The Libya liquidation strategy

By David Ignatius
The Washington Post
Friday, April , 8:26 PM

Col. Moammar Gaddafi has always depended on one strategic resource to hold his loopy government together, and that’s cash. But as the U.N.-backed coalition tightens its squeeze, Gaddafi is slowly running out of money — and his inner circle is showing early signs of collapse.

White House officials described a pressure campaign that is seizing Gaddafi’s assets, pounding his military and establishing covert links with both the rebels and members of his government. As this chokehold tightens, U.S. officials believe that Gaddafi’s regime is likely to implode around him or he’ll be forced to flee.

This Libya strategy is based on hopes and expectations, rather than a detailed endgame. And in that sense, it still lacks the kind of strategic clarity that President Obama’s critics would like to see. But compared with the other tempests swirling through the Middle East — in Syria and Yemen, especially — this one at least seems to be heading in the right direction.

The clearest sign that the squeeze is working was the defection Wednesday of Musa Kusa, Libya’s foreign minister and longtime intelligence chief for Gaddafi. He fled to Britain after what an intelligence source said was a ruse in which Kusa claimed to be heading to Tunisia to make a secret sale of refined oil products. The cover story illustrates Gaddafi’s desperate need for funds.

U.S. officials say that many others in the Gaddafi entourage have been in recent contact with the United States or its allies. These include the current intelligence chief, Abdullah al-Senussi, who helped safeguard the evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli in February, and other Cabinet ministers. The United States has also had indirect contact with members of Gaddafi’s family, who are said to be unhappy with events and looking for a way out.

With Kusa’s flight, the trickle of defections may turn into a flood. Ali Abdussalm Treki, a former foreign minister, fled to Egypt Thursday. One other key cabinet official was said to be negotiating the details of his departure. “I belong to you now; tell me what to do,” this cabinet member is said to have told an intermediary.

The CIA is sending covert teams into Libya to help undermine Gaddafi further. At present there are only several dozen operatives, including full-time case officers from the Special Activities Division, which manages covert actions, supplemented by former officers, known internally as “cadres,” who are on direct contract to the agency. Their tasks include providing clandestine communications links for the Libyan opposition, contacting and assessing the rebels, and providing money and other assistance to Libyans to break with Gaddafi.

The intelligence teams may also assist NATO forces in targeting remaining nodes of Gaddafi’s military, such as ammunition dumps, command-and-control centers, and tanks and armor. On Wednesday, a coordinated air assault is said to have obliterated a Libyan tank column on the highway near Gaddafi’s hometown of Sirte. The agency has some experience in Libya thanks to previous covert actions there, including one code-named “Sprint” some years ago.

An unpleasant but necessary task ahead is providing alternative sources of money to the tribal leaders Gaddafi has bribed over the 40 years of his rule, including those of his own tribe, the Gaddafah. If this can be done, the Libyan leader’s last strong pillars of support will fall away.

A measure of Libya’s inherent weakness came from Kusa himself, who is said to have told CIA officers several years ago, after the ouster of Saddam Hussein, how much more vulnerable Libya was to attack. “We are a [expletive] beach!” he supposedly remarked.

As in Iraq, the real challenge in Libya will be assembling a stable successor government. U.S. officials expect that this time, the operation will be overseen by the United Nations and its special representative for Libya, Abdul-Illah Khatib, a Jordanian diplomat. His immediate task is to coordinate contacts between the rebels and the regime. Arab cover is also coming from Qatar, which will host the next meeting of the “contact group” overseeing the anti-Gaddafi operation.

A lot of things could still go wrong. When backed into corners in the past, Gaddafi has used terrorism to fight back. He is said to have chemical weapons and perhaps other unconventional tools. But his machine needs cash, and an intelligence source said that his bankroll will last him another two to three months. From this financial perspective, Gaddafi could be described as a dictator in liquidation.

davidignatius@washpost.com

Facebook sued for $1 billion over Intifada page

Fri Apr 1, 7:58 pm ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Facebook and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg have been hit with a lawsuit seeking more than $1 billion in damages over a page on the social network which called for a "Third Intifada" against Israel.

Facebook this week shut down the "Third Intifada" page, which had almost 500,000 fans, but the lawsuit filed in a court here claims that the social network showed "negligence" by not quickly responding to appeals to remove the page.

