Archived news and commentary: March 28 - April 3, 2005

2005/03/28 - 2005/04/03
2005/03/21 - 2005/03/27
2005/03/14 - 2005/03/20
2005/03/07 - 2005/03/13
2005/02/28 - 2005/03/06
2005/02/21 - 2005/02/27

› From 2001/09/11 -

Sunday, April 3, 2005

News and commentary:

"Terror Broker" (Sami Yousafzai and Ron Moreau, Newsweek, from the 2005/04/11 issue)
"Hardly anyone was more surprised by Iraq's insurgency than Osama bin Laden. The terrorist chief had never foreseen its sudden, ferocious spread, and he was likewise unprepared for the abrupt rise of its most homicidal commander, Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi. Bin Laden and his aides knew the Jordanian-born Palestinian from Zarqawi's Afghan days, but mostly as a short-tempered bully and a troublemaker. So in the late summer of 2003, unwilling to sit on the sidelines, bin Laden sent two of his most trusted men to assess the Iraqi resistance and carve out a leading role for Al Qaeda. ...
Zarqawi had "a terrifying face," al-Iraqi recalled later. But the envoy said he knew at once that Zarqawi was exactly what Al Qaeda needed. "There is no doubt that he is the best man to lead foreign and Iraqi insurgents in Iraq," al-Iraqi told bin Laden when he got back to the caves, according to Zabihullah's account. "He deserves our support." ...
The envoy is proud of his work. "I'm the person who broke the silence and solved the difficulties between Zarqawi and the Al Qaeda leadership," he told Zabihullah. Donations to Al Qaeda's coffers had dried up as bin Laden's top men were killed or captured. Now private money is once again flooding in. Bin Laden himself is looking more confident and relaxed — maybe too relaxed, al-Iraqi said. When he visited the Qaeda leader in November, the envoy noticed fewer checkpoints than previously along the trail. "The sheik has a new mentality and is more healthy," he told Zabi-hullah. On his last visit to Iraq, the envoy got an offer from Zarqawi: if life got too risky in the mountains along Pakistan's border, bin Laden would be welcome to take refuge with him among the insurgents in Iraq. The envoy politely declined. At present, the Qaeda leader seems to be doing just fine where he is."

"Pak nuke scientist A Q Khan met Osama: Report" (Sify.com, 2005/04/03)
"New Delhi: Pakistani scientists Abdul Qadeer Khan and Sultan Bashiruddin Mehmood had held meetings with Osama bin Laden and other Al-Qaeda leaders, exchanged letters with militant organisations like the Lashkar-e-Toiba and attended their gatherings and rallies, a media report said.
"When the CIA searched (Sultan Bashiruddin) Mehmood’s UTN (Umma Tameere-Nau) office in Kabul, they found large amounts of data on the construction and maintenance of nuclear weapons from the Kahuta laboratories. It also found letters exchanged between the UTN and Islamist extremist organisations including Lashkar-e-Toiba", a report in Pakistani weekly The Friday Times said.
Mehmood, a close confidante of A Q Khan and a former director of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, was arrested on October 23, 2001, at the headquarters of the UTN which he had set up for 'humanitarian work in Afghanistan.'"

"Insurgents Attack Iraq's Abu Ghraib Prison" (Antonio Castaneda, AP/Yahoo! News, 2005/04/03)
"Insurgents detonated car bombs and fired rocket propelled grenades at the Abu Ghraib prison, injuring 44 U.S. forces after a period of declining attacks that had raised hopes the insurgency might be weakening. ...
Late Saturday, dozens of insurgents attacked the infamous Abu Ghraib prison, resulting in a clash that lasted about 40 minutes, 1st Lt. Adam Rondeau said. He added that it was unclear if the clash was aimed at helping prisoners escape, although the militants were unable to penetrate the prison's walls and no detainees were set free.
"This was obviously a very well-organized attack and a very big attack," Rondeau said.
On Sunday, U.S. military officials raised the casualty toll from 20 to 44 U.S. soldiers and Marines wounded. Officials said 13 prisoners were also injured.
Lt. Col. Guy Rudisill said one attacker was killed in the clash, but that none was detained. He didn't give further details.
Some soldiers were evacuated with serious injuries, officials said, but many wounds were minor and treated at the scene."

"Don't be surprised by the UN's corruption" (Anne Applebaum, The Sunday Telegraph, 2005/04/03)
"Nevertheless, the report does not, as Annan Senior claimed this week, amount to an "exoneration". Despite the fact that it did not find the Secretary General personally guilty of corruption, the portrait of his office that emerges from the report is not exactly savoury. When they began their work, the investigators discovered that Mr Annan's former chief of staff, Iqbal Riza, had just destroyed three years' worth of documents - a procedure that began, perhaps not coincidentally, right after the investigation was launched. They also discovered that the head of the United Nations' office of internal oversight, Dileep Nair, had paid the salary of a staff member using money that had been designated for the administration of the oil-for-food programme - which was particularly disturbing, given that Nair was the person responsible for monitoring UN bureaucrats, and that the staff member was employed to design an anti-corruption programme. These new revelations, when added to the dodgy procurement practices and corruption outlined in the previous oil-for-food investigation report - as well as recent revelations of misconduct by UN peacekeepers and sexual harassment scandals among UN bureaucrats - don't exactly make the United Nations look like a model of corporate probity, let alone an organisation that is capable of bringing peace to various war-torn bits of the world." (See also: "Panel Says Annan Didn't Intervene in Iraq Contract" (Warren Hoge, The New York Times, 2005/03/30))

"Muscular Utopianism: I used to be a liberal interventionist. Now I'm a realist" (David Rieff, The Wall Street Journal, 2005/04/03)
"Does the lack of democracy in the world really pose the kind of existential threat to the U.S. that most Americans believed the Soviet empire did during the Cold War? And even if it does, do we really have the wisdom to change the world, or, as President Bush has put it, "to spread the peace that freedom brings?"
I take the administration at its word that this is the new project for America in the world. But to me, both the "hard Wilsonians" of the Bush administration, to use the name coined by the Council on Foreign Relations' Max Boot, and their liberal interventionist interlocutors are suffering from a terrible hubris, a terrible utopianism about not just the use of force, but about the promise of democracy itself. The right at least used to scorn utopianism, as a folly of liberalism and the left. Communism, it was said, taught one where utopianism led. And yet, what has the administration's policy been if not utopian?" (See also: "A New Age of Liberal Imperialism?" (David Rieff, World Policy Journal, from the Summer 1999 issue))

"Daughter of the Enlightenment" (Christopher Caldwell, The New York Times Magazine, 2005/04/03)
A profile of Ayaan Hirsi Ali: "That day at the Dudok, several dozen vocational students were taking up the main restaurant, so she and her guards parked at two tables near the bar. Hirsi Ali had her back to the restaurant when one of the students, apparently a Dutch convert to Islam, tapped her on the shoulder. "I turned around," she recalls in her elegant English, "and saw this sweet, young Dutch guy, about 24 years old. With freckles! And he was like, 'Madam, I hope the mujahedeen get you and kill you.'" Hirsi Ali handed him her knife and told him, "Why don't you do it yourself?" ...
The present Dutch crisis looks very different if you believe a tribal principle is at work. It can look apocalyptic, in fact. In late February, sitting in an empty conference room in The Hague, clutching her black woolen wrap, Hirsi Ali speculated on one consequence. ''The Netherlands is an art country,'' she said. ''If the citizens of Amsterdam, 60 percent of whom will soon be of non-Western origin, are not made part of that, all of this will decay and be destroyed. When the municipality has to vote on whether funds go to preserve art or build a mosque, they may ask, 'Why should I pay for this stupid painting?' They may do a host of other things that are undemocratic, illiberal and unfriendly toward women and homosexuals and unbelievers.'' Hirsi Ali fears that inaction will be grist for the mill of an extreme right that is on the rise. ''If we don't take effective measures, now,'' she said, ''the Netherlands could be torn between two extreme rights'': an Islamic one and a non-Islamic one." (Note: The article can also be found here.)

