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On January 23, Al Jazeera released breaking news on its extensive “Palestine Papers” coverage, introducing them, saying:

It “obtained more than 1,600 internal documents from a decade of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations,” writer Gregg Carlstrom explaining that:

“Over the last several months, Al Jazeera has been given unhindered access to the largest-ever leak of confidential documents related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” They include “nearly 1,700 files, (and) thousands of pages of diplomatic correspondence detailing the inner workings of” peace process negotiations.

Included (from 1999 – 2010) were “emails, maps, minutes of private meetings, accounts of high level exchanges, strategy papers and even power point presentations….”

Releasing them from January 23 – 26, they reveal information about:

— the PA’s willingness to concede all East Jerusalem settlements except one;

— PA “creativ(ity)” about Islam’s third holiest site, Haram al-Sharif (Nobel Sanctuary), what Jews call the Temple Mount;

— compromise on the right of return, suggesting abandonment beyond token amounts;

— numerous details of PA-Israeli “cooperation,” suggesting complicity and unconditional surrender to Israeli demands; and

— private late 2009 PA-US negotiator exchanges when Goldstone Report discussions were ongoing at the UN.

Because of obvious sensitivity, Al Jazeera will keep source information confidential as well as how documents were obtained.

In a January 23 London Guardian article, Karma Nabulski headlined, “This seemingly endless and ugly game of the peace process is now finally over,” saying:

“It’s over. Given the shocking nature, extent and detail of these ghastly revelations from behind closed doors (shows none) of the villains on the Palestinian side can survive it….A small group of (duplicitous) men who have polluted the Palestinian public sphere with their private activities are now exposed.”

In fact, the PA is infested with traitors, some more recent like Salam Fayyad. As appointed prime minister, he’s Israel’s man in Palestine as a previous article explained, accessed through the following link:

http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2011/01/salam-fayyad-israels-man-in-palestine.html

President Mahmoud Abbas’ treachery way predates him also discussed in a previous article, accessed through the following link:

http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2010/10/palestinian-authority-traitors-serving.html

Jeffrey Blankfort called him a “double agent (serving) his Israeli and US masters in plain sight.” Saying he’s “Israel’s sheriff,” Edward Said called him “colorless, moderately corrupt and without any clear ideas of his own, except that he wants to please the white man.”

As chief Oslo negotiator, he surrendered unconditionally to Israeli demands, Said explaining:

“the fashion-show vulgarities of the (1993) White House ceremony, the degrading spectacle of Yasser Arafat thanking everyone for the suspension of most of his people’s rights, and the fatuous solemnity of Bill Clinton’s performance, like a 20th century Roman emperor shepherding two vassal kings through rituals of reconciliation and obeisance, (and) the truly astonishing proportions of the Palestinian capitulation.”

It was unilateral surrender, a Palestinian Versailles. They got nothing for renouncing armed struggle, recognizing Israel’s right to exist, letting it colonize Palestine, and leaving major unresolved issues for later final status talks, including self-determination, the right to return, the future of settlements, borders, water rights, and status of Jerusalem as sovereign Palestinian territory and future home of its capital.

Under Arafat, a new PA was established as Israel’s enforcer. At Oslo, Abbas arranged it, getting nothing except White House photo-ops and undisclosed personal favors. Nearly two decades later, they’ve still gotten nothing under him as president, serving his Israeli and US masters.

Main PA Negotiators/Traitors

Besides Abbas, they include:

(1) Saeb Erekat: Since the 1991 Madrid Conference attempt to restart the peace process, he was involved. Thereafter, he took part in every major negotiation, including Oslo and what followed. Overall, he participated in 116 meetings with Israeli, US, and European officials, and for the past two years, served as chief negotiator.

(2) Ahmed Qurei: From 2003 – January 2006 elections defeating Fatah for a new Hamas government, he was Palestinian prime minister. After leaving office, he became chief PA negotiator until late 2008. The documents suggest political infighting reduced his status.

(3) Maen Areikat: In 1992, he began working with Hanan Ashrawi, at the time, official spokeswoman of the Palestinian delegation to peace talk negotiations. In 1998, he served as PLO director general of the Negotiations Affairs Department, supervising its Negotiations Support Unit, providing legal, policy, communications and technical support to Palestinian negotiators. He’s currently heads the PLO mission to the US representative.

(4) Mohammed Dahlan: After Oslo, he headed the PA’s Preventive Security Service in Gaza. In the 1990s, his soldiers were accused of torturing Hamas prisoners. As a notorious Palestinian strongman, he’s perhaps its most controversial figure. In 2007, he headed the failed CIA-funded attempt to unseat Hamas in Gaza, and since August 2009, he’s been an elected member of Fatah’s Central Committee.

Erekat’s Yerushalayim/Haram al-Sharif Solution

As chief PA negotiator, he “suggested unprecedented compromises on the division of Jerusalem and its holy sites,” including ceding control to an international committee. Palestinians accused Israel of Judaizing East Jerusalem as well as pursuing destructive excavations to undermine the al-Aqsa mosque’s foundation, damaging its structural integrity, perhaps intending to destroy it.

Documents reveal that during an October 21, 2009 meeting with George Mitchell and other US negotiators, he said:

“It’s solved. You have the Clinton Parameters formula. For the Old City sovereignty for Palestine, except the Jewish quarter and part of the Armenian quarter….the Haram can be left to be discussed – there are creative ways, having a body or a committee, having undertakings, for example, not to dig (under the mosque). The only thing I cannot do is convert to Zionism.”

Haram’s status was seldom considered. As late as a July 2, 2008 meeting, Israeli negotiators were told discussing it was off-limits and that they couldn’t bargain on Jerusalem. Yet Erekat and those under him did so, “regardless of the tactical consequences.”

A month later, at a June 30, 2008 meeting, he said:

“It is no secret that on our map we proposed we are offering you the biggest Yerushalayim in history. But we must talk about the concept of Al-Quds (Jerusalem). (We) have a detailed concept (and) it’s doable.”

He seemed willing to accept an international overseeing arrangement, what never before was considered, fearing it would be a first step to losing it entirely and angering the entire Arab world. As chief negotiator, he “appeared totally disconnected from his own people, as well as his wider Arab and Muslim constituency.”

He was “so consumed by the negotiations that he became oblivious of the import of his remarks among Arabs, Muslims, and – most of all – his own people. Even among some Israelis, this seemed infantile.” According to Israeli lawyer Danied Seidemann:

“(A)ny attempt to construe the API (Arab Palestine Initiative) in a manner that falls short of ‘full-stop’ Palestinian or Arab sovereignty on the Haram/Mount would be an exercise in self-delusion.”

World Headlines

On January 14, Haaretz News Agencies headlined, “Abbas: Concessions in Palestine papers came from Israel, not us,” saying:

He “denied offering secret concessions to Israel and said that reporting of purportedly leaked documents” mistakenly presented Israeli positions, not those of his negotiators. Calling it a “mix-up,” he said it was “intentional….We say things very clearly, we do not have secrets.”

Clearly embarrassed like Abbas, Ahmed Qureia, chief 2008 negotiator, said “many parts of the documents were fabricated, as part of the incitement against the (PA) and the Palestinian leadership.” He denied making duplicitous offers, calling reports about Erekat “lies and half truths.” In fact, they came from his own verbatim comments.

On January 24, Haaretz writer Akiva Eldar headlined, “Lieberman’s map for future Palestinian borders is a joke,” calling it:

“a predetermined ritual: The government refuses to freeze settlement construction, the Palestinians freeze the negotiations, (Netanyahu) blames (Abbas), the international community presses Israel, Netanyahu/Lieberman/Barak (leak) ‘a new political program,’ (and) Palestinians reject it.”

With nothing constructive in it, it’s like trying to make eggs out of omelets or caterpillars out of butterflies.

BBC headlined, “Excepts: Leaked Palestinian ‘proposals,’ ” saying:

Their negotiators offered unprecedented concessions, including willingness “to accept Israel’s annexation of all but one of its settlements built illegally in occupied East Jerusalem.” They also “show how the Palestinians offered concessions on” Haram.

“They could not be independently verified and the chief Palestinian negotiator has dismissed them as a ‘pack of lies.’ “

The last refuge of a scoundrel caught red-handed is lying about it, revealing even greater treachery.

On January 23, London Guardian writers Seumas Milne and Ian Black headlined, “Secret papers reveal slow death of Middle East peace process,” saying:

Offered concessions sent “shockwaves (across Occupied Palestine and) the wider Arab world.” Revelations include:

— unprecedented “confidential concessions,” including on some of the most sensitive issues;

— Israeli leaders asking “some Arab citizens to be transferred to a new Palestinian state;”

— intimate “covert cooperation between Israeli security forces and the” PA;

— British intelligence’s “central role (in) drawing up a secret plan to crush Hamas…;”

— how PA “leaders were privately tipped off about” Cast Lead, showing their complicity and willingness to go along; as well as much more.