Besides awarding damages, the complaint calls on the court to bar Facebook "from allowing the Facebook page titled 'Third Palestinian Intifada,' and other related and similar sites, which advocate violence and death to Jews."

The suit, a copy of which was obtained by technology blog TechCrunch, was filed in DC Superior Court by Larry Klayman, who describes himself in the complaint as "an American citizen of Jewish origin" who is "active in matters concerning the security of Israel and all people."

Klayman also identifies himself as the founder of Freedom Watch, whose website describes it as a political advocacy group dedicated to protecting privacy, free speech and other rights and "our national sovereignty against the incompetent, terrorist state-controlled United Nations."

Facebook dismissed the case as "without merit" and said it would fight.

"While we haven't been served with a complaint, we believe the case is without merit and we will fight it vigorously," a Facebook spokesman said.

Facebook shut down the page on Tuesday, several days after Israeli Public Diplomacy Minister Yuli Edelstein sent a letter to Zuckerberg urging him to remove it.

Facebook said the page was initially tolerated because it "began as a call for peaceful protest" but direct calls for violence began appearing and the page was removed for violating Facebook's policies.

Reconsidering the Goldstone Report on Israel and war crimes

By Richard Goldstone
The Washington Post
Friday, April , 8:42 PM

We know a lot more today about what happened in the Gaza war of 2008-09 than we did when I chaired the fact-finding mission appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council that produced what has come to be known as the Goldstone Report. If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.

The final report by the U.N. committee of independent experts — chaired by former New York judge Mary McGowan Davis — that followed up on the recommendations of the Goldstone Report has found that “Israel has dedicated significant resources to investigate over 400 allegations of operational misconduct in Gaza” while “the de facto authorities (i.e., Hamas) have not conducted any investigations into the launching of rocket and mortar attacks against Israel.”

Our report found evidence of potential war crimes and “possibly crimes against humanity” by both Israel and Hamas. That the crimes allegedly committed by Hamas were intentional goes without saying — its rockets were purposefully and indiscriminately aimed at civilian targets.

The allegations of intentionality by Israel were based on the deaths of and injuries to civilians in situations where our fact-finding mission had no evidence on which to draw any other reasonable conclusion. While the investigations published by the Israeli military and recognized in the U.N. committee’s report have established the validity of some incidents that we investigated in cases involving individual soldiers, they also indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.

For example, the most serious attack the Goldstone Report focused on was the killing of some 29 members of the al-Simouni family in their home. The shelling of the home was apparently the consequence of an Israeli commander’s erroneous interpretation of a drone image, and an Israeli officer is under investigation for having ordered the attack. While the length of this investigation is frustrating, it appears that an appropriate process is underway, and I am confident that if the officer is found to have been negligent, Israel will respond accordingly. The purpose of these investigations, as I have always said, is to ensure accountability for improper actions, not to second-guess, with the benefit of hindsight, commanders making difficult battlefield decisions.

While I welcome Israel’s investigations into allegations, I share the concerns reflected in the McGowan Davis report that few of Israel’s inquiries have been concluded and believe that the proceedings should have been held in a public forum. Although the Israeli evidence that has emerged since publication of our report doesn’t negate the tragic loss of civilian life, I regret that our fact-finding mission did not have such evidence explaining the circumstances in which we said civilians in Gaza were targeted, because it probably would have influenced our findings about intentionality and war crimes.

Israel’s lack of cooperation with our investigation meant that we were not able to corroborate how many Gazans killed were civilians and how many were combatants. The Israeli military’s numbers have turned out to be similar to those recently furnished by Hamas (although Hamas may have reason to inflate the number of its combatants).

As I indicated from the very beginning, I would have welcomed Israel’s cooperation. The purpose of the Goldstone Report was never to prove a foregone conclusion against Israel. I insisted on changing the original mandate adopted by the Human Rights Council, which was skewed against Israel. I have always been clear that Israel, like any other sovereign nation, has the right and obligation to defend itself and its citizens against attacks from abroad and within. Something that has not been recognized often enough is the fact that our report marked the first time illegal acts of terrorism from Hamas were being investigated and condemned by the United Nations. I had hoped that our inquiry into all aspects of the Gaza conflict would begin a new era of evenhandedness at the U.N. Human Rights Council, whose history of bias against Israel cannot be doubted.