Saturday, April 2, 2005

News and commentary:

"A statue atop the colonnade..."
(Alessandra Tarantino, AP, 2005/04/01)
"A statue atop the colonnade is seen as people fill St. Peter Square at the Vatican, after the death of Pope John Paul II was announced, Saturday April 2, 2005. Pope John Paul II, the Polish pontiff who led the Roman Catholic Church for more than a quarter century and became history's most-traveled pope, has died at 84, the Vatican announced Saturday."

"Islam's grand wizard of deception" (Steven Emerson, WorldNetDaily, 2005/04/02)
"No case illustrates the murderous deception of Western society by Islamic militants more than the recent episode involving Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss professor who was denied a visa to teach at Notre Dame. His supporters in the U.S. rallied vigorously around Ramadan, protesting with total moral certitude the politically outrageous move by the U.S. government to muzzle a Muslim "moderate." The coalition to defend Ramadan included the New York Times, the Washington Post, academic boards around the country, Islamic advocacy groups and human-rights groups. Their near unanimous message was that Ramadan was a genuine "moderate" and "Islamic pluralist," but that even if one disagreed with some of his statements, Ramadan surely should have been entitled to have his ideas debated in the great free marketplace of ideas of the American campus. ...
Even after the murderous actions by Islamic militants on 9-11 in the U.S. and their carrying out or planning terrorist operations in more than 90 countries between 1990 and 2003, the American intelligentsia, in a devilish collusion with radical Islamic groups hiding under false veneer, have managed to perpetrate the grand deception of militant Islam: pretending to be moderate (small d) democrats, pluralists and victims of hate. ...
Aside from the legal justification for barring Ramadan, the moral reason for keeping him out is the same reason the U.S. has for years denied visas to neo-Nazi proponents from Western Europe. It is not only the access to the United States that both neo-Nazis and Ramadan have sought. Rather it is the official imprimatur of the U.S. government, an effective declaration of political legitimacy attending to the granting of the visa. And that is precisely same legitimacy that allowed militant Islamic groups to operate for so long in the United States. Do we really want to repeat history?" (Hat tip: Rochi Ebner.)

"Mugged by la Réalité" (Olivier Guitta, The Weekly Standard, from the 2005/04/11 issue)
"Frédéric Encel, professor of international relations at the prestigious Ecole Nationale d'Administration in Paris and a man not known for crying wolf, recently stated that France is becoming a new Lebanon. The implication, far-fetched though it may seem, was that civil upheaval might be no more than a few years off, sparked by growing ethnic and religious polarization. In recent weeks, a series of events has underlined this ominous trend.
On March 8, tens of thousands of high school students marched through central Paris to protest education reforms announced by the government. Repeatedly, peaceful demonstrators were attacked by bands of black and Arab youths--about 1,000 in all, according to police estimates. The eyewitness accounts of victims, teachers, and most interestingly the attackers themselves gathered by the left-wing daily Le Monde confirm the motivation: racism.
Some of the attackers openly expressed their hatred of "little French people." One 18-year-old named Heikel, a dual citizen of France and Tunisia, was proud of his actions. He explained that he had joined in just to "beat people up," especially "little Frenchmen who look like victims." He added with a satisfied smile that he had "a pleasant memory" of repeatedly kicking a student, already defenseless on the ground." (See also: "The Death of France's 'Multiculturalism'" (Nidra Poller, FrontPageMagazine, 2005/03/30) and "Union escort for protesting Paris students" (Expatica, 2005/03/15))

"The apparition in the Levant" (Fouad Ajami, USNews.com, from the 2005/04/04 issue)
"There is much that is wrong in the Arab world -- the willful refusal by modern-day Arabs to accept responsibility for their history, the schizophrenia of a world in the orbit of western culture but always accusing the West of all that is wrong. But these young people of Beirut, who had come together around the national cult of Rafiq Hariri, embody a desire for genuine change.
In a radically different era, America was "burned" in Beirut and quit the city under the gaze of Arabs who took the withdrawal as a sign of American abdication. There had been that searing October 1983 attack on the Marine barracks , which took the lives of 241 Americans. The U.S. Embassy was targeted by terrorists, and American missionaries and educators were murdered or taken as hostages for a cruel trade with Syria's and Iran's rulers. For good reasons, America gave up on Lebanon. But now the world is different, and there is in America a willingness to come to the aid of the Lebanese. It is Damascus and its tyranny on one side and the cedar revolution of the vast majority of Lebanon's people on the other. For once, there is an easy and good choice in an Arab land." (Hat tip: Barry Kaplovitz.)

"'Hell, No' - He's Not Exonerated" (Claudia Rosett, The Weekly Standard, from the 2005/04/11 issue)
"Now, in his rush to exonerate himself, the secretary general seems to have forgotten that Oil-for-Food was a vast endeavor, running from 1996 to 2003, in which the United Nations, in the name of providing for the sanctions-squeezed people of Iraq, oversaw more than $110 billion worth of Saddam Hussein's oil sales and relief purchases, much of that riddled with billions in graft. All but the first month of this exercise was administered and--in the words of one of Annan's spokesman--"audited to death" by Annan's Secretariat. It was Annan who personally signed off on Saddam's shopping lists, and repeatedly urged the Security Council not only to continue the program, but to expand it in size and scope, which allowed Saddam to rake in yet more illicit billions from oil smuggling.
If Annan has indeed lost sight of his own oversight role, it would hardly be the only such lapse turned up in this inquiry. What emerges from the jumbled narrative of the Volcker interim report is a U.N. universe of forgetful officials, botched record-keeping, cronyism, and conflicts of interest so abundant they start to sound simply routine--which they apparently were. Most noteworthy is the volume of damning information whitewashed by bland wording, culminating in Volcker's judgment that in some respects Annan's performance was "inadequate." By such standards, the Titanic was 'non-buoyant.'" (See also: "Panel Says Annan Didn't Intervene in Iraq Contract" (Warren Hoge, The New York Times, 2005/03/30))

Friday, April 1, 2005

News and commentary:

"A man looks at the top tier..."
(Dia Hamid, AFP, 2005/04/01)
"A man looks at the top tier of the 52-metre (170-foot) Malwiya tower, a treasured national monument, which was blown off in an attack, police Lieutenant Colonel Mahmoud Mohammed said, in the northern city of Samarra."

"Blast damages ancient Islamic monument in Iraq" (Reuters, 2005/04/01)
"An ancient Islamic minaret, one of Iraq's most important monuments, was damaged in an explosion on Friday, witnesses in the town of Samarra said.
Photographs show part of the top section of the spiralling 52-metre (160-foot) tower, built in the 9th century, was blown away in the blast, leaving crumbled brick and clay.
"Terrorists caused an explosion in Samarra's spiral minaret April 1, damaging the top of the structure," the U.S. military said in a statement. It said no U.S. troops were at the site of the blast.
The Malwiya minaret is one of the most important sites of Islamic antiquity. It was built by Abbasid Caliph Al-Motawakel in 852 AD, when Samarra was capital of the declining Abbasid empire."

"Clerics Urge Iraqis to Join Security Force" (Sinan Salaheddin, AP/Yahoo! News, 2005/04/01)
"BAGHDAD, Iraq - Influential Sunni Muslim clerics who once condemned Iraqi security force members as traitors made a surprise turnaround Friday and encouraged citizens to join the nascent police and army.
If heeded, the announcement could strengthen the image of the officers and soldiers trying to take over the fight against the Sunni-led insurgency.
Still, it wasn't a full-fledged endorsement. The edict, endorsed by a group of 64 Sunni clerics and scholars, instructed enlistees to refrain from helping foreign troops against their own countrymen.
Ahmed Abdul Ghafour al-Samarrai, a cleric in the Association of Muslim Scholars, read the edict during a sermon at a major Sunni mosque in Baghdad. He said it was necessary for Sunnis to join the security forces to prevent Iraqi police and army from falling into "the hands of those who have caused chaos, destruction and violated the sanctities."
It seemed to be a recognition by the Sunni minority, which dominated under former dictator Saddam Hussein, that Iraq's interim government is slowly retaking control of the nation and paving the way for a U.S. withdrawal."

