Distorting the Essence of the Great Arab Revolutions of 2011

March 4 - 6, 2011
It's Not About the West, Mr. Friedman

By ESAM AL-AMIN

“Orientalism is fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Orient because the Orient was weaker than the West. . . As a cultural apparatus Orientalism is all aggression.”

~ Edward Said

In his book “Manufacturing Consent,” Noam Chomsky discusses the role of the mainstream, corporate media in conditioning the public to conform to the views and policies of society’s powerful ruling elite.

Regarding these media outlets- as supposed to independent ones- he argues that “their role is quite different, it's diversion.” He describes those who distort facts to suit the interests of the powerful as living “in a world of comforting illusion.” They present a narrative that is more fiction than fact, one of fantasy rather than analysis. It’s actually “a form of propaganda, which is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state,” Chomsky argues.

One such enabler is New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. His frequently shallow and eccentric analysis of events in the Middle East has been noted for many years, whether it is his deliberate misrepresentation of the Camp David negotiations in July 2000, or his hyped columns regarding alleged – and as it turned out non-existent- weapons of mass destruction in Iraq on behalf of the Bush administration in the prelude to the 2003 war.

And now he’s at it again, with his incredible contention that the revolutions sweeping the Arab World, from Tunisia Egypt, and Libya, to Yemen, Bahrain, and beyond are due to external factors. In Friedman’s delusional world, the presence of decades-long repression, police state, corruption, poverty, economic strangulation, lack of infrastructure, or, in short, the collapse of the modern civil state in the Arab World for the benefit of thugs, thieves and Western underlings were not the real factors in the uprisings and revolutions of millions of Arabs from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf.

In his column on March 2, 2011, Friedman gives five reasons for these great revolutions, none of which is true. He starts by ridiculously claiming that it was President Barack Obama who inspired the Youth in the streets of Tunisia, Egypt, and other countries because of his race, middle name, and his 2009 Cairo speech. Clearly such opinion is an ethnocentric and distorted view of the Arab Middle East. Obama may inspire minorities in the West, but why would his skin color or the religion of his forefathers inspire people in the Middle East?

Former Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice did not inspire the Arab masses although they were also African Americans occupying high positions in government. On the contrary these Secretaries attained the Arabs’ scorn because they represented a U.S. administration that invaded two Muslim countries, killing tens of thousands of Arabs and Muslims, with millions more suffering. Their administration used torture, carried out unjust prosecutions, and abused its power against Arabs and Muslims not only in Guantanamo Bay and other prisons around the world, but also inside the U.S. against many Muslim leaders and charitable organizations. Arabs are not so naïve as to be inspired by the symbolism of skin color or middle name. It is a government’s policies and principles that inspire the oppressed whether in the U.S. or the Arab World.

Undoubtedly people around the world had hoped that the election of Obama would bring a new dawn of American foreign policy that would not only reverse much of the previous administration’s atrocious policies with regard to the Muslim World, but also institute pro-people policies against their dictators.

But Obama has broken nearly every meaningful promise he made in his June 2009 Cairo speech (see my article Promises Made.. Promises Unkept). If anything, Obama is perceived as a big disappointment across the Arab World. He exhibits the image of a weak and ineffective leader, as in the case of closing Guantanamo, as well as an unprincipled and hypocritical politician with regard to the illegal Jewish settlements on occupied Palestinian lands.

How could Obama inspire a small child, much less revolutionaries, when he has just vetoed in the U.N. Security Council his own declared policy that the Israeli settlements are illegal and must stop? During the 28 and 18 revolutionary days of continuous demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt respectively, not a single statement by any opposition figure had mentioned Obama in a positive light.

During the Tunisian revolution, Obama was MIA until the deposed Tunisian president left town on January 14. On Egypt, his administration kept wavering between asking Hosni Mubarak to leave and agreeing to keep him in power. In the beginning both his White House spokesperson and Secretary of State claimed that the Mubarak regime was stable before revising their assessment a few days later.

When Obama’s special envoy to Egypt Frank Wisner stated only days before Mubarak stepped down that he should stay as president until September, the following day Obama again reversed course to agree with Wisner. Freidman is fooling no one but himself if he thinks that Obama’s flip-flop on Mubarak was lost on the Egyptian people.

According to Friedman, the second factor that “fed the mass revolt” was Google Earth. This pitiful argument is based on a statement by a Bahraini man who supposedly looked at Google Earth and found out that Bahrain has “vast tracts of land” while he was living in a crowded home (at 257 square miles, Bahrain is one of the smallest countries in the world without really any vast tracts of land.)

In fact, the genesis of the uprising in Bahrain lies in the country’s repressive system in which a minority Sunni monarchy has been ruling with an iron fist a Shi’a majority for over two centuries. The fact that Bahrain serves as the headquarters of the U.S. navy’s Fifth Fleet, where foreigners living there are given many privileges, including significant tract of lands, over the oppressed population, clearly did not cross Friedman’s mind. People across the Arab world do not need Google Earth to know who has been looting their lands, resources, and wealth.

Friedman then claims Israel as the third cause for the Arab revolts. He argues that since Israel tried a former president, prime minster, and chief-of-staff on criminal conduct and corruption, then surely the Arabs must have been inspired by this Israeli “democracy” and “transparency.”

The foolishness of this argument is that it is presented in a vacuum. In every decade since Israel’s founding in 1948, scandals and investigations have forced many of its leaders out of office. David Ben Gurion, Pinhas Lavon, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, Ariel Sharon, and even the current PM Benjamin Netanyahu, had to resign or leave office under a cloud of suspicion or accusations. But such affairs never aroused the Arab masses.

Only an ignorant or depraved mind could even consider such factor to inspire the Arab collective mind. For the majority of Arabs Israel represents an illegitimate and a racist regime that has been illegally occupying Arab lands for decades while mercilessly oppressing their Palestinian brethren. In the Arab street Israeli leaders are considered war criminals perpetrating dozens of massacres (for the latest see the Goldstone report and last year’s Turkish flotilla). No revolutionary authority could seriously look up to Israel as an inspiring example.

Further in his column, Friedman contends that somehow the spectacular Olympic games organized by China in 2008 helped inspire Egyptians to take to the streets. One wonders whether he wrote this while sober. Indeed, Egyptians are proud people with great civilizations behind them, but their revolution was about restoring their freedom and dignity. The China model of state-controlled prosperity at the expense of political freedom and human rights is not an inspiration to any Arab.

But perhaps the greatest insult to the Arab revolutionaries is the last factor Friedman mentions as the source of inspiration to the Arab protesters, namely, the unelected Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority (PA), Salam Fayyad

If anything Fayyad is viewed as a Western-imposed autocrat that could never be elected as a small town mayor. The only reason he is in power is due to the pressure applied on the president of the PA, Mahmoud Abbas (whose term by the way has already expired), by the U.S. and Israel. During the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt in January and February of this year, not once has Fayyad or any PA official said anything positive about the Arab revolutions in the streets. On the contrary, they continued to lament in the media the loss of Mubarak.

Since 2008 Fayyad has been coordinating with the Israeli occupation against his own citizens causing hundreds to be arrested and detained without charges, sometimes even tortured. In a speech before the pro-Israel think tank, the Washington Institute on Near East Policy (WINEP) in May 2009, Lt. General Keith Dayton, the former U.S. Security Coordinator in the West Bank, exposed the Palestinian PM when he said “I don't know how many of you are aware, but over the last year-and-a-half, the Palestinians have engaged upon a series of what they call security offensives throughout the West Bank, surprisingly well coordinated with the Israeli army.”

He further admitted that during the twenty-two day Israeli onslaught on Gaza in 2008/2009, Fayyad’s security forces prevented Palestinians in the West Bank from organizing mass protests against the Israeli army, which ironically allowed for the reduction of the Israeli military presence in the West Bank in order to redeploy those troops to Gaza. Dayton added, “As a matter of fact, a good portion of the Israeli army went off to Gaza from the West Bank— think about that for a minute, and the (Israeli military) commander (of the West Bank) was absent for eight straight days.”

Moreover, in February 2010 Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak praised Fayyad for his security cooperation during a security conference in Herzliya. Incredibly he credited him with providing security for Israeli settlers in the illegal settlements in the West Bank. Barak told the conference, “The settlers are also saying that the security situation is better than ever, and that is thanks to the work of both sides."

In the Muslim World today there are two kinds of leaders despised by the public: autocrats and dictators supported by the West such as Egypt’s Mubarak and Tunisia’s Ben Ali, and agents who were directly installed by the West like Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai. At the height of the Tunisian and Egyptian demonstrations, the Palestine Papers released by Al-Jazeera and comprising hundreds of confidential documents from the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, portrayed Fayyad as another hireling for the West and Israel. In the Arab world he is neither respected nor inspiring.

One of the problems in Western media and political circles -as embodied by Friedman- is that great events somehow have to revolve around Western powerful elites in order for them to be meaningful. But the impressive Arab revolutions of 2011 are about the great awakening of the Arab people. It is their moment of glory. The sooner Western elites recognize this fact, the easier Orientalist stereotypes could be disposed of.