Some have charged that the process we followed did not live up to judicial standards. To be clear: Our mission was in no way a judicial or even quasi-judicial proceeding. We did not investigate criminal conduct on the part of any individual in Israel, Gaza or the West Bank. We made our recommendations based on the record before us, which unfortunately did not include any evidence provided by the Israeli government. Indeed, our main recommendation was for each party to investigate, transparently and in good faith, the incidents referred to in our report. McGowan Davis has found that Israel has done this to a significant degree; Hamas has done nothing.

Some have suggested that it was absurd to expect Hamas, an organization that has a policy to destroy the state of Israel, to investigate what we said were serious war crimes. It was my hope, even if unrealistic, that Hamas would do so, especially if Israel conducted its own investigations. At minimum I hoped that in the face of a clear finding that its members were committing serious war crimes, Hamas would curtail its attacks. Sadly, that has not been the case. Hundreds more rockets and mortar rounds have been directed at civilian targets in southern Israel. That comparatively few Israelis have been killed by the unlawful rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza in no way minimizes the criminality. The U.N. Human Rights Council should condemn these heinous acts in the strongest terms.

In the end, asking Hamas to investigate may have been a mistaken enterprise. So, too, the Human Rights Council should condemn the inexcusable and cold-blooded recent slaughter of a young Israeli couple and three of their small children in their beds.

I continue to believe in the cause of establishing and applying international law to protracted and deadly conflicts. Our report has led to numerous “lessons learned” and policy changes, including the adoption of new Israel Defense Forces procedures for protecting civilians in cases of urban warfare and limiting the use of white phosphorus in civilian areas. The Palestinian Authority established an independent inquiry into our allegations of human rights abuses — assassinations, torture and illegal detentions — perpetrated by Fatah in the West Bank, especially against members of Hamas. Most of those allegations were confirmed by this inquiry. Regrettably, there has been no effort by Hamas in Gaza to investigate the allegations of its war crimes and possible crimes against humanity.

Simply put, the laws of armed conflict apply no less to non-state actors such as Hamas than they do to national armies. Ensuring that non-state actors respect these principles, and are investigated when they fail to do so, is one of the most significant challenges facing the law of armed conflict. Only if all parties to armed conflicts are held to these standards will we be able to protect civilians who, through no choice of their own, are caught up in war.

The writer, a retired justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa and former chief prosecutor of the U.N. International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, chaired the U.N. fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict.

Egypt likely to face more difficult relations with Israel, U.S.

By Edward Cody, Wednesday, March 30, 4:41 PM
The Washington Post

CAIRO — Whatever new government emerges from the uprising in Tahrir Square, Egypt’s relations with Israel and the United States are likely to become more difficult in the months ahead with an infusion of Arab nationalism and skepticism about Egypt’s landmark peace treaty with Israel.

Many of those who helped oust President Hosni Mubarak, including secular democracy activists and Muslim Brotherhood leaders, say the 32-year-old treaty should be respected for now, since Egypt is in political limbo and overwhelmed by internal upheavals. But they add that, when stability is restored, the pact should be submitted to the Egyptian people for approval, through a new parliament scheduled to be elected in September and then perhaps in a public referendum.

The desire to reconsider the treaty marks a clear difference with the the policy of the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which soon after Mubarak’s Feb. 11 departure declared that Egypt would respect all its international commitments, including the treaty with Israel. The open-ended declaration, reportedly made at U.S. urging, was designed to reassure Israel, where Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had warned that his nation faced uncharted dangers in the months ahead because of the revolts across the Arab world.

Much about Egypt’s policy toward Israel will be determined by the relationships that emerge between the military and the civilian government due to be elected later this year, which is expected to include representatives of many of the groups that brought down Mubarak.

“There was no real end to the war with Israel, just a truce,” said Shadi Mohammed, a 26-year-old leader of the April 6 Movement that helped promote the Tahrir Square demonstrations. “That’s just my personal opinion, but there are a lot of people who think like I do.”

Mohammed Maher, a Muslim Brotherhood activist helping organize for the upcoming parliamentary vote, said that if his group gains influence through the elections, Egypt is likely to pursue closer ties with Gaza, opening border crossings and promoting trade as a way to undermine the Israeli blockade. The Brotherhood traditionally has focused on Gaza because the territory’s ruling Palestinian group, the Islamic Resistance Movement, known as Hamas, is an offshoot of the Brotherhood.

