This May Be Britain's Abu Ghraib

The allegations of torture by British soldiers in Iraq bear chilling comparison with America's worst excesses

by Phil Shiner and Tessa Gregory
The Guardian/UK
Published on Saturday, July 3, 2010

The inquiry into the death of Baha Mousa [1] is due to report by the end of the year. It will detail how Mousa died in Iraq in September 2003, allegedly brutalised by British soldiers in a "free for all"; and how it was that he and nine other men in the same incident were allegedly hooded, forced into painful stress positions, and deprived of sleep, food and water.

The Guardian article [2] this week, which reported that many more civilians died in army custody than previously thought, should shock the conscience of the nation. The evidence of Lieutenant Colonel Mercer to the inquiry reveals that as early as May 2003 - four months before Mousa's death - there were "a number of deaths in custody" with "various units". It appears there were, by then, at least nine deaths. The Ministry of Defence refuses to answer questions from us or the Guardian as to where, how or why these Iraqis died, and refuses to confirm or deny whether any of these deaths were ever investigated and if so with what outcome.

Although we are acting for one family referred to in the article, we have no idea about the other cases. And the story could be a lot worse: an ex-Royal Military Police (RMP) major told BBC radio last October that there were "hundreds" of similar cases [3].

Further, there are thousands of torture allegations being made by more than 100 Iraqi clients in new cases. We applaud the efforts of those who have succeeded in obtaining an inquiry into alleged British complicity in torture by various overseas regimes. But the public and the government also need to face up to our history of actual torture. The evidence from the Mousa inquiry and the allegations in these other cases may allow a chilling comparison to be made with the worst excesses of the US at Guantánamo Bay or Abu Ghraib, with the Stasi in the cold war, or the British in post-colonial wars.

Apart from the techniques banned by the Heath government in 1972 (hooding, stressing, food and water deprivation, sleep deprivation, the use of noise), which returned as standard operating procedure in Iraq, the array of allegations is staggering: mock executions; the use of tiny refrigerated spaces; electric shocks; forced nudity; threats of rape to female relatives; prolonged solitary confinement; loud, hardcore pornography played incessantly; disorientation by various means; simulated drowning; dog attacks; masturbation and other sexual acts; urinating on detainees; giving urine not water to drink; as well as systematic abuse through rifle-butting, kicks, punches, forced exertion and prolonged shouting at detainees.

The MoD insists our brave soldiers behaved impeccably save for a few rotten apples and that there is no evidence of coercive interrogation techniques. Now the Iraq historic allegation team, comprising of RMP investigators and others, will investigate whether anyone should be prosecuted by a military court martial.

However, these other deaths in custody are not being investigated; the thousands of allegations of the use of coercive interrogation make it difficult to see how much more evidence of systemic issues is needed; and the RMP is a discredited and failed organisation that is incapable of dealing with these cases, and in any event its soldiers are the subject of some of the allegations.

The damage caused to the French in Algeria by its use of torture is well known. The same damage may have been caused to the British battle for Iraqi hearts and minds. To perpetuate that damage by this alleged cover-up would be immeasurably stupid: as we now know from Bloody Sunday, when the state is involved in wrongdoing the nation requires not a Widgery but a Saville.

Phil Shiner and Tessa Gregory are solicitors at Public Interest Lawyers.

It's time to end this immoral war

By Jim Wallis
July 1, 2010; 2:49 PM ET

Jim Wallis is President and CEO of Sojourners, a Christian organization whose mission is to articulate the biblical call to social justice.

Q: In the wake of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's dismissal as chief commander of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, Congress is evaluating our policy and presence there. Is it time for the U.S. to get out of Afghanistan? Do we have a moral responsibility to stay or to leave?

After his unanimous approval by the Senate Armed Services Committee as the new Afghan war commander, Gen. David Petraeus was pictured in The Washington Post with a broad smile and thumbs up proclaiming, "We are all firmly united in seeking to forge unity of effort." No, we're not, General. No, we're not. In fact, I believe it's time to begin to unite the religious community against the war in Afghanistan.

Following last week's resignation of Gen. Stanley McChrystal as commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, confirmation hearings began right away for Petraeus to become his replacement. But the real issue is not replacing one general with another because of inappropriate comments and insubordination -- it's the fatally flawed war policy in Afghanistan.

In February 1968, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong attacks erupted throughout South Vietnam, showing that U.S. political and military leaders' optimistic pronouncements that the end of the war was near were not true. By then, it was clear to many that the war was not winnable, yet more than half of U.S. casualties in Vietnam occurred from that spring until the end of the war (35,000 of the total 58,000).

I have walked the line at the Vietnam Memorial Wall many times, with tears running down my face as I read the names of my generation who were killed there. And the painful remorse over that awful war is even greater when I remember that the majority of those who died in Vietnam were killed after we knew we would ultimately have to come home without "winning" the unwinnable war. The last of the many reasons for staying in Vietnam that I recall President Nixon saying was to come home "with our heads held high." We didn't.

After 9/11, an international police action to bring the perpetrators of that horrible crime to justice would have been one thing. But to begin a war and then an occupation of Afghanistan was the wrong policy, quickly killing more Afghan innocents than the American innocents who died on September 11. It was then further compromised by the completely mistaken and morally unjustifiable war in Iraq.

When will we ever learn? The failed policies are all too familiar: a counter-insurgency strategy requiring more and more troops; creating the continued presence of a large U.S. military force; increasing the resentment and hostility of the Afghan people at a foreign occupation; trying to create a central government out of an ungovernable tribal society; and depending on an incompetent and utterly corrupt political ruler and regime.

An effective anti-terrorism policy was never really tried and was replaced by a "war on terrorism" which has failed. Here's the metric: Has our primarily military policy in Afghanistan and Iraq killed more terrorists than it has recruited? I think we know the answer to that. The math of terrorism is against us. And our military obsession has made the most important question impossible to ask and even unpatriotic to consider: How might we reduce and defeat the causes of terrorism in the first place?

A new strategy in Afghanistan that focuses on humanitarian assistance and sustainable economic development, along with international policing, was also never tried. It could have been led by NGOs, both faith-based and secular, who have been in the region for years, have become quite indigenous, and are much more trusted by the people of these countries than are the U.S. military. But such assistance would have to be provided, as much as possible, by independent civilian and non-governmental organizations -- both international and local -- rather than using aid as a government adjunct to military operations.

Yes, after taking over the country, we do have a responsibility not to simply walk away. There are ethical and moral issues that need to be considered: legitimately protecting Americans from further terrorism; protecting the lives of U.S. servicemen and women; protecting the Afghan people from the collateral damage of war; defending women from the Taliban; genuinely supporting democracy; and of course, saving innocent lives from the collateral damage of war, to name a few.

And yes, effective development needs security. We could have focused on economic development, starting in areas that are secure and then growing to additional parts of the country, but providing only the security necessary to protect the rebuilding of the country. That kind of peacekeeping security would have been more likely to gain the international support we needed in Afghanistan, both from Europe and even from Arab and Muslim countries.

