.

Thinking the unthinkable

Amnon Rubinstein
THE JERUSALEM POST
Jun. 19, 2006

The mixed reception Iran gave the European proposal to discontinue its enrichment of uranium in return for a nice "basket of goodies" awakened the hope that Iran's leaders would cancel their satanic plans. However, this news item came at the same time as reports about Iran supplying long-range missiles to Hizbullah.

The European proposals are excellent, but behind the rhetoric is a reality and it is made up of two truths: If it does not accept the European proposals, Iran will have the ability to manufacture nuclear arms and long-range missiles that can reach Israel; second, Iranian President Ahmadinejad has adopted a Nazi policy according to which he both denies the Holocaust and also wants to complete it by wiping Israel off the map.

While American professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their article "The Israel Lobby" assure their readers that Israel is not in any real danger because "Iran is hundreds of miles away," this in fact is, more than anything else, evidence of the Harvard and University of Chicago scholars' sense of humor. Those who lack such a developed sense of humor look upon Iran's growing power, whose tentacles have already reached areas north and south of our country, with grave concern.

THE FACTS are serious, indeed: There appears to be no sign that international pressure, including a resolution passed by the UN Security Council, will succeed in preventing the nuclearization of Iran. Although those who try to reassure us say what is involved is a primitive type of nuclear weapon - the old-fashioned kind like the ones used to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki - we are well aware that a single, old-fashioned bomb would be enough to mortally wound our tiny, densely-populated country.

COULD MUTUAL deterrence of the type that saved the world during the Cold War protect Israel? It's unlikely, because what is driving the leaders of Iran is a deeply-held religious belief that the destruction of the State of Israel is mandated by Islam, and that in order to carry out this religious mission it is worthwhile to make great sacrifices.

The fact is Ahmadinejad is not afraid to threaten Israel's existence even though he knows that a nuclear attack would also kill tens of thousands of Arabs living in Israel and the territories.

Moreover, despite the ambiguity of Israel's nuclear policy, Teheran's leaders are certainly aware that any attempt to destroy Israel would lead to a second strike at Iran, and if they didn't know this, Shimon Peres reminded them.

The reality is that in Iran - though not only there - the Islamic willingness to commit suicide in order to murder has been elevated to the level of national policy.

WHAT CAN be done? Our government's rhetoric is that the response must come from the international community because a nuclear Iran endangers the entire world. This is true, but we all know who the first and main target of the Iranian bomb is. Israel cannot, even if it were desirable, take the step of preemptively bombing Iran's well-guarded nuclear facilities.

So what can Israel do?

First, it must prepare itself for a worst-case scenario, as Sweden did during the Cold War, and implement a comprehensive plan to build and renovate bomb shelters to protect Israel's home front.

Preparing shelters and converting underground parking lots to provide protection from radiation and fallout and the destructive power of a nuclear device is a huge undertaking. It is also important in the long term because the arming of Arab states and Islamists with nuclear weapons is just a matter of time. The absence of passive defense will only increase the Iranian appetite to carry out an attack.

Second, we must take advantage of our status in the current administration in Washington to have Israel join a defense alliance, preferably in the context of NATO. Such an alliance would serve as a warning to Teheran. Then, and only then, will it perhaps be time to take a preemptive step - not by Israel, but rather by a coalition fearful of a nuclear Iran.

This article discusses the unthinkable. But the history of the 20th century, especially that of the Jewish people, has proved to us that the unthinkable can happen when hate-filled dictators have the means to carry it out.

The writer is president of the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya

A perilous dance with the Arab press

Mona Eltahawy
International Herald Tribune
TUESDAY, JUNE 20, 2006

NEW YORK: Writing for an Arab newspaper is like playing hopscotch in a minefield.

From January 2004 until early this year I played my game of hopscotch in a weekly column on the opinion pages of Asharq al-Awsat, the London-based, Saudi-owned newspaper that is read across the Arab world.

And then I stepped on a mine. Without warning or notice, fewer and fewer of my columns made it into print. Then my articles stopped appearing altogether. I had been banned.

Nobody tells you that you're banned from an Arab paper - especially a paper that is supposedly the liberal home of writers banned from other papers, which is how Asharq al-Awsat portrays itself.

Sadly, my experience is not unique. When I told a veteran Egyptian journalist that I had not been officially notified of my ban, he reminded me that he found out about his removal as editor of a newspaper in Egypt when he read about it in another newspaper.

Another Egyptian journalist told me he'd been "lucky": The editor of a newspaper he used to write for actually confessed to him that the Egyptian regime had called the Saudi prince who publishes the paper and requested that my friend be banned.

That is probably what happened in my case. Since Egypt's parliamentary elections last year, which left President Hosni Mubarak's National Democratic Party in firm control of the legislature, the Egyptian regime has been settling scores with opponents, particularly those who support a small but vocal reform movement that has organized unprecedented street protests in Cairo.

I had moved back to Cairo from New York last year for four months to document and to take part in that reform movement, and devoted many of my weekly Asharq al-Awsat columns to it.

At the end of my stay, just before I left Egypt to return to New York, I was summoned to State Security because of an article I wrote criticizing the fraud and violence in the parliamentary elections. The summons was intended as a "we are watching you" warning.

Over the past two months, the Egyptian regime has brutally cracked down against democracy activists and journalists, beating and imprisoning many of the men and women I wrote about. Several of the detainees have accused security forces of torturing them in jail.

The trouble with Asharq al-Awsat, beyond its disturbing acquiescence to Arab regimes, is that it claimed a liberalism that was patently false.

Before my ban, Asharq al-Awsat launched a Web site in English. Designed to show Western readers how liberal it was, the site suffered from Yasser Arafat syndrome. Just as the late Palestinian leader's statements in Arabic and in English were sometimes contradictory, the newspaper in Arabic would abide by the red lines that govern criticism of Arab leaders while in English it ran roughshod over those very same lines.

A column I wrote tearing into the Egyptian regime for allowing its security forces to beat peaceful protesters and to sexually assault female journalists and demonstrators was spiked from the Arabic newspaper and Web site but appeared in its entirety on the English Web site.

Few newspapers in the Arab world are truly independent. Most are state- controlled or state-owned, or owned by persons very close to the state; Asharq al-Awsat is published by a nephew of the Saudi king.

The major red lines at Asharq al- Awsat could be quite simple - in descending order they were the Saudi royal family, Saudi Arabia's allies in the Gulf (Qatar, a rival, was considered fair game) and then Saudi Arabia's other Arab allies.

Within such a hierarchy of red lines, the Egyptian regime can indeed pull rank and demand that Asharq al- Awsat silence a critic.

So why did I even bother writing for Asharq al-Awsat? After I left news reporting and switched to opinion writing after the attacks of September 11, 2001, I didn't want to address just a Western audience. When it comes to reform and the fight against religious militancy, the primary conversation must be among us Arabs and Muslims - hence the need to wade into the minefield that is the Arab press.

It is gratifying to know that Arab regimes and compliant newspapers consider some of us annoying enough to ban, but equally sad to consider the many gatekeepers that stand between us and our fellow Arabs.

A Negotiated Solution to the Iranian Nuclear Crisis is Within Reach

The US must take three basic steps to defuse this confrontation. The consequences of not doing so could be grim
by Noam Chomsky
Guardian (UK)
June 19, 2006

The urgency of halting the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and moving toward their elimination, could hardly be greater. Failure to do so is almost certain to lead to grim consequences, even the end of biology's only experiment with higher intelligence. As threatening as the crisis is, the means exist to defuse it.