In his great work, Us and Them, Jim Carnes asks whether racism “is promoted by a sense of inferiority that makes us want to dominate others to protect our turf and to seek a status with no competition?”

Sadly Friedman’s explanation of the proliferation of the Arab revolutions of 2011 positively answers that question.

Esam Al-Amin can be reached at alamin1919@gmail.com

Is Algeria Next?

March 4 - 6, 2011
This US Has Lost the Opportunity to Lead in the Middle East

CounterPunch
By WIDED KHADRAOUI

Protesters in Martyr's Square chanted "yesterday Egypt, today Algeria" during demonstrations in the Algerian capital Algiers on February 12. The Algerian government's response to the protesters was reminiscent of Egypt's ex-President Hosni Mubarak during the last five days of the 18-day protest in Cairo. Armed riot police and pro-government thugs attacked pro-democracy protesters to provoke violent clashes. The same aggressive approach to the protesters was seen again on February 19 when military-style armored police vehicles deployed throughout Algiers to prevent the protests from even forming. Mubarak was visibly desperate when he sent in the camels and horses into Tahrir Square. In Algeria, however, the heavy-handed response from the regime should not be seen as an act of desperation.

After all, Algeria has seen this all before. In October 1988 strikes and walk-outs by students and workers, fuelled by the regimes' slow response to a decrease in standards of living and the sluggish approach to political reform, degenerated into rioting that ended in the destruction of the property of the government and the ruling FLN party. The government responded by unleashing the security forces to quell the unrest, leaving more than 500 dead and around 3,500 in jail. These hard-line measures led to a more unified opposition front ranging from lawyers, journalists, and physicians to the Islamist movement that was gaining momentum at that time.

Then-President Bendjedid drew up several reform measures to meet the demands of the opposition. The government drafted a new constitution, which was approved in February 1989. The changes included guaranteed freedoms of expression and association, and, to appease the Islamists, withdrew the guarantees of women's rights that originally appeared in the 1975 constitution. The army's role was relegated to national defense, downgrading its political importance. The ruling FLN, meanwhile, disappeared altogether from the revised constitution.

Then in 1991, an Islamist political party that had a strong showing in earlier local elections won the first round of national elections. The army stepped in before the second round could take place. It deposed Bendjedid, effectively took control of the government, and still hasn't left. Although the regime made some changes in the 1990s – by allowing a relatively free press, establishing a "pluralistic" party system, and engaging in modest economic reform – the top generals still pull the strings behind the current political leadership.

The years of overwhelming violence in the 1990s seemed to eradicate any hope for a just society in Algeria. The civil war left as many as 200,000 people killed, and the current regime still hasn't addressed the legacy of this violence. The Black Spring of 2001, during which the government's crackdown on Kabyle Berber activists left 90 dead and 5,000 wounded, demonstrated that the culture of impunity remains entrenched. In 2006, President Bouteflika issued a decree that criminalized public discussion of the civil war and made prosecution impossible for the human rights abuses committed by both state security forces and militant groups. The ongoing battle between the citizenry and the Algerian army is epitomized by the weekly rallies of the families of the disappeared demanding that the regime release information about the whereabouts of their relatives.

Lighting the Way

The recent collapse of Egypt's and Tunisia's autocratic regimes offers several key lessons for Algeria. In order to achieve political change in Algeria, the opposition must take into account the overreaction of the riot police. Spontaneous protests should observe the rules of the game by being nonviolent. To take advantage of the far-reaching publicity potential of Twitter and Facebook, Algerian activists must overcome their linguistic dependency on French and start sending out their appeals in English, both for the sake of their Arabic-speaking compatriots and for the English-dominated news agencies.

The U.S. response to Algeria has demonstrated its ambivalent attitude toward the pro-reform/pro-democracy wave in the Middle East and North Africa. When the protests broke out in Algeria on February 12, the State Department released a statement calling for "restraint on the part of the security services" and also reaffirmed its "support for the universal rights of the Algerian people, including assembly and expression." State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said on February 14 that "there is a greater respect for the rights of the citizens," when he was asked about the lack of U.S. condemnation of the hard-line responses to pro-democracy protests in Algeria, Bahrain, and Yemen, as opposed to Iran. That this statement was uttered with a straight face regarding Algeria suggests that the State Department needs a refresher course on the history of the Algerian security forces.

Algeria, of course, has been a close U.S. ally. After 9/11, Bouteflika visited then-President George W Bush twice and the leaders bonded over oil and terrorism. Algeria and the United States have cooperated on several law-enforcement and counter-terrorism initiatives, with Algeria attempting to link the U.S.-led war on terror to Algeria's decades-long struggle against Islamist militants.

Resistance Continues

Algerian Vice-Prime Minister Nouredine Yazid Zerhouni has emphasized the illegality of the protests and made it clear that the regime will continue to be treat protesters harshly. Zerhouni has also repeated the 19-year old argument on the necessity of upholding the state of emergency because of the threat of al-Qaeda and other militant Islamist movements in Algeria. But the current movement is spearheaded by neither the clamorous Berber minority nor the Islamist opposition. The move by protest organizers to call for demonstrations on Saturdays instead of Fridays, which could have mobilized Islamists, should help weaken the regime's arguments playing up the Islamist threat. The newly emerging opposition seems to be mostly secular and includes both Arabs and Berbers, traditionally a dividing line in Algerian society.

The regime's excessively confrontational approach to the protesters weakens the potential strength of a collective movement. The riot police's tactic of dividing planned marches into clusters of small, chaotic groups demolishes any sense of power that would come from mass mobilization. The Co-ordination for Democratic Change in Algeria (CNCD) is a recently formed coalition of human rights groups, trade unionists, and other small opposition parties calling for weekly protest marches in the capital. Though the attempt to centralize and coordinate the protest movement is laudable, it militates against spontaneous daily actions that typified the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia. Algerian demonstrations should organically rise without the constraints of political affiliations.

On a trip to Madrid this past weekend, Foreign Minister Mourad Medelci said in an interview with Spanish daily El Pais that the domino effect in the region is "an invention on the part of the media" that doesn't apply in Algeria. He reassured the West that "Algeria is not Tunisia or Egypt." The regime's reaction to the protests in Algeria illustrates the distance between its perception of reality and the truth of simmering unrest in the country. Sending in the riot police to maintain this distance will not hold back the region's tides of change for long.

The United States has frankly lost the opportunity to lead by example in the Middle East. An inability to choose between "stability" and "democracy" has handicapped the Obama administration. The resulting hesitancy has made the United States irrelevant in the current pro-reform trend. For now, America remains merely a spectator to the great drama unfolding in the Middle East.

Wided Khadraoui graduated from the London School of Economics with an MSc in conflict studies. She is a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus (where this article originally appeared) and writes on issues on the Middle East and North Africa, especially the Maghreb, at www.livefromthecasbah.com.

US: A terrorist training base

Saturday, March 5, 2011

Wayne Madsen  at opinion-maker.org

That specializes in car bombings

For some three decades, local residents near a top secret terrorist training base have reported on hearing explosions, seeing sudden flashes of light and night time flares, and noticing small planes and "black helicopters" arriving at and departing from a small airfield on the base. The airspace over the base is off-limits to unauthorized aircraft.

The base is not in Pakistan's restive Waziristan region or in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley but in northeastern North Carolina on Albemarle Sound, near the town of Hertford. Officially known as the Harvey Point Defense Testing Activity the base, which was once a Navy Supply Center, it actually serves as a paramilitary training course for the CIA and allied intelligence and paramilitary services, including Israel's Mossad and Britain's Special Air Services (SAS). On March 20, 1998, The New York Times reported that during its existence, Harvey Point trained 18,000 foreign intelligence operatives from 50 different countries.

Among those terrorists trained at Harvey Point were those who worked for the Chilean military junta of General Augusto Pinochet, El Salvador's death squad chief Roberto D'Aubisson, Egypt's General Intelligence Directorate, Katangan secessionist leader Moise Tshombe, Angola's UNITA guerrilla force, Colombian counter-insurgency personnel, Laotian anti-communist paramilitary forces, and Arab cadres who would later join Osama bin Laden's forces fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan. One can only contemplate how such regulars and irregulars from the far-flung corners of the world reacted to eastern North Carolina cuisine, including the barbecued pork, hush puppies, and steamed crabs.

First used to train anti-Castro Cubans for the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1960, the base has seen Lebanese Phalangist militia train for the failed March 8, 1985, west Beirut car bombing assassination attempt against Lebanese Shi'a spiritual leader Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, who was also known to be a leading figure in Hezbollah. Although Fadlallah escaped assassination, the car packed with 440 pounds of dynamite leveled an apartment building and a movie theater, killing 80 innocent people, including women and children, and injuring some 300 others.

As the United Nations Special Tribunal for Lebanon stands ready to indict key members of Lebanese Hezbollah for the February 15, 2005, massive car bombing that took the life of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, it is noteworthy that it has been the CIA, along with its Lebanese allies and Mossad agents trained at Harvey Point who have specialized in the urban car bombing tactic used so often over the past several decades in Lebanon. And as WMR previously reported, it was these same elements — CIA, Mossad, and their Lebanese assets – that jointly carried out the Hariri car bombing assassination.