Non-military strategies should have led the way, rather than the other way around, as counter-insurgency doctrine requires. We should not have made aid and development weapons of war by tying them so closely to the military; rather, we should have only provided the security support needed for the development work to succeed -- led by respected, well-established international organizations with strong local connections.

The current strategy, even with a new commander, will only lead to more casualties -- U.S. and Afghan -- while likely strengthening popular support for the Taliban as an anti-occupation force. It is a strategy of endless war that is ultimately doomed to failure.

Last Sunday, the photo on the front page of The New York Times broke my heart. It showed the family of a military serviceman just before he was redeployed to Afghanistan. He was in his fatigues, holding his 6-month-old son with a look of deep pain on his face, with his wife resting her head against his shoulder. The article told story after story about families being separated by repeated deployments in an endless war. Soldiers who are fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters are dying for a wrong-headed, ineffective, failed, doomed, arrogant, theologically unjust, and yes, immoral war policy. And of course, the ones dying are not the young people headed for our best universities and successful professional careers, but rather they are the ones who have fewer options, or who see the military as their only option. Those with the least opportunities, and their families, are again the ones to sacrifice and suffer. It's not right and it's not fair.

The number of U.S. service members killed in June was the highest for one month since this now nine-year war began. It's time to end this war. Or should we just start building another wall?

At Guantanamo, fewer assaults on guards after conditions eased

Associated Press
Saturday, July 3, 2010; A11

SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO -- More prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are sharing meals and recreation time with fellow inmates -- an easing of conditions that has led to fewer assaults against guards at the U.S. base in Cuba, the new commander said Friday.

Nearly 160 prisoners have been shifted into a communal living setting instead of spending most of the day confined alone in solid-wall cells, Navy Rear Adm. Jeffrey Harbeson said.

There have been about 60 cases of prisoners assaulting guards in the first seven months of the year, compared with more than 1,000 for 2009, he added.

Harbeson said 88 percent of the 181 prisoners are living in two camps that allow detainees to eat together and congregate. In January, about 75 percent were in communal living, while in previous years a majority of detainees were held in single-person cells because of security fears.

The military defines assaults broadly, including such things as spitting or hurling bodily fluids. Lawyers for the men and human rights groups complained that troops used excessive force and said the harsh isolation was driving them insane.

Harbeson said there hasn't been a confirmed case of a guard mistreating a detainee since February 2004. The military nonetheless took steps to improve conditions at the prison that President Obama has vowed to close.

Beyond McChrystal Lies a Bigger Tug-of-War

By MARK LANDLER
The New York Times
July 2, 2010
WASHINGTON

WHILE the uproar set off by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s imprudent comments in Rolling Stone magazine has focused on the larger-than-life personalities involved, there is an important subtext: What does all this drama suggest about how the Pentagon and the State Department are sharing responsibility for the war in Afghanistan?

Perhaps a clue came during a secure video conference call between Washington and Kabul last Saturday. General McChrystal’s replacement, Gen. David H. Petraeus, called up the two top American civilian officials in the war — Richard C. Holbrooke, the special envoy; and Karl W. Eikenberry, the ambassador in Kabul.

The general raised a touchy issue: whether to buy generators to supply electricity to Kandahar. For months, the ambassador and many civilian development experts had opposed doing so now, because it didn’t fit long-term national plans for power generation. But Kandahar is the Taliban stronghold that is the American military’s next target. And General Petraeus, according to an official familiar with the conference call, said the basic services were so badly needed there that it justified going ahead.

The ambassador fell into line, the official said. In the perennial tug-of-war between civilian aspirations and military imperatives, score one for the Pentagon.

That, at least, is one way to read the conversation, especially in light of the harsh comments about civilian officials that General McChrystal had allowed members of his staff to make in front of a reporter. But another is that the McChrystal episode — and rumors that Ambassador Eikenberry might be replaced — have chastened officials on both sides, and that both now want to avoid a zero-sum game between State and Defense in Afghanistan. There, more even than in Iraq, the military and civilian sides need each other.

The State Department grew used to a bitter separation in the early years of the Iraq war. Back then, civilian-military collaboration meant sidelining the diplomats, starving the State Department of funds, and marginalizing the secretary of state, Colin Powell, in White House debates.

But by 2007, when the American troop surge was in full swing, the State Department — then under Condoleezza Rice — had managed to achieve a respectable supporting role on the ground, deploying some 700 civilians in provincial reconstruction teams that helped fix sewage systems and train Iraqi judges.

No one was more responsible for that change than General Petraeus. As overseer of the team that wrote the Army’s field manual on counterinsurgency strategy, he stressed the necessity of civilian participation. And as the commander in Iraq, he made the American ambassador, Ryan C. Crocker, his Sancho Panza, bringing him along on tours of Iraq and testifying with him on Capitol Hill.

With the change in administrations in 2009, the State Department’s role seemed destined to expand further. President Obama chose a political star, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as secretary of state, and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates called on Congress to increase her department’s funding, so it could do more to help the Pentagon. During the White House policy debate on Afghanistan, Mrs. Clinton went toe-to-toe with the Defense Department, producing color-coded maps that showed how a “civilian surge” would unfurl across Afghanistan.

Mr. Holbrooke built a high-powered shop inside the State Department, drawing experts from nine other agencies, from the Agriculture Department to the Central Intelligence Agency. As a young diplomat, Mr. Holbrooke had seen firsthand a failed strategy, dominated by the military, in Vietnam. Still, the interwoven nature of military and civilian goals in Afghanistan was plain. Ambassador Eikenberry was given oversight of more than 1,000 civilians on the ground, triple the number in January 2009. But he came to the job as a retired lieutenant general, who himself was once the commander in Afghanistan.

Yet critical problems remained: Military officials expressed frustration at how long it was taking civilians to move aid into the field, and some critics blamed the civilian leadership for mishandling Afghanistan’s elections last year, which President Hamid Karzai is widely believed to have rigged.

“It’s very ironic that two military commanders have already been fired when the military has performed relatively well, while no one has been fired on the civilian side, when its major achievement so far has been the fiasco of the Afghan election,” said Bruce Riedel, a former intelligence official who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and who helped the administration devise its initial war strategy.

It is tempting to conclude that the arrival of General Petraeus will consolidate the supremacy of the Pentagon in the war effort. He certainly starts out with great prestige in Washington, drawn from his performance in Iraq, and his status as the intellectual father of the strategy.

But there are reasons to believe that the State Department will continue to play a substantial role, if only because that is what General Petraeus wants. He has pledged a “unity of effort” between the civilian and military operations, and he met with Ambassador Eikenberry at a NATO meeting in Brussels so the two of them could fly into Kabul together on Friday.

For all the parallels between Afghanistan and Iraq, there are key differences that will require robust diplomacy. In Iraq, General Petraeus was able to turn the tide by peeling away Sunni leaders who were willing to work with American forces against jihadi extremists. But in Afghanistan, any similar process requires Pakistan’s cooperation. Afghanistan’s neighbor has influence over powerful players like the Haqqani network, which is closely allied with the Taliban, and it is a sanctuary for leaders of the Afghan Taliban.