"Don’t Stop Now" (Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 2005/04/01)
"With the encouraging news of change in the air in Lebanon, Egypt, and the Gulf, coupled with a solidification of democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, there has arisen a new generation of doubters. Not all are simply gnashing their teeth that their prognostications of doom were wrong, but rather often reflect genuine worries about the viability of emerging democracy in the Middle East.
Concerns about illiberal democracy run the gamut. Some fear that Islamists will hijack democracy and install Islamist or other such theocracies. Others worry that the veneer of voting gives legitimacy to otherwise autocratic societies and leaders that will hide their crimes behind the sanction of the "people." ...
As the ripples from Iraq and Afghanistan spread, we are warned that success, not failure, is our new concern: The problem is not that the Middle East cannot vote, but that it can — and that the results will be worse than the mess that preceded it. ...
The next problem we face is not that we have pushed democracy too abruptly in once-hostile lands, but that we have not pushed it enough into so-called friendly territory. It is, of course, dangerous to promote democracy in the Middle East, but more dangerous still to pause in our efforts, and, finally, most dangerous of all to quit before seeing this bold gambit through to its logical end — an end that alone will end the pathologies that led to September 11."

"Syria and the New Axis of Evil" (Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post, 2005/04/01)
"All this regional mischief-making is critical because we are at the dawn of an Arab Spring -- the first bloom of democracy in Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Palestine and throughout the greater Middle East -- and its emerging mortal enemy is a new axis of evil whose fulcrum is Syria. The axis stretches from Iran, the other remaining terror state in the region, to Syria to the local terror groups -- Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad -- that are bent on destabilizing Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and destroying both Lebanese independence and the current Israeli-Palestinian rapprochement. ...
Today the immediate objective of this Iran-Syria-Hezbollah-Hamas-Islamic Jihad axis is to destabilize Syria's neighbors (Iraq, Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinian Authority) and sabotage any Arab-Israeli peace. Its strategic aim is to quash the Arab Spring, which, if not stopped, will isolate, surround and seriously imperil these remaining centers of terrorism and radicalism. ...
If Syria can be flipped, the axis is broken. Iran will not be able to communicate directly with the local terrorists. They will be further weakened by the loss of their Syrian sponsor and protector. Prospects for true Lebanese independence and Arab-Israeli peace will improve dramatically. ...
We need, therefore, to be relentless in insisting on a full (and as humiliating as possible) evacuation of Syria from Lebanon, followed by a campaign of economic, political and military pressure on the Assad regime. We must push now and push hard."

"The Palestine problem" (Caroline Glick, The Jerusalem Post, 2005/04/01)
"This week it was announced that Hamas and Islamic Jihad have reached an agreement with Abbas for these jihadist terror groups to officially become a part of the PLO. According to Dr. Michael Widlanski, who monitors the PA's media, Hamas and Islamic Jihad representatives claim that their decision to join the PLO is based on the PLO's staged plan for the destruction of Israel and its replacement with an Arab state. The plan, which was first adopted by the PLO in 1974, calls for the Palestinians to use any land that Israel transfers to the PLO as a staging ground for the next round of a war whose sole aim is the total destruction of Israel.
In exchange for this agreement to join the PLO, Abbas reportedly agreed that Hamas will receive 40 percent of the membership in all PLO institutions. He also accepted that Hamas and Islamic Jihad will retain their arms terror cadres. ...
How will the president be able to continue ignoring the pervasiveness of terror in the PLO now that Hamas and Islamic Jihad are overt and official members of the organization? How will the president be able to meet with Abbas or have his representatives meet with PA functionaries when the PA itself, after July's legislative elections, will be wholly penetrated by Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists (joined by Fatah-Aksa Martyrs Brigades terrorists) parading around as legislators and bureaucrats?"

"Hamas, Fatah battle for soul of a town" (Matthew Gutman, The Jerusalem Post, 2005/04/01)
"On the surface, the newly elected Hamas mayor's conflict with the Fatah representatives on his Bidya Municipal Council centers on moral ills like pornography. But scratch deeper and you'll find a struggle over the soul of a future Palestinian state.
In the last two rounds of Palestinian municipal elections, Hamas-affiliated candidates won 21 out of 37 municipal councils – a virtual landslide victory that Fatah officials admit exposed the frailty of the Palestinians' largest faction. ...
"Our goal," says the doe-eyed Hamas mayor, Ramadan Shtat, "is for everything to conform to Islamic morality, and our new cultural center is to be one of the links in that chain."
Yet Fatah members on his council, like Mustafa Da'as, fear the imposition of what they call Islamic "mind control" and insist that religion be removed from politics and certainly from the town's cultural center. ...
And with the 11-seat municipality packed with a solid majority of seven Hamas representatives, there is no legal way Fatah can block Islamic control of the cultural center, explains Shtat.
"Ah," jokes Shtat to his Fatah rivals, 'this is democracy!'"

"Militants' Wild West Night Leaves West Bank Town Dismayed" (Steven Erlanger, The New York Times, 2005/04/01)
"RAMALLAH, West Bank, March 31 - The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, ordered a crackdown on street chaos Thursday after gunmen fired shots at his headquarters here late Wednesday night and then ran riot, damaging restaurants and shopping areas as the police ran away.
"The Palestinian Authority has taken urgent steps to re-establish security, deal with the perpetrators and protect public property," the government said in a statement after an urgent security meeting called by Mr. Abbas, known as Abu Mazen. "Units are deployed to prevent any new aggression," the statement said, promising compensation to those who suffered losses in the rioting.
The response was little consolation to Osama Khalaf, general manager of the Darna restaurant, as he walked over broken window glass through his dining rooms, showing the smashed tables, overturned dishes and the bullet holes in the refrigerators, bars and televisions.
"This is a message to Abu Mazen," Mr. Khalaf said, kicking at the broken glass and cartridge shells. 'It's a challenge to Abu Mazen. Who's going to run the show, him or the gunmen?'" (See also: "Palestinian gunmen open fire on the Mukata" (AP/The Jerusalem Post, 2005/03/31))

"Berger Will Plead Guilty To Taking Classified Paper" (John F. Harris and Allan Lengel, The Washington Post, 2005/04/01)
"Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, a former White House national security adviser, plans to plead guilty to a misdemeanor, and will acknowledge intentionally removing and destroying copies of a classified document about the Clinton administration's record on terrorism. ...
Rather than misplacing or unintentionally throwing away three of the five copies he took from the archives, as the former national security adviser earlier maintained, he shredded them with a pair of scissors late one evening at the downtown offices of his international consulting business.
The document, written by former National Security Council terrorism expert Richard A. Clarke, was an "after-action review" prepared in early 2000 detailing the administration's actions to thwart terrorist attacks during the millennium celebration. It contained considerable discussion about the administration's awareness of the rising threat of attacks on U.S. soil. ...
Berger's archives visit occurred as he was reviewing materials as a designated representative of the Clinton administration to the national commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The question of what Clinton knew and did about the emerging al Qaeda threat before leaving office in January 2001 was acutely sensitive, as suggested by Berger's determination to spend hours poring over the Clarke report before his testimony."

"UN approves Darfur war crimes trials" (AFP/Yahoo! News, 2005/04/01)
"UNITED NATIONS (AFP) - The UN Security Council has voted to approve war crimes trials over Sudan's Darfur conflict at the International Criminal Court, ending weeks of deadlock over US opposition to the tribunal.
The council voted 11-0 to refer the matter to the ICC late on Thursday, two months after an international enquiry found evidence of war crimes in Sudan's Darfur region, where an estimated 300,000 have died in two years of violence.
The move clears the way for the Hague-based court to prosecute those behind the murder, rape and pillaging in the vast Darfur region, after weeks of tense diplomatic haggling over how to bring the guilty to justice.
Algeria, Brazil and China abstained along with the United States, which is not party to the Hague-based court and could have used its veto power to reject the measure -- the first time the council has made an ICC referral."

