Lettre 13

Fascinating interview with Seymour Hersh on Open Source with Christopher Lydon following its piece The Redirection (New Yorker). What is scary is that you get the feeling that the White House is playing with fire while being delusional and ignorant of the history/culture of the Middle-East. The fact of the matter for Sy Hersh is that the White House is a major contributing factor in pitching whole religious/ethnic groups against themselves, pursuing interests that maybe make sense in the short-term, but will bring more instability in the Middle-East in the long-term.

I must say that sometimes I find Sy Hersh sounding too much like if he was revealing a plot with black helicopters hovering over it, that his analysis are too much based on individuals but, overall, he presents solid arguments on how the US administration is misguided and improvising regarding its Middle-East policies.

Open Source, Making the Rounds with Seymour Hersh (mp3)

A very good round-up by Zvi Bar’el of Haaretz about what the Palestinians are enduring in Iraq.

This is not the nation’s largest minority, but it is apparently the most persecuted. Testimony by Palestinian refugees to journalists and human rights organizations paints a very grave picture: Iraqi gangs break into Palestinian homes at night and demand the residents leave within 24 hours. In isolated cases, Palestinians have been kidnapped on the street or at work, and their bodies have been found several days later, in ditches or garbage cans.

Unlike the 2 million Iraqi refugees who have left their homeland, Palestinians usually carry no documents bearing witness to their Iraqi citizenship, or anything that would permit them entry into neighboring Arab states, like Jordan or Syria.

Zvi Bar’el, Refugees, twice over, Haaretz.com

Palestinians are also part of a larger trend as Patrick Cockburn shows in The Independent:

Iraq’s minorities, some of the oldest communities in the world, are being driven from the country by a wave of violence against them because they are identified with the occupation and easy targets for kidnappers and death squads. A “huge exodus” is now taking place, according to a report by Minority Rights Group International.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees says 30 per cent of the 1.8 million Iraqis who have fled to Jordan, Syria and elsewhere come from the minorities.

Patrick Cockburn, ‘Exodus’ of Iraq’s ancient minorities, The Independent

Meanwhile, Rami G. Khouri is predicting that the Arab world is at a historic crossroad and that the current modern Arab state order that was created by the Europeans in circa 1920 has started to break down, in what we might perhaps call the Great Arab Unraveling. He adds that the way the US is pursuing its policy in the Midlle-East produce a murky picture.

The pervasive incoherence of this bizarre picture makes it perfectly routine for Arab monarchies to support Salafist terrorists, for Western democracies to ignore the results of Arab free elections, for Iranians and Arabs, and Shiites and Sunnis, to work hand in hand while also fighting bitter wars, for Islamists and secular Arabs to join forces, for freedom lovers in London and Washington to support seasoned Arab autocrats, for Western and Arab rule-of-law advocates to sponsor militias, and for Israel and the US to perpetuate Israeli policies that exacerbate rather than calm security threats and vulnerabilities in the region.

Rami G. Khouri, Prepare for the Great Arab Unraveling, The Daily Star

There’s an excellent introduction on Shiism by Mike Shuster of NPR available as a podcast.

Mike Shuster, The Partisans of Ali: A Series Overview, NPR (mp3)

See also the reading list.

Zvi Bar’el, one of my favorite political analyst have a somber evaluation of the situation one year after the election of Hamas.

(…) even if Haniyeh starts wearing a skullcap and Khaled Meshal begins humming Hatikva, and even if Abbas makes it mandatory to teach the heroic story of Masada in Palestinian schools, Israel does not want and is unable to propose a diplomatic alternative that would lead to the establishment of an independent and democratic Palestinian state. It does not want to - because any such proposal would mean a withdrawal from most of the territories and the dismantling of most of the settlements. It is unable to - because there is no government of Israel. After all, even when it appeared that there was a government in Israel, not a single measly illegal outpost was removed; this is a non-government that has transformed the disengagement from Gaza from a national trauma to a housing trauma; and in Hebron, or in Mount Hebron to be more precise, the sovereign provides free protection to a bunch of hooligans.

Zvi Bar’el, As long as we impose sanctions, Haaretz.com

It seems to me that the Palestinians are hostage of their political representatives notwithstanding the Israel intransigence and the completely stupid response from the Quartet to the election of Hamas.

It is the first time in history, according to the UN’s John Duggard, that an occupied people have been subject to international sanctions, especially sanctions of this magnitude and rigor.