Officials say that General Petraeus plans to shuttle between Kabul and Islamabad, conferring on issues like reintegrating Taliban fighters into Afghan society. But it easy to imagine that in the negotiations for a broader political settlement between Mr. Karzai and the Taliban, the general could turn to Mr. Holbrooke, whom he described last week as his “wingman.” Mr. Holbrooke, after all, played a central role in the Dayton peace accords, which ended the war in Bosnia.

“One of the reasons the selection of General Petraeus was such a masterstroke was that he understands the importance of a civilian-military effort,” said John A. Nagl, a retired Army officer who is now president of the Center for a New American Security, a Washington research group, and who helped write the counterinsurgency handbook under General Petraeus. “He’ll bend over backwards to make it work.”

The threat of a water war

Egypt and Sudan draw battle lines with upstream nations over access to the Nile

By Robert I. Rotberg
The Boston Globe
July 2, 2010

NATIONS FIGHT over water, especially when access is curtailed or threatened, and there are the ingredients for a battle over the 4,100-mile long Nile River. Egypt and Sudan have counted on the abundance of the Nile’s life-giving flow. Now upstream nations want to keep more of the abundance for themselves. Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Congo, Burundi, and Rwanda are asserting their rights to more of the river’s relentless flow. Washington needs to intervene to forestall hostilities between the countries.

Britain conquered Uganda and Kenya in the 19th century in part to protect the precious Nile waters from being diverted away from their critical possession of Egypt, the Suez Canal, and the Red Sea route to India. Without the yearly sustaining floods of the Nile, agriculture and settlement in the valley of the river from Luxor to Cairo and Alexandria would have been impossible.

When Britain in the 1920s controlled all of the waters of the Nile, bar those sluicing down the Blue Nile from Ethiopia, it signed a pact that gave Egypt and Sudan rights to nearly 75 percent of its annual flow. This 1929 agreement was confirmed in 1959, after Egypt and the Sudan had broken from Britain but while the East African countries were still colonies.

A new 2010 Cooperative Framework Agreement, now signed by most of the key upstream abutters, would give all riparian states (including the Congo, where a stream that flows into Lake Tanganyika is the acknowledged Nile source) equal access to the resources of the river. That would give preference to large scale upstream energy and industrial, as well as long-time agricultural and irrigation uses.

Egypt and Sudan have refused to sign the new agreement, despite years of discussions and many heated meetings. Given climate change, the drying up of water sources everywhere in Africa and the world, Egypt, which is guaranteed 56 billion of the annual flow of 84 billion cubic meters of Nile water each year, hardly wants to lose even a drop of its allocation. Nor does Sudan, guaranteed 15 billion cubic meters.

About 300 million people depend on the waters of the Nile. The upstream countries, with still growing populations, believe that their socio-economic development has long been unfairly constrained by Egypt’s colonial-era lock on the river. Ethiopia and Uganda have not been able to support agricultural schemes. Nor have they been able fully to harness the river or its tributaries for industry and power. Both have suffered from major hydroelectric shortages in recent years.

Egypt has declared the continued surge of the Nile waters a “red line’’ that affects its “national security.’’ There is discussion in Egypt about the use of air power to threaten upstream offenders, especially if Ethiopia becomes too demanding. In theory, Ethiopia could divert much of the Blue Nile to its own uses. Or Ethiopia and others could charge Egypt for water that has largely escaped modern pricing.

Egypt is sufficiently disturbed by Ethiopia’s potentially aggressive water designs that it has recently made friends with Eritrea, Ethiopia’s arch enemy. In 1998, Ethiopia and Eritrea went to war over slices of insignificant mountainous territory. Although the shooting ended in 2000, a peace settlement handed down by the World Court in 2006 has still not been observed by both sides. If Egypt attacks Ethiopia, Eritrea might join in. Egyptian generals claim that Israel is on the other side, helping the upstream nations by encouraging their thirst for water and by financing the construction of four hydroelectric projects in Ethiopia.

All these issues provide conditions for a war over water. Washington, Egypt’s largest donor, has significant leverage to de-escalate tensions and mediate between the haves and have-nots. After all, Washington supports both Egypt and Ethiopia lavishly and militarily. It needs to demand that all sides stand down.

Robert I. Rotberg directs Harvard Kennedy School’s Program on Intrastate Conflict and is president of the World Peace Foundation.

How Goldman Sachs Caused a 'Silent Mass Murder,'

Gambling on Starvation in the Developing World

By Johann Hari
Independent UK
July 2, 2010

By now, you probably think your opinion of Goldman Sachs and its swarm of Wall Street allies has rock-bottomed at raw loathing. You're wrong. There's more. It turns out that the most destructive of all their recent acts has barely been discussed at all. Here's the rest. This is the story of how some of the richest people in the world - Goldman, Deutsche Bank, the traders at Merrill Lynch, and more - have caused the starvation of some of the poorest people in the world.

It starts with an apparent mystery. At the end of 2006, food prices across the world started to rise, suddenly and stratospherically. Within a year, the price of wheat had shot up by 80 per cent, maize by 90 per cent, rice by 320 per cent. In a global jolt of hunger, 200 million people - mostly children - couldn't afford to get food any more, and sank into malnutrition or starvation. There were riots in more than 30 countries, and at least one government was violently overthrown. Then, in spring 2008, prices just as mysteriously fell back to their previous level. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, calls it "a silent mass murder", entirely due to "man-made actions."

Earlier this year I was in Ethiopia, one of the worst-hit countries, and people there remember the food crisis as if they had been struck by a tsunami. "My children stopped growing," a woman my age called Abiba Getaneh, told me. "I felt like battery acid had been poured into my stomach as I starved. I took my two daughters out of school and got into debt. If it had gone on much longer, I think my baby would have died."

Most of the explanations we were given at the time have turned out to be false. It didn't happen because supply fell: the International Grain Council says global production of wheat actually increased during that period, for example. It isn't because demand grew either: as Professor Jayati Ghosh of the Centre for Economic Studies in New Delhi has shown, demand actually fell by 3 per cent. Other factors - like the rise of biofuels, and the spike in the oil price - made a contribution, but they aren't enough on their own to explain such a violent shift.

To understand the biggest cause, you have to plough through some concepts that will make your head ache - but not half as much as they made the poor world's stomachs ache.

For over a century, farmers in wealthy countries have been able to engage in a process where they protect themselves against risk. Farmer Giles can agree in January to sell his crop to a trader in August at a fixed price. If he has a great summer, he'll lose some cash, but if there's a lousy summer or the global price collapses, he'll do well from the deal. When this process was tightly regulated and only companies with a direct interest in the field could get involved, it worked.

Then, through the 1990s, Goldman Sachs and others lobbied hard and the regulations were abolished. Suddenly, these contracts were turned into "derivatives" that could be bought and sold among traders who had nothing to do with agriculture. A market in "food speculation" was born.

So Farmer Giles still agrees to sell his crop in advance to a trader for £10,000. But now, that contract can be sold on to speculators, who treat the contract itself as an object of potential wealth. Goldman Sachs can buy it and sell it on for £20,000 to Deutsche Bank, who sell it on for £30,000 to Merrill Lynch - and on and on until it seems to bear almost no relationship to Farmer Giles's crop at all.