An article titled "CIA Missions Have Mysterious N.C. Roots" in the June 28, 1978; Virginia-Pilot and Ledger-Star reported that the Harvey Point base, described as an annex of the CIA training base at Camp Peary, Virginia, was being used to train CIA operatives in car bombings. The paper noted that every few days, Navy trucks hauled batches of new passenger vehicles into the base and every few days cars that were totally demolished were trucked out of the base. Some local residents described the vehicles: some had their hoods blown off while others were smashed flat.

In December 1999, a rumbling from the base, which lasted for up to five seconds, was so strong that thousands of people in the region believed it to be an earthquake. The US Geological Survey said it did not register any quakes in the region.

In 2009, the CIA conducted a security survey of the Elizabeth City water plant and found that security controls were lacking. The CIA pressed local officials to beef up security for the plant.

Former CIA operative Robert Baer wrote in his book, "See No Evil," that his two weeks of training at Point Harvey was, for all purposes, an "advanced terrorism course." Baer was trained in the use of plastic and other types of explosive materials. It is believed that former CIA and Chilean DINA intelligence agent Michael Townley, convicted in 1978 for the 1976 car bombing assassination in Washington, DC of former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and his American assistant, Roni Moffitt. Townley became part of the federal witness protection program in 1978 after his conviction in the murder of Letelier. However, Townley was spotted in Stockholm in 1986 a week before the assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme.

After 9/11, CIA paramilitary operatives who were assigned to the agency's Special Activities Division (SAD) and deployed against the Taliban in Afghanistan were first trained at Harvey Point. 

 Northeast North Carolina: Center of global terrorist training activity and home to CIA's Harvey Point car bombing training facility and Xe (former Blackwater) false flag terror camp.

With the current controversy raging about the roles that acting CIA station chief in Pakistan Raymond Davis and suspected CIA agent Aaron DeHaven, both jailed in Pakistan — Davis for murder of two Pakistani nationals and DeHaven for visa violations — may have played in false flag terrorist attacks in Pakistan, there is an interesting footnote to Harvey Point. Just north of the CIA terrorist training facility, past Elizabeth City, lies the sprawling Moyock, North Carolina training facility of the company formerly called Blackwater and now known as Xe Services. Now known as the United States Training Center, the Moyock facility is on a former U.S. Navy installation that once hosted a U.S. Naval Security Group Activity listening station that was part of the National Security Agency's global signals intelligence eavesdropping network
.
Harvey Point is used by Navy SEALS/Underwater Demolition Teams for training. Blackwater founder Erik Prince had served as a Navy SEAL and many of his early Blackwater employees were ex-SEALS. Their numbers were later supplemented by retired CIA officers. Navy SEALS/UDT and CIA teams trained at Harvey Point in the 1980s for the illegal planting of mines in Nicaraguan waters. In 1990, personnel trained at the base unsuccessfully attempted to capture Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar in the secret "POKEWEED" operation.

In 2008, the U.S. government used an eminent domain acquisition to procure the Moorman Pine tract adjacent to Harvey Point for use by the CIA base. The owners of the tract acquired the property in 2002 for a golf and residential project. The owners settled with the government for $5.8 million.
The operations of Harvey Point and Moyock appear to complement one another and jointly place a huge secretive CIA footprint in northeast North Carolina.

http://www.opinion-maker.org/2011/03/us-a-terrorist-training-base/

 

The Make-Believe Billion

How drug companies exaggerate research costs to justify absurd profits.
By Timothy Noah
Slate
Posted Thursday, March 3, 2011, at 9:19 PM ET

For years the government has sought to make brand-name drugs cheaper and more widely available to the public. It has tried and failed to limit to a reasonable time period various patent and other "exclusivity" protections. Or it's tried and failed to negotiate volume discounts on the drugs that the feds purchase through Medicare. Every time, the pharmaceutical lobby has used its considerable wealth and political clout to block any government action that might trim Big Pharma's profits, which typically amount to between one-quarter and one-half of company revenues. And just about every time, Big Pharma has argued that huge profit margins are vitally necessary to the pharmaceutical industry because drug research and development costs are so high.

The statistic Big Pharma typically cites (see, for instance, this PhRMA video on how Mister Chemical Compound becomes Mister Brand-Name Drug) is that the cost of bringing a new drug to market is about $1 billion. Now a new study indicates the cost is more like, um, $55 million.

Big Pharma has been making its R&D argument for half a century, but the specific source of the $1 billion claim is a 2003 study published in the Journal of Health Economics by economists Joseph DiMasi of Tufts, Ronald W. Hansen of the University of Rochester, and Henry Grabowski of Duke. I will henceforth refer to this team as the Tufts Center group, because they were working out of the (drug-company-funded) Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development. The Tufts Center group "obtained from a survey of 10 pharmaceutical firms" the research and development costs of 68 randomly chosen new drugs and calculated an average cost of $802 million in 2000 dollars. That comes to $1 billion in 2011 dollars based on the general inflation rate since 2000 (28 percent). One billion dollars for every little orange prescription bottle in your medicine cabinet! And according to PhRMA, even that is way too low! As of 2006, its calculation of the drug-development average had already risen to $1.32 billion. That means costs specific to drug development increased by 64 percent between 2000 and 2006. Medical inflation typically outpaces general inflation, but PhRMA's calculation puts its rate of cost increase at more than twice the rate for medical inflation during that period (26 percent). If Pharma's alleged inflation rate hasn't slackened since 2006, then the drug-development average should be now approaching $2 billion. But let's not go there. We'll stick to Big Pharma's official last-stated estimate of $1.32 billion.

The new study, by sociologist Donald W. Light of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and economist Rebecca Warburton of the University of Victoria, and published in the journal BioSocieties, builds on some excellent previous research by journalist and health care blogger Merrill Goozner, author of The $800 Million Pill, and the consumer advocate Jamie Love. Light and Warburton begin by pointing out that drug companies submitted their R&D data to the Tufts Center group on a confidential basis and that these numbers are therefore unverifiable. Light and Warburton find it a little fishy that only 10 of the 24 invited firms chose to participate, given "the centrality of the issue and the prominence of the Center" within the industry. "The sample," they suggest, "could be skewed" toward companies or drugs "with higher R&D costs." Light and Warburton also observe that if the Tufts Center group made any effort of its own to verify the information it received from the drug companies, the group makes no mention of it in the study.

The first research phase involved in developing a new drug is basic (as opposed to applied) research. Very little of this type of research is funded by drug companies; 84 percent is funded by the government, and private universities provide additional, unspecified funding. The Tufts Center group assumed that drug companies spent, on average, $121 million on basic research to create a new drug, but Light and Warburton find that hard to square with their estimate that industry devotes only 1.2 percent of sales to all their basic research. Add in a few additional considerations and Big Pharma would have us believe basic research costs end up constituting more than one-third of the Tufts Center's $802 million estimate. That's way too much, Light and Warburton say.

Another problem Light and Warburton have with the Tufts Center group is that they didn't subtract from their R&D calculations pharmaceutical firms' tax breaks. Research and development costs, they point out, are not depreciated over time like other investments; rather, they're excluded entirely from taxable profits. This tax break lowers net costs by 39 percent. Add in other tax breaks and that cuts the Tufts Center group's R&D estimate in half.

Now take that figure and cut it in half again, Light and Warburton say, because half the Tufts Center group's estimate was the "cost of capital," i.e., revenue foregone by not taking the money spent on R&D and investing it in securities instead. But R&D is a cost of doing business, Light and Warburton point out; if you don't want to spend money on it, then you don't want to be a drug company. And who says that investing in securities always increases your capital? Sometimes the market goes down. Many of us learned that the hard way in 2008.

There are other problems. The Tufts Center group's per-subject calculation of how much clinical trials cost was six times that of a National Institutes of Health study. Its calculation of how much time it takes to conduct clinical trials and have them reviewed by the Food and Drug Administration—7.5 years—is twice as long as Light and Warburton's calculation, which is less than four years. The Tufts Center group's use of the average (mean) cost rather than the median cost, Light and Warburton argue, is also misleading, because R&D costs for different drug products vary widely, and a very few expensive drugs will skew the mean. That appears to have happened in this case, because the Tuft Center group's median was only 74 percent of the mean.

When Light and Warburton correct for all these flaws—well, all the ones that can be quantified—they end up with an average cost of bringing a drug to market that's $59 million and a median cost that's $43 million. In 2011 dollars, that's a $75 million average and a $55 million median.

So the drug companies' $1.32 billion estimate was off, according to Light and Warburton, by only $977 million. Let's call it a rounding error.
Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate. He can be reached at thecustomer@slate.com.

Obama's low-key strategy for the Middle East

By David Ignatius
The Washington Post
Sunday, March 6, 2011;

President Obama has been so low-key in his pronouncements about events in Egypt and Libya that it's easy to miss the extent of the shift in U.S. strategy. In supporting the wave of change sweeping the Arab world, despite the wariness of traditional allies such as Israel and Saudi Arabia, Obama is placing a big bet that democratic governments will be more stable and secure, and thereby enhance U.S. interests in the region.

My own instinct, as someone who has been visiting the Arab world for more than 30 years, is that Obama is right. But given the stakes, it's important to examine how the White House is making its judgments - and whether intelligence reporting supports these decisions.