Shady Ghazali Harb, a 32-year-old surgeon in the Democratic Front Party who supports Mohamed ElBaradei, the former U.N. nuclear agency chief, also advocated stronger action to relieve besieged Palestinians in Gaza. “The environment there is inhuman,” he said.

These goals for Gaza would mark a sharp change from the way Israel and Egypt have done business in recent years.

Mubarak, eager to maintain economic and military aid from the United States, cooperated closely with Israel in Gaza security matters, including attempts to halt arms and other smuggling along the border. The Egyptian intelligence chief, Gen. Omar Suleiman, was a trusted intermediary between the Israeli government and Palestinian militant groups. Suleiman is long gone, having dropped out of sight along with Mubarak.

“Mubarak believed the door to the United States was through Israel,” said Mona Makram-Ebeid, a founding member of the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs and a former member of parliament who lectures at the American University in Cairo. “But that is no more.”

The Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, said in a Fox News interview last week that the Muslim Brotherhood’s expanded role represents a threat to Israel and to Egypt itself.

But he expressed confidence that whatever government comes to power in Cairo will see its relationships with Israel, the United States and Europe as keys to maintaining economic health in this nation of 80 million mostly poor people. The United States has poured $2 billion a year into Egypt in military and economic aid since the treaty with Israel was signed in 1979.

Harb, the Elbaradei supporter, said his group thinks the treaty obligates Israel to make more concessions in negotiations with the Palestinians. “We are for sticking by the treaty,” he said, “but we are also seeking a peace based on justice between Israel and the Palestinians.”

Makram-Ebeid, who sits on the protesters’ Council of Trustees of the Revolution, suggested treaty provisions limiting the number of Egyptian soldiers stationed along the Gaza border should be reviewed. But the main difference in Egyptian foreign policy is likely to be a demand for respect, she said, adding that many Egyptians felt humiliated by what she described as servile willingness by Mubarak to do what he was told by Washington.

“No more of the headmaster telling us what to do,” she said.

Makram-Ebeid said she told the same thing, in more diplomatic language, to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton during a meeting in Cairo two weeks ago.

Clinton had sought to meet with a range of pro-democracy leaders in addition to the military government, but a number of protest leaders refused her invitation. Clinton generated outrage during the protests here by suggesting Mubarak should stay in power to oversee a transition to new elections in the fall. Harb, whose group declined to talk with Clinton, said she had turned a blind eye to Mubarak’s repression because keeping him around would have been more comfortable for U.S. policy.

But Mohammed, the April 6 activist, said most of the protest leaders boycotted Clinton not because of her personal stand, and not even because she represented the United States, but because they decided not to be seen with any foreign leaders. “Things are very sensitive right now,” he added.

codyej@washpost.com

Correspondent Janine Zacharia in Jerusalem and special correspondent Muhammad Mansour in Cairo contributed to this report.

Nightly News stays mum on GE’s $0 tax bill

By Chris Lehmann Wed Mar 30, 8:50 am ET
Yahoo News

As the New Yorker's former press critic, A.J. Liebling, famously said, "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." Perhaps that quotation is framed somewhere in a boardroom at the General Electric Corp., which owns NBC News.

In spite of robust profits of $14.2 billion worldwide, GE has calculated a corporate tax bill for 2010 that adds up to zero, via a creative series of tax referrals and revenue shifts. (This was, indeed, the second year running that the company—which has an enormous, and famously nimble, 975-employee tax division, led by former Treasury official John Samuels—paid nothing in U.S. taxes; indeed by claiming a series of losses and deductions, GE came up with a negative tax of 10.5 percent in the admittedly dismal business year of 2009, and realized a $1.5 billion "tax benefit.")

The curious thing about this year's tax story is that it turned up in many major news outlets, with one key exception: NBC News. As the Washington Post's Paul Farhi notes, the network's "Nightly News" broadcast, hosted by Brian Williams, has not mentioned anything about its corporate parent's resourceful accounting, even though the story has been in wide circulation in the business and general-interest press for nearly a week. "This was a straightforward news decision, the kind we make daily around here" network spokeswoman Lauren Kapp told the Post.

