'All options on table' over Syria: US official (via AFP)
Ceasefire opens up deeper waters for Gaza's fishermen (via The Christian Science Monitor)
"What happened in Benghazi was in fact initially a spontaneous reaction to what had just transpired hours before in Cairo, almost a copycat of the demonstrations against our facility in Cairo, prompted by the video," Rice said.According to David D Kirkpatrick at the New York Times she was at least mostly right.
To Libyans who witnessed the assault and know the attackers, there is little doubt what occurred: a well-known group of local Islamist militants struck without any warning or protest, and they did it in retaliation for the video. That is what the fighters said at the time, speaking emotionally of their anger at the video without mentioning Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or the terrorist strikes of 11 years earlier. And it is an explanation that tracks with their history as a local militant group determined to protect Libya from Western influence. (bold mine)So it was in response to the video but was it spontaneous?
Other Benghazi militia leaders who know Ansar al-Shariah say it was capable of carrying out the attack by itself with only a few hours’ planning, and as recently as June one of its leaders, Mr. Zahawi, declared that it could destroy the American Mission.(bold mine)So spontaneous might not be that far off. But is Ansar al-Shariah al-Qaeda?
“It is a promiscuous use of ‘Al Qaeda,’ ” Michael Hanna, a researcher at the Century Foundation, said of those charging that Al Qaeda was behind this attack. “It can mean anything or nothing at all.”Are they terrorists? Without a doubt! Are they al-Qaeda? Not so much. It also appears they have no interest in attacking the West in the West only keeping Western influence out of the region.
I'm pretty sure that I'm an example of a Jewish person who wants good things for Israel. Am I turned around, here, or are people just being inflammatory out of reflex, and hurting themselves?
I think that people need to be working for peace, not supremacy. Maybe that's my problem.
ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates, Jan 13 -- President Bush accused Iran Sunday of undermining peace in Lebanon, funding terrorist groups, trying to intimidate its neighbors and refusing to be open about its nuclear program and ambitions.The reaction from the Arab leaders has been to smile and say we will get back to you because they are all going around around Bush in an attempt to stabilize the area - they know that the Bush administration won't.
In a speech described by the White House as the centerpiece of his eight-day trip to the Middle East, Bush tried to speak directly to the people of Iran as he urged nations to help the United States "confront this danger before it is too late."
[....]
Bush is trying to persuade Arab countries to join U.S. efforts to pressure Iran, though many have displayed ambivalence about the administration's campaign amid a new U.S. intelligence report that concluded Iran stopped a nuclear weapons program in 2003.
The president will travel Monday to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, viewed by many inside and out of the administration as the lynchpin of its efforts to develop an anti-Iran coalition.Of course Saudi Arabia has been talking to Iran with out the Bush administration.
Yet wealthy Saudis remain the chief financiers of worldwide terror networks. “If I could somehow snap my fingers and cut off the funding from one country, it would be Saudi Arabia,” said Stuart Levey, the US Treasury official in charge of tracking terror financing.The Saudis have done little to stop this.
Extremist clerics provide a stream of recruits to some of the world’s nastiest trouble spots.
An analysis by NBC News suggested that the Saudis make up 55% of foreign fighters in Iraq. They are also among the most uncompromising and militant.
Half the foreign fighters held by the US at Camp Cropper near Baghdad are Saudis. They are kept in yellow jumpsuits in a separate, windowless compound after they attempted to impose sharia on the other detainees and preached an extreme form of Wahhabist Islam.
In recent months, Saudi religious scholars have caused consternation in Iraq and Iran by issuing fatwas calling for the destruction of the great Shi’ite shrines in Najaf and Karbala in Iraq, some of which have already been bombed. And while prominent members of the ruling al-Saud dynasty regularly express their abhorrence of terrorism, leading figures within the kingdom who advocate extremism are tolerated.
Sheikh Saleh al-Luhaidan, the chief justice, who oversees terrorist trials, was recorded on tape in a mosque in 2004, encouraging young men to fight in Iraq. “Entering Iraq has become risky now,” he cautioned. “It requires avoiding those evil satellites and those drone aircraft, which own every corner of the skies over Iraq. If someone knows that he is capable of entering Iraq in order to join the fight, and if his intention is to raise up the word of God, then he is free to do so.”