Though the White House's response to these whirlwind events has sometimes seemed erratic, the policy, which has been evolving for many months, goes to the core of Obama's worldview. This is the president as global community organizer - a man who believes that change is inevitable and desirable, and that the United States must align itself with the new forces shaping the world.

An Israeli official visiting Washington last week sounded a note of caution: "We are too close to the eye of the storm to judge," he said. "We need to be more modest in our assessments and put more question marks at the end."

But the Obama White House doesn't feel it has the luxury of deferring judgment; history is moving too fast. Says one official, "It's a roll of the dice, but it's also a response to reality." If Obama has seemed low-key, he explains, it has been a calculated "strategic reticence" to send the message: This is your revolution; it's not about us.

The roots of the policy shift go back to Obama's first days in office and his feeling that America's relationship with the Arab world was broken. Though Obama seemed to be accommodating the region's authoritarian leaders, in August 2010, he issued Presidential Study Directive 11, asking agencies to prepare for change.

This document cited "evidence of growing citizen discontent with the region's regimes" and warned that "the region is entering a critical period of transition." The president asked his advisers to "manage these risks by demonstrating to the people of the Middle East and North Africa the gradual but real prospect of greater political openness and improved governance."

Six months later, street demonstrations were toppling autocratic leaders in Tunisia and Egypt, who looked in vain for support from Washington. Obama didn't come to the autocrats' rescue because he believed the transformations were positive developments. "We have a core interest in stability through political and economic change. The status quo is not stable," explains Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser.

The democratic youth movement sweeping the Arab world offered an "alternative narrative" to the versions of Islamic revolution put forward by Iran and al-Qaeda, says Rhodes. If this change scenario can succeed, threats to America will be reduced.

The White House studied past democratic transitions in Indonesia, the Philippines, Serbia, Poland and Chile for "lessons learned." Officials noted that last week national security adviser Tom Donilon was reading former secretary of state George Shultz's account of the peaceful ouster of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines.

This review has led U.S. officials to conclude that countries need to: bring the opposition quickly into the transition to achieve "buy-in"; make fast changes that people can see, such as freeing political prisoners; and sequence events, putting the easiest first, so that presidential elections precede parliamentary balloting and detailed rewriting of the constitution.

How well does this idealistic agenda match up with ground truth? In interviews last week, intelligence analysts said that Islamic extremists don't seem to be hijacking the process of change. There are near-term tactical dangers, said one counterterrorism analyst, such as the escape of prisoners in Egypt and the potential weakening of the intelligence service there. But this official says there's no evidence that al-Qaeda has been able to take advantage of the turmoil. It took a week for Ayman al-Zawahiri, the group's No. 2 official, to publish his windy and out-of-touch analysis of events in Egypt.

Change will have its downside, but a second U.S. intelligence analyst offers this estimate: "This is a world we can live with. Our relationship with Egypt may be different and rockier, but I don't think it will be inherently hostile." As for the much-feared Muslim Brotherhood, it is currently planning to run parliamentary candidates in only 150 of Egypt's 454 districts, and no candidate for president.

davidignatius@washpost.com

Five myths about the Muslim Brotherhood

By Lorenzo Vidino
The Washington Post
Friday, March 4, 2011;

Even before Hosni Mubarak gave in to the throngs in Tahrir Square and stepped down as Egypt's president on Feb. 11, officials in Western capitals were debating what role the Muslim Brotherhood would play in a new Egypt and a changing Middle East. Yet much of what we know - or think we know - about the group's ambitions, beliefs and history is clouded by misperceptions.
1. The Muslim Brotherhood is a global organization.

Founded in Egypt in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood saw its ideas quickly spread throughout the Arab world and beyond. Today, groups in more than 80 countries trace their ideologies to the Brotherhood, but these entities do not form a cohesive unit. Globally, the Brotherhood is more a school of thought than an official organization of card-carrying members.

Attempts to create a more formal global structure have failed, and the movement instead has taken on various forms. Where it is tolerated, as in Jordan, it functions as a political party; where persecuted, as in Syria, it survives underground; and in the Palestinian territories, it took a peculiar turn and became Hamas.

Though they interact through a network of personal, financial and ideological ties, Brotherhood entities operate independently, and each pursues its goals as it deems appropriate. What binds them is a deep belief in Islam as a way of life that, in the long term, they hope to turn into a political system, using different methods in different places.
2. The Brotherhood will dominate the new Egypt.

With most political forces in Egypt today discredited or disorganized, many assume that the Brotherhood's well-oiled political machine will play a major role in the country's future.

This is not far-fetched, yet there are reasons to believe that the group will hardly dominate post-Mubarak Egypt. When I interviewed members of the Brotherhood's Shura Council in 2009, they estimated that about 60 percent of Egyptians supported the group - seeing it as the only viable opposition to Mubarak - but that only 20 percent or so would support it in a hypothetical free election. And even that might have been optimistic: A poll of Egyptians by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy after Mubarak's fall found that only 15 percent of respondents approved of the Brotherhood, while the group's leaders received barely 1 percent in a presidential straw vote.

Over the past decade, aging hard-liners and a second generation of 50-somethings have wrestled for leadership of the Brotherhood. Then there are the younger cadres, which took part in the protest movement against Mubarak and deplored their leaders' late participation in it. How these divisions develop will determine the role of the Brotherhood in Egyptian politics.
3. The Brotherhood seeks to impose a draconian version of sharia law.

All Brotherhood factions will now push to increase the influence of sharia - Islamic law - in Egypt. However, the generational battle will determine what vision of sharia they will pursue.

The old guard's motto is still "the Koran is our constitution." The second generation speaks of human rights and compares itself to Europe's Christian Democrats - embracing democracy but keeping a religious identity. The third generation, especially in urban areas, seems to endorse this approach, even if skeptics contend that younger militants are simply offering a moderate facade to the West.

So far, the old guard is prevailing. The Brotherhood's first major political platform, released in 2007, paid lip service to democracy and stated that women and non-Muslims could not occupy top government posts, and gave a body of unelected sharia experts veto power over new laws. How long this old guard remains in control will shape the group's positions on sharia's most debated aspects, from women's rights to religious freedoms.
4. The Muslim Brotherhood has close ties to al-Qaeda.

Historically, yes. But recently, those ties have frayed.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Brotherhood was brutally repressed by the regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Understanding that violence against Nasser was a losing proposition, most of the group opted for nonviolent opposition, seeking to Islamize society through grass-roots education and mainstream politics.

But a smaller wing, led by theologian Sayyid Qutb, opted for violence. This faction argued that Islamization from below was too slow and would be impeded by local and foreign powers. For generations, Qutb's idea of religiously justified violence has inspired jihadists worldwide. Several al-Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheik Mohammed, were influenced by the Brotherhood early in life, only to grow disillusioned with the organization later on.

While the Brotherhood has not completely rejected violence - supporting its use in Iraq, the Palestinian territories, Afghanistan and other places where it believes Muslims are under attack - the two groups have recently clashed over tactics and theology. Al-Qaeda's No. 2, Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, even wrote a book attacking the group for replacing bullets with ballots.
5. Washington can't work with the Brotherhood.

U.S. and Brotherhood officials have taken tough public stances against each other recently. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, called the Brotherhood a "nefarious element" in Egyptian politics, while Brotherhood leader Mohammed Badi said America is "heading toward its demise."

But posturing aside, there may be room for engagement with the Brotherhood's more moderate players. It has happened before: Since early in the Eisenhower administration, parts of the U.S. government have reached out to the group, seeing its religious message as a potential bulwark against communism. It wasn't a true partnership, but during the Cold War, Washington and the Brothers occasionally put distrust aside to establish limited cooperation.

The White House took criticism last month when it said it would be open to a role for the Brotherhood in Egyptian politics, if it rejected violence and accepted democratic goals. But even after Sept. 11, 2001, some elements within the CIA and the State Department toyed with the idea of working with the Brotherhood against al-Qaeda, convinced that only radicals could defeat other radicals.

Even if Washington and the Brotherhood find ways to live with each other, big foreign-policy breakthroughs are unlikely. Wielding more power in Egypt could make the Brotherhood more pragmatic, but opposition to U.S. policy in the region is the cornerstone of its agenda - and that probably won't change.

Lorenzo Vidino, a visiting fellow at the Rand Corporation, is the author of "The New Muslim Brotherhood in the West."

Palestinian protests more muted compared with unrest elsewhere in Middle East

By Joel Greenberg
The Washington Post
Friday, March 4, 2011; 8:30 PM

IN RAMALLAH, WEST BANK At a recent Friday prayer here, a preacher in a large downtown mosque railed against the United States for vetoing a U.N. resolution condemning Israeli settlements, the opening salvo in what was designated as a "Day of Rage" among Palestinians.

But as worshipers filed out of the mosque, the only people hollering were hawkers at Ramallah's outdoor market, peddling their wares to the passing crowd.

While throngs have taken to the streets to oust autocratic rulers and demand political freedoms in neighboring Arab countries, protests here and in the Gaza Strip have been much more modest and different in intent. People have demonstrated against the U.S. veto, in support of the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, and in favor of national unity between Hamas-ruled Gaza and the West Bank, dominated by the Fatah party.

