A General's New Plan To Battle Radical Islam

Top commander Gen. Abizaid uses soldiers to build health clinics and dig wells. But is it enough?; Learning from Hezbollah
By Greg Jaffe
Wall Street Journal
September 2, 2006

CAMP LEMONIER, Djibouti -- In the fall of 2002, the U.S. military set up a task force here on the Horn of Africa to kill any al Qaeda fighters seeking refuge in the region. The base was crawling with elite special-operations teams, and an unmanned Predator plane armed with Hellfire missiles sat ready on the runway.

Today, the base houses 1,800 troops whose mission is to build health clinics, wells and schools in areas where Islamic extremists are active. The idea is to ease some of the suffering that leaves the locals susceptible to the radicals' message, thus bolstering local governments, which will run the new facilities and get credit for the improvements.

Behind the shift is Gen. John Abizaid -- a 55-year-old of Lebanese descent and a fluent Arabic speaker -- who leads U.S. forces in the Middle East. In May, the four-star Army general visited 17 Navy Seabees, or engineers, at work designing a school. "Those 17 Seabees doing their mission out there achieve as much for us as a battalion of infantry on the ground looking for bad guys," the general said.

In an interview in Iraq later, he was even blunter about the limits of U.S. firepower. "Military power can gain us time...but that is about it," he said.

It's a striking comment from one of the country's most influential generals, whose views are increasingly being echoed by President Bush. As head of the U.S. Central Command, Gen. Abizaid oversees the U.S. military effort in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the Horn of Africa, Central Asia and the Mideast. He wields great military power, commanding more than 200,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines, along with hundreds of warplanes and dozens of ships.

But his view of the region is increasingly shaped by the inability of all that firepower to prevail against a violent strain of Islam seeking to expand its foothold. "The best way to contain al Qaeda is to increase the capacity of the regional powers to deal with it themselves," he says.

Gen. Abizaid's approach is part of a broader rethinking within the Bush administration of how best to fight terrorism, driven in part by the failures of the past five years. One of its tenets is that change must take place gradually and be led by locals. The U.S. can provide help training and equipping indigenous counterterrorism forces to break up al Qaeda cells, Gen. Abizaid says. But bigger changes that address the root causes of terrorism in the region must take place over years, if not decades.

"We tend to be very impatient and want democracy to form tomorrow," he says. But "reform paced too quickly can have unintended consequences."

Gen. Abizaid says his approach calls for a "long war, because it will take a long time for reform to take place." President Bush has adopted the "long war" notion and uses it regularly in speeches.

The general's critics say such a strategy isn't bold enough. "The 'long war' is not a war to transform the Middle East -- it's a light hand and get out of there as fast as you can," says Thomas Donnelly, a conservative military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. Others say helping autocratic regimes to build local support could simply entrench them and further stymie change.

The Horn of Africa effort, the centerpiece of Gen. Abizaid's long war strategy, has had to fend off questions from Washington about its value. Earlier this year, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in a pointed memo, asked what the U.S. was getting out of it. Gen. Abizaid says the resistance was less from Mr. Rumsfeld than from the "Pentagon bureaucracy," which he says didn't understand the mission's worth or the peril if it failed.

Gen Abizaid's unorthodox strategy is a product of his unusual career. Most Army officers who rose high in the 1980s and 1990s didn't stray far from basic muddy-boots soldiering. Gen. Abizaid has spent significant stretches of his career immersed in the Arab world. He served a year in Jordan early in his military career, and traveled widely. In the early 1980s he served with a United Nations mission in Lebanon, and after the 1991 Gulf War he was part of a mission to carve out a haven for the Kurds in northern Iraq. Along the way, he earned a Harvard degree in Middle Eastern studies.

In Lebanon, Gen. Abizaid says, he saw firsthand how Hezbollah used guerrilla violence, political activity and social aid to grow over the course of decades. "We Western-educated people tend to view war as first you fight then you talk," he says. "Here you are always talking and fighting." The general's counter strategy -- particularly in the Horn of Africa -- in some ways mimics Hezbollah's hybrid approach to war.

Implementing the "long war strategy," however, has proved fiendishly difficult for troops in the Horn of Africa. The idea is to send small teams into some of the world's most troubled lands to train local forces, gather information and build clinics and schools that extend the local government's influence. The military has long dispatched humanitarian aid, civil affairs teams and military trainers to places like Indonesia, the Philippines and North Africa to provide relief and bolster allies. But the Horn of Africa task force marks the first time that a large military command has been established solely to address the root causes of terrorism in a region.

"This is the most complex thing I have done in my military career," says Rear Adm. Richard Hunt, the commander of the mission. He has struggled mightily in the last nine months to get his troops access to countries in the region. Local leaders, even after they grant U.S. troops access and win projects, don't immediately abandon anti-American attitudes. Even when things are going well, progress is often so slow that it is imperceptible to the soldiers performing the mission.

Earlier this year, the Horn of Africa task force dispatched a six-man civil-affairs team to Yemen. A poor land with a history of Islamic extremism, Yemen is a key battleground in the war on terror. It is the ancestral home of Osama bin Laden and about 106 Yemenis are among prisoners the U.S. holds at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The place is awash in arms. Officials at the U.S. embassy in its capital, Sana, worry that without an infusion of aid, Yemen could become a haven for al Qaeda operatives.

Three months into its tour, the U.S. team was having a hard time getting projects going. Just leaving Sana needed approval from a regional government and as many as five national ministries.

"I am stunned how hard it is. We want to help people and there is an obvious need, but we can't seem to get through the bureaucracy," says the team's senior noncommissioned officer, named Mike. The Army asked that full names not be used because the small team operates on its own in a dangerous place.

The team was eager to start projects in Marib, a restive province where, in 2002, a missile fired by a U.S. Predator drone incinerated six al Qaeda men as they rode across the desert in an SUV. Early in July, after almost two months of planning, the civil-affairs team thought it had finally scheduled a 10-day visit to the province.

The night before the visit, the regional governor canceled it. He said it was too long and he hadn't been briefed sufficiently on the team's movements. To appease him, the U.S. cut the trip to four days. Instead of looking into 10 or 11 potential projects, it would aim for five.

When the team entered the provincial capital, also called Marib, it found a maze of trash-strewn streets, dilapidated shops and mud-brick houses. Virtually every male on the street carried an AK-47 assault rifle on his shoulder. Escorting the team were a dozen Yemeni soldiers and Marib's education minister, who kept a snub-nosed .38-caliber pistol tucked in his belt. Asked why, he smiled and said it was for "bird hunting."

On the first day, the team met with the headmistress of a girls' school, clad head-to-toe in black so only her brown eyes peeked out. The team made plans to double the size of the school, which serves 1,000 students with 19 classrooms.

The next morning they headed deep into the desert on a paved road that after 90 minutes gave way to a rutted dirt trail. It finally ended at a forlorn village named al Faa. Its only school, built of uneven rocks scrounged from a nearby mountain, had no running water, electricity or desks. The town had run out of money to finish the roof.