One press critic who begs to differ: Daily Show host Jon Stewart, who noted that the Nightly News found the time for a dispatch on the inclusion of slang expressions in the Oxford English Dictionary, such as "LOL" and "OMG." Of course, Comedy Central's corporate parent, Viacom, is also no slouch when it comes to tax strategy: Earlier this year it sold its struggling videogame unit Harmonix for $50—so that it could claim a tax credit of $50 million.

Every Tyrant Makes the Same Mistake in the Arab Uprisings

Published on Sunday, March 27, 2011 by the Independent/UK
by Patrick Cockburn

The despots who have ruled the Arab world for half a century are not giving up without a fight. In the southern Syrian city of Dara, security forces last week machine-gunned pro-democracy protesters in a mosque, killing 44 of them, and then faked evidence to pretend they were a gang of kidnappers. In the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, a few days earlier, snipers firing from high buildings shot dead or wounded 300 people at a rally demanding the President step down.

In Syria and Yemen, state-sponsored violence has proved counter-effective. Protesters were enraged rather than intimidated. A remarkable aspect of the Arab uprisings is that ruler after ruler is making the same mistakes that brought down Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. Local tyrants, from Muammar Gaddafi in Libya to Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen, behave as if they had joined a collective political suicide pact whereby they alternate mindless violence and inadequate concessions in just the right quantities to discredit themselves and undermine their regimes.

Recipes for staying in power that have served them so well since the early 1970s suddenly don't work any more. This affects almost all the Arab states, monarchies as well republics, since they have functioned in approximately the same way.

The typical Arab state was based, with some local variations, on a single model: a kleptomaniac elite, often originating in the army and united by sect, tribe or extended family, monopolises power at the top. The government is a corrupt and bloated patronage machine used to reward cronies and followers. The most animate part of the state is the Mukhabarat, as the security services are generally known, which crushes all forms of dissent.

This type of autocracy was buttressed in the Middle East and North Africa by huge oil revenues. Those without oil themselves could get aid from those who had it. Oil states are, by their nature, undemocratic.

The Arab autocracies could also look to superpower backing which, up to 1990, meant the US and the Soviet Union. After the fall of Communism the US was the sole contender for hegemony, though this was never quite complete because Washington failed to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian struggle or overthrow the government in Tehran.

For the states most dependent on America, such as Egypt and Jordan, US political domination meant control of crucial security institutions. For instance, the then director of the CIA, General Michael Hayden, tried to persuade the newly elected Barack Obama to keep him in his job, according to Bob Woodward's book Obama's Wars, by stressing the tens of millions of dollars the CIA was pumping into foreign intelligence services. He cited in particular the Jordanian General Intelligence Department which, he said, the CIA "owned".

US predominance in the region started to be undermined when President Bush overplayed his hand by invading and then failing to hold Iraq. The neocons spoke openly of regime change in Damascus and Tehran, while the US gave full support to Israel as it ruthlessly colonised the West Bank. America's Arab allies discredited themselves in the eyes of their own people by conniving in or secretly supporting Israel's bombardment of Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza in 2008 and 2009.

It is easy in retrospect to dwell on the fragility of the Arab states if they ever came under sustained pressure. But until a few months ago they appeared to be the only model, not just for rulers, but for those who wanted to replace them. Yasser Arafat and Fatah, having fought for so long for a Palestinian homeland, in the 1990s established in the West Bank and Gaza a parody of the corrupt Arab police state. The Iraqi Shia religious parties, elected to form a government in 2005, soon began to set up a Shia-dominated version of Saddam Hussein's regime. By one count, there are now eight or nine competing intelligence services, and prisoners are routinely tortured.

So is the old model of the Arab security state as moribund as it ought to be? Gaddafi in Libya, Saleh of Yemen, Bashar al-Assad of Syria, the Khalifa royal family of Bahrain evidently do not think so. In Tunisia and Egypt, the army and the ruling class assented to Ben Ali and Mubarak being deposed in order to prevent an uprising turning into a revolution. Gaddafi, with his mix of buffoonery and realpolitik, is showing not so much that he has great support but that his opponents are united only in wanting to be rid of him.

Many things have changed in the Middle East and North Africa, but not everything. The influence of Facebook and Twitter are exaggerated, but satellite television – and, above all, al-Jazeera – the mobile phone, and the internet have been crucial in reducing government control of information and communications. In the 1950s and 1960s, coup-makers would make taking over the state radio station a priority. This would not do them much good today.