A near-meltdown seems to be imminent over Iran and its nuclear programmes. Before 1979, when the Shah was in power, Washington strongly supported these programmes. Today the standard claim is that Iran has no need for nuclear power, and therefore must be pursuing a secret weapons programme. "For a major oil producer such as Iran, nuclear energy is a wasteful use of resources," Henry Kissinger wrote in the Washington Post last year.

Thirty years ago, however, when Kissinger was secretary of state for President Gerald Ford, he held that "introduction of nuclear power will both provide for the growing needs of Iran's economy and free remaining oil reserves for export or conversion to petrochemicals".

Last year Dafna Linzer of the Washington Post asked Kissinger about his reversal of opinion. Kissinger responded with his usual engaging frankness: "They were an allied country."

In 1976 the Ford administration "endorsed Iranian plans to build a massive nuclear energy industry, but also worked hard to complete a multibillion-dollar deal that would have given Tehran control of large quantities of plutonium and enriched uranium - the two pathways to a nuclear bomb", Linzer wrote. The top planners of the Bush administration, who are now denouncing these programmes, were then in key national security posts: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.

Iranians are surely not as willing as the west to discard history to the rubbish heap. They know that the United States, along with its allies, has been tormenting Iranians for more than 50 years, ever since a US-UK military coup overthrew the parliamentary government and installed the Shah, who ruled with an iron hand until a popular uprising expelled him in 1979.

The Reagan administration then supported Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iran, providing him with military and other aid that helped him slaughter hundreds of thousands of Iranians (along with Iraqi Kurds). Then came President Clinton's harsh sanctions, followed by Bush's threats to attack Iran - themselves a serious breach of the UN charter.

Last month the Bush administration conditionally agreed to join its European allies in direct talks with Iran, but refused to withdraw the threat of attack, rendering virtually meaningless any negotiations offer that comes, in effect, at gunpoint. Recent history provides further reason for scepticism about Washington's intentions.

In May 2003, according to Flynt Leverett, then a senior official in Bush's National Security Council, the reformist government of Mohammad Khatami proposed "an agenda for a diplomatic process that was intended to resolve on a comprehensive basis all of the bilateral differences between the United States and Iran".

Included were "weapons of mass destruction, a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the future of Lebanon's Hizbullah organisation and cooperation with the UN nuclear safeguards agency", the Financial Times reported last month. The Bush administration refused, and reprimanded the Swiss diplomat who conveyed the offer.

A year later the European Union and Iran struck a bargain: Iran would temporarily suspend uranium enrichment, and in return Europe would provide assurances that the United States and Israel would not attack Iran. Under US pressure, Europe backed off, and Iran renewed its enrichment processes.

Iran's nuclear programmes, as far as is known, fall within its rights under article four of the non-proliferation treaty (NPT), which grants non-nuclear states the right to produce fuel for nuclear energy. The Bush administration argues that article four should be strengthened, and I think that makes sense.

When the NPT came into force in 1970 there was a considerable gap between producing fuel for energy and for nuclear weapons. But advances in technology have narrowed the gap. However, any such revision of article four would have to ensure unimpeded access for non-military use, in accord with the initial NPT bargain between declared nuclear powers and the non-nuclear states.

In 2003 a reasonable proposal to this end was put forward by Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency: that all production and processing of weapon-usable material be under international control, with "assurance that legitimate would-be users could get their supplies". That should be the first step, he proposed, toward fully implementing the 1993 UN resolution for a fissile material cutoff treaty (or Fissban).

ElBaradei's proposal has to date been accepted by only one state, to my knowledge: Iran, in February, in an interview with Ali Larijani, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator. The Bush administration rejects a verifiable Fissban - and stands nearly alone. In November 2004 the UN committee on disarmament voted in favour of a verifiable Fissban. The vote was 147 to one (United States), with two abstentions: Israel and Britain. Last year a vote in the full general assembly was 179 to two, Israel and Britain again abstaining. The United States was joined by Palau.

There are ways to mitigate and probably end these crises. The first is to call off the very credible US and Israeli threats that virtually urge Iran to develop nuclear weapons as a deterrent.

A second step would be to join the rest of the world in accepting a verifiable Fissban treaty, as well as ElBaradei's proposal, or something similar.

A third step would be to live up to article six of the NPT, which obligates the nuclear states to take "good-faith" efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons, a binding legal obligation, as the world court determined. None of the nuclear states has lived up to that obligation, but the United States is far in the lead in violating it.

Even steps in these directions would mitigate the upcoming crisis with Iran. Above all, it is important to heed the words of Mohamed ElBaradei: "There is no military solution to this situation. It is inconceivable. The only durable solution is a negotiated solution." And it is within reach.

Noam Chomsky's new book is Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy; he is professor of linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Go to: www.chomsky.info

Permanent War? Dealing with Realities in Iraq and Washington

by Robert Dreyfuss
June 19, 2006

One of the most unfortunate myths pervading American culture, the American psyche, and the whole American weltanschauung -- and it's one for which we might as well go ahead and blame movie director Frank Capra -- is that in most situations the good guys win. Morality triumphs. The greedy and self-interested, the cruel and mean-spirited are defeated. Ultimately, or so the myth goes, the bad guys win some of the battles, but in the end the good guys win the wars.

Sadly, in the real world, good doesn't always win. Sometimes, good isn't even there. When it comes to Iraq, the left, the liberals, the progressives (for the sake of argument, the good guys) sometimes seem to have their heads in the clouds. That's true in regard to the crucial question of whether President Bush's stay-the-course strategy can succeed. The answer, unfortunately, is: Yes, it can.

The Bush administration's strategy in Iraq today, as in the invasion of 2003, is: Use military force to destroy the political infrastructure of the Iraqi state; shatter the old Iraqi armed forces; eliminate Iraq as a determined foe of U.S. hegemony in the oil-rich Persian Gulf; build on the wreckage of the old Iraq a new state beholden to the U.S.; create a new political class willing to be subservient to our interests in the region; and use that new Iraq as a base for further expansion.

To achieve all that, the President is determined to keep as much military power as he can in Iraq for as long as it takes, while recruiting, training, funding, and supervising a ruthless Iraqi police and security force that will gradually allow the American military to reduce their "footprint" in the country without entirely leaving. The endgame, as he and his advisors imagine it, would result in a permanent U.S. military presence in the country, including permanent bases and basing rights, and a predominant position for U.S. business and oil interests.

Marshaling the Bad News

Many progressives scoff at such a scenario. They argue, with persuasiveness, that the American project in Iraq is doomed. To prove their point, they cite (what else?) the bad news. And there certainly is a lot of it.

First of all, the Sunni-led insurgency, metastasizing continually, is a hydra-headed army of armies representing former Baathist military, security, and intelligence officers, assorted nationalists and Islamists, tribal and clan leaders, and city and neighborhood militias. It has shown remarkable resilience. The elimination of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is not likely to put much of a dent in the Sunni resistance and may only strengthen it.

Second, Iraq's Shiites are restive, at best, and bitterly divided among themselves. The two most powerful blocs, with the two most important militias -- the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq with its Badr Brigade and Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army -- are to varying degrees unhappy with the American presence. The up-and-coming Fadhila bloc, one of whose leaders was just arrested in Najaf (allegedly for planning IED attacks against U.S. forces), is brooding. Throughout Iraq's mostly Shiite southern regions, Shiite parties and armies are battling among themselves for the control of important cities, including Basra, and of Iraq's Southern Oil Company, which produces the vast bulk of Iraqi oil and has provided a valuable stream of corrupt cash for Shiite party leaders. Some of them -- possibly all of them -- are turning to various factions in Iran for support.