Doug, a 44-year-old sergeant first class and engineer, sat on a rock with the school principal, who was armed with a pistol and a knife, and sketched out a proposal to finish the school. When they were done, the principal speculated on why the U.S. team had traveled so far. "You are building here and demolishing there," he said, referring to the fighting in Lebanon and Iraq. "You want us to forget the destruction."

Amer Blame, the mayor, adjusted the AK-47 slung over his shoulder and offered a different take. "America is intent on dominating the world, and this is a part of it. So why not come here?" he said. Eventually, the Marib minister of education ended the guessing. "Don't say anything bad or you won't get the project," he warned.

In its remaining days, the team visited a crumbling one-room health clinic at a desert crossroads that treats Bedouins. It needed to be replaced with a larger facility. When a yelling fight broke out among armed men over the where to put a new clinic, the team, worried that the men might begin shooting, sought refuge behind their armored car.

They received a heroes' welcome in a town called al Agaa, where all the males formed a receiving line and treated them to a lavish lunch. Al Agaa needed a new school, and the U.S. soldiers offered to finance one. Later they laid plans to dig a well for a village that was running out of water. The five projects, recently approved by the team's commanders in Djibouti, will cost about $600,000, paid for by the U.S. Central Command.

Team members in Yemen often wondered, despite their recent run of success in Marib, if their effort was too small to make a real difference in a region where the needs are huge and anti-American sentiment entrenched. "This could be a model," says Mike, the senior sergeant. "But it is not working right now."

Compared with other missions in the Horn of Africa, the Americans' experience in Yemen stands as a big success. At times, the command's meticulous plans, laid out over the course of months, have been undone by unexpected regional conflicts or mercurial local leaders.

Earlier this year the Horn of Africa mission's commander, Adm. Hunt, decided to focus on containing a radical Islamic government taking root in southern Somalia. U.S. policy didn't permit sending troops into Somalia, so Adm. Hunt tried seeding border areas with projects that would ease desperate local living conditions.

A goal was to extend the influence of the government of neighboring Ethiopia, which would own and operate the schools and clinics the team financed. Adm. Hunt sent 150 troops to Ethiopia in April.

Soon after they arrived, Ethiopia put tight limits on their movement. "No one could come to a compromise with the Ethiopians on how we should do our job," says Sgt. First Class Timothy Bowman. "So we just sat there. We did nothing."

In July, Ethiopia, citing worsening security, asked the Americans to leave for their own safety. They hadn't been able to start any major projects at all in three months. Recently, after a flood, a small team of engineers was allowed to return to build shelter for those displaced.

As the foray into Ethiopia shows, U.S. commanders have struggled to figure out how business is done in the Horn of Africa. "We don't have a lot of guys who know and understand the region well," Adm. Hunt says. In the 11 months through Thursday, his command spent only a third of the $10 million it had been allocated for aid projects in the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30. Some civil-affairs teams have been stuck at the base in Djibouti watching movies, playing bingo and eating diner-style food provided by civilian contractors to the military.

Adm. Hunt had better luck in May, when he traveled to Comoros, a three-island nation off East Africa that has seen 20 coups in three decades. He says he spent two hours with the country's new, Iranian-educated president on the eve of his inauguration discussing possible deployment of a six-soldier civil-affairs team. It's scheduled to arrive this month.

In the future, Gen. Abizaid envisions representatives from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Border Control moving through parts of the Horn of Africa. State Department representatives might "teach locals ways to open their societies that don't threaten them," he says.

In many ways, Gen. Abizaid has been training for this type of warfare his whole life.

Gen. Abizaid was raised mostly by his widowed father, a mechanic in Coleville, Calif., and went on to graduate from the U.S. Military Academy. His 1973 yearbook offers a nod to his competitive streak, dubbing him "an Arabian Vince Lombardi."

His success continued when he earned a coveted spot as a company commander in one of the Army's elite Ranger units that parachuted into Grenada during the 1983 invasion. At one point, he commandeered a bulldozer and ordered one of his Rangers to drive it toward Cuban troops as he and the rest of his men advanced behind it. The event was highlighted in the 1986 Clint Eastwood movie "Heartbreak Ridge."

By the mid-1980s Gen. Abizaid, who had already learned Arabic and spent significant time in the Middle East, was pegged as "one of the Army's best and brightest," says retired Lt. Gen. Dan Christman. He deployed in 1991 to northern Iraq as part of a relief operation to coax thousands of hungry and freezing Kurds down from the mountains, where they had been driven by Saddam Hussein's troops following an uprising. Then Lt. Col. Abizaid was at the center of the effort to push back Iraqi forces, establish a Kurdish zone and broker a peace between their often-warring factions. "He knew from the beginning he need to get to know the two main Kurdish leaders. He studied them and learned what made them tick," says retired Gen. John Shalikashvili, who was the commander of the mission and went on to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "We all took our cues from John."

At a time when many in the Army saw peacekeeping ventures like the one in Iraq as a distraction from their combat duties, Gen. Abizaid saw such missions -- mixing shows of force, politics and humanitarian relief -- as a key part of the Army's future. In a 1993 article he wrote in an Army journal, the officer practically begged his military colleagues to take such responsibilities more seriously. "We must recognize that peacekeeping is no job for amateurs," he wrote. "It is dangerous stressful duty that requires highly disciplined, well educated soldiers who understand the nature of the peacekeeping beast."

After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Gen. Abizaid held top positions in the Pentagon, where he forged a close relationship with the often prickly Mr. Rumsfeld. In the immediate aftermath of the Iraq war, Mr. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, leaned hard on Gen. Abizaid to take on the Army Chief of Staff post, the top job in the Army. Mr. Rumsfeld wanted him to shake up the service, which the secretary thought was too complacent and out of step with his vision to transform the military.

Gen Abizaid repeatedly turned it down, telling colleagues that if he didn't get the Central Command position he would likely retire to California. "Abizaid disagreed with the technology-focused view of warfare that had taken hold in the Pentagon," says one friend who talked with him about the job. In the summer of 2003, he accepted the job as the head of Central Command.

Posted in Gen. Abizaid's Central Command headquarters in Qatar is some 1918 advice from famed British officer T.E. Lawrence, also known as Lawrence of Arabia: "Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them." The saying, often cited by Gen. Abizaid, has become a mantra for commanders throughout the Central Command region.

Gen Abizaid's staff tracks everything from birth rates in places like Sudan to oil-pipeline deals to water consumption in the region. One of his staff officers, who has an advanced degree in Middle Eastern history, recently wrote a long paper for him on the British colonial experience in Iraq in the 1920s and '30s. The general's colleagues praise him for his ease with uncertainty and freewheeling debate.

In May, on a visit through Iraq, he was getting a briefing on security conditions in the country. An officer lamented that a significant share of Iraqis were telling opinion surveys it was honorable to attack U.S. forces. "You act like you're insulted or something," Gen. Abizaid said to the briefing officer.