Arab rulers can still press some buttons that work. For instance, Western pundits have been querying whether the fall of Saleh would open the door to al-Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula. The presence of this group of about 300 members in a country of 24 million has been skilfully exploited by the regime to extract aid and weapons from the US. In Bahrain, the monarchy, having brutally suppressed protesters, is pretending that unrest among the Shia majority was anti-Sunni and orchestrated by Iran. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia is trying to quell unrest by repressing it and buying off protesters with billions of dollars.

Such ploys may succeed for a time but the day of the classic Arab security state is surely over.

Libya, the “Responsibility to Protect,” and Double-Standards

Published on Sunday, March 27, 2011 by Foreign Policy in Focus
by Stephen Zunes

Reasonable people can disagree on the appropriateness of the decision by the United States and its NATO allies to attack Libya in the wake of the Gadaffi regime’s offensive against rebel-held cities under the doctrine of “the responsibility to protect.” Though the intervention likely prevented a slaughter, there is no guarantee that it won’t simply protract a bloody military stalemate that could result in at least as many civilian deaths. There are any number of other legitimate concerns raised by those distressed over the fact that there is now a third country in the greater Middle East in which the United States has found itself at war. At the same time, there are also legitimate arguments being made by prominent human rights advocates arguing that there is still a moral imperative for the use of force to avoid a large-scale massacre by a criminal regime.

In any case, let’s be clear: Even if one can justify the war on Libya on humanitarian grounds, this is probably not why it’s actually being fought.

The establishment of a no-fly zone was supported by the League of Arab States, an organization composed primarily of pro-Western autocracies which have shown little hesitance in brutally suppressing their own pro-democracy struggles. There was initially a fair amount of popular support within many Arab countries – even among some pro-democracy activists normally critical of U.S. interventionism – for some limited outside assistance to prevent the Libyan opposition from being wiped out. However, the air and missile strikes have gone well beyond simply protecting civilians from bombings by pro-government forces to active support for an armed opposition. This, combined with the failure of rebels to take greater advantage of the large-scale outside support to regain the offensive, has resulted in growing nervousness, even from top officials. As Arab League secretary general Amr Mussa told reporters, "What has happened in Libya differs from the goal of imposing a no-fly zone and what we want is the protection of civilians and not bombing other civilians."

Despite its potential of being abused, the concept of an international “responsibility to protect” is both legally and morally valid in theory. National sovereignty should not provide a tyrant protection to unleash a genocidal campaign against his own people. However, as horrific as the military response by Gaddafi towards civilians in suppressing both armed and nonviolent forms of resistance against his autocratic rule, it would naïve to claim that foreign intervention is prompted by Western leaders’ concern about protecting civilian lives. The United States, Great Britain and France have each allied with governments – such as Guatemala, Indonesia, Colombia, and Zaire – which, in recent decades, have engaged in the slaughter of civilians as bad or worse as had been occurring in Libya.

The number of civilian casualties from Gaddafi’s attacks is difficult to verify. Some estimates run as high as 8,000, some as low as 1,000, but most estimates put the number of civilians killed during the five weeks between the start of the uprising and the Western intervention country at approximately 1,700 people, roughly the same number of civilians killed during Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon and its 2008 war on the Gaza Strip combined. Rather than referring those responsible to the International Criminal Court (ICC) or engage in military intervention to stop the slaughter, as has been the case of Libya, both the U.S. Congress and the administration vigorously defended Israel’s assaults of heavily-populated civilian areas and condemned UN agencies and leading international jurists for documenting Israeli violations of international humanitarian law and for recommending that officials of both Israel and its Arab adversaries suspected of war crimes be referred to the ICC.

The principal intellectual advocate of the Responsibility to Protect is Gareth Evans, former head of the International Crisis Group, who has also emerged as one of the most vocal proponents of what he referred to as “the overwhelming moral case” for military intervention against Gaddafi. Ironically, as Australian foreign minister, Evans was a major defender of Indonesia’s genocidal war against East Timor, which took the lives of over 200,000 civilians, and repeatedly downplayed and even covered up for Indonesian war crimes.