Added in archive:
"The UN charade on human rights" (Frida Ghitis, The Boston Globe, 2005/03/27)

Thursday, March 31, 2005

News and commentary:

"The Politics of Churlishness" (Martin Peretz, The New Republic, 2005/03/31)
"If George W. Bush were to discover a cure for cancer, his critics would denounce him for having done it unilaterally, without adequate consultation, with a crude disregard for the sensibilities of others.":
"No, the president has not discovered a cure for cancer. But there is a pathology, a historical pathology, that he has attacked with unprecedented vigor and with unprecedented success. I refer, of course, to the political culture of the Middle East, which the president may actually have changed. And he has accomplished this genuinely momentous transformation in ways that virtually the entire foreign affairs clerisy -- the cold-blooded Brent Scowcroft realist Republicans and almost all the Democrats -- never thought possible. Or, perhaps, in ways some of them thought positively undesirable. Bush, it now seems safe to say, is one of the great surprises in modern U.S. history. Nothing about his past suggested that he harbored these ideals nor the qualities of character required for their realization. Right up to the moment Bush became president, I was convinced that his mind, at least on matters Levantine, belonged to his father and to James Baker III, whose worldview seemed to be defined by the pecuniary prejudice of oil and Texas: Keep the ruling Arabs happy. But I was wrong, and, in light of what has already been achieved in the Middle East, I am glad to say so. Most American liberals, alas, enjoy no similar gladness. They are not exactly pleased by the positive results of Bush's campaign in the Middle East. They deny and resent and begrudge and snipe. They are trapped in the politics of churlishness."

"Canadian Tortured, Raped Before Death in Iran" (AP/IRVAJ, 2005/03/31)
"A former Iranian army doctor said Thursday a Canadian photojournalist was beaten, tortured and raped before she died while in custody in Iran two years ago.
Shahram Azam said he examined Zahra Kazemi, a 54-year-old Canadian freelance journalist of Iranian origin, in a hospital June 26, 2003 and noticed horrific injuries to her entire body that could only have been caused by torture and rape. It was just days after she was arrested for taking photographs outside a Tehran prison during student-led protests against the ruling theocracy. ...
Azam examined Kazemi in the emergency room after she was transferred from Tehran's Evin prison. Reading from notes taken from the examination, Azam said Kazemi arrived unconscious with bruises all over her body.
She had a skull fracture, two broken fingers, missing fingernails, a crushed big toe and a smashed nose. She also had deep scratches on the neck and evidence of flogging on the legs and back.
"As a doctor I could see this was caused by torture," Azam said through an interpreter.
He said as a male doctor in a military hospital, he was banned from examining a woman's genitals, but the nurse who did so told him of 'brutal damage.'"

"Report Says U.S. Intelligence 'Dead Wrong' on Iraq" (Steve Holland and Adam Entous, Reuters, 2005/03/31)
"U.S. intelligence on Iraq was "dead wrong," dealing a blow to American credibility that will take years to undo, and spymasters still know disturbingly little about nuclear programs in countries like Iran and North Korea, a presidential commission reported on Thursday.
The commission's bluntly written report, based on more than a year of investigations, offered a damning assessment of the intelligence that President Bush used to launch the Iraq war two years ago and warned that flaws are still all too common throughout spy agencies.
"We conclude that the intelligence community was dead wrong in almost all of its prewar judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction," the commissioners wrote. ...
The 600-page report sharply criticized the intelligence-gathering on Iraq by the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency and other agencies for producing "worthless or misleading" intelligence before a war fought over claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, none of which was found.
In what amounted to a direct assault on George Tenet, who was CIA director in the run-up to the Iraq war and gave the president his daily intelligence briefing, the commission found that 'the daily reports sent to the president and senior policymakers discussing Iraq over many months proved to be disastrously one-sided.'" (See also the report [PDF]: "The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction" (wmd.gov, 2005/03/31): "We conclude that the Intelligence Community was dead wrong in almost all of its pre-war judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. This was a major intelligence failure. Its principal causes were the Intelligence Community's inability to collect good information about Iraq's WMD programs, serious errors in analyzing what information it could gather, and a failure to make clear just how much of its analysis was based on assumptions, rather than good evidence. On a matter of this importance, we simply cannot afford failures of this magnitude.")

"U.S. Denies U.N. Claim Iraqis Malnourished" (Bradley S. Klapper, AP/Yahoo! News, 2005/03/31)
"The U.S. human rights delegation Thursday rejected a U.N. monitor's claim that child malnutrition had risen in Iraq and said, if anything, health conditions have improved since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
Jean Ziegler, the U.N. Human Right Commission's expert on the right to food, cited U.S. and European studies Wednesday in telling the commission that acute malnutrition rates among Iraqi children under 5 rose late last year to 7.7 percent from 4 percent after Saddam's ouster in April 2003. Ziegler blamed the war for the situation.
"First, he has not been to Iraq, and second, he is wrong," said Kevin E. Moley, U.S. ambassador to U.N. organizations in Geneva and a member of the American delegation to the 53-nation U.N. Human Rights Commission.
"He's taking some information that is in itself difficult to validate and juxtaposing his own views — which are widely known," Moley said, referring to Ziegler's opposition to the U.S. military intervention in the country. ...
"If anything, vaccination, food aid ... has improved dramatically since the fall of Saddam Hussein," he added." (See also: "U.N.: Iraq Kids Suffer From Malnutrition" (Jonathan Fowler, AP/Yahoo! News, 2005/03/30))

"Lebanon's Peril" (Ralph Peters, New York Post, 2005/03/31)
"What does Syria want? Enduring control of Lebanon, its people, its foreign policy, its wealth and its strategic location. Assad and his cronies regard Syria as Saddam Hussein regarded Kuwait: an integral part of the homeland, hewn off by outside powers.
How will Syria try to get what it wants? Subversion. Terror. Resurrecting yesteryear's fears and hatreds. By bribing, blackmailing and murdering. By igniting a new civil war, if Damascus can get away with it. ...
What will happen if Lebanon's democracy appears on the verge of triumphing, despite Syrian mischief? If the Assad regime can't possess Lebanon, it will do its best to wreck it — to reignite the violence of 25 years ago to "prove" that Syria's presence was essential for peace.
What Assad the Lesser can't have, he'll try to destroy. ...
Our successes in the Middle East have changed the region's political direction. Freedom and democracy are gathering momentum. But the course of reform could still be reversed among the failure-haunted Arabs. Lebanon is the next potential crisis and a critical test of our will. President Bush must continue to make our resolve explicitly clear, if we hope to prevent the ruin of Lebanon's convalescent society and economy.
If the Syrian government attempts to destroy Lebanon, the Damascus regime itself must be destroyed."

"The neocon revolution" (Martin Jacques, The Guardian, 2005/03/31)
"There was speculation last autumn that the second Bush term would be different, that the breach with Europe would be healed as a matter of necessity, that the US could not afford another Iraq, that somehow the new position was unsustainable. Already, however, from last November's presidential election it was clear that the neocon revolution had wide popular support and serious electoral roots, that it was establishing a new kind of domestic political hegemony. In fact, the right has been setting the political agenda in the US for at least 30 years and that is now true with a vengeance. All the indications suggest that the revolution is continuing apace. ...
The restless determination of the Bush administration to reorder global affairs is well-illustrated by a classified document prepared by the US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld as a prelude to a massive review of Pentagon spending. It requires the military to build a far more proactive force focused on changing the world rather than responding to specific conflicts such as the Korean peninsula. It sees the development of very differently trained troops who would be able to intervene on a much more widespread basis. "The idea is that you would have lots of teams operating in lots of places throughout the world," a senior defence official was reported as saying. At the same time, there is an absolute belief that the US must maintain such a large lead in crucial technologies that growing powers - in other words, China - will decide that it is simply too expensive to try to compete. Welcome to the new world order as seen from Washington."