As the officer looked on, surprised, the general told him why he shouldn't be: Iraqis also thought it honorable to attack the British when they occupied Iraq, and they felt the same way earlier about the Turks. The attitude was "a part of the battlefield," and it showed the need to turn the fight in Iraq over to the Iraqis as quickly as possible, he said.

Gen. Abizaid's influence is evident in Iraq, where the U.S. has shifted away from its initial focus of building a U.S.-style democracy in the heart of the Muslim world. Today the top priority for commanders is building Iraqi police and army forces that can take over the fight and shoring up crumbling infrastructure. On the political side, U.S. and Iraqi leaders are working to persuade Sunnis who've supported the insurgency to take part in the political process. They're also trying to reach an accommodation with radical Shiite elements. "In Iraq, we are willing to accept a less-than-perfect democracy. Stability and security are more important," says one U.S. Army counterinsurgency expert. "Instead of mission creep, we are seeing mission shrink."

As for the Horn of Africa, Gen. Abizaid, from his perch atop the Central Command, says it could take years and much patience to make significant progress. He figures it will also take a lot of help from other departments of the government, agencies that aren't geared to providing such overseas assistance.

"I just think we've got to reform our structures, our authorities and our thinking to deal with the way the world is moving," Gen. Abizaid says. "You just can't let these places deteriorate ... unless you are willing to accept what they bring you -- terrorism and crime."

"Fascism" Frame Set Up by Right-Wing Press

by Jim Lobe
Inter Press Service
September 1, 2006

WASHINGTON - The aggressive new campaign by the administration of President George W. Bush to depict U.S. foes in the Middle East as "fascists" and its domestic critics as "appeasers" owes a great deal to steadily intensifying efforts by the right-wing press over the past several months to draw the same comparison.

The Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News Network and The Weekly Standard, as well as the Washington Times, which is controlled by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, and the neo-conservative New York Sun, have consistently and with increasing frequency framed the challenges faced by Washington in the region in the context of the rise of fascism and Nazism in the 1930s, according to a search of the Nexis database by IPS.

All of those outlets, as well as two other right-wing U.S. magazines -- The National Review and The American Spectator -- far outpaced their commercial rivals in the frequency of their use of key words and names, such as "appeasement," "fascism", and "Hitler", particularly with respect to Iran and its controversial president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Nexis, for example, cited 56 uses of "Islamofascist" or "Islamofascism" in separate programmes or segments aired by Fox News compared with 24 by CNN over the past year. Even more striking, the same terms were used in 115 different articles or columns in the Washington Times, compared with only eight in the Washington Post over the same period, according to a breakdown by Nexis.

Similarly, the Washington Times used the words "appease" or "appeasement" -- a derogatory reference to efforts by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to avoid war with Nazi Germany before the latter's invasion of Poland -- in 25 different articles or columns that dealt with alleged threats posed by Ahmadinejad, compared to six in the Post and only three in the New York Times.

Israel-centred neo-conservatives and other hawks have long tried to depict foreign challenges to U.S. power as replays of the 1930s in order to rally public opinion behind foreign interventions and high defence budgets and against domestic critics.

During the Cold War, they attacked domestic critics of the Vietnam War and later the Ronald Reagan administration's "contra war" against Nicaragua -- and even Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon -- as "isolationists" and "appeasers" who failed to understand that their opposition effectively served the interests of an "evil" Soviet Union whose ambitions for world conquest were every bit as threatening and real as that of the Axis powers in World War II.

Known as "the Good War", that conflict remains irresistible as a point of comparison for hawks caught up in more recent conflicts -- from the first Gulf War when former President H.W. Bush compared Iraq's Saddam Hussein to Hitler; to the Balkan wars when neo-conservatives and liberal interventionists alike described Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic in similar terms; to the younger Bush's "global war on terrorism" (GWOT), which he and his supporters have repeatedly tried to depict as the latest in a series of existential struggles against "evil" and "totalitarians" that began with World War II.

Given the growing public disillusionment not only with the Iraq war, but with Bush's handling of the larger GWOT as well -- not to mention the imminence of the mid-term Congressional elections in November and the growing tensions with Ahmadinejad's Iran over its nuclear program -- it is hardly surprising that both the administration and its hawkish supporters are trying harder than ever to identify their current struggles, including last month's conflict between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah, specifically with the war against "fascism" more than 60 years ago.

As noted by Associated Press (AP) this week, "fascism" or "Islamic fascism", a phrase used by Bush himself two weeks ago and used to encompass everything from Sunni insurgents, al Qaeda and Hamas to Shia Hezbollah and Iran to secular Syria, has become the "new buzzword" for Republicans.

In a controversial speech Tuesday, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld was even more direct, declaring that Washington faced a "new type of fascism" and, in an explicit reference to the failure of western countries to confront Hitler in the 1930s, assailing critics for neglecting "history's lessons" by "believ(ing) that somehow vicious extremists can be appeased."

But Rumsfeld's remarks, which drew bitter retorts from leading Democrats, followed a well-worn path trod with increasing intensity by the neo-conservative and right-wing media over the last year, according to the Nexis survey. Significantly, it did not include the Wall Street Journal whose editorial pages have been dominated by neo-conservative opinion, particularly analogies between the rise of fascism and the challenges faced by the U.S. in the Middle East, since 9/11.

Thus, the Washington Times published 95 articles and columns that featured the words "fascism" or "fascist" and "Iraq" over the past year, twice as many as appeared in the New York Times during the same period. More than half of the Washington Times' articles were published in just the past three months -- three times as many as appeared in the New York Times.

Similarly, the National Review led all magazines and journals with 66 such references over the past year, followed by 48 in The American Spectator, and 14 by The Weekly Standard. Together, those three publications accounted for more than half of all articles with those words published by the more than three dozen U.S. periodicals catalogued by Nexis since last September.

The results were similar for "appease" or "appeasement" and "Iraq". Led by the Review, the same three journals accounted for more than half the articles (175) that included those words in some three dozen U.S. magazines over the past year. As for newspapers, The Washington Times led the list with 46 articles, 50 percent more than the New York Times which also had fewer articles than its crosstown neo-conservative rival, the much-smaller New York Sun.

Searching on Nexis for articles and columns that included "Iran" and "fascist" or "fascism," IPS found that the Sun and the Times topped the newspaper list by a substantial margin, as did the Review, the Spectator, and the Standard among the magazines and journals. Nearly one-third of all such references over the past year were published in August, according to the survey.

Nexis, which also surveys the Canadian press, found that newspapers owned by CanWest Global Communications, a group that owns the country's Global Television Network, as well as the National Post, the Ottawa Citizen, and the Montreal Gazette and several other regional newspapers, were also among the most consistent propagators of the "fascism" paradigm and ranked far ahead of other Canadian outlets in the frequency with which they used key words, such as "appeasement" and "fascist" in connection with Iraq and Iran.

The group is run by members of the Asper family whose foreign policy views have been linked to prominent hard-line neo-conservatives here and the right-wing Likud Party in Israel.