Most revealing is “the weakness and growing desperation of PA leaders (to) reach agreement or even halt (settlement construction) temporarily,” undermining “their credibility in relation to their Hamas rivals.” In addition, Israeli negotiators showed “unyielding confidence,” and US politicians “dismissive(ness) towards Palestinian representatives,’ mere pawns to manipulate freely.

After the revelations, former Palestinian negotiator Diana Butto demanded Erekat resign, saying he “must step down and if he doesn’t it will only serve to show just how out of touch and unrepresentative the negotiators are.”

On January 23, New York Times writers Ethan Bronner and Neil MacFarquhar headlined, “Word of Palestinian Concession in 2008 Roils Mideast Debate,” saying:

New details emerged as Washington “is facing unusual pressure from its Arab and European allies, and even some former top American officials, not to veto a draft Security Council resolution reaffirming the longstanding international view” that Israeli settlements are illegal.

Of course, it’s far more than a “view.” Fundamental international laws affirm it, including Fourth Geneva prohibiting an occupying power from transferring its own population into territories its controls or changing their demographic makeup. Moreover, on March 22, 1979, UN Security Council Resolution 446 determined:

“that the policy and practices of Israel in establishing settlements in the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967 have no legal validity and constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East.”

At the time, Washington abstained. Now it obstructs by vetoing anything detrimental to Israel. According to Maged Abdelaziz, Egypt’s UN ambassador:

“The statements by the secretary of state and the American administration are that ‘We are against settlements and we are not going to do anything about (them) and we don’t want you to do anything about (them). We will let Israel do what they want. We will wake up one day to find that the two-state solution has become a dream that is unachievable.”

That day, in fact, long since passed, given how untenable division is after Israel expropriated all choice land and plans total Jerusalem Judaization, one home demolition and stolen dunam at a time.

On January 23, State Department spokesman PJ Crowley said “The US government is reviewing the alleged Palestinian documents released by Al-Jazeera. We cannot vouch for their veracity.” Later he added that Washington “remains focused on a two-state solution and will continue to work with the parties to narrow existing differences on core issues.”

So far, Obama and Netanyahu said nothing, and on January 24, Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal was silent.

In contrast, Financial Times contributor Nadia Hijab headlined, “Leaks will cripple Palestinian authority,” saying:

“It is likely to deal a death blow to an American-led peace process already on life support, and hasten the end of the” Oslo-created PA. Al Jazeera’s revelations confirm what’s been “clear to Palestinians for decades: their leadership” has conceded virtually all their rights, getting nothing back in return. Ahead are “two plausible options,” likely neither of which will be taken:

— dissolving the PA, uniting all factions (including Hamas), and refocusing on liberation, the only viable goal; or

— “continu(ing) down the road of hoping” pressure will get Israel to yield what it never did before.

Because of PA treachery, it looks “increasingly (like) a hollow shell, that may soon be blown away. The winds are coming from Tunisia. Palestine may be next.”

A Final Comment

Haaretz writer Akiva Eldar said Al Jazeera’s bombshell “trump(ed) WikiLeaks.” Perhaps so if duplicitous peace talks end, exposed Israeli/US perfidy weaken their influence internationally, PA credibility crumbles, then self-destructs, inspiring Palestinians to unite under viable leaders, choosing liberation as their goal.

Achieving those objectives won’t come easily or soon, but what’s more important than seizing a rare opportunity for change. Tunisian winds are spreading regionally. Thousands are demonstrating in Tunis, other Tunisian cities, Algeria, Yemen, Jordan, and may erupt anywhere from Morocco to Egypt to Occupied Palestine.

Sustained grassroots anger brings change, and what better reasons than poverty, unemployment, repression, occupation, and suffocating conditions under siege. Maybe exposed PA treachery created a rare chance seldom possible. Now’s the time to seize it.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

Nazareth: For more than a decade, since the collapse of the Camp David talks in 2000, the mantra of Israeli politics has been the same: “There is no Palestinian partner for peace.”

This week, the first of hundreds of leaked confidential Palestinian documents confirmed the suspicions of a growing number of observers that the rejectionists in the peace process are to be found on the Israeli, not Palestinian, side.

Some of the most revealing papers, jointly released by Al-Jazeera television and Britain’s Guardian newspaper, date from 2008, a relatively hopeful period in recent negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

At the time, Ehud Olmert was Israel’s prime minister and had publicly committed himself to pursuing an agreement on Palestinian statehood. He was backed by the United States administration of George W Bush, which had revived the peace process in late 2007 by hosting the Annapolis conference.

In those favourable circumstances, the papers show, Israel spurned a set of major concessions the Palestinian negotiating team offered over the following months on the most sensitive issues in the talks.

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, has tried unconvincingly to deny the documents’ veracity, but has not been helped by the failure of Israeli officials to come to his aid.

According to the documents, the most significant Palestinian compromise – or “sell-out”, as many Palestinians are calling it – was on Jerusalem.

During a series of meetings over the summer of 2008, Palestinian negotiators agreed to Israel’s annexation of large swaths of East Jerusalem, including all but one of the city’s Jewish settlements and parts of the Old City itself.

It is difficult to imagine how the resulting patchwork of Palestinian enclaves in East Jerusalem, surrounded by Jewish settlements, could ever have functioned as the capital of the new state of Palestine.

At the earlier Camp David talks, according to official Israeli documents leaked to the Haaretz daily in 2008, Israel had proposed something very similar in Jerusalem: Palestinian control over what were then termed territorial “bubbles”.

In the later talks, the Palestinians also showed a willingness to renounce their claim to exclusive sovereignty over the Old City’s flashpoint of the Haram al-Sharif, the sacred compound that includes the al-Aqsa mosque and is flanked by the Western Wall. An international committee overseeing the area was proposed instead.

This was probably the biggest concession of all – control of the Haram was the issue that “blew up” the Camp David talks, according to an Israeli official who was present.

Saeb Erekat, the PLO’s chief negotiator, is quoted promising Israel “the biggest Yerushalayim in history” – using the Hebrew word for Jerusalem – as his team effectively surrendered Palestinian rights enshrined in international law.

The concessions did not end there, however. The Palestinians agreed to land swaps to accommodate 70 per cent of the half a million Jewish settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and to forgo the rights of all but a few thousand Palestinian refugees.

The Palestinian state was also to be demilitarised. In one of the papers recording negotiations in May 2008, Erekat asks Israel’s negotiators: “Short of your jet fighters in my sky and your army on my territory, can I choose where I secure external defence?” The Israeli answer was an emphatic: “No.”

Interestingly, the Palestinian negotiators are said to have agreed to recognise Israel as a “Jewish state” – a concession Israel now claims is one of the main stumbling blocks to a deal.

Israel was also insistent that Palestinians accept a land swap that would transfer a small area of Israel into the new Palestinian state along with as many as a fifth of Israel’s 1.4 million Palestinian citizens. This demand echoes a controversial “population transfer” long proposed by Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s far-right foreign minister.

The “Palestine Papers”, as they are being called, demand a serious re-evaluation of two lingering – and erroneous – assumptions made by many Western observers about the peace process.

The first relates to the United States’ self-proclaimed role as honest broker. What shines through the documents is the reluctance of US officials to put reciprocal pressure on Israeli negotiators, even as the Palestinian team make major concessions on core issues. Israel’s “demands” are always treated as paramount.

The second is the assumption that peace talks have fallen into abeyance chiefly because of the election nearly two years ago of a rightwing Israeli government under Benjamin Netanyahu. He has drawn international criticism for refusing to pay more than lip-service to Palestinian statehood.

The Americans’ goal – at least in the early stages of Mr Netanyahu’s premiership – was to strong-arm him into bringing into his coalition Tzipi Livni, leader of the centrist opposition party Kadima. She is still widely regarded as the most credible Israeli advocate for peace.

However, Ms Livni, who was previously Mr Olmert’s foreign minister, emerges in the leaked papers as an inflexible negotiator, dismissive of the huge concessions being made by the Palestinians. At a key moment, she turns down the Palestinians’ offer, after saying: “I really appreciate it”.

The sticking point for Ms Livni was a handful of West Bank settlements the Palestinian negotiators refused to cede to Israel. The Palestinians have long complained that the two most significant – Maale Adumim, outside Jerusalem, and Ariel, near the Palestinian city of Nablus – would effectively cut the West Bank into three cantons, undermining any hopes of territorial contiguity.

Ms Livni’s insistence on holding on to these settlements – after all the Palestinian compromises – suggests that there is no Israeli leader either prepared or able to reach a peace deal – unless, that is, the Palestinians cave in to almost every Israeli demand and abandon their ambitions for statehood.

One of the Palestine Papers quotes an exasperated Mr Erekat asking a US diplomat last year: “What more can I give?”

The man with the answer may be Mr Lieberman, who unveiled his own map of Palestinian statehood this week. It conceded a provisional state on less than half of the West Bank.

By Jonathan Cook

25 January, 2011

Countercurrents.org

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.

A version of this article originally appeared in The National (www.thenational.ae), published in Abu Dhabi.