"Reality TV, Iraq-Style" (Steven Stalinsky, FrontPageMagazine, 2005/03/31)
Stalinsky on "Terror in the Hands of Justice", which runs on Iraq's Al-Iraqiya channel:
"The show consists of lengthy confessions by captured insurgents under interrogations by the Iraqi military. The insurgents come from all over the Arab world including Egypt, Syria, Sudan, Tunisia, and Saudi Arabia. All captured terrorists are asked their name, country of origin, birthday, how they got to Iraq, about their affiliation with terrorist groups, and about their training.
Many of these captured insurgents have common themes to their stories including pointing to Syrian intelligence as being the main source of their support and citing Al-Jazeera as a source of inspiration and motivation for Jihad. The insurgents also provide interesting bits of information on how the terrorist networks they were part of operate in Iraq. ...
Syrian intelligence officer Anas Ahmad Al-Issa confessed on Al-Iraqiya on February 23, explaining he was involved in 10 - 15 operations a day that consisted of setting bobby traps, explosions, kidnappings, and assassinations.
The coast city of Ladhqiya in Syria was mentioned by many fighters as their training place. On February 23, Iraqi Shihab Al-Sab'awi described his training course there to Al-Iraqiya. He detailed how Syrian intelligence slaughtered animals to train members of his group how to kill. He also explained that the Syrians paid for their stay in Iraq, including a salary of $1,500 for each member of the squad."

"Palestinian gunmen open fire on the Mukata" (AP/The Jerusalem Post, 2005/03/31)
"A group of Palestinian gunmen fired Wednesday at Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas' West Bank headquarters while he was in the compound, but he was not injured, security officials said.
Later, the group of 15 gunmen - who said they belong to an armed group linked to the ruling Fatah movement - went on a shooting rampage throughout the city of Ramallah, firing and damaging several restaurants and forcing the shops to close, witnesses and officials said. ...
The gunmen - members of the Al Aksa Martyrs' Brigades - said they went on their rampage after Palestinian security officials forced six of them out of the Ramallah headquarters, where they had sought refuge after Israel began hunting down fugitives shortly after violence erupted in September 2000.
Arafat had allowed more than 20 fugitives to remain in his compound, and Abbas had followed suit.
A Palestinian security official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the security forces asked the six gunmen to either hand over their weapons or leave the compound after 'they were involved in kidnappings, blackmailing, harming people, shooting them.'"

"Iraq's women of power who tolerate wife-beating and promote polygamy" (Catherine Philp, The Times, 2005/03/31)
"Jenan Al-Ubaedey peers over her half-moon glasses, waving her black-gloved hands between repeated tugs on her long, flowing abaya to pull it closer around her face.
“If you say to a man he cannot use force against a woman, you are asking the impossible,” she explains. “So we say a husband can beat his wife, but he cannot leave a mark. If he does that, he will be punished.”
On the subject of polygamy, the former paediatrician turned politician says: “If you don’t allow your husband to take another wife, he’d have an affair anyway . . . I’d rather know my husband has another wife that I know about.” ...
As a devout Shia Muslim and one of eighty-nine women sitting in the new parliament, she knows what her first priority there is: to implement Islamic law. When Dr Ubaedey took her seat at last week’s assembly opening, she found herself among an increasingly powerful group of religious women politicians who are seeking to repeal old laws giving women some of the same rights as men and replace them with Sharia, Islam’s divine law. ...
More than 50 per cent of female parliamentarians belong to the cleric-backed United Iraqi Alliance, which won the election in a landslide with just over half the seats. It has called the implementation of Sharia 'non-negotiable.'"

"Syria Moves to Keep Control of Lebanon" (Robin Wright, The Washington Post, 2005/03/31)
"Syria is working covertly through a network of Lebanese operatives to ensure Damascus can still dominate its smaller neighbor even after it withdraws the last of 15,000 troops, in defiance of a U.N. resolution demanding an end to Syria's 29-year control over Lebanon, according to U.S., European and U.N. officials, and Lebanon's opposition.
Although Syria shut down its notorious intelligence headquarters in downtown Beirut, Damascus is establishing a new hidden presence in the capital's southern suburbs, bringing in officials who will not be recognized, say Lebanese opposition and Western sources. The move would contradict a pledge by President Bashar Assad to withdraw Syria's large intelligence operation from the Lebanese capital as of today. ...
In their demarches, the United States and the European Union, which have crafted a joint policy on Lebanon, also made clear that they hold Syria at least partially responsible for a recent spate of bombings, U.S. officials said.
"We believe they are behind those attacks," the first senior U.S. official said. 'We're concerned that they want to foment the kind of bombings and dislocation that the Lebanese fear could happen -- and that will allow the Syrians to say this is what happens when we remove our forces from your country.'"

Wednesday, March 30, 2005

News and commentary:

"The Death of France's 'Multiculturalism'" (Nidra Poller, FrontPageMagazine, 2005/03/30)
"8 March 2005, Place de la République: a thousand young toughs pierced the heart of a student demonstration and unleashed their rage…not against the police but against the “privileged classes” in their own age group — the protesting lycée students. Operating in gangs of ten and twenty, the casseurs (smashers) in brand-name sweat suits swept through the march like pirate ships, zeroed in on their prey, attacked from behind. They threw kids to the ground, gratuitously beating and kicking them, snatching handbags, ipods, wallets, and cell phones. Riot police looking like robots with their thick leather padding stood by as the predators cut through the crowd wielding knives, clubs, and tear gas bombs. ...
The violent eruption of the Third World in the midst of a time-honored French protest tradition is the very emblem of what is going wrong in French society at the dawn of the 21^st century. ...
How much further can romanticized revolution go? The pro-Palestinian movement that has sullied huge swathes of French society culminated in the shamefully orchestrated death in Paris of Yasser Arafat. The banana republic anti-American anti-war movement deflated when jihadi peace marchers beat up youths from the leftist Zionist Hashomer Hazair movement in the last great Parisian peace demonstration in March 2003. And now the grandchildren of May ’68 can’t enjoy their ritual protest movement in peace. The Palestinians revered by European humanitarianists are kept at a safe distance; but on March 8^th the children of the Third World, the punks and the dropouts, the hoodlums and the lost souls crashed the party and spoke for themselves with kicks and hammerlocks." (See also: "Union escort for protesting Paris students" (Expatica, 2005/03/15))

"U.N.: Iraq Kids Suffer From Malnutrition" (Jonathan Fowler, AP/Yahoo! News, 2005/03/30)
Let's just say I'm a little skeptical of any conclusions coming from the U.N. Human Rights Charade:
"GENEVA - Almost twice as many Iraqi children are suffering from malnutrition since the U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein, a U.N. monitor said Monday.
Four percent of Iraqis under age 5 went hungry in the months after Saddam's ouster in April 2003, and the rate nearly doubled to 7.7 percent last year, said Jean Ziegler, the U.N. Human Rights Commission's special expert on the right to food.
The situation is "a result of the war led by coalition forces," he said.
Overall, more than a quarter of Iraqi children don't get enough to eat, Ziegler told the 53-nation commission, the top U.N. human rights watchdog.
The U.S. delegation did not respond to the report, and diplomats at the U.S. mission to the United Nations' European headquarters in Geneva also said they would not comment.
Ziegler also cited an October 2004 U.S. study estimating that as many as 100,000 more Iraqis — many of them women and children — had died since the start of the U.S.-led invasion than would have been expected otherwise, based on the mortality rate before the war." (See also: "100,000 Dead — or 8,000" (Fred Kaplan, Slate, 2004/10/29))

"Darfur Deathtoll May Be 300,000, Say UK Lawmakers" (Madeline Chambers, Reuters/My Way, 2005/03/30)
"As many as 300,000 people may have died in Sudan's western Darfur region in a conflict the international community is doing too little to stop, a British parliamentary report said on Wednesday. The report also urged the United Nations Security Council to impose sanctions on Sudan, extend its arms embargo and refer war criminals to the International Criminal Court (ICC).
"The world's failure to protect the people of Darfur from the atrocities committed against them by their own government is a scandal," said Tony Baldry, chairman of the cross-party International Development Committee.
The committee said it believed around 300,000 people may have died, far higher than previous death tolls which it said had underestimated the scale of the disaster."