Third, the Kurds, ensconced in the Alamo-like Kurdish region in the north, are happily waxing pro-American even as they quietly prepare for a unilateral grab of the key oil city of Kirkuk, of Iraq's Northern Oil Company, and of other territory contiguous to the Kurdish region -- thus threatening to set in motion an almost unavoidable clash with Iraq's Arabs, both Sunni and Shiite, and possibly nearby states as well.

Fourth, the American project to create an Iraqi army and police force is going badly. So far, at least, the main army and police units have been reconstituted from the Badr Brigade and Kurdish pesh merga militiamen, none of whom are loyal to the concept of a unitary, nonsectarian Iraq, nor have they been unable to grasp basic notions of human rights. The Shiites, in particular, are engaged in a bloody campaign of death-squad killings and kidnappings, along with targeted assassinations aimed at Baathists. It will be difficult, if not impossible, for the United States to use war-hardened, embittered, and power-hungry Shiite and Kurdish forces to keep peace in Sunni areas, including western Baghdad.

Fifth, of course, the economic reconstruction of Iraq is, shall we say, not going swimmingly.

Not surprisingly, many politicians and generals and most progressives have adopted a worst-case outlook. With bad news mounting, they argue that the American project in Iraq is lost. In truth, I've made the same argument, at various points over the past three years. Last November, in an article entitled Getting Out of Iraq for Rolling Stone, I wrote: "George Bush is just about the only person in Washington these days who doesn't know that the United States has lost the war in Iraq." I quoted former Georgia Senator Max Cleland, who told a congressional hearing organized by House progressives that the United States had better get out of Iraq before the resistance overruns the Green Zone. "We need an exit strategy that we choose -- or it will certainly be chosen for us," said the grievously wounded Vietnam veteran. "I've seen this movie before. I know how it ends."

Last week, writing for the Nation, Nicholas von Hoffman echoed this theme, suggesting that it's too late to worry about exit strategies:


"We could be moving toward an American Dunkirk. In 1940 the defeated British Army in Belgium was driven back by the Germans to the French seacoast city of Dunkirk, where it had to abandon its equipment and escape across the English Channel on a fleet of civilian vessels, fishing smacks, yachts, small boats, anything and everything that could float and carry the defeated and wounded army to safety… [In Iraq,] there is no seaport troops could get to, so the only way out of Iraq would be that same desert highway to Kuwait where fifteen years ago the American Air Force destroyed Saddam Hussein's army."

What Staying the Course Means

Let me now admit to having second thoughts on this matter. I no longer am convinced that the U.S. adventure in Iraq is lost. There is no guarantee that the Bush administration cannot succeed in its goals there. The only certain thing is that success -- what the president calls "victory in Iraq" -- will come at the expense of thousands more American deaths, tens of thousands more Iraqi deaths, and hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars.

Indeed, this war would have to be sustained not only by this administration, but by the next one and probably the one after that as well. For over three years, the United States has supported a massive military presence on the ground in Iraq, while taking steady casualties. It may be no less capable of doing so for the next two-and-a-half years, until the end of Bush's second term -- and during the next administration's reign, too, whether the president is named John McCain or Hillary Clinton. At least theoretically, a force of more than 100,000 U.S. soldiers could wage a brutal war of attrition against the resistance in Iraq for years to come. Last week, in a leak to the New York Times, the White House announced its intention to leave at least 50,000 troops in Iraq for many years to come. Last week, too, the son of the president of Iraq (a Kurd) revealed that representatives of the Kurdish region are in negotiations with the United States to create a permanent U.S. military presence in Iraq's north.

Meanwhile, President Bush and his Rasputin, Karl Rove, took the occasion of the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to reiterate their unalterable commitment to victory in Iraq, whatever the cost. There is no reason not to take Bush at his word. And there is no reason not to believe that Rove will orchestrate a withering offensive against Democrats who question the president's goal of victory.

The frightening thing about last week's House and Senate debates over Iraq was that the mainstream opposition to the Bush administration -- ranging from moderate Democrats to realist, if pro-military, moderate Republicans -- never challenges the goal of victory in Iraq. Yes, a hardy band of antiwar members of Congress (including Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, Lynn Woolsey and Barbara Lee of California, and others, joined by John Murtha of Pennsylvania) support the unconditional withdrawal of American troops. But the bulk of the Democrats, including the 42 Democrats who last week voted in favor of the bloodthirsty Republican war resolution, don't question the importance of victory in Iraq. They just question the Bush administration's tactics.

There are only two ways to thwart Bush's war. The first is for the Iraqi resistance to defeat the U.S. occupation. The second is for domestic public opinion to coalesce around a demand for unilateral withdrawal. So far, neither the Iraqi resistance, nor the antiwar movement have the upper hand; and sadly, so far they are loathe to make common cause with each other.

Where the Vietnamese resistance had a state, North Vietnam, and the support of the other superpower, the Soviet Union, as well as Mao's China, the resistance in Iraq is nothing but a grassroots insurgency. It neither controls a state, nor has the support of any state. (Contrary to the idiotic assertions of the neoconservatives and the Bush administration, Iran is not assisting the Sunni Iraqi resistance, and that fractured, fractious movement is getting only the most minuscule support from its Sunni Arab neighbors.)

Needless to say, there is no love lost between Iraq's Baathists and the kings of Saudi Arabia and Jordan. The resistance in Iraq would benefit mightily if elements of the Shiite bloc hived off to join the insurgency; if, say, Muqtada Sadr's ragtag forces abandoned the government to join the resistance, as they toyed with doing during the destruction of Fallujah in 2004. That's unlikely, though.

So who believes that the Iraqi resistance can fight on indefinitely against the combined might of the U.S. armed forces and American-supported Shiite and Kurdish armies as well as militias, especially with ongoing American divide-and-conquer efforts that involve blandishments offered to the less militant wings of the insurgency? Still, it's not impossible that the resistance can hold on long enough to effect at least a stalemate. But their ability to do so might depend, in part, on the ability of the American antiwar movement to undermine the administration's commitment to staying the course in Iraq.

Was Iraq a "Mistake"?

Until now, truly antiwar Democrats have represented a minority force within the party. In opposition, they have largely been eclipsed by moderate Democrats and realist Republicans, both seemingly content to argue that the war in Iraq was merely a "mistake" and an inefficiently prosecuted "failure" without confronting the war itself. In fact, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic minority leader who (half-heartedly) supports Rep. Murtha's get-out-now position, used both of those words over and over during last week's debate. Both words are deadly -- and probably wrong as well.

The war in Iraq was not a "mistake." It was a deliberately calculated exercise of U.S. power with a specific end in mind -- namely, control of Iraq and the Persian Gulf region. It was illegal and remains so. It was a war crime and remains so. Its perpetrators were war criminals and remain so. Its goals were unworthy and remain so.

Few Democrats, and almost no Republicans, have been willing to challenge Bush's war on these terms, however. Neither have most of the Bush administration's so-called mistakes truly been errors: the brutal dismantling of the Baath party and the dissolution of the Iraqi armed forces, widely castigated now as "mistakes" by many Bush critics, were meant. They were thought out. They were planned with purpose. They, too, were deliberate actions aiming at U.S. hegemony in Iraq.