What the Tunisian Revolution and WikiLeaks Tell Us about American Support for Corrupt Dictatorships in the Muslim World

Here’s one obvious lesson of the Tunisian Revolution of 2011: paranoia about Muslim fundamentalist movements and terrorism is causing Washington to make bad choices that will ultimately harm American interests and standing abroad. State Department cable traffic from capitals throughout the Greater Middle East, made public thanks to WikiLeaks, shows that U.S. policy-makers have a detailed and profound picture of the depths of corruption and nepotism that prevail among some “allies” in the region.

The same cable traffic indicates that, in a cynical Great Power calculation, Washington continues to sacrifice the prospects of the region’s youth on the altar of “security.” It is now forgotten that America’s biggest foreign policy headache, the Islamic Republic of Iran, arose in response to American backing for Mohammad Reza Pahlevi, the despised Shah who destroyed the Iranian left and centrist political parties, paving the way for the ayatollahs’ takeover in 1979.

State Department cables published via WikiLeaks are remarkably revealing when it comes to the way Tunisian strongman Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and his extended family (including his wife Leila’s Trabelsi clan) fastened upon the Tunisian economy and sucked it dry. The riveting descriptions of U.S. diplomats make the presidential “family” sound like True Blood’s vampires overpowering Bontemps, Louisiana.

In July of 2009, for instance, the U.S. ambassador dined with Nesrine Ben Ali el-Materi and Sakher el-Materi, the president’s daughter and son-in-law, at their sumptuous mansion. Materi, who rose through nepotism to dominate Tunisia’s media, provided a 12-course dinner with Kiwi juice — “not normally available here” — and “ice cream and frozen yoghurt he had flown in from Saint Tropez,” all served by an enormous staff of well-paid servants. The ambassador remarked on the couple’s pet tiger, “Pasha,” which consumed “four chickens a day” at a time of extreme economic hardship for ordinary Tunisians.

Other cables detail the way the Ben Ali and Trabelsi clans engaged in a Tunisian version of insider trading, using their knowledge of the president’s upcoming economic decisions to scarf up real estate and companies they knew would suddenly spike in value. In 2006, the U.S. ambassador estimated that 50% of the economic elite of Tunisia was related by blood or marriage to the president, a degree of nepotism hard to match outside some of the Persian Gulf monarchies.

Despite full knowledge of the corruption and tyranny of the regime, the U.S. embassy concluded in July 2009: “Notwithstanding the frustrations of doing business here, we cannot write off Tunisia. We have too much at stake. We have an interest in preventing al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and other extremist groups from establishing a foothold here. We have an interest in keeping the Tunisian military professional and neutral.”

The notion that, if the U.S. hadn’t given the Tunisian government hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid over the past two and a half decades, while helping train its military and security forces, a shadowy fringe group calling itself “al-Qaeda in the Maghreb” might have established a “toehold” in the country was daft. Yet this became an all-weather, universal excuse for bad policy.

In this regard, Tunisia has been the norm when it comes to American policy in the Muslim world. The Bush administration’s firm support for Ben Ali makes especially heinous the suggestion of some neoconservative pundits that George W. Bush’s use of democratization rhetoric for neo-imperialist purposes somehow inspired the workers and internet activists of Tunisia (none of whom ever referenced the despised former US president). It would surely have been smarter for Washington to cut the Ben Ali regime off without a dime, at least militarily, and distance itself from his pack of jackals. The region is, of course, littered with dusty, creaking, now exceedingly nervous dictatorships in which government is theft. The U.S. receives no real benefits from its damaging association with them.

No Dominoes to Fall

The Bush administration’s deeply flawed, sometimes dishonest Global War on Terror replayed the worst mistakes of Cold War policy. One of those errors involved recreating the so-called domino theory — the idea that the U.S. had to make a stand in Vietnam, or else Indonesia, Thailand, Burma and the rest of Asia, if not the world, would fall to communism. It wasn’t true then — the Soviet Union was, at the time, less than two decades from collapsing — and it isn’t applicable now in terms of al-Qaeda. Then and now, though, that domino theory prolonged the agony of ill-conceived wars.

Despite the Obama administration’s abandonment of the phrase “war on terror,” the impulses encoded in it still powerfully shape Washington’s policy-making, as well as its geopolitical fears and fantasies. It adds up to an absurdly modernized version of domino theory. This irrational fear that any small setback for the U.S. in the Muslim world could lead straight to an Islamic caliphate lurks beneath many of Washington’s pronouncements and much of its strategic planning.

A clear example can be seen in the embassy cable that acquiesced in Washington’s backing of Ben Ali for fear of the insignificant and obscure “al-Qaeda in the Maghreb.” Despite the scary name, this small group was not originally even related to Usamah Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, but rather grew out of the Algerian Muslim reformist movement called Salafism.

If the U.S. stopped giving military aid to Ben Ali, it was implied, Bin Laden might suddenly be the caliph of Tunis. This version of the domino theory — a pretext for overlooking a culture of corruption, as well as human rights abuses against dissidents — has become so widespread as to make up the warp and woof of America’s secret diplomatic messaging.

Sinking Democracy in the Name of the War on Terror

Take Algeria, for instance. American military assistance to neighboring Algeria has typically grown from nothing before September 11th to nearly a million dollars a year. It may be a small sum in aid terms, but it is rapidly increasing, and it supplements far more sizeable support from the French. It also involves substantial training for counterterrorism; that is, precisely the skills also needed to repress peaceful civilian protests.

Ironically, the Algerian generals who control the strings of power were the ones responsible for radicalizing the country’s Muslim political party, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS). Allowed to run for office in 1992, that party won an overwhelming majority in parliament. Shocked and dismayed, the generals abruptly abrogated the election results. We will never know if the FIS might have evolved into a parliamentary, democratic party, as later happened to the Justice and Development Party of Turkey, the leaders of which had been Muslim fundamentalists in the 1990s.

Angered at being deprived of the fruits of its victory, however, FIS supporters went on the offensive. Some were radicalized and formed an organization they called the Armed Islamic Group, which later became an al-Qaeda affiliate. (A member of this group, Ahmed Ressam, attempted to enter the U.S. as part of the “millennial plot” to blow up Los Angeles International Airport, but was apprehended at the border.) A bloody civil war then broke out in which the generals and the more secular politicians were the winners, though not before 150,000 Algerians died. As with Ben Ali in neighboring Tunisia, Paris and Washington consider President Abdel Aziz Bouteflika (elected in 1999) a secular rampart against the influence of radical Muslim fundamentalism in Algeria as well as among the Algerian-French population in France.

To outward appearances, in the first years of the twenty-first century, Algeria regained stability under Bouteflika and his military backers, and the violence subsided. Critics charged, however, that the president connived at legislative changes, making it possible for him to run for a third term, a decision that was bad for democracy. In the 2009 presidential election, he faced a weak field of rivals and his leading opponent was a woman from an obscure Trotskyite party.

Cables from the U.S. embassy (revealed again by WikiLeaks) reflected a profound unease with a growing culture of corruption and nepotism, even though it was not on a Tunisian scale. Last February, for example, Ambassador David D. Pearce reported that eight of the directors of the state oil company Sonatrach were under investigation for corruption. He added, “This scandal is the latest in a dramatically escalating series of investigations and prosecutions that we have seen since last year involving Algerian government ministries and public enterprises. Significantly, many of the ministries affected are headed by ministers considered close to Algerian President Bouteflika…”

And this was nothing new. More than three years earlier, the embassy in Algiers was already sounding the alarm. Local observers, it reported to Washington, were depicting President Bouteflika’s brothers “Said and Abdallah, as being particularly rapacious.” Corruption was spreading into an increasingly riven and contentious officer corps. Unemployment among youth was so bad that they were taking to the Mediterranean on rickety rafts in hopes of getting to Europe and finding jobs. And yet when you read the WikiLeaks cables you find no recommendations to stop supporting the Algerian government.

As usual when Washington backs corrupt regimes in the name of its war on terror, democracy suffers and things slowly deteriorate. Bouteflika’s flawed elections which aimed only at ensuring his victory, for instance, actively discouraged moderate fundamentalists from participating and some observers now think that Algeria, already roiled by food riots, could face Tunisian-style popular turmoil. (It should be remembered, however, that the Algerian military and secret police, with years of grim civil-war experience behind them, are far more skilled at oppressive techniques of social control than the Tunisian army.)

Were oil-rich Algeria, a much bigger country than Tunisia, to become unstable, it would be a strategically more striking and even less predictable event. Blame would have to be laid not just at the feet of Bouteflika and his corrupt cronies, but at those of his foreign backers, deeply knowledgeable (as the WikiLeaks cables indicate) but set in their policy ways.