"Assembly descends into TV farce" (James Hider, The Times, 2005/03/30)
"Two months after being elected by voters who braved terrorist bombs to make their voice heard, Iraq’s lawmakers failed to make any progress on forming a government yesterday at the second sitting of the new Iraqi parliament.
Instead, the nation witnessed a display of ethnic infighting, backstabbing and farce before the plug was pulled on television transmission and Arabic music filled the airwaves. ...
As the session threatened to degenerate into acrimony and irrelevance, Hussein al-Sadr, a moderate from the party of Iyad Allawi, the interim Prime Minister, tried to call the members to account.
“What are we going to tell the citizens who sacrificed their lives and cast ballots on January 30?” he cried. “The people are waiting for us to act!” At that point, the acting Speaker — appointed in a similarly abortive session two weeks ago on the basis that he is the oldest member of the House — demanded that all press and television cameras leave the hall: transmission ended and the nation found itself watching a Saddam-style broadcast of an orchestra playing the national anthem."

"The shreds of evidence that could destroy UN chief" (James Bone, The Times, 2005/03/30)
"Kofi Annan faced growing pressure to stand down as UN Secretary-General yesterday when an independent inquiry into the Iraq Oil-for-Food scandal found that UN documents were shredded in a possible cover-up.
The investigation found that Iqbal Riza, Mr Annan’s chief of staff, ordered the shredding the day after the Security Council approved the inquiry last April, and the shredding continued until the week of December 7.
The documents covered the crucial period from 1997 to 1999, when the Swiss company that employed Mr Annan’s son, Kojo, as a consultant was awarded a lucrative UN border-inspection contract in Iraq.
Ten days before the shredding, Mr Riza had sent the heads of nine UN-related agencies a directive asking them to 'take all necessary steps to collect, preserve and secure all files, records and documents . . . relating to the Oil-for-Food programme.'"

"Panel Says Annan Didn't Intervene in Iraq Contract" (Warren Hoge, The New York Times, 2005/03/30)
"UNITED NATIONS, March 29 - The commission investigating the oil-for-food program in Iraq reported Tuesday that Secretary General Kofi Annan had not influenced the awarding of a contract to the company that employed his son. But it faulted him for not looking more aggressively into the company's relationship with the United Nations once questions were raised.
The panel also criticized two of Mr. Annan's closest advisers, Iqbal Riza and Dileep Nair, for their conduct. ...
In the report, the committee was harshest in its judgment of Mr. Annan's son, Kojo, 31, and the Geneva-based company he worked for, Cotecna Inspection Services. It said they both conspired to conceal the duration of their business and professional relationship and that the younger Mr. Annan deceived his father about it. In addition, it said he had been uncooperative with the Volcker panel's investigators." (See also the report [PDF]: "Second Interim Report" (Independent Inquiry Committee, 2005/03/29))

Tuesday, March 29, 2005

News and commentary:

"Hamas recruit says he was trained in Syria" (AP/MSNBC, 2005/03/29)
"ASHKELON, Israel - A 20-year-old Palestinian recruited from a mosque in Gaza by Hamas militants told The Associated Press in a jailhouse interview Tuesday that he received weeks of military training in a Hamas camp in Syria this year.
The allegations by Osama Mattar, now in Israeli custody, mark the first time a Palestinian has spoken publicly about being trained in Syria, and contradict repeated Syrian denials.
The training base outside Damascus was far from secret and was once even inspected by Syrian intelligence agents, Mattar said.
“They know very well about the presence of Hamas,” he said. “What they may not have known about was the presence of a guy from Gaza coming to train at the training camp in Syria.” ...
Syria has repeatedly denied accusations it allows militants to train on its territory. The Syrian government says it once allowed militants to run media offices from Damascus, but those were closed after a visit by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell in May 2003."

"Lebanon's Prime Minister Says He'll Resign" (Hussein Dakroub, AP/Yahoo! News, 2005/03/29)
"BEIRUT, Lebanon - Lebanon's pro-Syrian prime minister said Tuesday he would resign, unable to put together a government, and the head of military intelligence stepped aside in new signs the anti-Syrian opposition was gaining momentum in the country's political turmoil.
Prime Minister Omar Karami's decision comes amid a deadlock over forming the government, which must be completed before parliamentary elections can be held. Elections are scheduled for April and May, and the opposition — which is expected to win them — is eager to see them held on time.
It was unclear whether the resignation would end to the standoff. It could delay the ballot because it means the process of finding a leader for the government must start again from scratch.
But it could also be a signal that the pro-Syrian leadership is ready to bend to opposition demands, which would clear the way for the quick formation of a new Cabinet and the organizing of elections."

"The Israel-Nazi Slander in Historical Context" (Rory Miller, Tech Central Station, 2005/03/29)
"From polls in Germany in which 51% of respondents expressed the view that Israel's current treatment of Palestinians is similar to that meted out to the Jews by the Nazis, to posters in Paris reading "Hitler has a son -- Sharon"; from information signs in the Spanish town of Oleiros, flashing "Let's stop the animal!!! Sharon the assassin, stop the neo-Nazis", to banners in a Dublin march demanding an end to the Palestinian holocaust and equating the Star of David with the Nazi swastika. Wherever we look we are being bombarded by attacks on Israeli "storm troopers" pursuing "SS tactics" and engaged in "Blitzkrieg" operations. ...
It is true that the survivor generation is passing away and the full horror of the Holocaust is becoming vague, especially in the minds of younger generations. But those who accuse Israel of having inherited the Nazi mantle are not speaking out of ignorance and are fully aware of the enormity of the accusation -- which is why they make it in the first place.
If anyone doubts this it should be remembered that the despicable comparisons of Zionism to Nazism did not simply come about in response to the breakdown of the Oslo peace process in 2000. It didn't even begin following the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in June 1967 war or even in response to the birth of Israel in 1948.
Indeed, one can see the truly cynical and evil antecedents of the current accusations only by realizing that the comparison of Zionism to Nazism was rife during World War II and gathered pace in the years immediately preceding the birth of Israel at a time when the true horrors of the Holocaust were no distant memory."

"Jenin: Anniversary of a Battle" (Natan Sharansky, FrontPageMagazine, 2005/03/29)
"Today, March 29, 2005 marks the three year anniversary of the battle of Jenin. If there is one incident that summarizes the war in the Middle East, and the way the terror war is fought in the media, this is it. On this three year anniversary, we have received permission from Natan Sharansky to run the section of his indispensable book The Case for Democracy, in which he relates what happened in Jenin, how it was reported, and why this is crucial to understanding the war we face.":
"But in an environment that lacked moral clarity, one of the finest examples in history of a democracy protecting human rights in wartime became infamous as a horrific assault on human rights. Relying on phony information produced by Palestinian sources and claiming that Israel had killed over 500 civilians, leveled a hospital, deliberately shot children, and executed prisoners, almost all the foreign press harshly criticized the Israeli action. The vilification rang out across the world, but the British press was in a class all by itself. The Independent called the Israeli opera­tion "a monstrous war crime." A. N. Wilson, writing for the Evening Standard, called it a "massacre, and a cover-up of genocide." The Guardian, not to be outdone, ran a lead editorial opining that "Jenin was every bit as repellent in its particulars, no less distressing, and every bit as man made, as the attack on New York on September 11."
The truth was very different: At the end of the operation, fifty-two Palestinians lay dead, almost all of whom were armed. On the Israeli side, twenty-three soldiers had been killed by Palestinian terrorists. This extremely high casualty ratio was a function of Israel's willingness to endanger the lives of its own soldiers in order to save the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of Palestinian civilians. Indeed, Israeli soldiers died to save innocent Palestinian lives." (See also: "The media and 'the massacre'" - News and commentary on the conflicting reports on what happened during the battle of Jenin.)