Nor is the war simply, or even largely, a "failure." As cruel and brutish as it is, it is grinding its way toward its goal. Victory for the United States in Iraq, as evidenced by the recitation of bad news I cited earlier, is by no means certain. But it is far too early to call it a failure either. To do so at this stage is Capra-esque. It assumes that bad guys don't win. But sometimes they do. And on Iraq, the jury remains out.

The danger of emphasizing the supposed "mistakes" and "failures" of the Bush administration's Iraq policy is that it plays into a notion held by an increasingly large component of centrists in both parties -- that, although the war itself was a "mistake," the only rational option for the United States now is to win it anyway. There are countless variations on this theme emanating from both Democratic and Republican centrists.

You hear it in the argument that, although the war was wrong, we now have a moral obligation to stay and prevent civil war. You hear it in the argument that the United States must be strong against the threat of global "Islamofascism," and that by leaving Iraq we will hand Al Qaeda and its allies a victory. There are other variations of the same, but all of those who make such arguments (while criticizing Bush for his alleged incompetence and mismanagement) end up arguing that the United States has no choice other than to stay.

In my discussions with them in recent weeks, several have brought up Colin Powell's absurd argument about the Pottery Barn rule: if you break it, you own it. Well, yes, we broke Iraq, but we don't own it. (In fact, the Pottery Barn itself has no such rule. If you mistakenly break a piece of pottery in one of its stores, you aren't actually liable.) We have absolutely no moral imperative to stay in Iraq. We have a moral imperative to leave -- and to apologize.

Just as the antiwar movement in the United States can strengthen the resistance in Iraq, the Iraqi resistance can aid the antiwar movement. The cold reality of the war in Iraq is that, had it not been for the Iraqi resistance, there would be no U.S. antiwar movement. Had Iraq's Sunnis collapsed in disarray and meekly ceded power to the Shiite-Kurdish coalition empowered by the U.S. invasion, President Bush's illegal war in Iraq might have succeeded far more effortlessly. But here's the truth of the matter: Led by Iraq's Baath party and by Iraqi military officers and their tribal and clan allies, a thriving insurgency did develop within months of the March 2003 invasion. Some of the resistance is, of course, still made up of Iraqis passionately loyal to the person of Saddam Hussein. But studies of the insurgency show that most of its fighters are loyal to the Baath party, whose origins were among left-leaning Arab nationalists, or they are loyal to a more specific version of Iraqi nationalism, or they simply oppose the foreign occupation of their country.

Back to Capra Country

The antiwar movement in the United States developed not out of intellectual and moral opposition to the war itself, although that is at its core. It grew because mainstream Americans became increasingly disturbed by the prolonged war that followed the 2003 invasion. Many Americans grew outraged over U.S. casualties. But the fact that a prolonged insurgency followed the invasion and that U.S. casualties mounted is the result of the Iraqi people's unwillingness to submit to an American diktat.

Viewed from that standpoint, it's at least worth asking: Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys in Iraq? Are the good guys the U.S. troops fighting to impose American hegemony in the Gulf? Are the good guys the American forces who have installed a murderous Shiite theocracy in Baghdad? Are the good guys the Marines who murdered children and babies in Haditha in cold blood? Are the good guys the U.S. officers who brought us Abu Ghraib, or the generals who signed off on their methods, or the administration that set them on such a path in the first place? Who was it, after all, who pulverized the institutions of the Iraqi state and society?

So if the U.S. "cavalry" aren't the good guys, who then can we cast in that role? If Frank Capra went to Iraq, how would he divide the place neatly into good guys and bad guys and assemble his feel-good morality play? Certainly, most Americans still believe that the Americans are the good guys, even if 62% (according to one recent poll) no longer believe that the war in Iraq was "worth fighting." But my argument here is: Capra could make a plausible argument that, in the hell that Iraq has become in 2006, with resistance fighters killing U.S. soldiers and vice versa, there's at least as much good on their side as on ours, if not more.

That raises, once again, the question of a dialogue with the Iraqi insurgents. For the past year, off and on, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad has conducted secret talks with the resistance and has openly made a distinction between Zarqawi-style jihadists and former Baathists and military men. Since the creation of the new, allegedly permanent government under Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, Iraqi government officials once again have raised the idea of talking to the resistance. An aide to Maliki even suggested an amnesty for armed fighters who have killed U.S. troops. That's a good idea, and it's been raised more than once since 2003. In this case, though, an ignorant Sen. Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat and Senate minority leader, expressed outrage at the idea of an amnesty. According to the Washington Post, which first reported the amnesty idea, the Maliki aide who suggested it was fired.

Personally I'm suspicious of Khalilzad's dialogue offers. By dangling the idea, Khalilzad is more than likely using a divide-and-conquer tactic, enticing some insurgent leaders to join the new Iraqi regime. How else to interpret the offer at a moment when President Bush is insisting on an unconditional U.S. victory in Iraq? People knowledgeable about the resistance know that the only basis for serious talks with the insurgents is the offer of an American withdrawal from Iraq in exchange for an accord.

Still, whether one thinks the resistance fighters are good guys, or bad guys that we need to talk to, the left, the antiwar movement, and progressives don't have to wait for Zal Khalilzad. The time for talking to Iraq's Baath, former military leaders, and Sunni resistance forces is here. And now that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is dead, the nature of the Iraqi insurgency is partly clarified. It's a lot harder for supporters of the war to argue that extremist, head-severing Islamist extremists are its dominant face. In fact, of course, they never were.

Some of the antiwar movement's more perceptive leaders have already started the dialogue. Tom Hayden, the former California state senator and activist, has been talking to the Iraqi resistance in London, Amman, and elsewhere. Some members of Congress, such as Rep. Jim McDermott, have traveled to Amman, Jordan to do the same thing. The Bush administration might not be ready to do it openly -- yet. But wars end either with the utter defeat of one side or the other, or with a negotiated settlement. I'll take that settlement.

Robert Dreyfuss is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. He covers national security for Rolling Stone and writes frequently for The American Prospect, Mother Jones, and the Nation.

Israel Engineers Another Cover-Up

Leaving the Truth Buried in Gaza's Sands
By JONATHAN COOK
CounterPunch
June 20, 2006

If you keep lying long enough and with enough conviction, people start to believe you -- or at least doubt the evidence in front of their own eyes. And so it has been with the Israeli army’s account of how seven members of a Palestinian family were killed, and dozens of other Palestinians injured, during shelling close by a beach in Gaza.

This week, according to reports in the Israeli media, even Marc Garlasco, a Pentagon expert on the effects of battlefield weapons hired by Human Rights Watch to investigate the deaths, "conceded" that he could not contradict the findings of the Israeli army’s own inquiry.

Presumably that is because Israel is not letting him or anyone else near their evidence. But Garlasco’s slight change of tune -- even if it is not exactly a ringing endorsement -- leaves the door ajar just wide enough that the Israeli army will doubtless slip through it to escape being held accountable yet again.

The army has been claiming for more than a week, based on its own evidence, that the lethal explosion was not caused by a stray shell landing on the Gaza beach but most probably by a mine placed there by Palestinian militants to prevent an Israeli naval landing.

The army’s case could be dismissed outright were it not for the racist assumptions that now prevail as Western "thought" about Arabs and Muslims.