The Ben Alis of Central Asia

Nor is the problem confined to North Africa or even anxious U.S.-backed autocrats in the Arab world. Take the natural gas and gold-rich Central Asian country of Uzbekistan with a population of about 27 million, whose corruption the U.S. embassy was cabling about as early as 2006. The dictatorial but determinedly secular regime of President Islam Karimov was an early Bush administration ally in its Global War on Terror, quite happy to provide Washington with torture-inspired confessions from “al-Qaeda” operatives, most of whom, according to former British ambassador Craig Murray, were simply ordinary Uzbek dissidents. (Although Uzbeks have a Muslim cultural heritage, decades of Soviet rule left most of the population highly secularized, and except in the Farghana Valley, the Muslim fundamentalist movement is tiny.) Severe human rights abuses finally caused even the Bush administration to criticize Karimov, leading Tashkent to withdraw basing rights in that country from the U.S. military.

In recent years, however, a rapprochement has occurred, as Washington’s regional security obsessions once again came to the fore and the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s northwest tribal belt ramped up. The Obama administration is now convinced that it needs Uzbekistan for the transit of supplies to Afghanistan and that evidently trumps all other policy considerations. As a result, Washington is now providing Uzbekistan with hundreds of millions of dollars in Pentagon contracts, a recipe for further corruption.

Last spring, one Central Asian government — Kyrgyzstan’s — fell, thanks to popular discontent, which should have been a warning to Washington, and yet U.S. officials already appear to have forgotten what lessons those events held for its policies in the region. As long as ruler Kurmanbek Bakiev allowed the U.S. to use Manas Air Base for the transit and supply of American troops in Afghanistan, Washington overlooked his corruption and his authoritarian ways. Then it turned out that his regime was not as stable as had been assumed.

Here’s a simple rule of thumb in such situations: bad policy creates even worse policy. The Obama administration’s mistake in ramping up its Afghan War left it needing ever more supplies, worrying about perilous supply lines through Pakistan, and so vulnerable to transit blackmail by the ruling kleptocracies of Central Asia. When their populations, too, explode into anger, the likely damage to U.S. interests could be severe.

And keep in mind that, as the State Department again knows all too well, Afghanistan itself is increasingly just a huge, particularly decrepit version of Ben Ali’s Tunisia. U.S. diplomats were at least somewhat wary of Ben Ali. In contrast, American officials wax fulsome in their public praise of Afghan President Hamid Karzai (even if privately they are all too aware of the weakness and corruption of “the mayor of Kabul”). They continue to insist that the success of his government is central to the security of the North American continent, and for that reason, Washington is spending billions of dollars propping him up.

Corruption Triumphant in the Name of Counterterrorism

Sometimes it seems that all corrupt regimes backed by the U.S. are corrupt in the same repetitive way. For instance, one form of corruption U.S. embassy cables particularly highlighted when it came to the Ben Ali and Trabelsi clans in Tunisia was the way they offered “loans” to their political supporters and family members via banks they controlled or over which they had influence.

Since these recipients understood that they did not actually have to repay the loans, the banks were weakened and other businesses then found it difficult to get credit, undermining the economy and employment. Thanks to the Jasmine revolution, the problem finally is beginning to be addressed. After the flight of Ben Ali, the Central Bank director was forced to resign, and the new government seized the assets of the Zitoune Bank, which belonged to one of his son-in-laws.

Similarly, in Afghanistan, Da Kabul Bank, founded by Karzai ally Sherkan Farnood, was used as a piggy bank for Karzai’s presidential campaign and for loans to members of his family as well as the families of the warlords in his circle. Recipients included Karzai’s brother Mahmoud Karzai and Haseen Fahim, the son of his vice president and former Northern Alliance warlord Marshal Mohammad Fahim. Some of the money was used to buy real estate in Dubai. When a real estate bust occurred in that country, the value of those properties as collateral plummeted.

With recipients unable to service or repay their debts, the bank teetered on the edge of insolvency with potentially dire consequences for the entire Afghan financial system, as desperate crowds gathered to withdraw their deposits. In the end, the bank was taken over by an impoverished Afghan government, which undoubtedly means that the American taxpayer will end up paying for the mismanagement and corruption.

Just as the Ben Ali clique outdid itself in corruption, so, too, Karzai’s circle is full of crooks. American diplomats (among others) have, for instance, accused his brother Wali Ahmed of deep involvement in the heroin trade. With dark humor, the American embassy in Kabul reported last January that Hamid Karzai had nominated, and parliament had accepted, for the counter-narcotics post in the cabinet one Zarar Ahmad Moqbel. He had earlier been Deputy Interior Minister, but was removed for corruption. Another former Deputy Interior Minister evidently even informed embassy officials that “Moqbel was supported by the drug mafia, to include Karzai’s younger half-brother Ahmed Wali Karzai and Arif Khan Noorzai.” This is being alleged of Afghanistan’s current counter-narcotics czar!

Or take the example of Juma Khan Hamdard, whom Karzai appointed governor of Paktya Province in the Pashtun-dominated eastern part of Afghanistan. A little over a year ago, the embassy accused him of being the leader of “a province-wide corruption scheme.” He is said to have been “the central point of a vast corruption network involving the provincial chief of police and several Afghan ministry line directors.”

According to that WikiLeaks-released cable, Hamdard’s network had set up a sophisticated money-skimming operation aimed at milking U.S. funds going into reconstruction projects. They gamed the bids on the contracts to do the work and then took cuts at every stage from groundbreaking to ribbon-cutting.

In addition, Governor Hamdard was reported to have longstanding ties to the Hizb-i Islami militia/party movement of Gulbaddin Hikmatyar, one of the Pashtun guerrilla leaders trying to expel the U.S. and NATO from the country, who, U.S. officials claim, is in turn in a vague alliance with the Taliban. Hamdard allegedly also has a business in Dubai in which Hikmatyar’s son is a partner, and is accused in the cable of funneling jewels and drug money to Hikmatyar loyalists. As with Tunisia, the public rhetoric of counterterrorism belies a corrupt and duplicitous ruling elite that may, by its actions, foster rather than forestall radicalism.

Harsh Truths

For a superpower obsessed with conspiracy theories and invested in the status quo, knowing everything, it turns out, means knowing nothing at all. WikiLeaks has done us the favor, however, of releasing a harsh set of truths. Hard-line policies such as those of the Algerian generals or of Uzbekistan’s Karimov often radicalize economically desperate and oppressed populations. As a result, U.S. backing has a significant probability of boomeranging sooner or later. Elites, confident that they will retain such backing as long as there is an al-Qaeda cell anywhere on the planet, tend to overreach, plunging into cultures of corruption and self-enrichment so vast that they undermine economies, while producing poverty, unemployment, despair, and ultimately widespread public anger.

It is not that the United States should be, in John Quincy Adams’s phrase, going out into the world to find dragons to slay. Washington is no longer all-powerful, if it ever was, and President Obama’s more realistic foreign policy is a welcome change from George W. Bush’s frenetic interventionism.

Nonetheless, Obama has left in place, or in some cases strengthened, one of the worst aspects of Bush-era policy: a knee-jerk support for self-advertised pro-Western secularists who promise to block Muslim fundamentalist parties (or, in the end, anyone else) from coming to power. There should be a diplomatic middle path between overthrowing governments on the one hand, and backing odious dictatorships to the hilt on the other.

It’s time for Washington to signal a new commitment to actual democracy and genuine human rights by simply cutting off military and counterterrorism aid to authoritarian and corrupt regimes that are, in any case, digging their own graves.

By Juan Cole

25 January, 2011

TomDispatch.com

Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History and the director of the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Michigan. His latest book, Engaging the Muslim World, is just out in a revised paperback edition from Palgrave Macmillan. He runs the Informed Comment website. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Cole discusses Washington’s backing of corrupt autocratic regimes globally, click here or, to download it to your iPod, here

Palestinian Authority proposed that only a handful of the nearly six million Palestinian refugees be allowed to return

At the Bourj el Barajneh refugee camp in southern Beirut, a centre for the elderly serves as an oasis from the overcrowded, filthy conditions outside its metal doors.

The right of return

On a recent Thursday morning, a group of men and women in their 60s and 70s gathered around a table to colour and draw pictures, while others solved crossword puzzles. One woman sitting in the corner focused intently as she embroidered a traditional Palestinian dress. The Active Ageing House in the refugee camp is a place where they can pass time, socialise and share meals.

They are known as the “Children of the Nakba” – a generation of Palestinians that witnessed, and survived, the forced expulsion and violence in 1948 committed by Zionist paramilitaries on behalf of the nascent state of Israel.

They each have a story about how they or their parents managed to escape their homeland over 60 years ago – and their wounds are still raw.

Some six million Palestinian refugees are scattered around the world, including more than 400,000 in Lebanon. Here, they are deprived of basic rights, not permitted to buy or sell property, and are banned from more than 70 job categories. Mired in abject poverty, they are dependent on an increasingly incapable United Nations agency for aid.

A “symbolic number” of returnees

The Palestine Papers show that Palestinian Authority (PA) negotiators were prepared to make major concessions on the refugees’ right of return: on the numbers potentially allowed to return to their homes in what is now Israel; on whether refugees would be able to vote on any peace agreement; and on how many would be able to settle in a future Palestinian state.