The Big Lie About 'Islamic Fascism'

by Eric Margolis
Sun National Media (Canada)
August 29, 2006

DIGG THIS

The latest big lie unveiled by Washington’s neoconservatives are the poisonous terms, "Islamo-Fascists" and "Islamic Fascists." They are the new, hot buzzwords among America’s far right and Christian fundamentalists.

President George W. Bush made a point last week of using "Islamofacists" when recently speaking of Hezbullah and Hamas – both, by the way, democratically elected parties. A Canadian government minister from the Conservative Party compared Lebanon’s Hezbullah to Nazi Germany.

The term "Islamofascist" is utterly without meaning, but packed with emotional explosives. It is a propaganda creation worthy Dr. Goebbels, and the latest expression of the big lie technique being used by neocons in Washington’s propaganda war against its enemies in the Muslim World.

This ugly term was probably first coined in Israel – as was the other hugely successful propaganda term, "terrorism" – to dehumanize and demonize opponents and deny them any rational political motivation, hence removing any need to deal with their grievances and demands.

As the brilliant humanist Sir Peter Ustinov so succinctly put it, "Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich."

Both the terms "terrorism" and "fascist" have been so abused and overused that they have lost any original meaning. The best modern definition I’ve read of fascism comes in former Columbia University Professor Robert Paxton’s superb 2004 book, The Anatomy of Fascism.

Paxton defines fascism’s essence, which he aptly terms its "emotional lava" as: 1. a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond reach of traditional solutions; 2. belief one’s group is the victim, justifying any action without legal or moral limits; 3. need for authority by a natural leader above the law, relying on the superiority of his instincts; 4. right of the chosen people to dominate others without legal or moral restraint; 5. fear of foreign "contamination."

Fascism demands a succession of wars, foreign conquests, and national threats to keep the nation in a state of fear, anxiety and patriotic hypertension. Those who disagree are branded ideological traitors. All successful fascists regimes, Paxton points out, allied themselves to traditional conservative parties, and to the military-industrial complex.

Highly conservative and militaristic regimes are not necessarily fascist, says Paxton. True fascism requires relentless aggression abroad and a semi-religious adoration of the regime at home.

None of the many Muslim groups opposing US-British control of the Mideast fit Paxton’s definitive analysis. The only truly fascist group ever to emerge in the Mideast was Lebanon’s Maronite Christian Phalange Party in the 1930’s which, ironically, became an ally of Israel’s rightwing in the 1980’s.

It is grotesque watching the Bush Administration and Tony Blair maintain the ludicrous pretense they are re-fighting World War II. The only similarity between that era and today is the cultivation of fear, war fever and racist-religious hate by US neoconservatives and America’s religious far right, which is now boiling with hatred for anything Muslim.

Under the guise of fighting a "third world war" against "Islamic fascism," America’s far right is infecting its own nation with the harbingers of WWII totalitarianism.

In the western world, hatred of Muslims has become a key ideological hallmark of rightwing parties. We see this overtly in the United States, France, Italy, Holland, Denmark, Poland, and, most lately, Canada, and more subtly expressed in Britain and Belgium. The huge uproar over blatantly anti-Muslim cartoons published in Denmark laid bare the seething Islamophobia spreading through western society.

There is nothing in any part of the Muslim World that resembles the corporate fascist states of western history. In fact, clan and tribal-based traditional Islamic society, with its fragmented power structures, local loyalties, and consensus decision-making, is about as far as possible from western industrial state fascism.

The Muslim World is replete with brutal dictatorships, feudal monarchies, and corrupt military-run states, but none of these regimes, however deplorable, fits the standard definition of fascism. Most, in fact, are America’s allies.

Nor do underground Islamic militant groups ("terrorists" in western terminology). They are either focused on liberating land from foreign occupation, overthrowing "un-Islamic" regimes, driving western influence from their region, or imposing theocracy based on early Islamic democracy.

Claims by fevered neoconservatives that Muslim radicals plan to somehow impose a worldwide Islamic caliphate are lurid fantasies worthy of Dr. Fu Manchu and yet another example of the big lie technique that worked so well over Iraq.

As Prof. Andrew Bosworth notes in an incisive essay on so-called Islamic fascism, "Islamic fundamentalism is a transnational movement inherently opposed to the pseudo-nationalism necessary for fascism."

However, there are plenty of modern fascists. But to find them, you have to go to North America and Europe. These neo-fascists advocate "preemptive attacks against all potential enemies," grabbing other nation’s resources, overthrowing uncooperative governments, military dominance of the world, hatred of Semites (Muslims in this case), adherence to biblical prophecies, hatred of all who fail to agree, intensified police controls, and curtailment of "liberal" political rights.

They revel in flag-waving, patriotic melodrama, demonstrations of military power, and use the mantle of patriotism to feather the nests of the military-industrial complex, colluding legislators and lobbyists. They urge war to the death, fought, of course, by other people’s children. They have turned important sectors of the media into propaganda organs and brought the Pentagon largely under their control.

Now, the neoconservatives are busy whipping up war against Syria and Iran to keep themselves in power and maintain the political dynamics of this 21st century revival of fascism.

The real modern fascists are not in the Muslim World, but Washington. The neocons screaming fascist the loudest, are the true fascists themselves. It’s a pity that communist and leftist propaganda so debased the term "neo-fascist" that it has become almost meaningless. Because that is what we should be calling the so-called neocons, for that is what they really are.

Time To Change the Tune

Editorial
Forward
Fri. August 18, 2006

As Israelis began trying this week to make sense of their bruising five-week war in Lebanon, discussion has returned again and again to the traumatic Yom Kippur War of 1973. Then as now, Israel’s vaunted military machine was caught with its pants down, locked into a strategic concept — static defense lines then, air dominance now — that had become obsolete. Then as now, the war ended in a victory that felt more like defeat, leaving Israel’s enemies crowing and Israelis fearing for their very future. This time, with Israel’s military deterrent exposed as lacking and jihadist rage mounting among the world’s billion Muslims, the fears feel very real.

But there is another, more hopeful parallel between 1973 and now, for those willing to see it. Back then, the mixed results of the war reshuffled the strategic balance in the Middle East, opening the way for a diplomatic flurry — tirelessly orchestrated by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger — that ultimately led to a peace treaty with Egypt, Israel’s most powerful Arab foe. This week, growing numbers of Israeli strategists are speaking of a similar opening arising from the latest war. They see an opportunity for Israel to reach out to moderate Arab and Muslim states, a chance to forge a common front against the extremist threat from Iran and Hezbollah. The price of admission: a regional peace accord, including a resolution of the Palestinian issue and genuine Arab recognition of Israel, that enables the moderates to unite and thus isolates the extremists.

“We need a realignment in the region,” says veteran Labor Party lawmaker Ephraim Sneh, a reserve brigadier general and former deputy defense minister. “We need to create a new balance with the all the moderate countries on one side” — and the extremists on the other.