What they have not done is call for the ouster of their own leaders.

"We are not happy. No one is happy. But the president and prime minister are doing their best," said Abed Jabaiah, an appliance store owner, referring to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. "We are under occupation. We are not a state. The things we demand of our government, we know it can't do because of the Israelis. Our revolution should be against Israel first."
The quiet stands out

The relative calm among Palestinians stands out against the turbulence in places such as Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen and Bahrain, whose rulers have been toppled or are threatened. A handful of other Arab countries, including Syria, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, have also remained orderly, but the quiet here could be the most surprising, given the history of upheaval.

In Ramallah, as shoppers and cars jammed downtown streets, Jabaiah ticked off the reasons he saw for the quiet: Abbas, elected in 2005, is not an autocratic ruler who has seized and held power for decades; Palestinians in the West Bank enjoy a measure of free expression; and their standard of living is better than in many neighboring Arab countries.

The split between Hamas and Fatah also had a chilling effect on attempts to demonstrate against the leaderships in the West Bank and Gaza. Anti-government dissent in either place is often viewed as support for the rival faction - a sensitive point in the divided society. Hamas seized power in the Gaza Strip in 2007 in a brief civil war, routing Fatah, which is the ruling party in the West Bank.

"If I want to demonstrate in the West Bank, it's automatically interpreted that I served the interest of Hamas, and in Gaza that I served the interest of Fatah," said Khalil Shikaki, a Palestinian analyst and pollster. "Most people who want to revolt - not too many at this stage - hate both Fatah and Hamas and see them as failing in the tasks of building a democratic entity that respects freedoms and implements the rule of law."

Demonstrations in support of the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia were broken up by Palestinian Authority security forces in the West Bank and Hamas police in Gaza, with some protesters arrested and beaten, an indicator of concern that the protests could turn against the authorities. The "Day of Rage" on Feb. 25, initially called by Fatah, was apparently called off for the same reason.
Reaction to Egypt unrest

In the first stages of the Egyptian uprising, the Palestinian Authority, which had close ties with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, was wary of taking sides. But after criticism by human rights advocates of measures against protesters, Fayyad told representatives of local non-governmental organizations at a recent meeting that freedoms must be protected.

In another nod to the regional unrest and calls for democracy, the Palestinian leadership announced that it would hold presidential and parliamentary elections by September. But Abbas later said that no such vote could be held without Gaza, where Hamas rejected the initiative.

Abbas's domestic standing has been bolstered by the recent U.S. veto at the U.N. Security Council, cast after he resisted pressure from Washington to withdraw the resolution condemning Israeli settlement activity. His refusal to negotiate with Israel unless it halts settlement building has also resonated positively among Palestinians, blunting anti-government sentiment.

"When the leader of the regime is seen to be standing up to the Americans and Israel, and when such a stance is a public demand, then people rethink what they intend to do regarding this leader," Shikaki said.

Still, the demands for change sweeping the region have led groups of young Palestinians, many brought together through Facebook groups, to mount a campaign to end the Hamas-Fatah split - in effect indicting leaders of both sides for the persistent fissure.

Hazem Abu Helal, 27, one of the youth organizers, said the aim, outlined in a manifesto published last week, was not to bring down the Palestinian leadership but to reform it and promote greater democracy. The Hamas-Fatah rift, he said, had brought increased stifling of dissent, with both governing factions cracking down on opponents and shutting institutions identified with their rivals.

"The repression has gotten worse after the split. The thinking is that if you criticize, you're not with us," said Abu Helal, who works at Sharek, a nonprofit group that promotes youth programs and activities and has published its own call for unity.

"Division = Repression of freedoms, and that's why I'm against it," said a sign held by one protester at a recent unity demonstration in Ramallah.

The youth manifesto calls for establishment of a court that would hold accountable the leaders and parties responsible for the split, and it demands prosecution of officials involved in corruption. The document also urges new elections for the Palestine Liberation Organization's highest decision-making body, a non-political governing administration for the Palestinian territories, and a grass-roots "struggle" against Israeli occupation.

"We have no regime we have to topple," Abu Helal said. "Israel controls it all. Our basic problem is the occupation."

In Egypt, crowd cheers newly appointed prime minister Essam Sharaf

By William Wan and Portia Walker
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, March 4, 2011; 10:31 PM

CAIRO - Massive crowds turned out across the Arab world for a Friday of mostly peaceful protests, although the Iraqi government responded with a forceful crackdown and at least three people were killed in Yemen.

In Egypt, the huge crowd that had gathered in Cairo's Tahrir Square cheered as the country's newly appointed prime minister waded into throngs of protesters and asked for their support and help.

"I draw my legitimacy from you," Essam Sharaf told the demonstrators, who greeted him with a deafening roar and later carried him off on their shoulders.

Sharaf had been appointed Thursday by the ruling military council in a move calculated to appease protesters ahead of Friday's demonstrations. He replaced Ahmed Shafiq, who had been chosen for the job by President Hosni Mubarak just days before Mubarak resigned and who was considered by protesters an unpopular vestige of the old regime.

Many hours later, after nightfall, hundreds of Egyptian protesters in Alexandria tried to storm a building belonging to the internal security service, a much-hated agency blamed for human rights violations during Mubarak's rule. Officers inside the building opened fire on the crowd, injuring three demonstrators, according to the Associated Press, which quoted a medic and one of the protesters.

In his speech, Sharaf appealed to the crowd members, praising them for carrying out the revolution, promising to fulfill their demands and pleading for their help in "rebuilding Egypt."

While the crowd's celebratory response suggests the tensions that emerged after Mubarak's ouster might be easing, it is unclear whether the latest moves will be enough. Protesters say many of their demands remain unmet, including the dissolution of the much-hated state security police and the release of political detainees.

"But just the fact that he came here without any protection, like an average man, this is good credit for him," said Ashraf Abdel Aal, 45, a protester who witnessed Sharaf's speech.

State television announced Friday that Egypt will hold a referendum March 19 on amendments to its constitution. The referendum is necessary before Egypt can hold free, multiparty elections later this year.

In Yemen, tens of thousands of people took to the streets Friday to protest the 33-year rule of President Ali Abdullah Saleh. In the northern town of Harf Sufyan, a rebel Shiite group said its peaceful demonstration was attacked by government forces, leaving at least three people dead and seven injured. The government disputed that account, saying an armed group had attempted to overrun a military checkpoint.

In the capital, Sanaa, and in other major cities, protests calling for Saleh's ouster have united formerly disparate anti-government groups, including a separatist movement in the south and rebel tribes in the north. Although Saleh's grip on his office appears precarious, so does this new bond among opposition forces, who have little in common beyond their mutual contempt for Saleh.

In Iraq, about 1,000 people gathered in Baghdad's Tahrir Square despite government warnings, a ban on driving and recent clashes in which security forces have shot, beaten and detained demonstrators.

For every demonstrator who made it into Tahrir Square on Friday, dozens more were held up by a gauntlet of checkpoints and blockades.

Nidhal al-Azawi, who lives in a southern district of Baghdad, said that when she tried to leave her neighborhood Friday morning, a soldier told her: "If I let you go, I will be detained."

The scene in Iraq was markedly different than the one last Friday, when tens of thousands of Iraqis streamed into the streets, only to be fired upon by security forces, resulting in at least 29 deaths.

This time, protesters were not shot, but they were chased into alleys and beaten with sticks. By evening, state television was broadcasting old images of Tahrir Square, pristine and empty of people.

In Saudi Arabia, a small number of protesters gathered in several areas, including the oil-rich Eastern Province. Although small compared with protests in other Arab countries, the demonstrations in favor of freedoms and the release of political prisoners were significant for a country in which rallies are rare.

In nearby Bahrain, opposition leaders ranging from moderate to hard-line spoke at a rally of tens of thousands Friday night in the capital, Manama. They were unified in calling for further pressure on the government, saying that they doubted the royal family's commitment to reform and that nothing short of a full resignation of the cabinet would satisfy them.

Walker reported from Sanaa. Staff writers Liz Sly in Cairo, Stephanie McCrummen in Baghdad, Michael Birnbaum in Manama and Janine Zacharia in Riyadh contributed to this report.

Gaddafi forces mount fierce counterattack

By Leila Fadel and Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, March 4, 2011; 10:44 PM

BENGHAZI, LIBYA - Forces loyal to Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi on Friday unleashed their fiercest counterattack yet, assaulting rebel-held positions by ground and air and firing on demonstrators in the government stronghold of Tripoli.

The lethal force of the government offensive, including what rebels described as a "bloodbath" in the strategic western port of Zawiyah, raised the stakes for Washington and its Western allies. They have threatened military intervention if the Gaddafi government crosses red lines including the systematic endangerment of defenseless civilians or if the battle for Libya evolves into a long-term, bloody stalemate.

Yet if anything, the events Friday underscored Gaddafi's ability to press defiantly ahead with a brutal campaign to reclaim land lost to the rebels and squelch dissent within bastions of government control. The government appeared to be trying to secure a buffer zone around Tripoli and target areas vital to the country's oil industry, taking aim at cities and ports that have given the rebels a foothold close to the capital.