In an email Ziyad Clot, a legal adviser to Palestinian negotiators on the refugee file, writes, “President [Mahmoud] Abbas offered an extremely low proposal for the number of returnees to Israel a few weeks only after the start of the process.”

The papers also reveal that then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert proposed that 1,000 Palestinian refugees be allowed to return annually to Israel over a period of five years – totalling just 5,000, a tiny fraction of those displaced after Israel’s creation.

On January 15, 2010, Erekat told US diplomat David Hale that the Palestinians offered Israel the return of “a symbolic number” of refugees.

According to the documents, not only did Palestinian officials offer a low figure of returnees, the chief negotiator of the PLO, Saeb Erekat, said that refugees would not have voting rights on a possible peace deal with Israel.

Notes of a meeting on March 23, 2007, between Erekat and then-Belgian foreign minister Karel De Gucht, reveal that Erekat said, “I never said the Diaspora will vote. It’s not going to happen. The referendum will be for Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Can’t do it in Lebanon. Can’t do it in Jordan.”

While Erekat conceded the rights of Palestinian refugees to determine their own fate, during such meetings Israeli negotiators made clear their vision for the refugees.

In a negotiation meeting on January 27, 2008, then-Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, told her Palestinian counterparts, “Your state will be the answer to all Palestinians including refugees. Putting an end to claims means fulfilling national rights for all.”

Erekat seemed to buy into this idea. In a meeting with US diplomats, including Special Envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, on October 21, 2009, Erekat said, “Palestinians will need to know that five million refugees will not go back. The number will be agreed as one of the options. Also the number returning to their own state will depend on annual absorption capacity”.

So even a future Palestinian state could not accommodate the millions of displaced who would want to settle there.

Al Jazeera spoke with three dozen refugees in the Burj al-Barajneh camp, from ages 16 to 88, and they all expressed the same sentiment: They want to return to their native homeland, and to have a say in any final settlement between the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Israel.

Shafiqa Shalan, 60, who was born in Burj al-Barjnah, said she would not agree to being settled in Palestine. “What’s the difference?” she said. “We’re refugees in Lebanon and we would be refugees in the West Bank. So we might as well stay here. I would not consider it my home. My homeland is the village where my parents were expelled.”

That sentiment was echoed among younger residents of the camp. Ruwaida Al-Daher, 47, who was also born in Bourj el Barajneh, said, “We ask for the right of return because he who has no country has no dignity. We live like dogs here. But I would still oppose going to the West Bank or Gaza. Why would I go back to any place but my hometown?”

Al-Daher said she would not want to become a Lebanese citizen if that were offered to her under any peace deal – and that Palestinian negotiators had no mandate to make concessions on her behalf.

“The right of return is a personal right. It’s sacred,” she said. “No one can cancel it or take it away.”

“We’re going to die here”

Hussam Assairy, a 22-year-old who works as a mechanic in the camp, said he would move to his grandparents’ hometown of Haifa if given the chance

I would rather live in the camp,” he said, “than to become a Lebanese citizen and give up my Palestinian nationality”. As for voting on any future deal, he said, “Every Palestinian should be able to vote. Palestine is not just for those living there. It’s ours too”.

“It’s ours more than there’s,” Sara Ghannoum, 20, interjected. “They’re able to live there, while we’re deprived of that.”

For the refugees at Bourj el Barajneh, returning to their hometowns is the only conceivable option.

“I am willing to walk to Palestine, to my country,” says 76-year-old Kamel Shraydeh. “I think about this day and night, because as the saying goes, ‘The one who walks in a strange land gets lost.’” All these decades later, Lebanon remains a foreign place he cannot call home.

Despite these dreams, many have resigned themselves to a life spent in the camps. Over breakfast at the elderly center, a group of women reflected on their decades in Bourj el Barajneh.

“We were born here and we grew old here,” said Asiya al-Ali, 65. “And we’re going to die here,” Sha’alan added with resignation.

Even so, throughout the camp, refugees cling to hope that someday their situation will change – and there are signs that they place that hope in their leadership, which has shown that it’s willing to compromise the right of return.

Filling them with hope are posters on the crumbling walls bearing the image of a smiling PA President Mahmoud Abbas, and the words: “Firm on Principles”.

By Laila Al-Arian

25 January, 2011

Aljazeera

While scholars dispute whether Tunisia serves as model Arab world uprising, many agree that it was near-perfect US ally

Almost six years ago, President George W. Bush’s otherwise inconsequential Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice, gave a speech at the American University in Cairo that grabbed headlines.

While lauding the autocratic leadership of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, Rice indicated a new approach to the Arab world by the United States in these much-quoted words: “For sixty years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region, here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither. Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people.”

Explaining further this new approach in Washington, she went on to say, “Throughout the Middle East, the fear of free choices can no longer justify the denial of liberty. It is time to abandon the excuses that are made to avoid the hard work of democracy.”

Any close listener at the time should have wondered what was meant when at the same time she praised Mubarak for having “unlocked the door for change”, whatever that might mean. As it turned out, outlawing opposition parties and locking up their leaders seemed to remain the bottom line in Egypt without generating a whimper of complaint from the White House either in the Bush years, or since, in the supposedly milder presidency of President Obama.

And supporting “the democratic aspirations of all peoples” seems to have run aground for the White House after the Gaza elections of January 2006 in which Hamas triumphed, and the people of the Gaza Strip, regardless of how they voted, were immediately punished despite the internationally monitored elections being pronounced among the fairest in the region.

It should be remembered that Hamas was enticed to participate in the political process as a way of shifting the conflict with Israel toward nonviolent political competition, and that when victorious in the elections Hamas immediately declared a unilateral ceasefire as well as indicated its openness to diplomacy and a long-term framework of peaceful co-existence.

Maybe these Hamas initiatives were not sustainable, but they was neither welcomed, reciprocated, nor even explored. Instead, humanitarian assistance from Europe and the United States to Gaza was drastically cut and Israel engaged in a variety of provocations including targeted assassinations of Hamas leaders.

In mid-2007, after Hamas seized control of the governing process from Fatah in Gaza, Israel imposed its notorious blockade that unlawfully restricted to subsistence levels, or below, the flow of food, medicine, and fuel. This blockade continues to this day, leaving the entire Gazan population locked within the world’s largest open-air prison, and victimized by one of the cruelest forms of belligerent occupation in the history of warfare.

There is another aspect to the Rice/Bush embrace of democracy that was disclosed by their avowedly disproportionate response to the indiscriminate bombing campaign unleashed in 2006 by Israel on population centers in Lebanon in retaliation for a border incident. In the midst of the carnage Rice observed at the United Nations that the Lebanon War exhibited “the birth pangs of a new Middle East”, while her boss in the White House described the one-sided assault on a helpless civilian population as “a moment of opportunity”.

The point here being that when the people get in the way of imperial policies, it is the people who are sacrificed without even shedding a tear, really without even noticing. If their lives and well-being is so easily cast to one side in this callous geopolitical manner, surely the American posture of welcoming democracy in the region needs to be viewed with more than a skeptical smile. Supporting Israel’s aggressive wars initiated against Lebanon in 2006 and its massive assault for three weeks on Gaza at the end of 2008 and beginning of 2009 are clear demonstrations of the priorities of American foreign policy.

Looking back at the 20th century

Actually, this pattern has far deeper historical roots. During the Cold War there were strategic excuses constantly being given by Washington that overlooked oppression and corruption in Third World countries so long as they aligned themselves with the United States in the ideological struggle against the Soviet Union and put out a welcome mat to foreign investors. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, this geopolitical argument evaporated, but the economic and strategic priorities remained unchanged.

This supposed American dedication to democracy has all along seemed schizophrenic, lauding its virtues, but often dreading its genuine emergence, especially if strategic interests associated with economic and military priorities are at stake as they usually are. Consult the record of “gunboat diplomacy” in the Western Hemisphere carried out under the aegis of the Monroe Doctrine (1823) if any doubt exists.

Turning back to North Africa in 1992 when the FIS in Algeria won hotly contested elections for legislative representation. The military intervened to impose its will; Washington was silent and remained so during the “dark decade” of strife followed in which at least 60,000 Algerians lost their lives. It is part of the reality in the region that American strategic and ideological goals point one way and the popular will of the people point in the opposite direction.

It is thus either hypocritical or a sign of deep confusion for American leadership to advocate democracy in the Middle East without being willing to alter its grand strategy. As of now, there is every indication of continuity in the American approach to the region, signaled by its passivity in the face of Israeli extremism, its continuing military presence in Iraq, and the degree to which keeping Gulf oil reserves in friendly autocratic hands is an unquestioned goal of American foreign policy.

Given these considerations what are we to make of America’s cautiously affirmative response to the Tunisian Revolution, or as it often called, the Jasmine Revolution? It is certainly prudent to be wary of the words issued by our government in particular, and to keep an eye out for its contrary actions, although such a gaze may well be obstructed by reliance on covert activities, and only when the next Julian Assange steps bravely forward will the public get any real understanding of the realities that take refuge behind non-transparent walls.