By “moderate countries,” Sneh is thinking first of all the nearby Arab states that have made peace with Israel or hinted at it clearly in recent decades, beginning with Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinians. Not coincidentally, all of them are Sunni Muslim societies that view the Shi’ite Iran-Hezbollah axis with fear and loathing.

As it happens, every one of the target nations has sent urgent signals to Israel in recent weeks, making it clear that they want to do business. Israelis must now ask themselves what price they would have to pay to join the game, and what role they need their American ally to play to make it work.

The Egyptians, as usual, are leading the way. Their security services have been working frantically in the past month to separate the Hamas-led Palestinian government from its Hezbollah allies, to secure the release of kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit and to create a unified Palestinian negotiating partner for peace talks with Israel, under the clear leadership of the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas.

Hamas — at least its local wing in the territories — seems desperate to buy in; it has endorsed the Egyptian initiative and cracked down on rocket fire. This week it approved a unity government with Fatah and announced that it had “no problem negotiating with Israel.”

With Egypt playing enforcer, the Saudis have taken on the role of pitchman. Three weeks ago, midway through the war, they dusted off their 2002 peace plan, known as the King Fahd plan, which offered Israel full peace and normalized relations with all 22 Arab states in return for “solving the Palestinian problem.” It included Palestinian statehood within the 1967 borders (details to be negotiated between Israel and the Palestinians) and a “resolution of the refugee problem” (essentially repatriating a symbolic group and compensating the rest, diplomats said). What was new in this month’s announcement was this ominous warning: Given the mounting level of anti-Israel rage in the region, the offer might not be on the table forever. It’s time, Saudi officials said, for a regional settlement that brings Israel into the Middle Eastern family. The alternative is chaos.

Israelis rejected the Saudi plan back in 2002 as demanding too much from them. At this point, given a choice between the Fahd plan and the prospect of Iranian regional dominance, the Fahd plan is looking better and better, officials say privately.

There are a few wild cards in the scenario. One of them is Syria. As long as it remains tied to Iran and Hezbollah, there may be no way to neutralize the terrorist militia, a basic Israeli condition for any deal. Nor can the Fahd plan be completed with

Syria, a key Arab state, holding out. This week’s “victory” speech by the Syrian president, Bashar Assad, set an alarmingly shrill tone, promising continued support for Hezbollah and even threatening military action on the Golan Heights, something Damascus has avoided for 33 years. Tucked within Assad’s speech, though, was a very different message: a call to Israel, repeated several times, to “turn toward peace” and so avoid defeat. Assad may have been reading from the playbook used by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in the early 1970s: Threaten fire and brimstone, claim you’ve redeemed your honor through military victory, then open a quiet channel to talk peace.

And that raises the second wild card: Are Israelis ready to join? The answer isn’t simple. Defense Minister Amir Peretz, the Labor Party leader, opened the debate this week with a speech urging Israel to “renew our dialogue with the Palestinians” and to “create the conditions for dialogue with Syria.” “Every war creates an opportunity for a new political process,” he said.

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni of the Kadima party said much the same thing the same day. Last week’s unanimous United Nations Security Council resolution, with its clear blaming of Hezbollah and refusal to condemn Israel, creates “a window of opportunity,” she said.

For now, the main roadblock is Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Whether out of mistrust of Arab intentions, emotional attachment to the settlements or fear of political retribution from the right, he is rejecting talk of a Syrian opening or a renewed Fahd plan. Aides say he’s not ready to jump in.

A plan for easing into regional dialogue more gently was offered this week by Yossi Beilin, leader of the left-wing Meretz party and architect of the 1993 Oslo Accords. Beilin is calling for a reconvening of the Madrid Conference, an all-party Middle East roundtable convened in 1991 by President George H.W. Bush. Summoned in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War, the conference brought all the main Middle East players around a single table and then broke up into working committees, some of which continue to stumble along, at least on paper. In Beilin’s view, calling a conference like that would let the parties sit together without committing themselves to a predetermined result. They could simply say that Uncle Sam made them come.

And that raises the third wild card: whether the current President Bush is willing and able to do what has to be done. Right now he’s torn between the pragmatists in his administration, who favor dialogue, and the ideologues, who insist on seeing the world in blacks and whites and are willing to keep fighting to the last Israeli. Bush’s own instincts are with the ideologues, though he’s shown himself capable of acting pragmatically when he sees the need.

That is the challenge for Israel’s friends right now. Bush has been convinced by self-appointed spokesmen for Israel and the Jewish community that endless war is in Israel’s interest. He needs to hear in no uncertain terms that Israel is ready for dialogue, that the alternative — endless jihad — is unthinkable. Now is time to change the tune.

Criticize Israel? You're an Anti-Semite!

How can we have a real discussion about Mideast peace if speaking honestly about Israel is out of bounds?
Rosa Brooks
Los Angeles Times
September 1, 2006

EVER WONDER what it's like to be a pariah?

Publish something sharply critical of Israeli government policies and you'll find out. If you're lucky, you'll merely discover that you've been uninvited to some dinner parties. If you're less lucky, you'll be the subject of an all-out attack by neoconservative pundits and accused of rabid anti-Semitism.

This, at least, is what happened to Ken Roth. Roth — whose father fled Nazi Germany — is executive director of Human Rights Watch, America's largest and most respected human rights organization. (Disclosure: I have worked in the past as a paid consultant for the group.) In July, after the Israeli offensive in Lebanon began, Human Rights Watch did the same thing it has done in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Bosnia, East Timor, Sierra Leone, Congo, Uganda and countless other conflict zones around the globe: It sent researchers to monitor the conflict and report on any abuses committed by either side.

It found plenty. On July 18, Human Rights Watch condemned Hezbollah rocket strikes on civilian areas within Israel, calling the strikes "serious violations of international humanitarian law and probable war crimes." So far, so good. You can't lose when you criticize a terrorist organization.

But Roth and Human Rights Watch didn't stop there. As the conflict's death toll spiraled — with most of the casualties Lebanese civilians — Human Rights Watch also criticized Israel for indiscriminate attacks on civilians. Roth noted that the Israeli military appeared to be "treating southern Lebanon as a free-fire zone," and he observed that the failure to take appropriate measures to distinguish between civilians and combatants constitutes a war crime.

The backlash was prompt. Roth and Human Rights Watch soon found themselves accused of unethical behavior, giving aid and comfort to terrorists and anti-Semitism. The conservative New York Sun attacked Roth (who is Jewish) for having a "clear pro-Hezbollah and anti-Israel bias" and accused him of engaging in "the de-legitimization of Judaism, the basis of much anti-Semitism." Neocon commentator David Horowitz called Roth a "reflexive Israel-basher … who, in his zest to pillory Israel at every turn, is little more than an ally of the barbarians." The New Republic piled on, as did Alan Dershowitz, who claimed Human Rights Watch "cooks the books" to make Israel look bad. And writing in the Jewish Exponent, Jonathan Rosenblum accused Roth of resorting to a "slur about primitive Jewish bloodlust."