The White House expressed renewed alarm, saying that President Obama is "appalled by the use of force against unarmed, peaceful civilians." Obama is being briefed on Libya three times a day, and "we're not taking any options off the table," said Jay Carney, the White House press secretary.

With thousands of refugees stuck on the Tunisian border with Libya, two U.S. Air Force C-130 cargo planes flew in humanitarian supplies for them Friday and planned to return Saturday to pick up Egyptian refugees and fly them home.

The fiercest attack Friday fell on the opposition-held city of Zawiyah, home to one of Libya's largest oil refineries and situated 27 miles west of Tripoli. Official Libyan media said the government had retaken the city, though the rebels there denied it. As of late Friday, the city remained under siege.

"We are still in the square," said Mohamed Magid, an opposition spokesman. "Zawiyah has not fallen."

Gaddafi loyalists armed with tanks and heavy machine guns and reportedly led by his son Khamis Gaddafi launched an offensive around midday, rebels said. Forces loyal to Gaddafi entered the city from several directions, using tanks, sport-utility vehicles and trucks armed with heavy machine guns, witnesses said. They also laid siege to the city with mortar fire.

Though details were impossible to verify, witnesses in Zawiyah said at least 15 people were killed and 200 wounded, with a senior rebel leader reported to be among the dead. Some reports put the death toll as high as 50. Rough video clips uploaded to the Internet showed people falling to the ground in the city's main square amid the sound of gunshots.

One rebel fighter said Gaddafi loyalists shot at people in front of a hospital, blocking the injured from getting treatment. Pro-Gaddafi forces reached the gates of the city, climbing upon the tallest buildings outside the edge of town and firing on crowds, witnesses said. Mohammed Ahmad, a 31-year-old doctor, said that in the mayhem government forces had opened fire on an ambulance, pulled out two of the wounded inside and shot them dead.

"This is inhuman behavior," Ahmad said. "There are hundreds wounded. There is no room for all of them in the hospital. It is a tragedy."

A rebel fighter in Zawiyah who spoke on the condition of anonymity said opposition forces still outnumbered the government troops. But the opposition was running low on ammunition, sandwiched between government-controlled territories and unable to get fresh supplies.

In Tripoli, meanwhile, Gaddafi again moved swiftly against his opponents, who witnesses described as largely unarmed protesters attempting to demonstrate in various parts of the clamped-down city.

Early Friday, Gaddafi loyalists had erected checkpoints in the restive suburbs, searching vehicles ahead of what was expected to be the first large anti-government demonstration there in days. As hundreds of protesters took to the streets after Friday prayers, government forces moved in with tear gas and opened fire with live ammunition, according to witnesses and reports.

In the Bab al-Aziziyah neighborhood of Tripoli, protesters returned to their homes after being faced down by security forces. But others turned out in the city's Green Square chanting slogans against the regime, scattering only when bullets started to fly. "I heard the shots," said a 33-year-old electrical engineer who lives near the square. "I don't know how many were killed."

On Friday, rebels suffered other setbacks. In the heart of opposition-controlled territory in the east, a massive explosion at a weapons depot near Benghazi left at least 16 people dead, according to doctors at the city's Jalla hospital. At least 29 others were injured. Witness accounts varied, and it was unclear whether a bomb had been planted or if something inside the building detonated.

"This is not an accident. Our dictator is out of his mind,'' said Omar el-Zawawee, a senior resident at the hospital.

On a day when Gaddafi's forces appeared to be on the offensive, the rebels claimed at least one significant victory.

In eastern Libya, rebels attacked a pro-Gaddafi military base on the outskirts of Ras Lanuf, about 410 miles east of Tripoli, in an attempt to capture the oil terminal on the Mediterranean. Gaddafi's forces fought back with fighter jets and ground troops, killing at least four rebels, according to Mohammed Sultan, a rebel fighter.

But just after dark Friday, the band of rebels said they had taken Ras Lanuf, with some loyalist forces hoisting a white flag of surrender. The rebels, armed with surface-to-air missiles, antiaircraft weaponry and other aged weapons, were pushing forward into Bin Jawad despite being severely outgunned.

"The plan is to go toward Sirte," said Khaled Sayeh, the spokesman for the opposition's military council, referring to Gaddafi's home town, a loyalist stronghold.

Overnight and into the early morning Friday, Gaddafi's forces fired artillery rounds from a hilltop air base into the nation's third-largest city, Misurata, a rebel-held enclave between Tripoli and Sirte. Some residents said that government airplanes were sky-writing messages calling on residents to surrender.

Opposition forces said they remained in control but were being besieged by Gaddafi loyalists and were running low on food and ammunition. Said Abdul Baset Ahmed Abu Mzereek, an opposition spokesman in Misurata, called on foreign powers to airdrop supplies.

"We are fixing a lot of weapons, but that takes time," he said. "We can defeat him; it's just a matter of time."

Cairo 1.5

The Arab world that Barack Obama addressed in his famous speech two years ago is history. It's time for him to speak to the new one.

BY JAMES TRAUB | MARCH 4, 2011
FOREIGN POLICY

It's too early for President Barack Obama's administration to formulate a new long-term strategy for the Middle East; no one knows what it will look like six months hence, or for that matter, next week. But it's already clear that the Middle East which Obama addressed in his Cairo speech in June 2009 no longer exists, and thus that the premises of the strategy behind that speech no longer apply.

Administration officials are reported to have begun thinking about how they must adapt to this transformed environment. Sen. John Kerry has begun working with colleagues from both parties to draw up a new package of economic aid for Arab countries seeking to move toward democracy. In that spirit, I offer, not Cairo 2.0, but something more provisional -- let's say, Cairo 1.5.

Salaam Aleikum. My friends, I have returned to Cairo, almost two years after my last visit, because, thanks to the courage of its people in overthrowing a regime they had come to despise, Egypt has reasserted its role at the very center of the Arab political order. That order, for many years, was an autocratic one. Now it is struggling toward freedom. The outcome of that struggle remains unclear and, of course, will vary greatly from state to state. But all those who cherish freedom have an obligation to help the peoples of the Arab world build a new order.

What does that mean in practice? First, I must acknowledge a simple, if inconvenient, truth: We in the United States, while encouraging democracy in the Arab world, were never quite sure we wanted it. Precisely because they were not accountable to the public, autocratic leaders could advance American and Western national security goals that Arab publics broadly did not accept. We were not prepared to push those leaders very hard; that was why the last time I came before you I admonished regional leaders to "maintain your power through consent, not coercion" -- but didn't single out any of them by name. I acknowledge that we may have raised expectations we were not prepared to satisfy.

I come before you today to say that we have put that ambivalence aside. We embrace the truth that in the long run a democratic Middle East is the essential precondition to securing regional peace and stability, and to ending the scourge of terrorism. But that's the long run. In the years to come, both we and you will have to make painful adjustments. My country cannot and will not abandon its core security interests; but now we must advance those interests in ways that citizens in the Middle East can accept. I will get to that in a moment.

The second thing the United States can do to help the birth of a new Middle East is to provide diplomatic support to the forces of change. Above all, we must help prevent backsliding in those places where the old order has been overthrown and a new one has yet to be born. That means making it clear to transitional leaders in Egypt and Tunisia that ongoing American military and economic support will be conditioned on laying out a clear path to elections and on bringing democratic forces into the government right away. Elsewhere, we will not become advocates for "regime change" -- that's your business, not ours -- but we will press leaders in Bahrain, Jordan, Yemen, and elsewhere to accept the legitimacy of popular protest; and we will do this with the full understanding that reform could lead to governments less sympathetic to American policy in the region.

In several states, notably Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia, citizens have paid a high price for their demands for freedom not only in human but in economic terms. So the third step for the United States and the international community is to provide humanitarian and developmental assistance. Humanitarian aid, especially in Libya, must be forthcoming immediately and without conditions; development aid will depend on political change. Here I suggest as a model our own Millennium Challenge Account, which provides funds for states that make strides on indices of democracy and transparency. I propose that new money be made available for states that embrace reform, whether or not they meet current MCA standards. This will not be "democracy assistance," directed toward political party-building and the like, unless states ask for it. Struggling democracies need economic opportunity, and we must help supply it.

The United States will help, but other countries must pitch in. The only way I can persuade a very reluctant U.S. Congress to add new money to a foreign aid budget already under threat is if the lion's share comes from other wealthy countries in the West and in the Arab world.

The one true democracy in the Middle East is, of course, Israel, and I believe that over time aspiring democracies in the region will look to Israel for lessons and even help. But this can't happen until the Israeli-Palestinian crisis is solved -- the fourth element of a new Middle East. In 2009, I implored the Palestinians to refrain from violence, and the Israelis to stop building settlements. The Palestinians largely complied, but Israel -- thanks in part to legitimate fears that Hamas will not accept any agreement and will exploit a withdrawal to attack Israel's borders -- did not.