And then there’s that other story: the one about a people forgotten in all of this. Who will relay their narrative?

Laila El-Haddad, Hamas in power: one year on, Raising Yousuf: a diary of a mother under occupation

See also Laila El-Haddad’s interview that narrate the social dislocation in Gaza. (mp3)

Jimmy Carter still amazes me. He gave a conference about his last book (Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid) at an American nondenominational Jewish university and received a standing ovation.

Nathaniel Popper, Carter Wins Over Student Crowd at Brandeis, Receives Ovation, Forward.com

See also Jimmy Carter defends new book on Middle East for the podcast of this conference (mp3)

SyriaComment.com: What is New about Bush’s New Strategy?

Sacrificing political stability in Somalia for three al-Qaida operatives is terrible math. Even more troubling is the continued escalation toward Iran. Beefing up Gulf defenses by sending additional battle ships to the region, leaked Israeli plans to use nuclear bunker busters against Iran’s facilities, and promises to provide Patriot missiles to the Arab Gulf states all suggest that Bush is expanding the battle field in the hope that US fortunes in Iraq will be reversed if Washington can claim victory elsewhere. The problem with this strategy is that it builds on the erroneous presumption that the US is in a war against “evil.” Rather than disaggregating struggles in Palestine, the Horn of Africa, Lebanon, Iran, Afghanistan, and Iraq in order to deal with each separately, Washington is stubbornly gluing them together in one super war on radical Islam. We are pretending they are all directed by al-Qaida and a nebulous enemy of freedom and liberty. This is not the enemy that exists. There is no command central. Moreover, we cannot destroy an idea with firepower. By pursuing this false war with greater determination, the US is ensuring failure with greater determination.

This an excellent recapitulation on all the battle fronts the White House is opening in the Middle-East (Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine) and the Horn of Africa (Ethiopia/Somalia). It’s quite scary. You have the feeling that there’s no check and balance from the Congress, and that Bush/Cheney will be able to do as they like.

The drums of war are even more beating here if you believe Zbigniew Brzezinski:

…this is what really worries me. There are hints in the president’s speech and in Rice’s testimony today about the possibility of escalation, not necessarily in the number of troops, but in the range of the military operations, namely perhaps against Syria or Iran.

And the incident with the Iranian consulate, the rhetoric about Iran, the increasing temptation to blame our failure on the Iranians and the Syrians could push us in that direction. And there are a lot of people still around here, particularly the neocons, who would like us to have a crack at Iran.

and

I think it reflects, on the one hand, desperation, on the other hand, a kind of fanatical commitment which I think is detached from reality.
Jim Lehrer: From the United States?
Zbigniew Brzezinski: Of the United States and of presidential leadership. And don’t forget that, even the existing policy, short of the widened war with Iran and Syria, does not have the support of the three still-living former presidents, and one who recently died, who went public on record as opposing the current policy.

And that means a total exclusion of any rational regional effort to get a political process going of the kind that the Baker-Hamilton commission spoke and which I think very rightly advocated.

Online NewsHours: Plan to Increase Troop Numbers Comes Under Broad Scrutiny (mp3)

Jimmy Carter, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, 2006.

I was astonished to hear Jimmy Carter talking on an American network television in such a way when he gave an interview about his last book on the NewsHour (PBS). Ok, its PBS, but still, his critics of Israel are coming from an ex US President. You should hear the mp3 that add more humanity to the whole thing. But I tend to disagree with his assessment, when he put the onus of the occupation only on the settler and seems to separate them from the state apparatus.

And let me get to the word “apartheid.” Apartheid doesn’t apply at all, as I made plain in my book, anything that relates to Israel to the nation. It doesn’t imply anything as it relates to racism. This apartheid, which is prevalent throughout the occupied territories, the subjection of the Palestinians to horrible abuse, is caused by a minority of Israelis — we’re not talking about racism, but talking about their desire to acquire, to occupy, to confiscate, and then to colonize Palestinian land.

So the whole system is designed to separate through a ferocious system Israelis who live on Palestine territory and Palestinians who want to live on their own territory.

Jimmy Carter, Former President Jimmy Carter Examines Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Online NewsHour, (mp3)

Helena Cobban point to the flaws of the argumentation of Jimmy Carter.