To be plausible the army account requires two preposterous assumptions: first, that Palestinian militants are so fanatical that they consider it acceptable to lay a mine secretly in an area frequented by local families; and second, that they are so primitive that their best military minds could not work out the futility of placing a single mine along miles of coastline that could be used for a landing (or are we to assume that there are many more of these mines waiting to explode?).

To support its case, the army has produced two pieces of evidence that apparently make its denials of responsibility "airtight".

First, it claims that a piece of shrapnel removed by doctors from an injured Palestinian transferred to an Israeli hospital was not from one its shells but more likely from a Palestinian explosive device.

Given that, unlike Israel, the Palestinians do not have any factories manufacturing mines or rockets and are forced instead to make them out of any spare metal parts they can get their hands on -- doors, pipes, wrecked cars, fridges -- this evidence is meaningless. Palestinian witnesses have already said the beach victims were standing close to taxis when the shell exploded. So if the shrapnel was not from an Israeli shell, it suggests only that the missile also damaged other metal objects -- possibly the cars -- sending a shard into at least one of the victims.

The army will have a lot of explaining to do if reports on Israeli TV, not usually noted for its independent approach, confirm that another piece of shrapnel found in a victim is from an Israeli shell. So far, of course, the army is denying the report.

The second piece of evidence is supplied by the army, which says one of its many drones that circle overhead spying on Gaza round the clock shows the families calmly still on the beach, and later an ambulance arriving, tens of minutes after the army had finished shelling the area.

The problem with the Israeli evidence is that we have to take the army’s word for it: that the families shown are the ones who were about to be shelled, and that the timings given are accurate.

It also means we have to discount a lot of counter-evidence supplied by Garlasco, journalists, doctors and Palestinian witnesses -- and even the Israeli army. The army, for example, has admitted that one of the shells it fired in the area is unaccounted for, a striking admission in itself. The drones apparently were no help in locating this "missing" explosion, even though they were spying on the area.

Garlasco has already determined that the injuries sustained by the beach victims accord with a blast above ground -- an Israeli shell -- rather than one underground -- a Palestinian mine.

The many Palestinian witnesses have all put the time of the blast close to when the shelling occurred, and report that the reason they were queuing for taxis was because of panic sown by the shells they were hearing landing nearby.

Independent journalists have shown that, according to the clocks on the hospital computers that admitted the dead and injured, the timing of the first blood tests were taken soon after the Israeli army shelling -- and certainly too soon to accord with the army’s account of when the Palestinian mine supposedly exploded. Doctors have also confirmed that they were called to the nearest hospitals well before 5pm -- at about the time, or even before, the army claims the mine went off.

The outrage expressed in some quarters at the failure simply to believe the army’s version might sound more convincing were Israel welcoming an international investigation to adjudicate on the matter. But of course it is not. Just as in spring 2002, following the deaths of many civilians in the Palestinian town of Jenin and the destruction of the heart of the local refugee camp during a prolonged attack by the Israeli army and air force, Israel is rejecting all suggestions of an independent inquiry.

So why not just take Israel’s word for it? Its army is the most moral in the world, after all, and a state of law like Israel would gain nothing from lying in such a bare-faced manner.

The only problem is that Israel and its security forces have been caught out lying repeatedly during this intifada and before it, not just to people on the other side of the world who cannot verify the facts but also to its own courts and public.

Ths week, for example, the Supreme Court ordered the army and Ministry of Defence to pull down several kilometres of the steel and concrete barrier they have erected on Palestinian land in the West Bank after it was proved that the security considerations behind the choice of the wall’s route were entirely bogus. Official documents reveal that the wall was located there to allow for the future expansion of nearly illegal Jewish settlements on yet more Palestinian land. The army and government concocted the fib and then stuck to it for more than two years. Chief Justice Aharaon Barak called their systematic lying “a grave phenomenon”.

And at the start of the intifada, back in October 2000, the government and police covered up the fact that live ammunition and sniper units trained to deal with terror attacks had been used against unarmed Arab demonstrators inside Israel. For more than six months the government and security services denied that a single live round had been fired, despite mounting evidence to the contrary that lawyers and journalists like myself had unearthed.

They might have got away with their brazen lies too, had it not been for an unusual series of events that led to the appointment of a state inquiry headed by a Supreme Court judge, Theodor Or, who quickly exposed the truth.

That happened not because of any urge by official bodies to come clean or the inevitable triumph of Israeli justice. It happened for one reason alone: the prime minister of the day, Ehud Barak, feared losing the impending general election to his rival Ariel Sharon and thought he could buy back Arab votes by setting up an inquiry.

The inhabitants of Gaza have no such leverage inside the Israeli legal and political system. They have no friends inside Israel. And now it looks like they have no friends in the international community either.

Jonathan Cook, a writer and journalist living in Nazareth, Israel, is the author of “Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State”, published by Pluto Press. His website is www.jkcook.net

ZOA Agrees With Former CIA Head James Woolsey

Israel's Unilateral Concessions Have "Failed Utterly"
Zionist Organization of America
June 01, 2006

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Morton A. Klein, 212-481-1500

New York - The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) has strongly supported the analysis by R. James Woolsey, who served under President Clinton as Director of the CIA, that Israel’s policy of making unilateral concessions to its enemies has “failed utterly.” Mr. Woolsey is now a Distinguished Advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a Trustee of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Woolsey exposed the fallacies that underlie arguments for further, unilateral Israel concessions and the dire consequences of such concessions.

Excerpts from Mr. Woolsey’s article:


“It is ... widely assumed that Palestinian hostility to Israel is fueled by despair that can only be reduced by Israeli concessions ... [this assumption is] fundamentally flawed. The approach Israel is preparing to take in the West Bank was tried in Gaza and has failed utterly. The Israeli withdrawal of last year has produced the worst set of results imaginable: a heavy presence by al Qaeda, Hezbollah and even some Iranian Revolutionary Guard units ... Hamas assassination attempts against ... Jordan’s ambassador; rocket and mortar attacks against nearby towns inside Israel; and a perceived vindication for Hamas, which took credit for the withdrawal. This latter almost certainly contributed substantially to Hamas’s victory in the Palestinian elections.”

“Ariel Sharon repeatedly said he would not replay the Gaza retreat in the West Bank . With good reason: Creating a West Bank that looks like today’s Gaza would be many times the nightmare. How would one deal with continuing launches of rockets and mortars from the West Bank into virtually all of Israel? ... A security barrier does no good against such bombardment. The experience in Gaza, further, has shown the difficulty of defending against such attacks after the IDF boots on the ground have departed. Effective, prompt retaliation from the air is hard to imagine if the mortar rounds and Katyushas are being launched, as they will be, from schools, hospitals and mosques.”

“Israeli concessions will also make the U.S. look weak because it will be inferred that we have urged them, and will suggest that we are reverting to earlier behavior patterns — fleeing Lebanon in 1983, acquiescing in Saddam’s destruction of the Kurdish and Shiite rebels in 1991, fleeing Somalia in 1993, etc.”

“Israel is not the only pro-Western country that would be threatened. How does moderate Jordan, with its Palestinian majority, survive if bordered by a West Bank terrorist state?”

“Three major Israeli efforts at accommodation in the last 13 years have not worked. Oslo and the 1993 handshake in the Rose Garden between Yitzhak Rabin and Yassir Arafat produced only Arafat’s rejection in 2000 of Ehud Barak’s extremely generous settlement offer and the beginning of the Second Intifada. The Israeli withdrawal from Southern Lebanon in 2000 has enhanced Hezbollah’s prestige and control there; and the withdrawal from Gaza has unleashed madness. These three accommodations have been based on the premise that only Israeli concessions can displace Palestinian despair. But it seems increasingly clear that the Palestinian cause is fueled by hatred and contempt.”