If this seems mystifying, it is. John Lanchester, in his superb guide to the world of finance, Whoops! Why Everybody Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay, explains: "Finance, like other forms of human behaviour, underwent a change in the 20th century, a shift equivalent to the emergence of modernism in the arts - a break with common sense, a turn towards self-referentiality and abstraction and notions that couldn't be explained in workaday English." Poetry found its break with realism when T S Eliot wrote "The Wasteland". Finance found its Wasteland moment in the 1970s, when it began to be dominated by complex financial instruments that even the people selling them didn't fully understand.

So what has this got to do with the bread on Abiba's plate? Until deregulation, the price for food was set by the forces of supply and demand for food itself. (This was already deeply imperfect: it left a billion people hungry.) But after deregulation, it was no longer just a market in food. It became, at the same time, a market in food contracts based on theoretical future crops - and the speculators drove the price through the roof.

Here's how it happened. In 2006, financial speculators like Goldmans pulled out of the collapsing US real estate market. They reckoned food prices would stay steady or rise while the rest of the economy tanked, so they switched their funds there. Suddenly, the world's frightened investors stampeded on to this ground.

So while the supply and demand of food stayed pretty much the same, the supply and demand for derivatives based on food massively rose - which meant the all-rolled-into-one price shot up, and the starvation began. The bubble only burst in March 2008 when the situation got so bad in the US that the speculators had to slash their spending to cover their losses back home.

When I asked Merrill Lynch's spokesman to comment on the charge of causing mass hunger, he said: "Huh. I didn't know about that." He later emailed to say: "I am going to decline comment." Deutsche Bank also refused to comment. Goldman Sachs were more detailed, saying they sold their index in early 2007 and pointing out that "serious analyses ... have concluded index funds did not cause a bubble in commodity futures prices", offering as evidence a statement by the OECD.

How do we know this is wrong? As Professor Ghosh points out, some vital crops are not traded on the futures markets, including millet, cassava, and potatoes. Their price rose a little during this period - but only a fraction as much as the ones affected by speculation. Her research shows that speculation was "the main cause" of the rise.

So it has come to this. The world's wealthiest speculators set up a casino where the chips were the stomachs of hundreds of millions of innocent people. They gambled on increasing starvation, and won. Their Wasteland moment created a real wasteland. What does it say about our political and economic system that we can so casually inflict so much pain?

If we don't re-regulate, it is only a matter of time before this all happens again. How many people would it kill next time? The moves to restore the pre-1990s rules on commodities trading have been stunningly sluggish. In the US, the House has passed some regulation, but there are fears that the Senate - drenched in speculator-donations - may dilute it into meaninglessness. The EU is lagging far behind even this, while in Britain, where most of this "trade" takes place, advocacy groups are worried that David Cameron's government will block reform entirely to please his own friends and donors in the City.

Only one force can stop another speculation-starvation-bubble. The decent people in developed countries need to shout louder than the lobbyists from Goldman Sachs. The World Development Movement is launching a week of pressure this summer as crucial decisions on this are taken: text WDM to 82055 to find out what you can do.

The last time I spoke to her, Abiba said: "We can't go through that another time. Please - make sure they never, never do that to us again."

New Estimate of Strength of Al Qaeda Is Offered

By DAVID E. SANGER and MARK MAZZETTI
The New York Times
June 30, 2010

ASPEN, Colo. — Michael E. Leiter, one of the country’s top counterterrorism officials, said Wednesday that American intelligence officials now estimated that there were somewhat “more than 300” Qaeda leaders and fighters hiding in Pakistan’s tribal areas, a rare public assessment of the strength of the terrorist group that is the central target of President Obama’s war strategy.

Taken together with the recent estimate by the C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, that there are about 50 to 100 Qaeda operatives now in Afghanistan, American intelligence agencies believe that there are most likely fewer than 500 members of the group in a region where the United States has poured nearly 100,000 troops.

Many American officials warn about such comparisons, saying that Al Qaeda has forged close ties with a number of affiliated militant groups and that a large American troop presence is necessary to helping the Afghan government prevent Al Qaeda from gaining a safe haven in Afghanistan similar to what it had before the Sept. 11 attacks.

On Monday, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that on a recent trip to the region he was struck by the “depth of synergies” between Al Qaeda and a number of other insurgent groups, including the Pakistani and the Afghan Taliban.

Mr. Leiter, who is the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, concurred with Admiral Mullen’s judgment.

But with the fighting in Afghanistan intensifying and few indications that the Taliban are weakening, the recent estimates of Al Qaeda’s strength could give ammunition to critics of President Obama’s strategy who think the United States should pull most of its troops from the country and instead rely on small teams of Special Operations forces and missile strikes from C.I.A. drones.

Both Mr. Leiter and Admiral Mullen were speaking at the same homeland security conference at the Aspen Institute, sponsored in part by The New York Times. Mr. Panetta’s public remarks came last Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”

Mr. Leiter told the audience on Wednesday that “we’ve had some incredible successes” against Al Qaeda’s leadership. Echoing Mr. Panetta’s assessment, he said the group “is weaker today than it has been at any time since 2001.”

But he quickly added, “Weaker does not mean harmless.”

Administration officials talk increasingly about the dangers posed by militant groups affiliated with Al Qaeda, saying they have both the intent and the capabilities to attack the United States. The man accused of trying to detonate a vehicle in Times Square in May received training from the Pakistani Taliban, a group once thought to be interested only in attacking inside Pakistan. On Dec. 25, a young Nigerian man tried to blow up a transatlantic jetliner on its way to Detroit after being trained by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a Yemen-based terror group, officials say.

Mr. Leiter’s organization was one of those criticized for failing to thwart the Dec. 25 attack by placing the man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, on a no-fly list.

Mr. Leiter said that “the threshold has been lowered” for placing individuals with suspected links to terror groups on that list, though he would not describe the new criteria. He said that Mr. Abdulmutallab was on a list of suspects “available to 10,000 people” inside the United States government, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department and others.

When Does Conciliatory Become Obsequious?

Abbas Meets The Pro-Israel Lobby

Ira Glunts
lobelog.com
June 30th, 2010

In what was a surprising and disconcerting development, 30 of the most influential and politically powerful American Jews identified with the pro-Israel lobby, met recently with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in what was called a “dinner and conversation.” The Palestinian leadership has never before met formally with Jewish American supporters of Israel, who as a group are usually more intransigent than the Israeli government in power.

The event, which was described as “surreal” by one of the organizers, took place in Washington on the evening of June 9. The meeting was sponsored by the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace, which is currently headed by former Florida congressman, Robert Wexler. As a legislator, Wexler was a staunch and mostly uncritical supporter of Israeli government policy. He was a leading defender of the 2008 Israeli invasion of Gaza and recently justified the Israeli commando assault upon the Turkish-led aid flotilla as self-defense.