There is no doubt that during the twenty-four years of cruel dictatorial rule of Zine El Abedine Ben Ali, the United States government, despite the words of Rice, the “democracy promotion” schemes of the Bush presidency, and the new approach to the Islamic world promised by Obama, found nothing to complain about – ignoring report from respected human rights organizations.

As Yvonne Ridley, a British journalist and activist dedicated to the Palestinian struggle has written of the American response to the violence directed by the police during the Tunisian uprising, “Not one word of condemnation, not one word of criticism, not one word urging restraint came from Barack Obama or Hilary Clinton as live ammunition was fired into crowds of unarmed men, women, and children”.

Compare the strong denunciations of Iranian authorities when they used similarly brutal tactics to suppress the Green Revolution in Iran. The point is that geopolitics calls the tune in Washington.

Old Tunisia as ideal US ally

Indeed, Tunisia exemplified what the United States believed serves its interests: a blend of neoliberalism that is open to foreign investment, cooperation with American anti-terrorism by way of extreme rendition of suspects, and strict secularism that translates into the repression of political expression.

The Arab regimes throughout the region that seem most worried by the regional reverberations of the unfolding story in Tunisia all resemble the Ben Ali approach to governance, including dependence in various forms on the United States, which is usually accompanied, as in the Tunisian case, by aloofness from the Palestinian struggle for self-determination that is so symbolically significant for the peoples in these countries. There is no way for any government in the region to follow the Ben Ali path without becoming beleaguered and led to rely on extreme repression, denial of rights, abuse of political prisoners, and police violence designed to induce fear in the population – and shield the privileged corrupt elites from accountability and public rage.

The spontaneous popular eruption in Tunisia that followed the tragic suicide of Mohammed Bouazizi in the central Tunisian city of Sidi Bouzid on December 17, 2010, was the spark that lit the revolutionary fire. This flame surge only could have occurred in an environment of acute grievance that was felt deeply and widely by ordinary Tunisians, so deeply and widely that in a few weeks time it shifted the locus of fear from the oppressed to the oppressed.

This shift was signaled by the abdication of Ben Ali on January 14, a pattern repeating the departure of another bloody dictator, Idi Amin, a few decades earlier. But the main lesson here is that oppressive regimes alienated from their populations are vulnerable to political bonfires that can be started by an insignificant spark in a faraway part of the country. Facing such a prospect can only make rulers dependent on force both more insecure and more inclined to extend the reach of political firefighting so as to achieve the impossible – spark prevention!

The martyrdom of Mohammed Bouazizi epitomized the plight of many young jobless and tormented Tunisians. This impoverished young vegetable street seller set himself on fire in a public place after the police confiscated his produce because he lacked a permit.

Such an act of principled and spontaneous suicide is not common in Arab culture where suicide, if it occurs in a politically relevant mode, is usually a deliberate instrument of struggle, relied upon by Palestinians for a while and currently by parts of the opposition to developments in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Such forms of political suicide are usually, although not always, targeting civilians, and are inconsistent with basic ideas of morality and law.

Bouazizi’s acts were expressive, not aggressive toward others, and recall practices more common in such Asian countries as Vietnam and Korea. When Buddhist monks set themselves on fire on the streets of Saigon in 1963 it was widely interpreted within the country as a turning point in the Vietnam War, a scream of the culture that was outraged by both oppressive Vietnamese rule and by the American military intervention. The intensity of Mohammed Bouazizi’s emotional funeral on Janurary 4 was intoned in these words exhibiting sadness and anger: “Farewell, Mohammed, we will avenge you. We weep for you today. We will make those who caused your death weep”. In the end one hopes that these almost inevitable sentiments of revenge, however understandable given the background of suffering and injustice, do not become the signature of the revolution.

‘Bread, freedom, dignity’

Another more hopeful direction was captured by a slogan that was said to draw inspiration from the French Revolution: “bread, freedom, dignity”. To be worthy of the sacrifices of those who took to the streets, confronting the violence of the state without weapons during these past several weeks, any new governing process must attend to the material needs of the Tunisian masses, open up the society to democratic debate and competition, and assert the protection of human rights as an unconditional commitment of whatever new leadership emerges.

Not many revolutions manage to carry out their idealistic promises that infused the period of struggle against the established order. Typically, they quickly succumb to the temptation to punish wrongdoers from the past and imaginary and real adversaries in the present instead of improving the life circumstances of the people.

It is not a simple situation. Such a revolution as has taken place in Tunisia is likely to beset by determined efforts to reverse the outcome. Powerful and entrenched enemies do exist, and rivalries among those contending anew for power will produce imaginary enemies as well that can discredit the humanistic claims of the revolution by tempting the leadership to launch bloody campaigns to solidify its claims to run the country. It is often a tragic predicament: either exhibit a principled adherence to constitutionalism, and get swept from power or engage in a purge of supposed hostile elements and initiate a new discrediting cycle of repression.

It was said that friends were afraid to talk in cafes or restaurants, and even in their homes, because of this omnipresent surveillance. So far even prisoners of conscience have not been released from Tunisian jails, sites that daily exposed the brutality of the Ben Ali regime. Heading the interim government are longtime allies of Ben Ali, including Mohammed Ghannouchi, his main aide, regarded as being more aligned with the West than with the Tunisian people, although these days promising to step aside as soon as order is restored. But even if such an intention is carried out, is it enough?

We know that the revolution came about because of the courage of young Tunisians who took to the street in many parts of the country, faced gunfire and vicious state brutality, and yet persisted, seeming to feel that their life circumstances were so bad that they had little to lose, and everything to gain.

We know that the flames of revolution spread rapidly throughout, and beyond the borders of Tunisia, by interactive reliance on the Internet, many throughout the Arab world replacing personal pictures on their Facebook page with admiring pictures of revolutionary turmoil on Tunisian streets or as a sign of solidarity, posting pictures of the Tunisian flag.

There were even suicides of regime opponents in several Arab countries. What we don’t know is whether a leadership can emerge that will be faithful to the revolutionary ideals, and will be allowed to be. What we cannot know is how determined and effective will be internal and external counter-revolutionary tactics. We do know from other situation that elites rarely voluntarily relinquish class privileges of wealth, status, and influence, and that Tunisian elites have allies in the region and beyond who are silently opposed to the Jasmine Revolution, and extremely worried about its wider implications for other similar regimes in the region that stay in power only so long as their citizen is held in check by state terror.

We also know that policymakers in Washington and Tel Aviv will be particularly nervous if Islamic influence emerges in the months ahead, even if vindicated by electoral outcomes. Fisk reminds us that Ben Ali was praised in the past for keeping “a firm hand on all those Islamists”, which was itself code language for bloody repression and a terrorized populace. It may even be that if Islamic-oriented political parties demonstrate their popularity with the Tunisian citizenry by winning the forthcoming promised election for a new democratic selected leadership, then the counter-revolutionary backlash will be particularly severe.

There is some reason to believe that Islamic political forces currently enjoy great popularity in Tunisia, and that the main voice of the most important political party with an Islamic identity, Ali Larayedh (imprisoned and tortured for 14 years; and harassed for the past six years by Ben Ali’s secret police), articulates a moderate line on the relation of Islam to the future of Tunisia that resembles the development of recent years in Turkey rather than the hard line and oppressive theocratic developments that have so deeply tainted the Iranian Revolution.

The future of the Tunisian Revolution is filled with uncertainty. It remains at this moment a great victory for the people of the country, and those of us in sympathy with the struggle for “bread, freedom and dignity” must do all in our power to honor these goals and preserve this victory. A Palestinian journalist living in Norway, Salim Nazzal, put the situation well: “Arab observers agree that even if it is difficult to know where things would go in the future what is sure is that the Arab region is not the same after the Tunisian Revolution”.

By Richard Falk

26 January, 2011

Aljazeera

Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Visiting Distinguished Professor in Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has authored and edited numerous publications spanning a period of five decades, most recently editing the volume International Law and the Third World: Reshaping Justice (Routledge, 2008). He is currently serving his third year of a six year term as a United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights.

The thirty-year-old US-backed dictatorship of President Hosni Mubarak was shaken by an unprecedented wave of mass demonstrations Tuesday demanding an end to the regime. An estimated 20,000 protesters, largely youth and young workers, defied a huge deployment of riot police and paramilitary troops in the center of Cairo, and thousands more rallied in cities across the country.

The demonstrators hailed the mass protests that ousted long-time Tunisian strongman Zine El Abidine Ben Ali on January 14 and demanded that Mubarak follow Ben Ali’s example and resign. Police attacked the rallies in Cairo and other cities, firing tear gas and water cannon and wielding clubs. Two protesters were reported killed in Suez, east of Cairo.

The day in Cairo began with a massive buildup of police and paramilitary units in the city center. Central Security Forces trucks were deployed in front of the High Court in downtown Cairo and police moved in to cordon off large sections of the city center.

Demonstrators in Cairo advanced in star formation from the city’s suburbs to assemble in the centre. At midday, reports emerged of hundreds protesting in Dar El-Salam, south of Cairo, chanting “bread and freedom.” The protest was quickly broken up by the police.