“Israeli concessions indeed enhance Palestinian hope ... a hope that they will actually be able to destroy Israel.”

“The Iranian-Syrian-Hezbollah-Hamas axis is quite explicit about a genocidal objective. When they speak of “ending Israeli occupation” they mean of Tel Aviv.”

“Under these circumstances it is time to recognize that, sadly, the Israeli-Palestinian issue will likely not be the first matter settled in the decades-long war that radical Islam has declared on the U.S., Israel, the West and moderate Muslims -- it will more likely be one of the last.”

“... three failures in 13 years should permit us to evaluate the wisdom of further concessions” ( Wall Street Journal, May 23).

ZOA National President Morton A. Klein said, “James Woolsey has pointed out many of the dangers and consequences of a policy of Israeli unilateral retreats, to which could also be added that since last year’s Gaza withdrawal, Palestinian bombings and attempted attacks have increased, from 48 in October last year to 277 in December. Smuggling of weaponry into Gaza has also increased by 300 percent, according to Yuval Diskin, the head of Israel’s security service, Shin Bet. As he put it in January, ‘If before the disengagement they smuggled in 200 to 300 rifles a month, they are now smuggling in close to 3,000.’


“Woolsey is right to point out the dangers of further Israeli unilateral withdrawals for the US. As Caroline Glick, the Managing Editor of the Jerusalem Post, has observed, the Olmert plan will provide ‘a strategic victory to the forces of global jihad in a war they wage not only against Israel but against the US and the Western world as a whole because they will see Israel destroying itself under the gun of their terror and enabling the establishment of yet another base for global terrorists.’ Glick, in a major research piece for the highly respected Washington-based Center for Security Policy, has shown that implementing Olmert’s plan will endanger US military assets in Israel and Jordan and allow Iranian and Al-Qaeda forces to establish themselves in Judea and Samaria.


“It is also noteworthy that the distinguished Israeli journalist for Israel’s left-wing Haaretz newspaper, Ari Shavit, has written of the plan that, ‘It is not just the stability of Israel that Olmert is endangering. He is also endangering the regional stability. A Hamas state will accelerate Jordan’s collapse... Egypt will also be threatened... Olmert’s plan will be supporting not only anti-Israel terror, but also the anti-Western revolutionary movement. [Olmert’s] radical unilateral process will disrupt the American strategy in the area and will bury U.S. President George W. Bush’s dream of stability and democracy in the Middle East. ... The history books will record Olmert’s unconditional withdrawal as the unconditional surrender of Zionism.’


“It needs to be widely known that Ariel Sharon stated that he was opposed to making any further unilateral withdrawals and that he intended making no concessions until the Palestinian fully complied with their Roadmap obligations to fight terror and end incitement to hatred and murder within the PA that feeds it. As he told Jewish leaders at Blair House in Washington D. C., on April 13, 2005, “No serious steps have been taken by [the PA to stop terrorism] and we can’t get to the Roadmap plan until the PA fully implements its obligations.”


“The ZOA concludes, as has former Israeli Defense Force (IDF) Chief-of-Staff, Moshe Yaalon that, in the absence of “any prospect for peace and reconciliation on the Palestinian side ... Under no circumstances should [ Israel] surrender to terror. As long as they see our appeasement policy, they will continue.”

Revived Taliban Waging 'Full-Blown Insurgency'

Fighters spreading fear in southern Afghanistan; threat said worst since '01
By Paul Wiseman, USA Today
USA Today
June 20, 2006

PANJWAI DISTRICT, Afghanistan — In their biggest show of strength in nearly five years, pro-Taliban fighters are terrorizing southern Afghanistan — ambushing military patrols, assassinating opponents and even enforcing the law in remote villages where they operate with near impunity.

“We are faced with a full-blown insurgency,” says Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, author of Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil & Fundamentalism in Central Asia.

Four and a half years after they overthrew the Islamic militia that had controlled much of Afghanistan, U.S.-led forces have been forced to ramp up the battle to stabilize this impoverished, shattered country. More than 10,000 U.S., Canadian, British and Afghan government troops are scouring southern and eastern Afghanistan in a campaign called Operation Mountain Thrust.

Even before fighting heated up this spring, Lt. Gen. Michael Maples, director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, warned Congress that the insurgents “represent a greater threat” to the pro-U.S. government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai “than at any point since late 2001.”

More than 500 people — mostly insurgents — have died since mid-May in the fiercest fighting since the fall of the Taliban regime. Since Operation Enduring Freedom began in October 2001, more than 300 U.S. troops have died, 165 of them killed in action. NATO's 36-country International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) has lost 60.

Despite the damage they can do, the insurgents do not have enough support to topple Karzai, who was elected two years ago and enjoys international support. “We are not in a situation yet where the Karzai government is threatened,” says Joanna Nathan, Afghan analyst for the International Crisis Group, a non-profit research organization. But in places where they are strong, the insurgents have been able to harass government operations and relief efforts — so much so that reconstruction has come to a virtual standstill in the south and east.

“It is hurting us,” says Afghan Finance Minister Anwar ul-Haq Ahady. “We build a school, and they come and they burn it. We build a clinic, and they come and burn it. We build a bridge, and they knock it down. Security is the No. 1 issue.”

Fears of 'new training camp'

The fear is that an ungovernable Afghanistan will revert to what it was before the overthrow of the Taliban: a failed state that can spread instability across Central Asia and be used as a launchpad for international terrorism. “If the Taliban get their way, Afghanistan will again become a training camp for terrorists,” NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer told CBC, Canada's public broadcaster, this month.

The influence of the fundamentalist Islamic militia is obvious in Panjwai district, in the heart of Taliban country. Villagers on this dry, dusty plain 15 miles west of Kandahar say they are trapped between the Taliban and the U.S. and Afghan troops hunting them. If they cooperate with the coalition or with the Afghan government, they risk Taliban reprisals.

Just outside Makuan village here, Noor Mohammed, deputized as a security guard at a radio tower, goes to work in plainclothes. “If I wear a uniform, they will kill me,” he tells Canadian army Capt. Jonathan Snyder, 24, who is patrolling the area two days after a Canadian convoy was ambushed nearby. Snyder is exasperated: “You shouldn't fear for your life,” he tells the frightened man. “They should be fearing for their lives because of you.”

The insurgency is a loose alliance of Taliban guerrillas, followers of former prime minister and fundamentalist warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, al-Qaeda terrorists recruited from across the Islamic world, opium traffickers and local fighters whose murky motives are rooted in tribal politics.

Taliban commander Mullah Dadallah told al-Jazeera television last month that the insurgents can call on 12,000 fighters. In an interview, Taliban leader Naseeruddin Haqqani says there also are hundreds of suicide bombers. The Taliban's claims probably are exaggerated, Rashid says, but they can draw on hundreds of fighters.

The insurgency began a few months after U.S.-led forces drove the Taliban out of the Afghan capital, Kabul, in November 2001. It became more effective two years ago, when insurgents switched to new tactics, including breaking up into small groups of 10 fighters or less, attacking “soft” civilian targets and limiting head-on confrontations with coalition and Afghan troops.

Like their counterparts in Iraq, the insurgents use the Internet to pick up tips on making roadside bombs, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, has said. They increasingly rely on suicide bombers. Writing in The New York Review of Books this month, Rashid noted 40 suicide attacks in the past nine months vs. five in the previous five years.