According to Levey, not one person identified by America or the United Nations as a terrorist financier has been prosecuted by Saudi authorities.On the other side of the arch villain Iran things are not to rosy either.
For more than five months the United States has been trying to orchestrate a political transition in Pakistan that would manage to somehow keep Gen. Pervez Musharraf in power without making a mockery of President Bush’s promotion of democracy in the Muslim world.So a country that already has nukes it teetering on chaos and their is the very real risk that really crazy people will get the bomb.
On Saturday, those carefully laid plans fell apart spectacularly. Now the White House is stuck in wait-and-see mode, with limited options and a lack of clarity about the way forward.
General Musharraf’s move to seize emergency powers and abandon the Constitution left Bush administration officials close to their nightmare: an American-backed military dictator who is risking civil instability in a country with nuclear weapons and an increasingly alienated public.
In many respects our republic, as it has existed since the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, is already dead. But such deaths of governments happen periodically in most countries, I think. Now, although the outer trappings of government may not change in any significant way, we are living in an entirely different form of government than we knew in, say, the 1960s. And for us, since the changes to date appear all to have been uniformly negative, this is a very sad time.Ralph of course is right but I think it goes a lot deeper than the decline of the US Republic. Like the people that create them civilizations are born, live and die. They usually don't die of old age but of some terminal disease. Our current civilization has three such diseases and no, I'm not talking about Islamic jihads. The three are:
Nevertheless, I've personally concluded it's useless to pretend we can bring back the republic we have known. Rather, we need to focus on what form of government comes next for our country. While the death of the previous republic is an established fact, the future form of our government appears to be very much in doubt, open for ideas and actions. On that, we can hope to have an influence.
"Almost every decision the United States has made to interfere with Palestinian politics has boomeranged."The above quote is from
~Robert Malley
Five years ago this month, President Bush stood in the Rose Garden and laid out a vision for the Middle East that included Israel and a state called Palestine living together in peace. "I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror," the president declared.The two-state vision in Palestine is not the only thing that's dead, the entire neocon/Bush administration strategy of Democracy at gunpoint in dead. The infamous "purple finger" elections in Iraq only resulted in more violence as did the elections in Lebanon. In Iraq the Americans are blamed for the non-stop death and violence and the people are saying if this is Democracy we don't want it.
The takeover this week of the Gaza Strip by the Hamas militant group dedicated to the elimination of Israel demonstrates how much that vision has failed to materialize, in part because of actions taken by the administration. The United States championed Israel's departure from the Gaza Strip as a first step toward peace and then pressed both Israelis and Palestinians to schedule legislative elections, which Hamas unexpectedly won. Now Hamas is the unchallenged power in Gaza.
After his reelection in 2004, Bush said he would use his "political capital" to help create a Palestinian state by the end of his second term. In his final 18 months as president, he faces the prospect of a shattered Palestinian Authority, a radical Islamic state on Israel's border and increasingly dwindling options to turn the tide against Hamas and create a functioning Palestinian state.
"The two-state vision is dead. It really is," said Edward G. Abington Jr., a former State Department official who was once an adviser to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
...the war itself was a catastrophic mistake. It was a faulty grand strategy, not poor implementation. The Bush administration was operating under an international political illusion, one that is further discredited with every car bombing of a crowded Baghdad marketplace and every Iraqi doctor who packs up his family and flees his country.The same can be said about the entire Middle East.
Bush administration officials have been scratching their heads over steps taken by Prince Bandar’s uncle, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, that have surprised them by going against the American playbook, after receiving assurances to the contrary from Prince Bandar during secret trips he made to Washington.And King Abdullah has delivered yet another blow to the administration:
For instance, in February, King Abdullah effectively torpedoed plans by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for a high-profile peace summit meeting between Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel and the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, by brokering a power-sharing agreement with Mr. Abbas’s Fatah and Hamas that did not require Hamas to recognize Israel or forswear violence. The Americans had believed, after discussions with Prince Bandar, that the Saudis were on board with the strategy of isolating Hamas.