In attendance at the event, in which Abbas spent 90 minutes answering questions from the Jewish leaders, were an all-star-team of prominent pro-Israel activists. Among the participants were leaders of the most powerful Jewish organizations: Howard Kohr, Executive Director of AIPAC; Lee Rosenberg, President of AIPAC; Robert Sugarman, National Chair of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL); and Alan Solow, Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Also present were former government officials Elliot Abrams, Steve Hadley (I guess he must be Jewish) and Dov Zakheim. The pro-Israel American press was represented by Mort Zuckerman. (This list is taken from the S. Daniel Abraham Center’s website.)

A transcript of the meeting was made apparently at the insistence of the Palestinian leader. (It has been made available to various media and Jewish organizations, but is not, to my knowledge, been publicly posted online.) In his replies to questions, Abbas attempted to assure those gathered that he was a reliable peace partner, that he is a strong opponent of the Palestinian armed struggle and that he will promote the understanding of the Holocaust among Palestinians. Abbas also told the Jewish leaders that he will do all he can to limit what the Israelis and American Jewish leaders claim is a campaign of “incitement” to anti-Israel violence in the Palestinian media, in the mosques and in textbooks. Abbas stated that he was willing to talk to the Jewish leaders in an effort to explain his positions and win their support.

The answers that Abbas gave his interlocutors will not endear him to many Palestinians, who already tend to view the Palestinian President as more concerned with pleasing his American benefactors than fighting for justice and Palestinian rights. Most of them believe that an armed response to the brutal Israeli oppression is justified and that the incitement charge is both exaggerated and too widely defined. An example of this is the suppression of the displays of Palestinian flags in Jerusalem, which is justified by Israeli claims that they incite violence. Also many believe that Israeli actions are the prime cause of the violence and anger, and to the extent that the Israelis change their behavior, the Palestinians’ anger and violence will decrease.

How many words have been written and spoken in the last 10 years which make the case that these same people in attendance at the Abbas meeting are the lobbyists who are the engine driving a self-defeating U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East? Members of this group and others like them have too much power to influence policy. Now they have direct contact with the only Palestinian negotiating partner which the U.S. and Israel will recognize. This cannot be good.

Although most reports of the meeting describe it as cordial and beneficial, Jeremy Ben-Ami, the director of JStreet, professes another view. Expressing disappointment in the behavior of the Jewish leaders, Ben-Ami told Ron Kampeas of the Jewish news agency JTA, that “[w]e have a man [Abbas] ready to make peace, and we raised [the issue of incitement-filled Palestinian] television shows and said for that reason he is not a partner.”

JStreet is the Jewish group that is politically closest to the Obama administration. This begs the question of what the administration thought of the meeting. It is likely that Obama’s Middle East team does not want these Jewish leaders in direct contact with Abbas, thus creating a possibility of opening an additional competing channel for the negotiations or maybe a proxy group of negotiators for the Netanyahu government. A minority of those in attendance, like Debra DeLee of Americans for Peace Now, were from so-called moderate pro-Israel groups or individuals like Sandy Berger not known as strong AIPAC supporters. However, Ben-Ami was not listed as one of those in attendance. I wonder if JStreet’s exclusion was a message to the Obama administration that this group wants an even more pro-Israel policy from this White House. I am afraid that these Jewish leaders will get what they want simply because they have the power to make it happen, a fact that is illustrated by Abbas’ willing attendance at this tawdry Jewish affair.

The reason why the American Jewish leaders would want to hold this meeting is not totally clear. Robert Wexler, the organizer of the event, probably hopes that it will enhance his stature as a player in the world of U.S. – Israel diplomacy. He may also feel that it will improve his chances for an appointment as the next U.S. ambassador to Tel Aviv. It is a position he does did not deny that he covets in a recent interview by Ha’aretz reporter, Natasha Mozgovaya. Others, such a Elliot Abrams, probably just attended so that they could report that he “is skeptical about [Abbas’] ability to deliver, his evasiveness suggested that he doesn’t want to be pinned down on substantive issues.” I wonder though how many of the attendees thought that this and future meetings could give them increased leverage in their quest to protect Israeli interests.

I really do not see any good coming from meetings between this group of powerful pro-Israel Jews and Mahmoud Abbas. If the Jewish leaders actually wanted to support Abbas in a quest for a fair and just two-state solution they would never compromise his credibility by a public meeting in which they force him to be conciliatory bordering on the obsequious.

The Appalling Cowardice of the NY Times and the Rest of America's Big Newspapers

Too Scared to Say 'Torture'

By Will Bunch
Media Matters for America
July 1, 2010

On the one hand, waterboarding is torture.

On the other hand....

I'm sorry -- there is no other hand. Waterboarding is torture, period. It's been that way for decades -- it was torture when we went after Japanese war criminals who used the ancient and inhumane interrogation tactic, it was torture when Pol Pot and some of the worst dictators known to mankind used it against their own people, and it was torture to the U.S. military which once punished soldiers who adopted the grim practice.

And waterboarding was described as "torture," almost without fail, in America's newspapers.

Until 2004, after the arrival of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and their criminal notions of "enhanced interrogations." For four years -- in what would have to be the bizarro-world version of "speaking truth to power," waterboarding was almost never torture on U.S. newsprint. Then waterboarding-as-torture nearly made a mild comeback in journo-world, until perpetrators like Cheney and Inquirer op-ed columnist John Yoo began the big pushback, when American newspapers bravely turned their tails and fled.

The sordid history is spelled out in a significant new report by the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard (you can read it as a PDF file here). The report notes:

From the early 1930's until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5% (44 of 54) of articles on the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3% of articles (26 of 27). By contrast, from 2002-2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture. The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture.

The report also notes that waterboarding had constantly been referred to as torture by newspapers when other nations did it, but when the United States did it in the 2000s, it was, to paraphrase Richard Nixon, not illegal. The study proves scientifically something we've been talking about here at Attytood since Day One, about the tragic consequences of the elevation of an unnatural notion of objectivity in which newspapers abandoned any core human values -- even when it comes to something as clear cut as torture -- to give equal moral weight to both sides of an not-so-debatable issue (not to mention treating scientific issues like climate changes in the same zombie-like manner).

Never before in my adult life have I been so ashamed of my profession, journalism.

There's already some good analysis of the report out there from the likes of Glenn Greenwald and Adam Serwer, who writes:

As soon as Republicans started quibbling over the definition of torture, traditional media outlets felt compelled to treat the issue as a "controversial" matter, and in order to appear as though they weren't taking a side, media outlets treated the issue as unsettled, rather than confronting a blatant falsehood. To borrow John Holbo's formulation, the media, confronted with the group think of two sides of an argument, decided to eliminate the "think" part of the equation so they could be "fair" to both groups.

The irony that Serwer notes -- and I completely agree -- is that in claiming they were working so hard not to take "a side," the journalists who wouldn't call waterboarding "torture" were absolutely taking a side and handing a victory to the Bush administration, which convinced newspapers to stop unambiguously describing this crime as they had done for decades prior to 2004. It's a tactic that has continued to this day. It's the reason why Cheney-- who'd been nearly invisible when he was in power -- and Yoo were suddenly all over the place beginning on Jan. 21, 2009, because they were desperately trying to keep framing this debate as the newspapers had, that their torture tactics were a public, political disagreement, and not a war crime.