Leaders in Egypt and Jordan, whom Israel has relied on for support in the past, are now weakened or gone; as pressure from more representative governments grow, Israel will have little choice but to reach a two-state solution acceptable to the Palestinians. I believe, and I hope, that Israel's leaders will come to accept this reality. The United States will continue to serve as Israel's security guarantor even while driving home the imperative of territorial compromise -- including by supporting the Palestinian government's current drive for sovereign recognition. But states in the region must reassure Israel that it can afford to take such painful steps by supporting a two-state solution and isolating those, like Hamas and Hezbollah, that seek Israel's destruction.

The fifth and final issue where we must redraw the social contract between an emerging democratic Middle East and its partners in the West is terrorism. The resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will remove one of the great recruitment tools for Islamic extremists, as will the replacement of despotic governments in the region by genuinely representative ones. But the extremists will, if anything, grow more violent as their cause becomes more desperate. And they will be quick to exploit the inevitable disorder, even chaos, produced by the shattering of the old order. In the past, U.S. counterterrorism policy depended on secret understandings struck with leaders unaccountable to their own citizens, who might have bridled at an American presence on the ground and, often, in the air. This arrangement, which originated during the Cold War, will not survive the transition to democracy.

And yet, because a democratic Middle East poses such a grave threat to the extremist narrative, terrorists are likely to target local states as well as the West. This means that while explaining counterterrorism policy has become more difficult than ever, the need for coordination has become yet greater. For our part, this means greater transparency in explaining what we do abroad -- and the abolition, once and for all, of policies like extraordinary rendition that have rightly inflamed public opinion. For emerging Middle Eastern states, it means publicly taking on and repudiating extremism in the mosques and on the streets, as well as through vigorous, and transparent, law enforcement. Autocrats said one thing in public and something else in private; now public speech will have to conform to private action.

The euphoria many of you feel today, which you have earned through painful sacrifice, will not long survive the hard struggle toward self-government. Sharp differences of opinion will threaten to degenerate into violence; demagogues will try to exploit ethnic and tribal divisions; the old elite will seek to hijack popular movements. Many of you may soon find yourselves despairing of the future -- even, perhaps, wishing for the deadly calm of the old regime. But you must remind yourselves that it was those authoritarian rulers, most of all, who believed that democracy would never flourish in the Arab world. I believe that you will prove them wrong.

James Traub is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and author of, most recently, The Freedom Agenda. "Terms of Engagement," his column for ForeignPolicy.com, runs weekly.


SHOW COMMENTS:

MIGHTY MOUSE

6:01 PM ET
March 4, 2011
Better Speech:

Salaam aleikum,

I would like to encourage the democratic state of Egypt to throw open the gates to the ghetto -- nay, the concentration camp -- called Gaza.

I hereby pledge that I will zero out all military aid to Israel since it committed human rights abuses with US arms -- this, after all, is in accordance with our Arms Export Control Act. I encourage all the free people of Arabia to read the Goldstone report for themselves.

I promise I will no longer run scared from AIPAC.

I promise to return all US troops to the US since our presence, according to Pentagon studies, has increased not reduced radicalism:

http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/dod/dsb/commun.pdf

“American efforts have not only failed....they may also have achieved the opposite of what they intended. American direct intervention in the Muslim World has paradoxically elevated the stature of and support for radical Islamists, while diminishing support for the United States to single-digits in some Arab societies.

• Muslims do not “hate our freedom,” but rather, they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf states.

• Thus when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy....

• Furthermore, in the eyes of Muslims, American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq has not led to democracy there, but only more chaos and suffering. U.S. actions appear in contrast to be motivated by ulterior motives, and deliberately controlled in order to best serve American national interests at the expense of truly Muslim self-determination.

• ... Fighting groups portray themselves as the true defenders of an Ummah (the entire Muslim community) invaded and under attack — to broad public support.

• What was a marginal network is now an Ummah-wide movement of fighting groups. Not only has there been a proliferation of “terrorist” groups: the unifying context of a shared cause creates a sense of affiliation across the many cultural and sectarian boundaries that divide Islam."



MIGHTY MOUSE

6:03 PM ET
March 4, 2011

Yes, even our best CIA people agree
The military will not win this.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/graham-e-fuller/global-viewpoint-obamas-p_b_201355.html

excerpt:

" The situation in Pakistan has gone from bad to worse as a direct consequence of the U.S. war raging on the Afghan border. U.S. policy has now carried the Afghan war over the border into Pakistan with its incursions, drone bombings and assassinations -- the classic response to a failure to deal with insurgency in one country. Remember the invasion of Cambodia to save Vietnam?

-- The deeply entrenched Islamic and tribal character of Pashtun rule in the Northwest Frontier Province in Pakistan will not be transformed by invasion or war. The task requires probably several generations to start to change the deeply embedded social and psychological character of the area. War induces visceral and atavistic response.

-- Pakistan is indeed now beginning to crack under the relentless pressure directly exerted by the U.S. Anti-American impulses in Pakistan are at high pitch, strengthening Islamic radicalism and forcing reluctant acquiescence to it even by non-Islamists.

Only the withdrawal of American and NATO boots on the ground will begin to allow the process of near-frantic emotions to subside within Pakistan, and for the region to start to cool down. Pakistan is experienced in governance and is well able to deal with its own Islamists and tribalists under normal circumstances; until recently, Pakistani Islamists had one of the lowest rates of electoral success in the Muslim world.

But U.S. policies have now driven local nationalism, xenophobia and Islamism to combined fever pitch. As Washington demands that Pakistan redeem failed American policies in Afghanistan, Islamabad can no longer manage its domestic crisis."

Graham E. Fuller



VALWAYNE

12:11 PM ET
March 5, 2011

Jimmy Obama!!!!

We can all agree that Obama's foreign policy of bows, apology, and appeasement has failed miserably. You have to look back to Jimmy Carter and the Iran catastrophe to find anything comparably bad, and Obama has created an even worse mess! We don't need Obama to give any speeches, and making things worse. Let's just hope he remains silent and we muddle through until we can select a competent President in 2012!



ABURAIHI

1:36 PM ET
March 5, 2011
The revolution is against your policy.

Again, Obama administrations has to know that we are protesting against our regimes and your policy. You have to know that the people are protesting in your best allies countries. So, we are making another history and there is no place for U.S. and our undemocratic regimes.



MIGHTY MOUSE

1:43 PM ET
March 5, 2011

SAVAK r U.S.

Can you say "Shah"?

Can you say "iran"?

Can you say "SAVAK"??

Can anyone in the USG say Blowback?

see:

http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Global-Viewpoint/2011/0204/US-can-blame-itself-for-anger-in-the-Middle-East-and-start-making-peace



SAMMYBOY84SD

2:12 PM ET
March 5, 2011

Man to hell with obama he is

Man to hell with obama he is a lapdog,like all US polticians. "The only true democracy in the mid east....israel" Wow you know those zionist really own America, when they make them call an apartheid state with "jew only" roads as the only democracy in the region. Lebanon and turkey are democracies. Man america is screwed, looks they destroyed another nation



RAFIK BOUKHRIS

7:17 AM ET
March 6, 2011

Nice try, but as usual the

Nice try, but as usual the real problem : the racist and cruel Israeli domination of the oppressed Palestinian people, is # pushed under the carpet #. Nobody, including President Obama and Mr Traub, can tell the truth as it is. Practically every American, especially the politicians, the journalists, and the other intellectuals are TERRORIZED by AIPAC. The question that the whole other world is asking is : for how many more American generations ?



MIGHTY MOUSE

11:19 AM ET

March 6, 2011

Hope we should not have believed in

Let us hope the new Egypt opens up the ghetto/concentration camp of Gaza.

Why the Mideast revolts will help al-Qaeda

By Michael Scheuer
The Washington Post
Friday, March 4, 2011; 1:00 PM

The rush in the West to proclaim the advance of democracy in the Arab world has led to the propagation of an ill-conceived and dangerous corollary: that the revolts in the Middle East and North Africa also mark the irrelevance of al-Qaeda and other Islamist militant groups.

"Al Qaeda Sees History Fly By," declared the New York Times. "Uprisings Put al Qaeda on Sidelines," asserted the Wall Street Journal. And Western politicians, academics and even intelligence specialists appear to agree that, with peaceful and pro-democratic change afoot in the Middle East, the world has moved beyond al-Qaeda, leaving Osama bin Laden writhing in the dust.

If only that were true. Since bin Laden declared war against the United States in 1996, al-Qaeda's main goals have included the destruction of the Arab world's tyrannies and of Israel. The events of recent weeks only move al-Qaeda closer to those objectives.

Today, the dictatorships of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt are gone. Yemen's President Ali Abdullah Saleh is little more than the mayor of his capital city of Sanaa. And Col. Moammar Gaddafi may be on his way out in Libya, unless some knee-jerk U.S.-led intervention saves him by refocusing Libyan and other North African Islamists on what they consider an infidel threat greater than Gaddafi.

As for Israel, the fall of Mubarak - and the unsealing of Egypt's border with Gaza - pose a security disaster equal to the destruction of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. Israel's two anti-Islamist shields to the east and to the west are now history.

All of this amounts to an enormous strategic step forward for al-Qaeda. That these victories have come with virtually no investment of manpower or money by the terrorist network, and with self-defeating applause from the Facebook-obsessed, Twitter-addled West, only makes them all the sweeter for bin Laden.