"Arab League — Of Denial" (Amir Taheri, New York Post, 2005/03/29)
"In several stories of the Arabian Nights, the caliph is left with egg on his face thanks to remarks by the court jester. It was, perhaps, in this spirit that Col. Moammar Khadafy, Libya's maverick ruler, played court jester during last week's Arab Summit.
At the closing session of the gathering in Algiers, Khadafy, in his favorite dramatic posture, unleashed one of his trademark lectures on a stunned assembly.
"I am a philosopher," Libya's dictator announced. "And I shouldn't be here among all of you. But now that I am here, I have to call on you to wake up to the emerging realities of a new world."
The Khadafy agenda is original, to say the least: The Arabs should stop calling for a separate Palestinian state and, instead, insist on a single Arab-Jewish state to replace Israel. Mahmoud Abbas (and other Palestinian leaders who have accepted the two-state solution) are "traitors to the Arab cause." As for terrorism, Khadafy believes it is generated by poverty and sustained by "wrong social systems."
"You are all corrupt," Khadafy told his fellow leaders. "You are all opposed to reform. Your system of education is designed to produce a million bin Ladens."
Unsure as how to respond to this hour-long diatribe, most Arab leaders chose silence." (See also: "Arabs fail to face the facts" (Bangkong Post, 2005/03/28) and "Arabs looking backward" (The Boston Globe, 2005/03/27))

"In the Gulf, Dissidence Goes Digital" (Steve Coll, The Washington Post, 2005/03/29)
"KUWAIT CITY -- Rola Dashti's cell phone buzzed on the heady evening of March 7, hours after she had helped lead the largest demonstration for women's voting rights in Kuwait's history, a clamorous protest that ended when hundreds of activists were expelled from parliament for shouting from the gallery.
She pressed her phone's text message button and read an anonymous insult circulating on hundreds of Kuwaiti phones, digital graffiti that attacked her family's Persian ancestry and disparaged her Lebanese-born mother. "Here's what voters will gain if they vote for Rola Dashti," the text message read, as she recalled it. "They will learn the Iranian accent. They will learn a Lebanese accent. And they will learn how to work with the American Embassy to get money."
In this roiling political spring of protest and debate about democracy in repressive Arab countries, cell phone text messaging has become a powerful underground channel of free and often impolite speech, especially in the oil-rich Persian Gulf monarchies, where mobile phones are common but candid public talk about politics is not.
Demonstrators use text messaging to mobilize followers, dodge authorities and swarm quickly to protest sites. Candidates organizing for the region's limited elections use text services to call supporters to the polls or slyly circulate candidate slates in countries that supposedly ban political groupings. And through it all, anonymous activists blast their adversaries with thousands of jokes, insults and political limericks." (See also: "Kuwaitis demonstrate for women's suffrage" (Haitham Haddadin, Reuters/Yahoo! News, 2005/03/07))

"Koran scholar: US will cease to exist in 2007" (Khaled Abu Toameh, The Jerusalem Post, 2005/03/29)
If it's Allah's policy to wipe out cultures which have slavery and bad treatment of indigenous cultures on their historic consciences, wouldn't that sadly enough cover virtually all known civilizations and cultures, including Silwadi's own?:
"A thorough analysis of the Koran reveals that the US will cease to exist in the year 2007, according to research published by Palestinian scholar Ziad Silwadi.
The study, which has caught the attention of millions of Muslims worldwide, is based on in-depth interpretations of various verses in the Koran. It predicts that the US will be hit by a tsunami larger than that which recently struck southeast Asia.
"The tsunami waves are a minor rehearsal in comparison with what awaits the US in 2007," the researcher concluded in his study. "The Holy Koran warns against the Omnipotent Allah's force. A great sin will cause a huge flood in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans." ...
Silwadi said his study of the Koran showed that the US would perish mainly because of its great sins against mankind, including the Native Americans and blacks."

"Picnic Is No Party In the New Basra" (Anthony Shadid, The Washington Post, 2005/03/29)
On today's holy agenda: "Let's raise an armed mob, beat up defenseless young women viciously and rob them.":
"BASRA, Iraq, March 28 -- Celia Garabet thought students were roughhousing. Sinan Saeed was sure a fight had erupted. Within a few minutes, on a sunny day at a riverside park, they realized something different was afoot. A group of Shiite Muslim militiamen with rifles, pistols, thick wire cables and sticks had charged into crowds of hundreds at a college picnic. They fired shots, beat students and hauled some of them away in pickup trucks. The transgressions: men dancing and singing, music playing and couples mixing. ...
Garabet, an unveiled woman from an Armenian Christian family, never saw her assailant. ... As she walked out the gate, a second blow to the back of her head almost knocked her unconscious. Two weeks later, she is still wearing a neck brace, and her vision is blurred. She has numbness in one hand and suffers severe headaches.
At about that time, students said, a militiamen struck an unveiled 21-year-old, Zeinab Faruq, with a stick. Another accosted a couple, they recalled. The militiaman fired two shots at the legs of 22-year-old Muhsin Walid; another shot grazed Walid's hand. ...
Students accused the men of stealing cell phones, cameras, gold jewelry and tape players as the students left.
"They focused on the women," said Saeed's friend, Osama Adnan. "They were beating them viciously."
"Without any discrimination," Saeed added."

"Annan 'will sacrifice son to save himself'" (Alec Russell, The Daily Telegraph, 2005/03/28)
"Kofi Annan, the beleaguered United Nations secretary general, is expected to sacrifice his son's reputation today as he fights to save his own position after a damaging report into a family conflict of interest.
The long-awaited report by the commission set up to investigate the scandal-hit oil-for-food programme for Iraq, will criticise the UN leader for a series of management failings.
In particular, he will be accused of failing to recognise or deal with conflicts of interest involving the work of his son, Kojo, for Cotecna, a Swiss firm that had a lucrative UN contract in the multi-million-pound humanitarian programme.
Leaks of the report suggest that Mr Annan will be absolved of having organised or benefited from the United Nations' allocation of contracts.
But there is mounting concern at UN headquarters in New York that new revelations over Cotecna and Kojo Annan will intensify the pressure from Washington for him to step down.
The Wall Street Journal said the report would say that Kojo Annan received nearly $400,000 from Cotecna, more than twice the money previously acknowledged." (See also: "Special Report #1 - Oil-For-Food Investigation" (Roger L. Simon, rogerlsimon.com, 2005/03/27))

Monday, March 28, 2005

News and commentary:

"Anti-American Trade Surplus" (James Taranto, Best of the Web Today, 2005/03/28)
"Where does Arab anti-Americanism come from? Sometimes from America itself. The other day, the Yemen Observer, a Sanaa-based online newspaper, published an article that blamed America for the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. And not just America, but Karl Rove:

A number of intelligence sources have reported that assassinations of foreign leaders like Hariri and Hobeika are ultimately authorized by two key White House officials, Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliot Abrams. In addition, Abrams is the key liaison between the White House and Sharon's office for such covert operations, including political assassinations.

The author is Wayne Madsen, "a Washington, DC-based journalist and columnist and the co-author of 'America's Nightmare: The Presidency of George Bush II.' " Longtime readers may recognize him as a writer for the far-left Counterpunch site, for which he penned a rant calling everyone under the sun a "fascist" and spun a conspiracy theory about President Bush's Thanksgiving 2003 visit to Baghdad that turned out to have been based on a misreading of the clock." (See also: "The new conspiracy: Hariri assassinated to make way for US airbase in Lebanon" (Wayne Madsen, Yemen Observer, 2005/03/19). More on Wayne Madsen: "Terrorism is a beast to be killed, not fed" (Mark Steyn, The Daily Telegraph, 2003/12/02) and "Fascist Alert!" (James Taranto, Best of the Web Today, 2003/07/07))

"Iraq's Most-Wanted Terrorist 'Surrounded'" (The Scotsman, 2005/03/28)
Surrounded in more than one area?: "Iraqi security forces have surrounded Iraq’s most-wanted terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the country’s interior minister said today.
Al-Zarqawi, the leader of the terror network al Qaida in Iraq, has eluded arrest while kidnapping and killing people in Iraq. Yesterday, militants posted a video on the internet showing the purported execution of a man identifying himself as Interior Ministry official Col. Ryadh Gatie Olyway.
“We have not arrested al Zarqawi,” Interior Minister Falah al-Nakib said during a news conference. “He is surrounded in a certain area, and we hope for the best. This operation is ongoing. We hope that the situation will be completely different in Iraq at the end of this year.”
Al-Nakib said al-Zarqawi was moving in “more than one area,” but he refused to give details."