Marchers demonstrated in front of the ruling National Democratic Party headquarters in Cairo chanting, “We want a free government” and “Down with Mubarak.” Later, crowds advanced to Tahrir Square and attempted to storm the Egyptian parliament. They were met by waves of police and security forces who used water cannon, tear gas and clubs to repulse them.

At times the clashes between demonstrators and police resembled civil war. Protesters clambered onto fire trucks and attempted to disrupt police water cannon. On occasion, the police were overwhelmed and forced to retreat down side streets. Dozens of arrests were made and many protesters were injured as police rushed the crowds with batons.

At the same time, the state sought to close down media coverage of the protests. Journalists’ IDs were reportedly confiscated by the police in a number of towns. Independent web sites covering the protests were shut down and the Twitter service in Egypt was disrupted.

The anti-government day of action in Egypt is part of a growing revolt by the working class and oppressed of Northern Africa and the Middle East against the Arab bourgeois regimes and their imperialist sponsors. In addition to the ongoing protests in Tunisia, mass demonstrations have occurred in Algeria, Yemen, Jordan and Sudan.

Egypt, the most populous and powerful of the Arab states and the recipient of hundreds of billions of dollars in US military aid, is the main bulwark of imperialist domination in the Arab world. This immensely raises the stakes in the outcome of events in Egypt for the Arab ruling elites and imperialism on the one side, and the working class on the other.

The upsurge in Northern Africa and the Middle East is a powerful expression of the entry of the masses into revolutionary struggle and the immense social power of the working class. However, it confronts great dangers as US and European imperialism and their allies in the Arab bourgeoisie seek to regroup and enlist the support of nominal opposition forces—including the trade union bureaucracies, Islamist groups, Stalinists and bourgeois nationalists—to contain, derail and ultimately crush the movement.

The critical issue is the development of a revolutionary leadership throughout the region armed with an understanding of the historical experiences of the Middle Eastern and international working class to establish the political independence of the working class from all sections of the bourgeoisie and rally all of the oppressed on the basis of the socialist perspective of permanent revolution.

The US government, which has sought to mask its hostility to the popular movement in Tunisia with empty talk of democratic reform, has responded to the mass protests in Egypt by reiterating its support for Mubarak. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters in Washington: “Our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable and is looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people.”

This indicates that Washington is determined to draw the line in Egypt and is prepared to back brutal repressive measures by Mubarak.

Demonstrators on Tuesday raised a series of social and democratic demands: for jobs, against poverty and for an end to the country’s emergency laws. The organisers of the protests, which were coordinated over Facebook and Internet web sites, had called for a “day of revolt against torture, poverty, corruption and unemployment” to coincide with a national holiday honoring the police, but traditionally used by dissidents to protest against police brutality.

Fearing a social upheaval on a similar scale to that in Tunisia, Egypt’s leading opposition parties and political figures boycotted the demonstrations and issued declarations aimed at discouraging their supporters from taking part.

Immediately following the events in Tunisia, Mohamed ElBaradei, who ran against Mubarak in the recent presidential election, expressed his intention to ensure that “change will come in an orderly way and not through the Tunisian model.” He announced that he would not take part in the January 25 protests, cynically declaring to Der Spiegel in an interview last week: “I don’t want to steal their thunder.”

The protests were also boycotted by the Muslim Brotherhood. Sobhi Saleh, a former member of the party’s parliamentary bloc, made absolutely clear that his organisation was opposed to a popular mass movement capable of unseating the government. Saleh stated, “Huge participation, with all of our power, will lead to chaos and we don’t want that. We’re trying to avoid it.”

Another leading member of the organisation, Essem el-Erian went even further and indicated that the Brotherhood was prepared to solidarise with the police against demonstrators on this day when “We should all be celebrating together.”

The national reformist El Tagammu (National Progressive Unionist Party), which is misleadingly described as socialist, also declared that it would not support the protests.

Workers and youth all over the country rejected the position of these organizations and defied the security forces to demonstrate their determination to bring down the dictatorship. In addition to Cairo, demonstrations were held in numerous towns and cities, including Alexandria, Sinai Giza, Port Said and Suez. In Sinai, protesters shut down the road to the airport used by Multinational Force Observers. In Alexandria, protesters tore down posters of Mubarak and one of his sons, Gamal, who is being groomed for office when his father retires or dies.

Police checkpoints were set up in the Mahalla district west of Cairo. On April 6, 2008, tens of thousands of Mahalla residents staged a strike protesting rising prices and low salaries. On Tuesday, Mahalla was once again the scene of confrontations between workers and police, with factory workers from Ghazl el-Mahalla joining the protest.

In Tunisia, demonstrations against the interim government continued on Tuesday, and the military intervened to disperse protesters for the first time since the ousting of Ben Ali. Soldiers fired in the air to scatter hundreds of demonstrators in the central city of Gefsa, and a young man set himself on fire inside the regional trade union headquarters in protest.

Trotskyist parties of the International Committee of the Fourth International must be built throughout Northern Africa and the Middle East to unite the working masses under the banner of the United Socialist States of the Middle East and the Maghreb, as part of the world socialist revolution.

This struggle must be linked up with the mounting struggles of workers in the advanced capitalist countries, many of which have large populations of Arab workers from Northern Africa and the Middle East.

By Johannes Stern & Stefan Steinberg

26 January, 2011

WSWS.org

My thanks to an eagle-eyed supporter for pointing out that, on January 11, the Voice of the Cape radio station in South Africa interviewed Elaine Whitfield Sharp, the lawyer for Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani neuroscientist whose 86-year sentence in a New York courtroom last September — for allegedly trying and failing to shoot at her US captors in Afghanistan, and her imprisonment in Carswell, a notorious psychiatric facility in Texas — have seemed to her supporters to crown, in a typically lawless, brutal and overblown manner, the long story of her presumed detention in a US-run “black site” for five years and four months before her alleged reappearance in Afghanistan, the encounter with US soldiers that prompted her rendition to justice in the US, and her trial last year in which all mention of her missing years was suppressed.

I have written at length about Dr. Siddiqui’s case before, and encourage anyone interested in her story to check out my archive of articles, and also to visit the website of the Justice for Aafia Coalition, and I’m delighted to add Elaine Whitfield Sharp’s interview with Voice of the Cape radio (cross-posted below, with minor corrections), because of her open declaration that Dr. Siddiqui was not a terrorist, and that, after her capture in Karachi in March 2003, by Pakistani forces and the CIA, she was “taken to some off-site country — a third-world nation, possibly Jordan or Afghanistan — where she was detained for five years in a black site or secret prison. Here she was forced to create documents to incriminate herself to support what we see in this war on terror. She was then dumped in Afghanistan with a bag that conveniently had incriminating documents.”

The mention of Jordan is not something I had come across before, as an alternative to Bagram, or elsewhere in Afghanistan, although there was certainly a secret prison in Jordan, operated on behalf of the CIA, and I had also not heard before the suggestion that Dr. Siddiqui was forced to forge documents whilst in custody, although I have previously heard of this in connection with a prisoner at Guantánamo, Umar Abdulayev, a Tajik who is still held, despite being cleared for release in 2009, who has stated that he was made to forge documents by his Pakistani captors, prior to being handed over — or sold — to US forces..

Elaine Whitfield Sharp Discusses the Case of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui on Voice of the Cape radio

“Dr. Aafia Siddiqui was no more a terrorist than Nelson Mandela. She was not a person who was a serious player in Al-Qaeda. She may have had contact in those associations, but it was innocent contacts. She was not the person that I would believe to be involved in anything remotely designed to cause harm to another human being, but rather quite the opposite.”

Those were the words of conviction spoken by Aafia Siddiqui’s lawyer, Elaine Whitfield Sharp, on VOC’s “Drivetime” on Monday. Aafia Siddiqui, the American educated Pakistani cognitive neuroscientist, was convicted of assault with intent to murder her US interrogaters in Afghanistan. She was sentenced in a US federal court to 86 years in prison.

Capturing of Siddiqui

According to Whitfield Sharp, this is a case that many will never understand completely. “From the defense’s point of view, I can relate our position on the facts: Aafia Siddiqui was picked up in Karachi, Pakistan in March 2003. We believe that she was rendered, which is taken illegally against Pakistani law, by Pakistani forces and the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).”

“We believe she was then taken to some off-site country — a third-world nation, possibly Jordan or Afghanistan — where she was detained for five years in a black site or secret prison. Here she was forced to create documents to incriminate herself to support what we see in this war on terror. She was then dumped in Afghanistan with a bag that conveniently had incriminating documents.”

Siddiqui’s story was then picked up in the “world hysteria against Muslims and terrorism.” She was brought to the United States and charged with firing at US personal at the Afghan national police headquarters in Ghazni. One of the US personnel, who was a warrant officer, shot her in the abdomen, claiming that she picked up an M4 rifle and fired it at the group.