If I were Jimmy Carter, which I’m not, I would have noted that there are indeed many many things that Israel’s projects in the occupied West Bank and Golan have in common with South African apartheid, and very few if any of them have to do with skin color. (US citizens have this hang-up about skin color issues, which goes back deep in their collective past, obviously. Their common understanding of the word ‘racism’, for example, completely limits it to discrimination based on skin color, unlike just about everywhere else in the world where ‘racism’ has a far broader meaning.)

The term “Bantustans” is generally appropriate in both cases.

Helena Cobban, If I Were Jimmy Carter…, Just World News

What Helena Cobban is saying is that this form of discrimination is deeply rooted in the state apparatus of Israel, even, if, following the pools in Israel, the majority of the civil society is against this occupation (and there is numerous Israeli groups that works against this occupation).

The lesson in that is clear and sobering: As bad as things may seem now, they can yet become worse, and not just in Iraq. The longer we pretend that we have not lost there, the more we risk losing other wars we still may salvage, starting with Afghanistan.

The members of the Iraq Study Group are all good Americans of proven service to their country. But to the extent that their report forestalls reality and promotes pipe dreams of one last chance for success in this fiasco, it will be remembered as just one more delusional milestone in the tragedy of our age.
Frank Rich, The Sunshine Boys Can’t Save Iraq, nytimes.com [subscription needed]

There is more than anti-syrian and pro-syrian parties in Lebanon.

The March 14 Coalition, however, insisted that every wrong happening in Lebanon was the doing of the Syrians. Aoun was shunned for his views and, in a fit of rage, he lashed out against them, reminding the Hariri bloc that they were the same ones who legitimized Syria in Lebanon in the 1990s by assuming government office during the heyday of Syrian power under the late prime minister Hariri.

Siniora, after all, had been minister of finance when Syria was in control of Lebanon. Marwan Hamadeh, one of the loudest anti-Syrian voices, was minister of health, and Walid Jumblatt had been a close ally of Damascus and minister of the displaced under Hariri. The dramatic U-turn by the March 14 Coalition, and its continued anti-Syrian tone even after the exodus of the Syrian army, shed serious doubt on the government’s convictions, loyalties or beliefs.

Sami Moubayed, The anti-Siniora craze in Beirut, AsiaTimes

See also this article by Simon Tisdall in The Guardian.

Having looked on helplessly, or unhelpfully, during Israel’s destabilising summer bombardment of Lebanon, Britain and other European countries are now scrabbling to shore up Fouad Siniora’s shaky pro-western government. The foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, and her German counterpart were in Beirut at the weekend. Messages of solidarity have come from France and Italy. Even Israel is warning of dire consequences should Mr Siniora fall.

All agree that this week’s Hizbullah-organised, largely Shia Muslim demonstrations, although broadly peaceful and “democratic” so far, must not be allowed to topple the government. Their attitude contrasts awkwardly with the approving western view of last year’s anti-Syrian street protests by Sunni Muslims, Christians and Druze, whimsically dubbed the “cedar revolution”, which ousted Lebanon’s then prime minister, Omar Karami.

Simon Tisdall, Iran v Saudis in battle of Beirut, The Guardian, December 5, 2006

“Canada changes, the Conservatives change and do certain things, all we need to do is make a gesture of openness to Quebec and we have just done exactly the opposite,” a former Quebec-based federal cabinet minister said on the convention floor.
What really frustrated the Quebec delegation — including several MPs who were sounded out a few minutes after Dion’s victory — was to see, in the words of one, “that the English don’t understand what they’ve just done in electing Stéphane Dion.”
The fact that Gerard Kennedy and his most celebrated supporter, Justin Trudeau, who are both opposed to the concept of a Quebec nation, rallied to Dion’s side has not improved his standing among Quebec Liberals.

Vincent Marissal, Delegates chose man most like Chrétien
But support not there in Quebec, Toronto Star.

Though Liberals now celebrate Dion as “the next prime minister of Canada,” the rap against him is that he remains unpopular in Quebec, where the former unity minister is known for his acerbic wit, stiff personality, and uncanny ability to rub sovereignists the wrong way.
In the words of a senior Bloc Québécois official who attended the convention as an observer, “the biggest party tonight isn’t going to be here — it’s going to be at our headquarters.”

Sean Gordon, Improbable, yet unstoppable
Stéphane Dion’s win is seen as a victory of convictions over charisma, Toronto Star.