American officials also believed, again after speaking with Prince Bandar, that the Saudis might agree to direct engagement with Israel as part of a broad American plan to jump-start Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. King Abdullah countermanded that plan.
Most bitingly, during a speech before Arab heads of state in Riyadh three weeks ago, the king condemned the American invasion of Iraq as “an illegal foreign occupation.” The Bush administration, caught off guard, was infuriated, and administration officials have found Prince Bandar hard to reach since.
Since the Iraq war and the attendant plummeting of America’s image in the Muslim world, King Abdullah has been striving to set a more independent and less pro-American course, American and Arab officials said. And that has steered America’s relationship with its staunchest Arab ally into uncharted waters. Prince Bandar, they say, may no longer be able to serve as an unerring beacon of Saudi intent.
“The problem is that Bandar has been pursuing a policy that was music to the ears of the Bush administration, but was not what King Abdullah had in mind at all,” said Martin S. Indyk, a former United States ambassador to Israel who is now head of the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy.
In a serious rebuff to U.S. diplomacy, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has refused to receive Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on the eve of a critical regional summit on the future of the war-ravaged country, Iraqi and other Arab officials said yesterday.What we see here is that none of the players in the region thinks that the Bush administration can do anything positive in the region. They are working behind the scenes without the Bush administration to try to broker some stability. The Iraqis have been talking to the Iranians, the Saudis have been talking to the Iranians - leaving the incompetent Bush administration out of the loop.
The Saudi leader's decision reflects the growing tensions between the oil-rich regional giants, the deepening skepticism among Sunni leaders in the Middle East about Iraq's Shiite-dominated government, and Arab concern about the prospects of U.S. success in Iraq, the sources said. The Saudi snub also indicates that the Maliki government faces a creeping regional isolation unless it takes long-delayed actions, Arab officials warn.
For the United States, the Saudi cold shoulder undermines hopes of healing regional tensions between Sunni- and Shiite-dominated governments and producing a new spirit of cooperation on Iraq at the summit, to be held Thursday and Friday in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, the sources warn.
The Bush administration has invested significantly in the Egypt meeting, which Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will attend. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said in a television interview last Thursday that the United States holds a "lot of hope" that the conference will serve as a catalyst for garnering regional and international support for solving Iraq's problems.
We are in the ditch in the Middle East. As bad as you think it is watching TV, it's worse. It's not just Iraq but the whole pattern of America's dealings with the Arab world. People aren't just angry at America -- they've been that way to varying degrees since I first came here 27 years ago. What's worse is that they're giving up on us -- on our ability to make good decisions, to solve problems, to play the role of honest broker.So the US is universally hated in the mid east. That's OK with Cheney exactly what he wants. Cheney doesn't want to be liked - only feared. The second piece is by Christiane Amanpour,
Let's start with some poll numbers presented at the Doha conference by Shibley Telhami, a University of Maryland professor and a fellow of the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution, which co-sponsored the conference with the Qatari foreign ministry. The polling was done last year by Zogby International in six countries that are usually regarded as pro-American: Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
In these six "friendly" countries, only 12 percent of those surveyed expressed favorable attitudes toward the United States. America's leaders have surpassed Israel's as objects of anger. Asked which foreign leader they disliked most, 38 percent named George Bush; Ariel Sharon was a distant second at 11 percent; and Ehud Olmert was third with 7 percent.
The poll data show a deep suspicion of American motives: 65 percent of those surveyed said they didn't think democracy was a real U.S. objective in the Middle East. Asked to name two countries that had the most freedom and democracy, only 14 percent said America, putting it far behind France and Germany. And remember, folks, this is coming from our friends.