Anyone familiar with Human Rights Watch — or with Roth — knows this to be lunacy. Human Rights Watch is nonpartisan — it doesn't "take sides" in conflicts. And the notion that Roth is anti-Semitic verges on the insane.

But what's most troubling about the vitriol directed at Roth and his organization isn't that it's savage, unfounded and fantastical. What's most troubling is that it's typical. Typical, that is, of what anyone rash enough to criticize Israel can expect to encounter. In the United States today, it just isn't possible to have a civil debate about Israel, because any serious criticism of its policies is instantly countered with charges of anti-Semitism. Think Israel's tactics against Hezbollah were too heavy-handed, or that Israel hasn't always been wholly fair to the Palestinians, or that the United States should reconsider its unquestioning financial and military support for Israel? Shhh: Don't voice those sentiments unless you want to be called an anti-Semite — and probably a terrorist sympathizer to boot.

How did adopting a reflexively pro-Israel stance come to be a mandatory aspect of American Jewish identity? Skepticism — a willingness to ask tough questions, a refusal to embrace dogma — has always been central to the Jewish intellectual tradition. Ironically, this tradition remains alive in Israel, where respected public figures routinely criticize the government in far harsher terms than those used by Human Rights Watch.

In a climate in which good-faith criticism of Israel is automatically denounced as anti-Semitic, everyone loses. Israeli policies are a major source of discord in the Islamic world, and anger at Israel usually spills over into anger at the U.S., Israel's biggest backer.

With resentment of Israeli policies fueling terrorism and instability both in the Middle East and around the globe, it's past time for Americans to have a serious national debate about how to bring a just peace to the Middle East. But if criticism of Israel is out of bounds, that debate can't occur — and we'll all pay the price.

Back to Human Rights Watch's critics. Why waste time denouncing imaginary anti-Semitism when there's no shortage of the real thing? From politically motivated arrests of Jews in Iran to assaults on Jewish children in Ukraine, there's plenty of genuine anti-Semitism out there — and Human Rights Watch is usually taking the lead in condemning it. So if you're bothered by anti-Semitism — if you're bothered by ideologies that insist that some human lives have less value than others — you could do a whole lot worse than send a check to Human Rights Watch.

The Perils of Foreign Policy by Report Card

By John R. Hamilton
The Washington Post
Friday, September 1, 2006; A21

Attempts to explain the vehemence of anti-U.S. feeling abroad correctly home in on Iraq and other unpopular policies of the current administration. But over the past three decades the kudzu-like growth of another U.S. practice, used by Congress and by Democratic and Republican administrations alike, has nurtured seething resentment abroad.

This is what might be called "foreign policy by report card," the issuing of public assessments of the performance of other countries, with the threat of economic or political sanctions for those whose performance, in our view, doesn't make the grade. The overuse of these mandated reports makes us seem judgmental, moralistic and bullying.

The degree to which public reports accompanied by the threat of sanctions have been institutionalized in U.S. policy is stunning. A partial list:

Each year we issue detailed human rights reports on every country in the world, including those whose performance appears superior to our own. We judge whether other countries have provided sufficient cooperation in fighting illegal drugs. We place countries whose protection of intellectual property has been insufficient on "watch lists," threatening trade sanctions against those that do not improve. We judge respect for labor rights abroad through a public petition process set up under the System of Generalized (trade) Preferences. We publish annual reports on other countries' respect for religious freedom.

And more: We seek to ensure the adequacy of civil aviation oversight and the security of foreign airports through special inspections and categorizing of government performance. We ban shrimp imports from countries whose fishing fleets do not employ sea turtle extruder devices and yellowfin tuna imports where the protection of dolphins is in our view inadequate. We report on trafficking in persons and categorize the performance of every country where such trafficking is a problem, which is just about everywhere. And we withhold military education, training and materiel assistance from countries that do not enter into agreements with us to protect our nationals from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.

The point is not that these goals are illegitimate. The large majority of Americans would probably support most if not all of them and would be reassured to know that the government is working assiduously to promote them. It is also true that foreign governments do sometimes improve their performance to avoid sanctions or the embarrassment of a critical public report.

But in the aggregate, our public reports have reinforced the view abroad that we set ourselves up unilaterally as police officer, judge and jury of other countries' conduct. Often, governments in developing countries in particular are committed to the objectives we are promoting, but they are overwhelmed by poverty, political instability and other existential problems that, in their view, dwarf the issues on which we would have them concentrate. Even so, they struggle to improve, say, performance on human trafficking, only to be found lacking with respect to drugs or labor rights. They may well conclude that, however much they try, their best is never good enough for us. The result is demoralization, anger and sullen resistance where we otherwise might have made common cause.

We could adjust this approach, especially where the objectives enjoy broad support in the international community, to advance them through multilateral organizations. We have effectively promoted more vigorous action against money laundering through the broadly based Financial Action Task Force. Several years ago, and as resentment over our annual narcotics certification process threatened to spin out of control, Congress softened the approach and, with modest success, we sought to make the Western Hemisphere portion of it multilateral through the Organization of American States.

Scaling back in other areas would help. It is critical, though, that we refrain from using this tool as we seek to promote new objectives -- however worthy -- in the future. The tolerance of other societies for being publicly judged by the United States has reached its limits.

The writer, who retired last year after 35 years as a Foreign Service officer, served as ambassador to Peru and Guatemala.

War Turns To 'Islamic Fascism'

By Associated Press
August 31, 2006

President Bush in recent days has recast the global war on terror into a "war against Islamic fascism." Fascism, in fact, seems to be the new buzzword for Republicans in an election season dominated by the war in Iraq.

Mr. Bush used the term earlier this month in talking about the arrest of suspected terrorists in Britain, then spoke of "Islamic fascists" in a speech in Green Bay, Wis. Spokesman Tony Snow has used variations on the phrase at White House press briefings.

Sen. Rick Santorum, Pennsylvania Republican, in a tough re-election fight, drew parallels on Monday between World War II and the current war against "Islamic fascism," saying they both require fighting a common foe in multiple countries.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Tuesday took it a step further in a speech to an American Legion convention in Salt Lake City, accusing critics of the administration's Iraq and counterterrorism policies of trying to appease "a new type of fascism."

White House aides and outside Republican strategists said the description is an attempt to more clearly identify the ideology that motivates many organized terrorist groups.

The White House yesterday announced that Mr. Bush would elaborate on this theme in a series of speeches beginning today at the American Legion convention and running through his address to the U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 19.

"The key is that all of this violence and all of the threats are part of one single ideological struggle, a struggle between the forces of freedom and moderation, and the forces of tyranny and extremism," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino told reporters traveling with Mr. Bush aboard Air Force One.

Depicting the struggle as one against Islamic fascists is "an appropriate definition of the war that we're in," Republican pollster Ed Goeas said.

Muslim groups have cried foul. Mr. Bush's use of the phrase "contributes to a rising level of hostility to Islam and the American-Muslim community," said Parvez Ahmed, chairman of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Dennis Ross, a Middle East adviser to both the first Bush and Clinton administrations and now the director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said he would have chosen different words.