"From Deicide to Genocide" (David Gutmann, FrontPageMagazine, 2005/03/28)
"Among the many sources of Anti-Semitism, the accusation of “Christ killer!” stands out as having the longest history — and the most deadly consequences for Jews. Although Vatican II saw the charge of deicide officially expunged from Catholic doctrine in 1962, it continues to thrive in the Arab world. And nowhere does the charge find a more enthusiastic audience than among the Palestinian Arabs and their largely European groupies.":
"The American religious activist and paleoconservative pundit, Gary North, has put forth a related claim. Giving voice to the explicit anti-Semitism and hectic anti-Zionism much in fashion among the paleoconservative right, North has claimed that the “modern crucifixion” of the Palestinians will result in future acts of terrorism: “If Jews and Christian Zionists succeed in this modern crucifixion, it will not produce another Savior. Not all 100 million Arabs and one billion Muslims are turn-the-other-cheek followers of Jesus. This crucifixion will produce a thousand more World Trade Center horrors.” ...
Secular Europe, no stranger to Jew-bashing, is also getting into the act. When the IDF besieged terrorists in Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity, Italy's La Stampa published an editorial cartoon showing the Baby Jesus, crouching in his manger under an Israeli tank, while crying out, “Oh, no! They don't want to kill me again?!”
Finally, the stigma of deicide has invaded the foreign policy realm, in the person of French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine, who reportedly charged the Bush administration with washing its hands of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, just as the biblical Roman governor Pontius Pilate washed his hands of responsibility for the crucifixion of Christ. The odious implication of Vedrine’s remarks is clear: the blood libel attaches not only to the Jews, but also to their Gentile allies." (See also: "Surely they don't want to kill me again?" (La Stampa, 2002/04/03))

"Tehran Twist" (Lawrence F. Kaplan, The New Republic, 2005/03/28)
"Not since Reykjavik -- the 1986 summit at which Ronald Reagan emerged from his meeting with Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev sounding like, well, Mikhail Gorbachev -- has an American president turned so quickly on a dime. But there was President Bush on the final leg of his trip to Europe three weeks ago, emerging from meetings with French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Jettisoning the administration's long-standing and vocal contempt for European efforts to cut a deal with Iran over its nuclear program, Bush announced that, when it came to the Islamic Republic, the United States and Europe were now "on the same page." ...
Nor does the administration seem to have a clear idea of what the point of the whole enterprise is meant to be, other than to insist it's not military action. Hence the problem with today's sideshow: American and European officials insist that Iran must never have the bomb, and yet, absent a willingness to match words with deeds on either side of the Atlantic, it clearly will. As the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center's Henry Sokolski, who has studied Iran's nuclear program extensively, puts it, "No other major gaps remain: Iran has the requisite equipment to make the weapons fuel, the know-how to assemble the bombs, and the missile and naval systems necessary to deliver them beyond its borders." At this rate, rather than debating what to do about an Iran that wants to go nuclear, the Bush team and its European counterparts may soon be debating what to do about an Iran that just did."

"At last, a power of sense at the UN" (Robert Skidelsky, The Times, 2005/03/28)
"Liberals on both sides of the Atlantic are dismayed by President Bush’s nomination of the arch-hawk John Bolton as US representative to the UN. They are wrong; Bolton’s appointment may give the UN just the shot in the arm it needs. It promises serious US interest in UN reform; it challenges the UN to get serious.
The UN needs not more liberalism but more relevance. Its charter, the custodian of international law, was fashioned to deal with a much narrower set of threats than now exist. Today, in an age of transnational terrorism and nuclear proliferation, the sole superpower, the United States, is strongly tempted to ignore the charter and “break the law”.
But the US lacks both legitimacy and resources to be the sole world policeman. ...
If power and law are to be reconnected, the first requirement is to update international law. The UN was set up to provide collective security against aggression. National sovereignty was its core legal doctrine. This is now inadequate, since many threats to peace arise from failed states that cannot provide basic security for their own people. There are 25 or so of these in the world, mainly in Africa. Failed states produce terrorism, genocide and mass starvation that affront the conscience of mankind."

"Victory for Lebanese hungry for 'truth'" (Nicholas Blanford, The Christian Science Monitor, 2005/03/28)
"The Lebanese government has reversed its opposition to an international investigation into the assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri after a UN report released last week slammed the Lebanese authorities' handling of the case.
The decision to accept an independent investigation came as this city was rocked by another bomb blast Saturday evening, the third unclaimed explosion in eight days. The blast wounded six people further heightening tensions in this city already on edge since the Feb. 14 murder of Mr. Hariri.
"Lebanon agrees to the creation of an international commission of inquiry if the Security Council takes such a decision to uncover the truth in the assassination of Rafik Hariri," Foreign Minister Mahmoud Hammoud said Saturday. ...
Under mounting domestic and international pressure, Emile Lahoud, the pro-Syrian Lebanese president, also promised to cooperate with the United Nations "on whatever method it adopts in order to know the identity of the perpetrators." It is a marked turnaround for the embattled Lebanese authorities that had opposed any international involvement in investigating Hariri's murder."

"Al-Qaeda shows footage of Iraqi official's murder" (Catherine Philp, The Times, 2005/03/28)
"A senior official from Iraq’s Interior Ministry who was taken hostage a month ago has been shot by his captors and a video of his killing posted on the internet.
The blindfolded man, who identified himself as Colonel Ryad Kateh Olyway, was shot in the head by a masked gunman after confessing to collaboration with American forces. Followers of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an al-Qaeda-linked militant, claimed responsibility.
The video showed the hostage confessing his supposed crimes as he sat, with his hands tied behind him, on a chair in front of a banner bearing the name of al- Zarqawi’s organisation. He was flanked by two masked men holding assault rifles.
“I worked at the Interior Ministry to collaborate with the American forces,” he told the camera in an expressionless voice. “I gave the names and addresses of fellow officers in the former army, who are Sunnis.” ...
Another masked man then read out his sentence. “The religious court of the organisation of al-Qaeda of jihad in the land of two rivers has decided to implement God’s order on this infidel to serve as a lesson to others,” he stated.
Then he killed his captive with a shot to the head."

"Rings That Kidnap Iraqis Thrive on Big Threats and Bigger Profits" (James Glanz, The New York Times, 2005/03/28)
"BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 27 - While Westerners are transfixed by the occasional kidnapping of one of their own here, Iraqis are far more vulnerable. As many as 5,000 Iraqis have been kidnapped in the last year and a half, according to Western and Iraqi security officials.
Some of the kidnappings are of Iraqis who work with Westerners, said Col. Jabbar Anwar, head of a major crimes unit in Baghdad that works extensively with American intelligence groups on kidnapping cases. But ransom is a far greater motive than intimidation, he said: the threat of death for collaboration is usually just a way to drive up the price of freedom.
"The only reason they kidnap people is for money," Colonel Jabbar said.
Ransom demands, security officials say, range from a few hundred to half a million dollars. The death rate among hostages is uncertain, but the officials say many simply disappear even after a ransom is paid."

See the archive for earlier news and commentary.

 

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Jacques Barzun

Articles of the week

"Losing the Enlightenment" (Victor Davis Hanson, OpinionJournal, 2006/11/29)

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From the archives

Oriana Fallaci, R.I.P.

"The Rage, the Pride and the Doubt" (Oriana Fallaci, The Wall Street Journal, 2003/03/13)

"How the West Was Won and How It Will Be Lost" (Oriana Fallaci, The American Enterprise, from the January/February 2003 issue)

"On Jew-hatred in Europe" (Oriana Fallaci, dennisprager.com, 2002/04/13)

"Anger and Pride" (Oriana Fallaci, dennisprager.com, 2001/12/19)

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