And tragically, they succeeded. They were America's leaders, they tortured, and they got away with it. And newspapers and other journalists drove the getaway car.

I do think this report frames a much broader problem in America, which is that we've lost our ability to distinguish right from wrong on its most basic level, because of our need to filter everything through some kind of bogus political prism. Look past torture, and look at the Elena Kagan hearings down in Washington, and the shameful way that Republican senators have desecrated the memory of the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. What made Marshall a great American is that he started with an alienable truth -- that segregation and other unequal treatment of blacks or other minorities are a sin against mankind -- and that it was our duty not just as Americans but as human beings to end that injustice by any peaceful means necessary. If Marshall had behaved the way that the 2010 Republican Party would want him to act, forget the notion of an African-American president -- there would be water fountains in some American states where Barack Obama could not get a drink.

Increasingly, we're losing our perspective, maybe our minds. We have candidates for the U.S. Congress comparing the taxes that we pay to finance the U.S. military or to pay for public schools to slavery, or to the Nazi-led Holocaust. As Americans, we should all seek higher ground over what we talk about when we talk about slavery, and what we talk about when we talk about torture.

And yet even some of my own colleagues failed -- journalists who started out with a mission to tell the truth and who got very, very lost in a thicket of politics and perhaps self-importance along the way.

And that is beyond shameful.

Will Bunch is a Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America.

The Fight Over the Nile

By Elizabeth Weingarten
The Atlantic
Jun 29 2010

Al Jazeera English reports that five countries won't back down on their quest for a greater share of Africa's largest river.

Where?

The Nile River Basin

What's happening?

Last month, nine African countries met in Entebbe, Uganda, where five signed the Nile River Cooperative Framework Agreement (CFA) to increase their current share of the river. Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania, the five signatories, all claim the current agreement -- dating back to 1929 -- is unfair. It allots about two-thirds of the water to Egypt and much of the rest to Sudan.But five signatures won't change the allocation status quo; the countries in agreement need a sixth name to ratify the CFA. According to some experts, they aren't likely to get it.

Currently, 90 percent of the river's water flows to Egypt and Sudan, and the two North African nations are adamantly opposed to the proposed changes. Egyptian and Sudanese leaders maintain they need the water more than the countries downstream, and their claim is not unfounded. With desert climates, both nations suffer from rainwater shortages, and do not have the money for water desalination.

"Upstream countries have many sources and aren't managing our Nile properly," Mohamed Nasreddin Allam, Egypt's water resources and immigration minister, told Reuters. "That's what we are asking for." But last weekend, the five countries in agreement said they stood by their pact, and refused to back down despite the intense condemnation from the North Africa nations.

The other countries' argument? They should be able to better use a resource that flows through their land, too. Under the 1929 and 1959 treaties, written when Britain ruled over much of the continent, Egypt and Sudan received essentially full control of the Nile. Even Ethiopia, which has 86 percent of the river's flow, received nothing from the original deal. The current agreement would allot a certain amount of water to each country based on factors like population, climate, total contribution to the river's flow, and current use of the water.

What's next?

Expect another meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, sometime between September and November. It will allow the Nile Basin countries to continue to discuss the still null agreement. Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo might still sign it.

If they do, it could spark more conflict in a region already plagued with poverty, overpopulation and ethnic tensions. Ned Walker, the former Ambassador to Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Israel, and a current scholar at the Middle East Institute, is confident Sudan and Egypt won't acquiesce to any terms of an agreement that might limit their water supply. If forced to comply, they might resort to violence.

"The Egyptians have made it fairly clear to me in the past that this [could be] a cause of war," Walker says." They will not put up with anybody trying to unilaterally change the status quo, and that's what they feel that those other countries were doing when they were calling for reallocations of the water."

Walker hopes the Egyptians and Sudanese return to the Nile Basin countries with a counter proposal. A potential solution could come from better utilization of the water already in the region. Sudan has a large marsh that could be tapped better, and Egypt wastes much of their water by growing water intensive crops.

Still, Walker emphasizes that diplomatic success of the Nile Basin Initiative is unlikely without support from international institutions and other countries. "You need somebody outside to come in and try to be an umpire," he explains. "I don't think the governments are capable of solving this on their own. The World Bank or other European countries could intervene, and perhaps we could bring our own leverage to bear. It's not in our interest to have any more conflict break out in the African continent."

World's Water Supply: Here Are the Haves and Have Nots

By Jaymi Heimbuch
TreeHugger
June 29, 2010

British-based risk consultancy Maplecroft has released a new report showing which countries have the most precarious and stable water supplies. The report is intended to help guide investors, underscoring just how serious water supply is getting when it comes to the world economy. From farming to manufacturing, investors in various industries are starting to seriously weigh where they put their money based on how secure water supplies are or will be, and companies with interests in areas with unstable water supplies are having to put water efficiency in a place of priority. Though it focuses on areas of risk, the report also reveals whole new areas in water where investors may want to pile in funds.

Reuters reports, "African nations led by Somalia, Mauritania and Sudan have the most precarious water supplies in the world while Iceland has the best, according to a survey on Thursday that aims to alert companies to investment risks... A "water security risk index" of 165 nations found African and Asian nations had the most vulnerable supplies, judged by factors including access to drinking water, per capita demand and dependence on rivers that first flow through other nations."

Image via Maplecroft

Maplecroft writes, "The index is one of over 100 created by Maplecroft to identify risks across supply chains, operations and investments of multinational companies and has been developed by measuring the four key areas surrounding the issue. These include: access to improved drinking water and sanitation; the availability of renewable water and the reliance on external supplies; the relationship between available water and supply demands; and the water dependency of each country's economy."

Water wars and civil upsets are a real concern in areas where supplies are slim. For instance, CEO of Maplecroft Alyson Warhurst warns, "The fact that Pakistan and Egypt are amongst the most vulnerable nations should send a signal to investors who will need to develop water conservation and security strategies and be mindful of their water use impacts on local communities. These countries also have some of the highest population growth rates in the world, especially around cities, so there is an urgent imperative for renewed policy action underlined by these results."

This is a big warning to companies with interests in these areas that they need to minimize their water footprint, and fast. Also, while this could mean investors direct funds elsewhere for some industries, it simultaneously uncovers new areas of investments for water efficiency and generation. The study points out that 70% of fresh water consumption goes into irrigation. So, more intelligent irrigation techniques and supplies for farming, water generation and purification technology, and other possibilities for investors are opening up.

Even in areas with strong water supplies, investing in smart water grid technologies is proving to be a brilliant area to invest -- experts are pegging it to be a $16.3 billion industry over the next 10 years.

According to the report, water stress was not only a problem in poor nations. The US and Australia are some of the most notable wealthy countries with major water woes. Bulgaria, Belgium and Spain are also feeling the stress of the water crisis.

Jaymi Heimbuch coverrs all things techy, gadgety and green for TreeHugger.

12 Degrees of Failure

How does a weak state become a failed state?