Hypocrisy and double-standards regarding military intervention does not automatically mean that military intervention in this case is necessarily wrong. Though many of us familiar with Libya remain dubious, it cannot be ruled out that events could transpire in such a way that this intervention could prove to have saved lives, brought stability, and promoted a democratic transition. However, it would be naïve to believe that the attacks on Libya are motivated primarily by humanitarian concerns. Certainly, there aren’t many Libyans – even those who support foreign intervention on behalf of the uprising – who believe this. Ongoing U.S. support of the Yemeni and Bahraini regimes as they brutally suppress nonviolent pro-democracy protesters raises questions as to why the U.S. is so quick to intervene militarily against the Libyan regime suppressing an armed rebellion by those whose commitment to democracy in more suspect.

As a result, any honest debate on Libya should not be based just upon the question as to whether foreign military intervention is necessary to stop widespread repression. It should also be as to whether the United States should take sides in a civil war. It should also be as to whether democracy can be imposed through air strikes. It should also be as to whether the best way to overthrow dictators is through a foreign-backed armed uprising or – as demonstrated in Egypt, Tunisia, Serbia, Chile, the Philippines, Indonesia, Poland, and dozens of other countries – whether the people of the affected countries themselves be allowed to do so through the power of mass strategic nonviolent action.

Our Dance with Arab Dictators

Published on Sunday, March 27, 2011 by Toronto Star
by Haroon Siddiqui

When we allow ourselves to be pushed into thinking about a people and a region as a monolith, sans diversity and differences, we view them only in stark stereotypes. We allow racist notions to become respectable.

Thus “the Arab street,” a contemptuous phrase the media dare not use for public opinion elsewhere. There is no “Canadian street.” No “American street.” No “British street.” No “French street.” But Arab public opinion, emanating in the street — emotional and irrational — is to be dismissed.

Similarly, we are told that all Arabs/Muslims are hard-wired to mistreat women. Like blacks being prone to violence and Catholics to abusing boys.

And in the middle of this glorious Arab spring, we are instructed to keep our enthusiasm in check and ponder instead that democracy may not be part of the Arab DNA.

These crude formulations do serve a purpose. They keep the focus of Arab troubles exclusively on Arabs, as though we have had no part in the mess.

For decades, Arabs have been denied democracy mostly by client regimes of the United States and Europe that financed and trained the dictators’ security set-ups. The mandate of these dreaded outfits has been to keep “the street” quiet, lest it resonate with what we did not want to hear.

Of the 22 members of the Arab League (18 really, if you ignore Comoros, Mauritania, Djibouti and Somalia), eight are monarchies — Jordan, Morocco and the six members of the oil-rich Gulf Cooperation Council. They are all American/western allies. They are described by our politicians and pundits as “moderate.” But they are tyrannies, in varying degrees. Six of them use torture.

There are eight other autocratic states — Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Sudan and the Palestinian Authority. Six and a half (Mahmoud Abbas being only half the PA) have been western allies. Most maintain torture chambers, which the U.S. has rented for anti-terror interrogations.

All seven have had entrenched dictatorships, five of them western allies at some point or another (Hosni Mubarak, 30 years; Moammar Gadhafi, 42 years; Abdullah Saleh, 33 years; Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, 23 years; Abdelaziz Bouteflika, 12 years). Saddam Hussein also belonged in that club until he invaded Kuwait in 1991.

Our friends are all corrupt. The monarchs treat the state treasury as their own and won’t divulge the dividing line between state and personal funds. Others have found ways to monetize power and amass fortunes (Mubarak $5 billion; Gadhafi $10 billion; Ben Ali $8 billion). We winked and nodded, as though the deal was that we’d enrich them for services rendered.

The West helped deny democracy to the Arabs in order to protect oil and ensure security for Israel.

When George W. Bush decided in 2003 to change that policy — “stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty” — he opted for war to bring democracy to Iraq. He adopted the same model, retroactively, in Afghanistan. And when Israel invaded Lebanon in 2006, Condoleezza Rice called it “the birth pangs of the new Middle East.”

The Arab masses are giving us an alternate model: a non-violent grassroots demand for pluralistic and transparent democracy. They are promoting it with nothing more than raw courage, only to run into the guns, bullets, tanks and tear gas supplied, in most cases, by the West.

These brave reformers are not unaware of our role in their plight. Yet they are not blaming us or Israel. It’s a sign either of their generosity of spirit or their more immediate concerns of surviving another day.