"The 'war on terror' has always been a misnomer, because terrorism is an instrument, it's not an ideology. So I would always have preferred it to be called the 'war with radical Islam,' not with Islam but with 'radical Islam,' " Mr. Ross said.

Although "fascism" once referred to the rigid nationalistic one-party dictatorship first instituted in Italy, it has "been used very loosely in all kinds of ways for a long time," said Wayne Fields, a specialist in presidential rhetoric at Washington University in St. Louis.

"Typically, the Bush administration finds its vocabulary someplace in the middle ground of popular culture. It seems to me that they're trying to find something that resonates, without any effort to really define what they mean," Mr. Fields said.

Pollster Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center, said the "fascist" label may evoke comparisons to World War II and remind Americans of the lack of personal freedoms in fundamentalist countries. "But this could only affect public opinion on the margins," he said.

We're Not Winning This War

Despite Some Notable Achievements, New Thinking Is Needed on the Home Front and Abroad
By John Lehman
The Washington Post
Thursday, August 31, 2006; A25

Are we winning the war? The first question to ask is, what war? The Bush administration continues to muddle a national understanding of the conflict we are in by calling it the "war on terror." This political correctness presumably seeks to avoid hurting the feelings of the Saudis and other Muslims, but it comes at high cost. This not a war against terror any more than World War II was a war against kamikazes.

We are at war with jihadists motivated by a violent ideology based on an extremist interpretation of the Islamic faith. This enemy is decentralized and geographically dispersed around the world. Its organizations range from a fully functioning state such as Iran to small groups of individuals in American cities.

We are fighting this war on three distinct fronts: the home front, the operational front and the strategic-political front. Let us look first at the home front. The Bush administration deserves much credit for the fact that, despite determined efforts to carry them out, there have been no successful Islamist attacks within the United States since Sept. 11, 2001. This is a significant achievement, but there are growing dangers and continuing vulnerabilities.

One of the most deep-seated of these problems is the U.S. government's tendency to treat this war as a law enforcement issue. Following a recommendation of the Sept. 11 commission, Congress sought to remedy this problem by creating a national security service within the FBI to focus on preventive intelligence rather than forensic evidence. This has proved to be a complete failure. As late as June of this year, Mark Mershon of the FBI testified that the bureau will not monitor or surveil any Islamist unless there is a "criminal predicate." Thus the large Islamist support infrastructure that the commission identified here in the United States is free to operate until its members actually commit a crime.

Our attempt to reform the FBI has failed. What is needed now is a separate domestic intelligence service without police powers, like the British MI-5.

The Sept. 11 commission catalogued in detail how our intelligence establishment simply does not function. We made priority recommendations to rebuild the 15 bloated and failed intelligence bureaucracies by creating a strong national intelligence director to smash bureaucratic layers, to tear down the walls preventing intelligence-sharing among agencies, and to rewrite personnel policy with the goal of bringing in new blood not just from the career bureaucracy but from the private sector as well. This approach was completely rejected by the Bush administration, which decided instead to leave this sprawling mess untouched and to create yet another bureaucracy of more than 1,000 people in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It was the exact opposite of what we had recommended.

The greatest terrorist threat on the home front is, of course, the use of weapons of mass destruction by Islamists. Here the president has moved to establish a national counter-proliferation center to share and act on intelligence, and he has recently initiated a cooperation agreement with Russia and our allies to work together in preventing nuclear materials from getting into the hands of the Islamists and to undertake joint crisis management if such an attack takes place. These are real accomplishments.

Turning to the operational front, our objectives are to destroy the capability of Islamist organizations to attack us and to deny them geographic sanctuaries in which they can recruit, train and operate.

The post-Sept. 11 threat demanded preemptive attack against Islamist bases, and this was done without delay in the invasion of Afghanistan to destroy al-Qaeda and remove the Taliban government, its ally and supporter. It was a brilliantly executed operation in which all our armed forces and CIA operatives combined in a ruthlessly efficient victory. In the succeeding years, however, the Taliban and al-Qaeda have been able to regroup, rebuild and re-attack because they enjoy a secure sanctuary largely free from attack within the border areas of Pakistan.

The next military operation of the war was, of course, the invasion of Iraq. Here again the combined military operations of the United States and Britain were brilliantly successful in defeating Iraqi forces and removing Saddam Hussein and his regime. But in the aftermath of that victory, grave blunders were made. There was a total misunderstanding of the requirements for successful occupation.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was proved right in his keeping the initial invasion force small and agile, but desperately wrong in disbanding all Iraqi security forces and civil service with no plan to fill the resulting vacuum. Certainly it is hard now to understand the logic of that decision.

The military occupation in Iraq is consuming practically the entire defense budget and stretching the Army to its operational limits. This is understood quite clearly by both our friends and our enemies, and as a result, our ability to deter enemies around the world is disintegrating.

This brings us to the third front, the strategic-political. The jihadist regime in Iran feels no reservation about flaunting its policy to go nuclear, and it unleashed Hezbollah, its client terrorist organization, to attack Israel. In Somalia a jihadist group has seized control of the government. In Pakistan, Islamists are becoming more powerful, and attacks within India are increasing. Governments in Indonesia, Malaysia, Egypt, Algeria and Jordan are under increasing Islamist pressure. In the Pacific, North Korea now feels free to rattle its missile sabers, firing seven on America's Independence Day. China is rapidly building its 600-ship navy to fill the military vacuum that we are creating in the Pacific as our fleet shrinks well below critical mass. Not one of these states believes that we can undertake any credible additional military operations while we are bogged down in Iraq.

The indoctrination and recruiting of jihadists from Indonesia, South Asia and the Middle East are carried out through religious establishments that are supported overwhelmingly by the Saudi and Iranian governments. Even in the United States, some 80 percent of Islamic mosques and schools are closely aligned with the Wahhabist sect and heavily dependent on Saudi funding. Five years after Sept. 11, nothing has been done to materially affect this root source of jihadism. The movement continues to grow, fueled by an ever-increasing flow of petrodollars from the Persian Gulf.

There is no evidence that the administration has ever raised this matter with the Saudi government as a high-level issue, and -- just as damaging -- it has never acknowledged it as an issue to the American people. Thus Rumsfeld's question -- are we killing, capturing or deterring jihadists faster than they are being produced? -- must be answered with an emphatic no.

In reviewing progress on the three fronts of this war, even the most sanguine optimist cannot yet conclude that we are winning or that we can win without some significant changes of policy.

The writer was secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration and later served as a member of the Sept. 11 commission. This is a condensed version of an article that appears in the September issue of the U.S. Naval Institute's Proceedings magazine.

The Great Wall Of Arabia

By Timothy J. Burger
Time
September 4, 2006

No, you won't be able to see it from space, but Saudi Arabia, unnerved by the violence next door in Iraq, plans to spend up to $7 billion on a partly virtual fence along its 500-mile border with Iraq. The ultramodern barrier will combine fencing, electronic sensors and sand berms. Saudi and U.S. sources tell TIME the kingdom is seeking bids from contractors, including U.S. defense giant Raytheon. (A Raytheon spokesman says the Saudis asked the company not to comment.)