Franchising terror

Insurgent leaders — such as Taliban spiritual leader Mullah Mohammed Omar; Jalaluddin Haqqani, father of Naseeruddin Haqqani; and Hekmatyar, who heads the radical Islamic Hizb-i-Islami group — “do not exert power the way a military general does,” Seth Jones, an analyst for the California-based think tank RAND Corp., wrote in the spring edition of the journal Survival. Instead, they leave “tactical and operational” control to local cells, “which act as franchises.”

Al-Qaeda, which supports the insurgency with training, supplies and occasionally manpower, operates much the same way.

The loose alliance opposed to the Karzai government and the U.S.-led reconstruction of Afghanistan has gained strength because:

*The insurgents have found sanctuary in Pakistan, “fairly brazenly” staying “beyond the reach of Afghan and international security forces,” Nathan says. Pakistan's powerful spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), supported the Taliban against rival Afghan factions when the fundamentalist movement formed in the mid-1990s. Pakistan's military regime wants to counter the separatist instincts of Pashtun tribesmen who live in both countries. The government's pro-Taliban policy changed under U.S. pressure after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Rashid says Pakistan has done nothing to eliminate Taliban forces operating openly out of Baluchistan, a Pakistani province opposite southern Afghanistan. The reason, he says, is that the Baluchistan insurgents are “pure Taliban” — remnants of the ISI-supported fundamentalist regime that ruled most of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. The insurgents based in Waziristan, by contrast, include many foreign jihadi fighters and members of al-Qaeda — fighters the United States has pressured Pakistan to pursue. “That suited the Pakistanis quite well,” Rashid says.

*Ordinary Afghans won't risk their lives to support Karzai's government, which many view as weak and corrupt. Afghanistan's problem is “not necessarily the strong enemy,” Eikenberry said in Washington last month. “It's the very weak institutions of the state.”

The government also is widely seen as corrupt and dominated by warlords linked to the bloody civil war during the 1990s. “Day by day, corruption, bribery and narcotics go up,” says Noor ul-Haq Ulumi, a member of the Afghan parliament from Kandahar. “Weak governors we have every place. They think only about their benefit, not their country's benefit.”

*The United States and its allies have scrimped on money and manpower, critics say. Rashid says Iraq has distracted the United States from the difficult tasks of subduing the Taliban and rebuilding Afghanistan. “For Afghanistan, the results have been too few Western troops, too little money and a lack of coherent strategy,” Rashid wrote in The New York Review of Books.

According to RAND, international aid to Afghanistan equals $57 per person, compared with $679 in Bosnia and $206 in Iraq. RAND also found that Afghanistan has one soldier for every 1,000 people vs. seven in Iraq, 19 in Bosnia and 20 in Kosovo. RAND's Jones reckons Afghanistan needs 200,000 Afghan and foreign troops and police officers to establish order. The country has about 120,000.

Insurgents test the resolve of NATO forces in the process of taking over combat responsibility from U.S. forces in southern Afghanistan. The incoming NATO commander, British Lt. Gen. David Richards, insists NATO forces “will deal most robustly” with insurgents.

Rashid says the rules of engagement are “incredibly unclear.”

“They bifurcate NATO into countries that will fight and countries that won't fight, and that's a dangerous thing,” Rashid says.

The insurgents are eager to bloody the NATO newcomers, to find out which ones will fight and to target those that won't. “This is a testing time, a transition time, and is likely to be messy,” Nathan says.

Insurgents “are betting that the West doesn't have the political will to remain in Afghanistan for the long run,” Jones wrote. “Proving them wrong is the key challenge.”

Sending troops to back Karzai's government and keeping them there is “a sacrifice worth making,” Nathan says. “Sept. 11 demonstrated what happened last time the international community abandoned Afghanistan.”

The Way Out Of Iraq: A Road Map

By Mowaffak al-Rubaie
Washington Post
June 20, 2006

There has been much talk about a withdrawal of U.S. and coalition troops from Iraq, but no defined timeline has yet been set. There is, however, an unofficial "road map" to foreign troop reductions that will eventually lead to total withdrawal of U.S. troops. This road map is based not just on a series of dates but, more important, on the achievement of set objectives for restoring security in Iraq.

Iraq has a total of 18 governorates, which are at differing stages in terms of security. Each will eventually take control of its own security situation, barring a major crisis. But before this happens, each governorate will have to meet stringent minimum requirements as a condition of being granted control. For example, the threat assessment of terrorist activities must be low or on a downward trend. Local police and the Iraqi army must be deemed capable of dealing with criminal gangs, armed groups and militias, and border control. There must be a clear and functioning command-and-control center overseen by the governor, with direct communication to the prime minister's situation room.

Despite the seemingly endless spiral of violence in Iraq today, such a plan is already in place. All the governors have been notified and briefed on the end objective. The current prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, has approved the plan, as have the coalition forces, and assessments of each province have already been done. Nobody believes this is going to be an easy task, but there is Iraqi and coalition resolve to start taking the final steps to have a fully responsible Iraqi government accountable to its people for their governance and security. Thus far four of the 18 provinces are ready for the transfer of power -- two in the north (Irbil and Sulaymaniyah) and two in the south (Maysan and Muthanna). Nine more provinces are nearly ready.

With the governors of each province meeting these strict objectives, Iraq's ambition is to have full control of the country by the end of 2008. In practice this will mean a significant foreign troop reduction. We envisage the U.S. troop presence by year's end to be under 100,000, with most of the remaining troops to return home by the end of 2007.

The eventual removal of coalition troops from Iraqi streets will help the Iraqis, who now see foreign troops as occupiers rather than the liberators they were meant to be. It will remove psychological barriers and the reason that many Iraqis joined the so-called resistance in the first place. The removal of troops will also allow the Iraqi government to engage with some of our neighbors that have to date been at the very least sympathetic to the resistance because of what they call the "coalition occupation." If the sectarian issue continues to cause conflict with Iraq's neighbors, this matter needs to be addressed urgently and openly -- not in the guise of aversion to the presence of foreign troops.

Moreover, the removal of foreign troops will legitimize Iraq's government in the eyes of its people. It has taken what some feel is an eternity to form a government of national unity. This has not been an easy or enviable task, but it represents a significant achievement, considering that many new ministers are working in partisan situations, often with people with whom they share a history of enmity and distrust. By its nature, the government of national unity, because it is working through consensus, could be perceived to be weak. But, again, the drawdown of foreign troops will strengthen our fledgling government to last the full four years it is supposed to.

While Iraq is trying to gain its independence from the United States and the coalition, in terms of taking greater responsibility for its actions, particularly in terms of security, there are still some influential foreign figures trying to spoon-feed our government and take a very proactive role in many key decisions. Though this may provide some benefits in the short term, in the long run it will only serve to make the Iraqi government a weaker one and eventually lead to a culture of dependency. Iraq has to grow out of the shadow of the United States and the coalition, take responsibility for its own decisions, learn from its own mistakes, and find Iraqi solutions to Iraqi problems, with the knowledge that our friends and allies are standing by with support and help should we need it.

The writer is Iraq's national security adviser.

Iraq's Post-Hussein Air Force Finds Its Wings Clipped

The country's airspace will remain under U.S. control for years, the military says.
By Louise Roug and Peter Spiegel, Times Staff Writers
Los Angeles Times
June 18, 2006

BAGHDAD — Iraqi pilots bitterly recall one of the commands that came down from Saddam Hussein as the dictator prepared for the U.S.-led invasion three years ago: Bury fighter jets in the sand.