FOREIGN POLICY
JULY/AUGUST 2010

Each weak state is beset by a unique set of troubles. One country's chief woe might be staggering economic decline while another's is the rapid brain drain of its best and brightest. Here are the worst performers in each of the index's 12 indicators -- and how things got so bad.

DEMOGRAPHICS
Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC): 9.9 of 10
If you live in Congo, there's about a 50-50 chance you are under age 14. Population growth hovers at a fast-paced 3 percent annually, despite civil war, a sky-high infant mortality rate, and pervasive infectious disease.

REFUGEES
Somalia: 10
Almost a quarter of Somalia's population, or about 2 million people, has been uprooted by conflict in recent years.

ILLEGITIMATE GOVERNMENTS
Afghanistan, Somalia: 10
Somalia's Western-backed government controls just a few blocks in Mogadishu. In Afghanistan, a thriving Taliban insurgency, the presence of international troops, and a flawed presidential election have undermined the government's legitimacy.

BRAIN DRAIN
Zimbabwe: 9.7
One out of every five Zimbabweans has fled the country over the past decade-many of them professors, doctors, engineers, lawyers, and journalists.

PUBLIC SERVICES
Niger: 9.7
Niger may well be the poorest country in the world. The government lacks any ability to provide services such as education and health care; rampant illiteracy and high rates of infant mortality are the abysmal result.

INEQUALITY
DRC, Sudan: 9.5
The tiny elites in Congo and Sudan have profited enormously from resource wealth. Overwhelming majorities in both countries, meanwhile, remain desperately poor.

GROUP GRIEVANCES
Sudan: 9.9
Sudan's south, east, and west are all in some stage of seeking autonomy from the capital in Khartoum, citing grievances that range from government neglect to active persecution.

HUMAN RIGHTS
Somalia, Sudan: 9.9
Having a president indicted for war crimes isn't a good sign, but the real measure of Sudan's woeful human rights record is its history of subduing restive regions through massive brutality.

ECONOMIC DECLINE
North Korea, Somalia, Zimbabwe: 9.6
Dictators in North Korea and Zimbab- we have rigged their economies to funnel profits into regime hands -- even with their national markets in complete collapse.

SECURITY FORCES
Somalia: 10
In a few parts of Mogadishu, the government or African Union peacekeepers are in control. Elsewhere, it's Islamist militias, local warlords, or an assortment of rival clan factions.

FACTIONALIZED ELITES
Somalia: 10
Islamist and clan organizations vie for control throughout the country, and internal shake-ups have made the government spectacularly unstable.

EXTERNAL INTERVENTION
Afghanistan: 10
NATO forces are not alone in trying to direct Afghanistan's future: Pakistan, India, Iran, Russia, and China are also pursuing divergent interests there.


See complete list

Military disturbed by rapid turnover at top in Afghan, Iraq wars

By Greg Jaffe
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 27, 2010; A01

Since 2001, a dozen commanders have cycled through the top jobs in Iraq, Afghanistan and the U.S. Central Command, which oversees both wars. Three of those commanders -- including the recently dismissed Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal -- have been fired or resigned under pressure.

History has judged many others harshly, and only two, Gen. David H. Petraeus and Gen. Ray Odierno, are widely praised as having mastered the complex mixture of skills that running America's wars demands.

For the military, this record of mediocrity raises a vexing question: What is wrong with the system that produces top generals?

Much of what top commanders do in such places as Afghanistan and Iraq bears little relation to the military skills that helped them rise through the ranks, military officials said. Today's wars demand that top commanders act like modern viceroys, overseeing military operations and major economic development efforts. They play dominant roles in the internal politics of the countries where their troops fight.

When support for these long wars inevitably flags back home, the White House often depends on its generals to sell the administration's approach to lawmakers and a skeptical American public. To the military's extreme discomfort, its generals often act like shadow cabinet secretaries.

"What we ask of these generals is a very unusual skill set," said Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who has advised both Petraeus and McChrystal. "It is a hard thing for anyone to do, much less than someone who comes to it so late in life."
Repeated disappointment

Over nine years of war, top commanders have fallen victim to their own ignorance of Washington politics and the press. Adm. William J. Fallon, once commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, resigned after he made offhand remarks trashing the Bush administration's Iran policy.

Other commanders, including Gen. Tommy Franks and Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, spent most of their careers studying conventional battles and couldn't grasp the protracted wars or the shadowy enemies that they were fighting. "A year from now, Iraq will be a different country," Franks wrote in his 2004 autobiography. "Our steady progress in Afghanistan is one factor that gives me confidence that Iraq will be able to provide for its own security in the years ahead."

A few top commanders started out well enough, but they found themselves exhausted and out of new ideas by the end of their tours. With sectarian violence spinning out of control in the spring of 2006, Gen. George. W. Casey scribbled the words "must act" in the margins of an intelligence report that warned of even worse killing in the weeks to come. Yet he did little to change the military's approach in the months that followed. After more than 30 months in command, he was forced out to make way for Petraeus and a new approach.

Explanations for the shortage of good generals abound. Some young officers blame the Pentagon's insistence on sticking with its peacetime promotion policies. Military personnel rules prevent the top brass from reaching down into the ranks and plucking out high-performers who have proved themselves especially adept at counterinsurgency or have amassed significant knowledge about Afghanistan and Iraq. "In all previous wars, promotions were accelerated for officers who were effective," a senior Army official said.

Instead of speeding promotions, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld slowed them down so that officers wouldn't cycle through complex jobs so quickly. As a result, there are many three-star generals with limited counterinsurgency experience and a large pool of colonels and one-stars who have done multiple tours of Iraq and Afghanistan. The lower-ranking officers are years away from even being considered for senior slots in the wars.

Other experts maintain the military must cast a wider net in its search for creative commanders who can balance the military and political demands of their job. One day after McChrystal was dismissed, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described how hard it is to find just the right general to lead U.S. troops in battle. "One of the most difficult things we do is pick people," Mullen said. "We spend an extraordinary amount of time on it." He offered the same observation a year earlier in explaining the move to sack McChrystal's predecessor, Gen. David D. McKiernan.

Rarely, though, does the exhaustive search lead to anyone outside the narrow confines of the U.S. Army. Eleven of the 12 top war commanders since 2001 have been Army generals. "The Army has had an absolute hammer lock on all the senior jobs and their staffs," said Bing West, a former Marine who has written several books about the Iraq and Afghan wars.

Marines often point out that Gen. James N. Mattis, who won widespread praise as a two-star general in Iraq's Anbar province, has spent the past several years at U.S. Joint Forces Command, a sprawling bureaucracy that produces doctrine, conducts war games and oversees troop deployments. He is expected to retire this year.
Searching for a formula

The struggle to produce successful senior commanders has spurred a search in the Pentagon for the magic formula that will produce more warrior-diplomats. One school of thought holds that, given the breadth of skills required for today's high-command jobs, officers should be selected and groomed at an early stage of their careers, with tours in Washington, battlefield commands and time in civilian graduate schools.