Their uprisings — each shaped by the particular circumstances of their nations and the depth of depravity of their respective rulers — have exposed the moral and even strategic bankruptcy of the western approach. Oil is available to us, yes, but at usurious rates. And Israel does not have long-term security.

A more democratic order would no more restrict the flow of oil than trade is hindered between democracies. Rather, the opposite dictum would apply: that democracy is good for business. Similarly, democracy promotes stability and peace.

Rather than being held hostage by their puppets, the U.S. and its allies must use their clout to back pro-democracy forces. The West clearly cannot military intervene everywhere. However, waging war in the name of humanitarian intervention in Libya but turning a blind eye to Bahrain and Yemen is too self-serving to ignore.

The Arab Awakening is as much about us as it is about them.

I wish you Egypt!

A Message to People of Conscience in the West

By OMAR BARGHOUTI
CounterPunch
March 23, 2011

I wish you empowerment to resist; to fight for social and economic justice; to win your real freedom and equal rights.

I wish you the will and skill to break out of your carefully concealed prison walls. See, in our part of the world, prison walls and thick inviolable doors are all too overt, obvious, over-bearing, choking; this is why we remain restive, rebellious, agitated, and always in preparation for our day of freedom, of light, when we gather a critical mass of people power enough to cross all the hitherto categorical red lines. We can then smash the thick, cold ugly, rusty chains that have incarcerated our minds and bodies for all our lives like the overpowering stench of a rotting corpse in our claustrophobic prison cell.
Your prison cells, however, are quite different. The walls are well hidden lest they evoke your will to resist. There is no door to your prison cell -- you may roam about "freely," never recognizing the much larger prison you are still confined to.

I wish you Egypt so you can decolonize your minds, for only then can you envision real liberty, real justice, real equality, and real dignity.omar

I wish you Egypt so you can tear apart the sheet with the multiple-choice question, "what do you want?", for all the answers you are given are dead wrong. Your only choice there seems to be between evil and a lesser one.

I wish you Egypt so you can, like the Tunisians, the Egyptians, the Libyans, the Bahrainis, the Yemenis, and certainly the Palestinians, shout "No! We do not want to select the least wrong answer. We want another choice altogether that is not on your damned list." Given the choice between slavery and death, we unequivocally opt for freedom and dignified life -- no slavery, and no death.

I wish you Egypt so you can collectively, democratically, and responsibly re-build your societies; to reset the rules so as to serve the people, not savage capital and its banking arm; to end racism and all sorts of discrimination; to look after and be in harmony with the environment; to cut wars and war crimes, not jobs, benefits and public services; to invest in education and healthcare, not in fossil fuel and weapons research; to overthrow the repressive, tyrannical rule of multinationals; and to get the hell out of Afghanistan, Iraq, and everywhere else where under the guise of "spreading democracy" your self-righteous crusades have spread social and cultural disintegration, abject poverty and utter hopelessness.

I wish you Egypt so you can fulfill your countries' legal and moral obligations to help rebuild the ravished, de-developed economies and societies of your former -- or current -- colonies, so that their young men can find their own homelands viable, livable and lovable again, instead of risking death -- or worse -- on the high seas to reach your mirage-washed shores, giving up loved ones and a place they once called home. You see, they're "here" because you were there... and we all know what you did there!

I wish you Egypt so you can rekindle the spirit of the South African anti-apartheid struggle by holding Israel accountable to international law and universal principles of human rights, by adopting boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS), called for by an overwhelming majority in Palestinian civil society. There is no more effective, non-violent way to end Israel's occupation, racial discrimination and decades-old denial of the UN-sanctioned right of Palestinian refugees to return.

Our oppression and yours are deeply interrelated and intertwined -- it is never a zero-sum game! Our joint struggle for universal rights and freedoms is not merely a self gratifying slogan that we raise; rather, it is a fight for true emancipation and self determination, an idea whose time has vociferously arrived.

After Egypt, it is our time. It is time for Palestinian freedom and justice. It is time for all the people of this world, particularly the most exploited and downtrodden, to reassert our common humanity and reclaim control over our common destiny.

I wish you Egypt!

Omar Barghouti is a Palestinian human rights activist, former resident of Egypt, and author of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS): The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights (Haymarket: 2011)