Saudi diplomats say the fence is intended to stop weapons and drug smuggling and illegal immigration. But they admit they fear that Iraq's sectarian fighting and jihadi militancy could spill south. "We're worried about the war in Iraq coming into Saudi Arabia and spreading into the whole region," says Nail al-Jubeir, a spokesman for the Saudi embassy in Washington. "Having some of these guys heading toward the Saudi border is something we want to make sure doesn't happen."

While good fences may make good neighbors, this one will not ensure Saudi Arabia's security. The kingdom has had at least five deadly terrorist attacks since 2003, and some of the perpetrators were homegrown.

Relentless Violence Fueling A Boom In Funeral Industry

Coffin makers, even professional mourners, expand operations to cope with the demand
By Sinan Salaheddin, Associated Press
Houston Chronicle
August 27, 2006

BAGHDAD, IRAQ - Back in 1982, Radhwan Mizaal Ali opened a tiny shop offering funeral supplies. Now he runs six shops, and business is booming.

"Whenever they beat war drums, our business flourishes more," Ali said as he puffed on a hookah waterpipe in one of his shops.

From coffin makers to professional mourners who weep and wail at ceremonies, a wave of killings in Baghdad is fueling a boom in the funeral industry.

Ali offers everything a grieving family needs for a proper burial: chairs for the mourners, tape recorders and speakers to transmit Quranic verses, plates for traditional foods and a generator — all rented out for about $100 a day.

According to Muslim and Iraqi tradition, bodies should be buried quickly, if possible on the very day of death. Tradition also calls for three days of mourning. Families rent a tent near the deceased's home and receive visitors.

On the final day of mourning, the deceased's family throws a big feast, where mourners and the poor in the neighborhood can partake. That's where Ali and other funeral suppliers come in.

And demand for their services is up. Since the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra in February, much of the country has been gripped by a wave of reprisal killings by Sunni and Shiite extremists.

The United Nations says nearly 6,000 people were killed in May and June, and the morgue in Baghdad said it received about 1,500 bodies of people who died violently last month.

With killings on the rise, coffin maker Abbas Hussein Mohammed has opened a new shop to cope with the demand.

"Our business is booming day after day with each roadside bomb or car bomb and with the ongoing sectarian killings," Abbas said as he showed off his wooden coffins inside his tiny shop on Baghdad's Haifa Street.

"During the Saddam era, we used to do one or two coffins a day and the price ranged between $5 to $10," Mohammed said.

Now he produces an average of 10 to 15 coffins a day and charges about $50 for each of them.

Um Alaaa, 50, is a professional mourner who attends funerals to add emotion to the ceremony. The profession is widespread in the Middle East, but lately demand has been so great that she is training one of her six daughters to help with the workload.

"I can't do more than three funerals a day," she said by telephone from Baghdad's Sadr City, a Shiite stronghold, as she was preparing to attend another funeral.

Her rate is about $50 per appearance, which she limits to Sadr City unless clients agree to drive her to and from the services.

"Increasing demands give me the impression that this cursed country is running out of its people," she said.

Break Up Iraq To Save It

Getting Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds to relocate might be the only way to salvage the state.
By Michael O'Hanlon
Los Angeles Times
August 27, 2006

WITH THE IRAQ mission on the brink of outright failure, some analysts are contemplating a "Plan B" — pulling out and trying to prevent the war from spreading to other countries. But rather than accept complete disaster, outright civil war and the likelihood of genocide, we should try to develop a strategy for achieving some minimal level of stability, even if it requires discarding our loftier aims for Iraq.

There is what might be called a "Plan A-" option — facilitating voluntary ethnic relocation within Iraq while retaining a confederal governing structure. We should offer individuals who want to protect themselves and their families the chance to move to an Iraq territory more hospitable to their ethnicity and/or religion.

To a substantial extent this is happening already, but the 100,000 or more internally displaced Iraqis have received scant help or protection to date. With Plan A- as a policy, not an accident, the international community and Iraqi government could help offer housing and jobs to those wishing to move, as well as protection en route. Houses left behind would revert to government ownership, to be offered to individuals of other ethnic groups who wanted them, in what would largely become a program of swapping. Funds for some new home construction would be needed as well.

Obviously, this idea would only work if Iraq's government, through a strong consensus of its Sunni Arabs, Shiites and Kurds, endorsed it. Most Iraqis, in fact, still say they want an integrated country, but if the civil war gets much worse, that option may no longer exist. In that case, reluctant Sunnis could be persuaded if it was made clear that the confederal governing body would distribute all Iraqi oil revenue equitably on a per capita basis, not by geography. Former Baathists, up to a certain rank in the party, also should be quickly "rehabilitated" and allowed to hold jobs and run for office.

For Americans who cherish the notion of multiethnic democracy, actively facilitating voluntary ethnic segregation would be a tough pill to swallow. Some might even go so far as to claim it unethical, making a mockery of the moral purpose we claimed to be furthering when we liberated Iraq from Saddam Hussein's cruel rule.

But what would truly mock our initial goals would be outright defeat followed by genocide — perhaps similar to what happened in Bosnia in the early 1990s. There, 200,000 people died; in Iraq, which has five times the population, the death toll could be much worse.

Although we should generally favor and support multiethnic democracy, it is not our most important objective — especially not in today's Iraq, where it may no longer even be achievable. For people trying to cope with the country's daily perils, staying alive is a higher priority than living in a diverse neighborhood.

THIS PROPOSAL shares many elements with those that have favored the partitioning of Iraq. But partitionists have never explained how we would get to their preferred solution without massive and violent ethnic cleansing. Confederacy, along with safe passage, property swapping, job-creation programs and oil revenue sharing, provides at least a plausible path forward while in fact avoiding formal partition and holding out hope that the country could someday regain its cohesiveness.

The Bosnia experience is again instructive. We declared a victory of sorts there in 1995, even though a previously diverse society was ultimately divided into three ethnically homogenous pieces through a terribly violent war.

Iraq still has a chance to turn out better, even if our current strategy fails. If we can encourage future ethnic relocation to occur voluntarily and peacefully, rather than through murder, rape and intimidation, we can still salvage an imperfect but real success that ultimately leaves most Iraqis better off than they were under Hussein. And in contrast to Bosnia, where land swaps occurred only after the civil war had largely run its course, Iraq might use such a policy to nip a broader war in the bud.

To move in this direction, no one need immediately decide that Iraq will heretofore be a land of three or four major segregated populations. Rather, individuals can decide themselves where they feel most secure. To the extent that many take up the offer of government help in relocating, the program could be expanded. Much of the resettlement is likely to be within Baghdad, with many Sunnis relocating to neighborhoods west of the Tigris River while Shiites head east.

Radical solutions far different — and far more promising — than "stay the course" need to be designed now. "Give up hope" is not one of them.

MICHAEL O'HANLON is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.