TEHRAN, Iran (CNN) -- As I sat down recently with a senior Iranian government official, he urgently waved a column by Thomas Friedman of The New York Times in my face, one about how the United States and Iran need to engage each other.Yes natural allies in the real war on terror. The terror threat doesn't come from the Shiites in Iran, or Iraq. The roots of al Qaeda and the Taliban is the extremist Sunni Wahhabi sect out of Saudi Arabia, enemies of the Shiite Iranians for 1400 years. Now the PNAC neocons, including Dick Cheney, have had Iran as a target since their own tyrant, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was overthrown in 1979. They controlled the Shah and so they controlled the resources of the country. Indirect imperialism. Now an attack on Iran will further destabilize the region leading to more war and less security. Cheney and his fellow lunatics are fully aware of this and it's just what they want. Dick Cheney is a classic megalomaniac - a man who wants above all else to be a tyrant. Like all tyrants Cheney and the rest of the PNAC crowd realize that one of the best ways to consolidate power is war - a constant state of war against real or concocted external enemies. No Dick Cheney is not incompetent. Instability in the middle east and the wars it will bring are exactly what he wants. That's why they will attack Iran. It's not about oil but power except for the power that comes from controlling the oil.
''Natural allies,'' this official said.
It was a surprising choice of words considering the barbs Washington and Tehran have been trading of late.
"We are not after conflict. We are not after crisis. We are not after war," said this official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "But we don't know whether the same is true in the U.S. or not. If the same is true on the U.S. side, the first step must be to end this vicious cycle that can lead to dangerous action -- war."
Churchillian it was not. Yet the State of the Union seemed a success if Bush's purpose was to buy time from Congress to wait and see if his surge of U.S. forces into Iraq might yet succeed.Terrorist don't fear free societies they thrive in them.
But when Bush started to describe the ideological war we are in, one began to understand why we are in the mess we are in.
"This war," said Bush, "is an ideological struggle. ... To prevail, we must remove the conditions that inspire blind hatred and drove 19 men to get onto airplanes and to come to kill us."
But the "conditions" that drove those 19 men "to come to kill us" is our dominance of their world, our authoritarian allies and Israel.
They were over here because we are over there.
If Bush is going to remove those "conditions," he is going to have to get us out of the Middle East. Is he prepared to do that? Of course not. Because Bush, believing the problem is not our pervasive presence but the lack of freedom in the Middle East, is waging his own ideological war to bring freedom in by force of arms, if necessary.As Tucker Carlson pointed yesterday free elections in the Middle East would only result in more governments hostile to the US. Pat Buchanan agrees:
"What every terrorist fears most is human freedom – societies where men and women make their own choices."
Very American. But the truth is terrorists do not fear free societies, they flourish in them. The suicide bombers of 9-11, Madrid and London all plotted their atrocities in free societies. From the Red Brigades, who murdered Italy's Aldo Mori, to the Baader-Meinhoff Gang, who tried to kill Al Haig, to the Basque ETA, the IRA and the Puerto Rican terrorists who tried to assassinate Harry Truman, free societies are where they do their most effective work.
Stalin's Russia and Nazi Germany had no trouble with terrorists.
"Free people are not drawn to violent and malignant ideologies," declared Bush. Oh? Explain, then, why 70 million Germans, under the most democratic government in their history, gave more than half their votes to Nazis and Communists in 1933? In every plebiscite he held, Hitler won a landslide. In the year of Anschluss and Munich, 1938, Hitler was Time's Man of the Year and far more popular than FDR, who lost 71 seats in the House.
In the free elections Bush demanded in Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq, the winners were the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, Hamas and Shia militants with ties to Iran.Can we decide for them?
If a referendum were held in the Middle East on the proposition of the U.S. military out and Israel gone, how does Bush think it would come out?
"So we advance our security interests by helping moderates, reformers and brave voices for democracy," said Bush. But how many of those "moderates" – Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco, Kuwait, the Gulf States – are ruled "by brave voices for democracy"?
Our Islamist enemies would likely endorse unanimously a Bush call for free elections in all those countries, as elections could not but help advance to greater power, at the expense of our friends, those same Islamist enemies.
"Give me liberty or give me death!" said Patrick Henry of the Brits remaining in this country that Brits had founded. "Live free or die!" is the motto of the great state of New Hampshire.
This is the heart of the war we are in. Americans believe in freedom first. Millions of Muslims believe in Islam first – submission to Allah. We decide for us. Do we also decide for them?