Today, the men who flew those jets are in effect still grounded, even though they make up the bulk of the new Iraqi air force.

The U.S. military has hurriedly tried to turn over square mile after square mile of territory to Iraqi soldiers and police officers, but it has yet to yield control of a single cubic inch of the country's skies.

Despite U.S. pledges to help, the fledgling Iraqi air force remains tiny and ineffective — consisting of three Vietnam-era cargo planes, a few secondhand helicopters, some small, problem-ridden aircraft and just 14 pilots, decades older than their American counterparts and under threat from Sunni Muslim insurgents and Shiite militias alike.

U.S. military officials say that addressing the question of when they will allow the Iraqi air force to acquire combat capabilities is years away. The U.S. Air Force, they say, will retain control of Iraqi airspace for the foreseeable future, regardless of any drawdown of ground troops.

In a country rife with sectarian tension, where militias appear to have infiltrated every layer of the government's security forces, a strong air force that could conduct bombing missions is a troubling prospect for the United States. Both Washington and its allies in the region are wary of putting such formidable powers in Iraqi hands, observers and Iraqi officials say.

"I think they're afraid of terrorists taking over the air force and attacking American bases," said an Iraqi airman who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Washington is also concerned about the loyalties of Iraq's Shiite-dominated government in the light of regional dynamics, notably with regard to neighboring Iran, also led by Shiites.

If the Iraqi air force develops combat capabilities, questions will arise about how to ensure that the firepower is not misused, said Robert Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and a former teacher of air power strategy for the U.S. Air Force's School of Advanced Airpower Studies. "They might do more harm than good," he said.

Although U.S. officials describe a harmonious collaboration between the Iraqi airmen and their American advisors, Iraqi officials portray it as fraught with suspicion.

One Iraqi air force official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Iraqis were routinely kept in the dark about missions, and sometimes found their requests for flight missions inexplicably denied.

"The initiative to do anything is in their hands," he said of the U.S. officials.

He wondered whether Americans feared "the relationship between the Shiites in Iran and Iraq," but added, "That's not fair, because Iran has not even given us a bag of flour."

Despite hand-over ceremonies and talk of "reducing the footprint" of American ground forces, the U.S. military still controls key bases equipped to support aircraft in Iraq.

"We're looking at reducing the number of bases," Gen. T. Michael "Buzz" Moseley, the U.S. Air Force chief of staff, told reporters in a recent briefing. The Americans fly out of 18 bases, he said. "I see that number coming down. But I don't see the air and space component leaving soon."

The U.S. has stepped up its use of airpower in Iraq during this last year, increasing the number of bombings and other aerial missions. In Baghdad, troops now rarely leave their bases without air support, even for routine patrols.

However, the Iraq air force is not involved in combat, at least for now. Pilots monitor key infrastructure — such as oil pipelines — and fly reconnaissance missions, especially along the border with Iran. The larger cargo planes are used for medical missions and to shuttle government officials between meetings, among other things.

This spring, at a ceremony to celebrate the new Iraqi air base next to Baghdad's airport, U.S. Brig. Gen. David W. Eidsaune told the audience, "We will work together to restore Iraq's air force to what it once was."

During an interview, however, Eidsaune, the senior air liaison for U.S.-led forces, said that "as much as [the Iraqis] would like to get back to it, they can't afford it right now." Though the government has begun to realize that the air force is a good "enabler," he said, it still faces challenges in terms of funding, recruitment and equipment.

So far, the fleet — described by one Iraqi pilot as "not secondhand but tenth-hand" — includes three C-130 cargo planes, bought through the U.S. Foreign Military Sales program; a few Soviet-era transport helicopters; and three small planes. Some aircraft were donated by Jordan, others purchased under the Coalition Provisional Authority immediately after the U.S.-led invasion, with little paperwork left to account for it, Eidsaune said.

All told, the fleet has about 30 aircraft, most of them based in Baghdad, north of the capital in Taji or in the southern city of Basra. The U.S. hopes to add 12 small planes to the reconnaissance fleet and 16 refurbished Huey helicopters to its transport squadrons.

But that's a long way from the heyday of the 1970s and '80s, when Iraqis commanded thousands of aircraft, including hundreds of jet fighters such as Soviet-made MIGs and French Mirages.

The 1991 Persian Gulf War dealt a death blow to the Iraqi air force. The U.S. destroyed many aircraft, sanctions hindered upkeep on the rest and no-fly zones grounded the country's pilots for 13 years. When U.S. troops advanced through the country in 2003, they destroyed any planes that hadn't been buried or flown to safety in Iran.

Today, the air force is manned by the same people who flew those MIGs — men who remember missions over Iran and even Israel during the 1960s and '70s. With an average age of 48, their retirement is not far off. When they leave, the air force will vanish unless recruitment begins in earnest. The U.S. military and the Iraqi security ministries have yet to process applicants whose names were submitted months ago, said an American advisor who declined to be identified.

Rebel threats also pose a challenge. The personnel routinely receive threats from insurgents, and a few pilots have already left, wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars in training.

One Iraqi pilot, a captain whose father and two brothers also served in the air force, reluctantly left his job this year after receiving an envelope containing his death certificate.

He accused members of the Iranian-linked Badr Brigade militia of kidnapping and killing several former pilots, most of whom were Sunni, in retaliation for bombing missions over Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. None of the slain pilots were members of the post-Hussein air force. (Under the former dictator, the air force also participated in the brutal crackdown on Kurdish villages after the 1991 war.)

The pilot, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he still feared for his family's safety, said he was hopeful when he first signed up for the new air force.

Along with several other pilots, he was sent on monthlong training trips to Jordan and the U.S. in 2004 and 2005. But the program was soon riddled with problems. Pilots went unpaid for months; helicopters and some of the smaller airplanes were grounded because technical problems made them too dangerous to fly. Eventually, however, it was the threats against his family that made him give up his wings, one of the toughest decisions he ever made, he said.

"I love aircraft more than my life," he said. "If you open my heart, you'll see a lot of aircraft there."

Today, the air force numbers just 600 personnel — the vast majority of them support staff — though 1,000 are expected to be added in the next 12 months.

The 14 pilots train in what Eidsaune described as the "least permissible environment in the world."

For the C-130 pilots based at Al Muthanna air base in Baghdad, for example, that means corkscrew landings and takeoffs to avoid rebel fire.

In addition, uneasy relations with neighboring countries can complicate matters as Iraqi pilots face more stringent bureaucracy and security checks. On a recent humanitarian mission to Turkey, lack of appropriate paperwork prevented an Iraqi-flown C-130 from entering Turkish airspace.

"This is unique — trying to build an air force in the middle of a war," Eidsaune said.

Retired Gen. Charles Horner, who commanded all U.S. Air Force squadrons in the Middle East during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, said it was important for Iraq to eventually gain control of its airspace, if only for sovereignty purposes, particularly since Iran, which has been developing its missile capabilities, someday could pose a threat.

Iraqi commanders are hoping that Americans will do in the sky what they have done on the ground: Give Iraqis control of their own territory.

"We thank them," said Maj. Gen. Kamal A. Barzanjy, commander of the Iraqi air force, referring to the Americans. But, he said, the Iraqi air force needs more support, "more help from our friends to grow, to give them a chance to leave."