Peering into the future, the autocrats' probable successors likewise offer abundant good news for al-Qaeda and kindred groups. In Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen and any other nation with a U.S.-supported tyranny that sinks in the weeks and months ahead, the role of Islamist groups will become larger - and over time perhaps dominant - if only because the populations in play are almost entirely Muslim and because Islamist groups have the most effective nationwide infrastructures to replace the old guard. And most do and will receive funding, openly or covertly, from always generous donors in Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich Sunni gulf states.

Each new regime is likely to host a more open, religion-friendly environment for speech, assembly and press freedoms than did Mubarak and his ilk. So it will be easier for media-savvy Islamist groups - whether peaceful or militant - to proselytize, publish and foment without immediate threat of arrest and incarceration. Indeed, Washington and its Western allies will dogmatically urge the new governments to maintain such freedoms, even as the Islamists capitalize on them.

The Islamists will follow the formulas for gaining power and then governing that are detailed in the Koran and the Sunnah, the prophet Muhammad's sayings and traditions. Western experts have long failed to recognize these documents as Islam's equivalent to the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Federalist Papers. In Egypt, for example, governance based on them would be far more familiar, comfortable and culturally appropriate than anything opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei and his followers could offer.

The blessing of the Arab revolts for al-Qaeda and its allies also can be seen in the opening of prisons across Egypt, Tunisia and Libya. In Egypt alone, the news media are reporting that at least 17,000 prisoners have been freed. Many of those released are not thieves and murderers, but Islamist firebrands that the regimes had jailed to protect their internal security - at times even at the request and with the funding of Washington and its allies. Indeed, many were incarcerated as a result of quiet cooperation between Western and Arab intelligence services; their release is a major setback for these efforts.

So al-Qaeda and like-minded groups are now being replenished by a steady flow of pious, veteran mujaheddin, each of whom will never forget that U.S. and other Western funds helped keep them jailed by Arab tyrants.

The revolts also mean that the United States and its Western allies must take on a far greater share of the counterterrorism operations that they previously conducted with the help of Arab regimes. The days of Mubarak, Saleh, Gaddafi and Ben Ali doing the dirty work for American, European and Israeli counterterrorism efforts are over. Soon it will be U.S. and Western special forces and intelligence services that will be ordered to capture or kill militants in Muslim lands - individuals that our tyrannical friends used to dispose of for us.

How tragic that in the war being waged against the United States by al-Qaeda and its allies precisely because of Washington's relentless intervention in the Islamic world, the U.S. government will now be forced to intervene even more - or sit on the sidelines and watch al-Qaeda build or expand bases from which to threaten U.S. security.

Of course, open and vociferous participation by Islamists in the demonstrations in Cairo, Tunis, Tripoli and elsewhere would have earned a lethal and Western-supported response from Mubarak, Ben Ali and Gaddafi. So al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood and other groups simply used a talent that long ago atrophied in the West - the ability to keep their mouths shut. As usual, the West wrongly concluded that silence connotes not strategy, but impotence and irrelevance.

Bin Laden and his peers are counting on the fact that the uprisings' secular, pro-democracy Facebookers and tweeters - so beloved of reality-averse Western journalists and politicians - are a thin veneer across a deeply pious Arab world. They are confident that these revolts are not about democratic change but about who, in societies where peaceful transfers of power are rare, will fill the vacuum left by the dictators and consolidate power. These men also know that the answer to that question will ultimately come out of the barrel of a Kalashnikov, of which they have many, along with the old tyrants' weapons stockpiles, on which they are now feasting.

Michael Scheuer, chief of the CIA's Osama bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, is an adjunct professor of security studies at Georgetown University. He is the author of the new biography "Osama bin Laden" and will be online on Monday, March 7 at 11 a.m. EST to chat. Submit your questions and comments.

Obama administration prepares for possibility of new post-revolt Islamist regimes

By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 4, 2011; 12:00 AM

The Obama administration is preparing for the prospect that Islamist governments will take hold in North Africa and the Middle East, acknowledging that the popular revolutions there will bring a more religious cast to the region's politics.

The administration is already taking steps to distinguish between various movements in the region that promote Islamic law in government. An internal assessment, ordered by the White House last month, identified large ideological differences between such movements as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and al-Qaeda that will guide the U.S. approach to the region.

"We shouldn't be afraid of Islam in the politics of these countries," said a senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal policy deliberations. "It's the behavior of political parties and governments that we will judge them on, not their relationship with Islam."

Islamist governments span a range of ideologies and ambitions, from the primitive brutality of the Taliban in Afghanistan to Turkey's Justice and Development Party, a movement with Islamist roots that heads a largely secular political system.

None of the revolutions over the past several weeks has been overtly Islamist, but there are signs that the uprisings could give way to more religious forces. An influential Yemeni cleric called this week for the U.S.-backed administration of President Ali Abdullah Saleh to be replaced with Islamist rule, and in Egypt, an Islamist theoretician has a leading role in drafting constitutional changes after President Hosni Mubarak's fall from power last month.

A number of other Islamist parties are deciding now how big a role to play in protests or post-revolution reforms.

Since taking office, President Obama has argued for a "new beginning" with Islam, suggesting that Islamic belief and democratic politics are not incompatible. But in doing so, he has alarmed some foreign-policy pragmatists and allies such as Israel, who fear that governments based on religious law will inevitably undercut democratic reforms and other Western values.

Some within the U.S. intelligence community, foreign diplomatic circles and the Republican Party say Obama's readiness to accept Islamist movements, even ones that meet certain conditions, fails to take into consideration the methodical approach many such parties adopt toward gradually transforming secular nations into Islamic states at odds with U.S. policy goals.

Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories have prospered in democratic elections and exert huge influence. Neither party, each with an armed wing, supports Israel's right to exist, nor have they renounced violence as a political tool.

And while many in the region point to Turkey as a model mixture of Islam and democracy, the ruling Islamist party is restrained by the country's highly secular army and court system, a pair of strong institutional checks that countries such as Egypt and Tunisia lack.

"The actual word and definition of Islamism does not in and of itself pose a threat," said Jonathan Peled, the spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington, citing Israel's relationship with the Turkish government, among others.

But Peled said Israel fears that "anti-democratic extremist forces could take advantage of a democratic system," as, he said, Hamas did with its 2006 victory in Palestinian parliamentary elections. Israel allowed Hamas to participate only under pressure from the George W. Bush administration as part of its stated commitment to promote Arab democracy.

"We obviously have concerns that are different than the administration's," Peled said. "We live in the neighborhood, obviously, and so we experience the results more closely."

The choice between stability and democracy has been a constant tension in U.S. foreign policy, and in few places has it been more pronounced than in the Middle East.

Many of the fallen or imperiled autocrats in the region were supported by successive U.S. governments, either as Cold War foils to the Soviet Union or as bulwarks against Islamist extremism before and after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

In his June 2009 address at Cairo University, Obama acknowledged the controversy that the Bush administration's democracy promotion stirred in the region.

"That does not lessen my commitment, however, to governments that reflect the will of the people," he said, adding that "each nation gives life to the principle in its own way, grounded in the traditions of its own people."

In the Arab Middle East, those traditions include Islam, although Obama did not directly address the religion's role in democratic politics. He said the United States "will welcome all elected, peaceful governments - provided they govern with respect for all their people."

The goal of Islamist movements after taking power is at the root of concern expressed by Republican lawmakers and others in Washington.

Paul Pillar, a longtime CIA analyst who now teaches at Georgetown University, said, "Most of the people in the intelligence community would see things on this topic very similarly to the president - that is, political Islam as a very diverse series of ideologies, all of which use a similar vocabulary, but all quite different."

"The main challenge President Obama will face is a political challenge from across the aisle, and one reinforced by Israel," said Pillar, whose portfolio included the Middle East.

As the Arab revolutions unfold, the White House is studying various Islamist movements, identifying ideological differences for clues to how they might govern in the short and long term.

The White House's internal assessment, dated Feb. 16, looked at the Muslim Brotherhood's and al-Qaeda's views on global jihad, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the United States, Islam in politics, democracy and nationalism, among others.

The report draws sharp distinctions between the ambitions of the two groups, suggesting that the Brotherhood's mix of Islam and nationalism make it a far different organization than al-Qaeda, which sees national boundaries as obstacles to restoring the Islamic caliphate.

The study also concludes that the Brotherhood criticizes the United States largely for what it perceives as America's hypocritical stance toward democracy - promoting it rhetorically but supporting leaders such as Mubarak.

"If our policy can't distinguish between al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood, we won't be able to adapt to this change," the senior administration official said. "We're also not going to allow ourselves to be driven by fear."

After Hamas won the Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006, the United States and Israel led an international boycott of the government. But Obama administration officials, reviewing that history with an eye toward the current revolutions, say the reason for the U.S. boycott was not Hamas's Islamic character but its refusal to agree to conditions such as recognizing Israel.

In a speech Monday in Geneva, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton appeared to draw on that lesson, implicitly inviting Islamist parties to participate in the region's future elections with conditions. "Political participation," Clinton said, "must be open to all people across the spectrum who reject violence, uphold equality and agree to play by the rules of democracy."