Petraeus spent extensive time working for three top generals; two of his tours were in the Pentagon, where he worked directly for the both the Army chief of staff and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the late 1990s. His unusual career path generated grumbling among peers who thought that real officers should be in the field. Others complained that he seemed to be trying too hard to make top rank. But the experience is now seen as having given him the political savvy he has needed to be successful in the latter part of his career.

Currently, all of the armed services are hatching plans to send more of their high-performing young officers to graduate school. Air Force Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, for example, has posited that more pilots with PhDs will increase his service's "intellectual throw-weight." But the military remains deeply uncomfortable with idea of targeting a subset of officers for an elite education, with the aim of installing them in senior command slots decades later.

"Part of the Army's problem is its egalitarianism," said retired Col. Don Snider, who teaches leadership at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa.

There is also widespread skepticism that the military's slow-moving bureaucracy can come up with a system for routinely producing innovative officers with the political, bureaucratic and battlefield skills needed to lead at the highest levels.

"A lot of the service's efforts feel like groping in the dark," said Biddle, of the Council on Foreign Relations.

The Worst of the Worst

Bad dude dictators and general coconut heads.

GEORGE B.N. AYITTEY
FOREIGN POLICY
JULY/AUGUST 2010

4. OMAR HASSAN AL-BASHIR of Sudan: A megalomaniac zealot who has quashed all opposition, Bashir is responsible for the deaths of millions of Sudanese and has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. Bashir's Arab militias, the janjaweed, may have halted their massacres in Darfur, but they continue to traffic black Sudanese as slaves (Bashir himself has been accused of having had several at one point).
Years in power: 21

11. MUAMMAR AL-QADDAFI of Libya: An eccentric egoist infamous for his indecipherably flamboyant speeches and equally erratic politics, Qaddafi runs a police state based on his version of Mao's Red Book -- the Green Book -- which includes a solution to "the Problem of Democracy." Repressive at home, Qaddafi masquerades as Africa's king of kings abroad (the African Union had to politely insist that he step down as its rotating head).
Years in power: 41

12. BASHAR AL-ASSAD of Syria: A pretentious despot trying to fit into his father's shoes (they're too big for him), Assad has squandered billions on foreign misadventures in such places as Lebanon and Iraq while neglecting the needs of the Syrian people. His extensive security apparatus ensures that the population doesn't complain.
Years in power: 10

15. HOSNI MUBARAK of Egypt: A senile and paranoid autocrat whose sole preoccupation is self-perpetuation in office, Mubarak is suspicious of even his own shadow. He keeps a 30-year-old emergency law in place to squelch any opposition activity and has groomed his son, Gamal, to succeed him. (No wonder only 23 percent of Egyptians bothered to vote in the 2005 presidential election.)
Years in power: 29

U.S.-Israel mend fences amid threat of looming U.N. action

Josh Rogin
FOREIGN POLICY
Friday, June 25, 2010

The Obama administration is still not saying what it will do if and when the U.N. calls for another international investigation into the Gaza flotilla incident.

That subject was the focus of meetings this week between Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak and U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in New York. But before he went up to Turtle Bay, Barak came to Washington to see Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. After his U.N. meetings, Barak came back to D.C. and met with Vice President Joe Biden and National Security Advisor Jim Jones.

Both the U.S. and Israeli administrations are working to head off the prospect of another international investigation, which would come on top of the Israeli probe that the U.S. worked so hard to ensure had a measure of international participation and credibility -- but would fundamentally remain in Israeli hands.

But the U.S. and Israeli approaches right now, while having the same goal, are not totally in synch. The uncertainty is whether the Obama administration is willing to actively oppose a new investigation. This uncertainty is compounded by the mixed messages coming from senior officials like Jones, as well as the Obama team's apparent unwillingness to brush Secretary-General Ban off the plate.

"The Americans at the moment agree that our investigation right now should be the only game in town," an Israeli official told The Cable. "What they would be willing to do if this issue comes up in the U.N. is still unclear."

In fact, when Ban convened a meeting of all 14 U.N. Security Council countries last week to discuss the issue, only one country representative declined to speak at all: U.S. Deputy Ambassador Alejandro D. Wolff.

"The fact that they did not choose to speak can be seen not as all enthusiastic [about a new investigation] but also not wanting to get into any confrontation with Ban Ki-moon," the official said.

Barak's message to Ban this week was twofold: The easing of the Gaza blockade should prevent the need for more flotillas, and a new investigation would only encourage those who want to send more ships to provoke another confrontation.

Ban heard Barak out but didn't commit one way or the other, the official said. Ban has previously said he is considering endorsing a new investigation, something the Turks are still pushing hard, but for now the U.S.-Israeli effort to convince him to stall is working.

Most observers see Ban as not willing to go out on a limb one way or the other without assurance that he has support from either the Security Council or a large portion of the General Assembly. He is caught between the strong urging of the U.S. and the prospect that if he does nothing, the Turks or someone else might just launch something on their own, outside of his control.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration's Israel team, led by Jones, Special Envoy George Mitchell, and the National Security Council's Dennis Ross and Daniel Shapiro, spent the last couple of weeks working with Israel on the easing of the Gaza blockade. Their efforts in shaping the Israeli investigation clearly indicate they do not want a competing international inquiry to pop up.

But if a new investigation does surface, the Obama administration's quiet diplomacy might have to come to an end.

"Their hope is that by addressing the question of Gaza in some measure, they can diffuse the whole question of both the last flotilla and any future ones as well," said Rob Malley, Middle East Program Director at the International Crisis Group.

Either way, the close cooperation of the U.S. and Israel on both crafting the investigation and working on the blockade issue has brought both camps back into the constructive rhythm they lost after Biden's trip to Israel in March erupted into an ugly public spat.

Even though the U.S. and Israel aren't entirely in lockstep, "from their respective vantage points, they felt that they were at least able to work out solutions that both sides could live with on both issues. And that's more how relations have traditionally been," Malley said.

This week's events have also cemented Barak as the key Israeli interlocutor with the Obama administration, which is of course what the White House would prefer, considering that he is closer to the U.S. side than Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on crucial issues.

For example, this week he was quoted as backing the U.S. position against a controversial development project in Israel. "The King's Garden project, which has waited for 3,000 years, can wait another three to nine months if government policy considerations necessitate it," Barak was quoted as saying.

He was also in Washington discuss to Iran, Syria, U.S. military assistance to Israel, the peace process, and many other issues.

Compare that to the recent visit of Israel's hard-line foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, who came to New York the week before Barak but didn't visit Washington at all. Lieberman met with U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice, but didn't request and wasn't invited to any meetings with any U.S. officials in Washington. Insiders say Lieberman and Clinton have a "Don't ask, don't tell" policy: He doesn't push her to establish a close relationship and she doesn't say what she thinks of his views.

Meanwhile, some potential flash points for the renewed comity between Washington and Jerusalem loom large. What will Israel do when its current settlement freeze expires? Where exactly does the Israeli government stand on many final-status issues that will need to be discussed in order to move from proximity talks to direct talks?

The Obama team will want some answers from Netanyahu when he comes to Washington and meets with Obama July 6.
"These issues are coming up fast," said Malley. "Whether they erupt or get resolved, nobody knows."