However, Whitfield Sharp said that, contrary to the accusation, there were no bullet fragments found or any damage to the wall. There were also no fingerprints found on the gun and the witnesses testimony conflicted in several ways, thus there were many discrepancies in the forensic evidence.

Whitfield Sharp again cited the rife Islamophobia in the US for Siddiqui being unanimously convicted by the jury to her 86-year sentence. She believes that the case was a riddle of misunderstandings, false nuances and political posturing that has tragically resulted in the sentencing of an innocent woman to prison. Siddiqui is currently incarcerated at the Carswell Federal Medical Centre in Texas.

“We tried to stop the case from going to trial on the grounds that Siddiqui was so traumatised from the ‘missing five years.’ We believe that the five years culminating in the shooting of this woman in the abdomen, the bringing and trying of her in the US and keeping her in solitary confinement rendered her mentally incompetent to stand on trial. Unfortunately, the judge disagreed with us and went ahead with the trial,” Whitfield Sharp continued.

Siddiqui’s children

Siddiqui is the mother of three children, Ahmed, Mariam and the youngest Suleiman. Since her capture in 2003, Ahmed and Mariam have been recovered, but Suleiman’s whereabouts are unknown and he is feared dead. “According to Siddiqui, on the day she left her mother’s house with her three children, the cab they left in detoured from the usual route to the station,” the lawyer related.

“The driver took a back road and this is when two black cars pulled up, held the cab driver at gunpoint while the other men opened the back door and took the children. Siddiqui herself was then dragged from the cab and given something that knocked her out. Ahmed corroborated this, saying he too was made unconscious. Next thing she woke up strapped to a gurney. Reports in the Urdu speaking press in Pakistan stated she was seen and picked up on a CIA transport plane.”

Whitfield Sharp said Siddiqui was continually tortured whilst in custody and was shown pictures of what was deemed her dead son, face down in a pool of blood. “Siddiqui said she was drugged, electrocuted, tortured and threatened with her kids being harmed. They threatened to rape her daughter, told her that Ahmed was dead and said that they would shoot her baby son and asked if she would she like to watch.”

“Her daughter just appeared last year outside their house in Karachi. A car pulled up, threw Mariam out and sped off. Siddiqui’s sister Fowzia, a Harvard trained neurologist, is taking care of both children. Ironically enough, Siddiqui was sent to Carswell Federal Medical Centre, which is a facility where people are treated for mental illness. Do the math! At the facility she has been declared mentally unstable and I believe she is ill as a result of what has happened to her.”

“The grey lady of Bagram”

Siddiqui was dubbed “The grey lady of Bagram,” as several detainees at the Bagram Theatre Internment Facility in Afghanistan — renowned for its capture and torture of so-called terrorists — claimed to see a woman matching her description, thus suggesting that this is where she was held for the five missing years.

“There were open bull-pens or wired cages where men were placed and they were able to see out of what was going on. One of the people incarcerated at the Bagram male area was Binyam Mohamed, who said he saw a woman matching Dr. Siddiqui’s description in Bagram. We have also heard accounts of the men being tortured psychologically by hearing a tape recording or, as we believe, live screams of a woman being repeatedly raped (which we assume to be Siddiqui). There are more than enough people who say they saw her,” Whitfield Sharp said.

An appeal has been filed, and, in the lawyer’s view, the trial had been fair in many ways, except that a considerable amount of the evidence was kept out. “There are very many excellent issues for appeal and it is going forward. The brief for appeal is due in April. As you know, there have been some WikiLeaks cables leaked suggesting that the CIA were using agents to infiltrate the Taliban, which makes one think what role Dr. Siddiqui was forced into once she was rendered and tortured at the beginning of March 2003.”

“What we do know is Aafia Siddiqui says she was tortured and, unlike the witnesses’ contradicting testimonies that went all over the place, Aafia’s has never changed.”

By Andy Worthington

26 January , 2011

Andyworthington.co.uk

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and currently on tour in the UK), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

It’s official, or nearly so, Haaretz, on January 25 headlining, “Hezbollah’s PM pick wins majority backing as Hariri supporters hold ‘day of wrath,’ ” saying:

Hezbollah-backed Najib Mikati, a Sunni billionaire, became new prime minister after getting 68 votes, a majority in Lebanon’s 128-member parliament. Caretaker PM Saad Hariri got 60. As a result, Hezbollah “is now in position to control Lebanon’s next government. The move has set off angry protests and drew warnings from the US that its support could be in jeopardy.”

“Sunni blood is boiling,” chanted protestors. Burning Mikati pictures, they said they won’t serve in a coalition government, adding that anyone allying with Hezbollah is a traitor. After being appointed, he said:

“I extend my hand to everyone….This is a democratic process. I want to rescue my country….My actions (as PM) will speak for themselves.”

“I affirmed to the president that cooperation will be complete between us to form a new government which the Lebanese want, a government to maintain the unity of their country and their sovereignty, achieve the solidarity of its people, protect the coexistence formula and respect the constitutional rules.”

However, nothing in Lebanon is ever simple, especially with Washington and Israel often intervening politically, economically and/or violently.

Commenting briefly, State Department spokesman PJ Crowley said Washington has “great concerns about a government within which Hezbollah plays a leading role,” adding that relations and Washington-supplied aid will be affected.

On January 25, Reuters headlined, “Clinton warns Hezbollah-backed government may alter US ties with Lebanon,” saying:

She accused Hezbollah of “coercion, intimidation, (and) threats of violence to achieve its political goals,” adding, (o)ur bottom lines remain as they always have been. We believe that justice must be pursued and impunity for murder ended. We believe in Lebanon’s sovereignty and an end to outside interference. As we see what this new government does, we will judge it accordingly.”

In fact, no nation matches Washington’s worldwide lawlessness, waging imperial wars for global dominance and increasing repression of its own people at home.

Yet White House spokesman Tommy Vietor said:

“It is hard to imagine any government that is truly representative of all of Lebanon would abandon the effort to end the era of impunity for assassinations in the country (referring to Mossad’s 2005 Rafiq Hariri killing falsely blamed on Hezbollah). In the meantime, we call on all parties to maintain calm.”

America designated Hezbollah a foreign terrorist organization, meaning aid is automatically suspended. In the past five years, it’s been $1.2 billion, and the Obama administration requested $246 million more this year.

Hezbollah supporters dismissed US concerns, saying Lebanon’s power shift will be conciliatory and peaceful. According to Hassan Khalil, publisher of the left of center Al Akhbar:

“Mikati is not coming to power by force, a coup or by civil unrest. (It’s by Lebanon’s) parliamentary system. (Moreover, (f)unding from the United States is limited and will not disturb the balance of power,” if cut off.

According to American University of Beirut Professor Hilal Khashan, however:

Lebanon’s parliamentary arithmetic may be less important than securing sectarian consensus, saying:

“If most of the Sunni community doesn’t accept Mikati’s designation, we have a problem. If they are unhappy, that would violate the spirit of the constitution,” arguing that he risked “political suicide” if he tries forming a government opposed by Hariri supporters who consider him a tool of a Hezbollah “coup.”

On January 23, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah pledged to include political rivals in a coalition government, saying:

We seek a “national partnership in which all parties will participate. We respect everyone’s right to representation.”

Middle East analyst Franklin Lamb believes Mikati’s appointment is a “done deal,” substituting “sunni billionaire #2 (for) #1.” Though street protests erupted, they “won’t amount to all that much and the army will break up rowdy demos.” Anger will subside. There’s “not much the Obama administration can do. (S)treet pressure (might) close the US embassy, (but Washington) has almost no options since it will not squeeze Israel, so it gifts another Middle East country to the rising other empire,” suggesting Iran, closely allied with Hezbollah.

Despite Hariri’s March 14 coalition boycott threat, some members may break ranks, shifting loyalties to assure current benefits aren’t lost, thus aiding a new government’s formation.

On January 24, New York Times writer Isabel Kershner headlined, “A Hezbollah-Run Lebanon, but No Panic in Israel,” saying:

Some analysts “said it was not necessarily an immediate cause for alarm.” According to Tel Aviv University’s Professor Eyal Zisser, the change is largely “semantic,” and for Bar-Ilan University’s Professor Efraim Inbar:

Though “the Heabollization of Lebanon” is worrisome, it’s “not like they will start shooting at us tomorrow. They are busy now with internal affairs.”

According to vice prime minister Silvan Shalom, however, a Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon is “a very, very dangerous development,” adding it’s like having “an Iranian government on Israel’s northern border.”

An unnamed Israeli official said:

“We are concerned about Iranian domination of Lebanon through its proxy, Hezbollah. We are not going to give the other side any excuse whatsoever to initiate an escalation along the border,” no matter that Hezbollah doesn’t “initiate.” It responds defensively as international law allows to repeated Israeli provocations.

Retired General Giora Eiland perhaps suggested more coming, saying:

“If Hezbollah is behind the government, it will be much easier to explain to the international community why we must fight against the State of Lebanon.”

In a January 25 editorial, headlined “Any misstep could imperil Lebanon,” Beirut’s The Daily Star called “none” of Lebanon’s “handful of options” going forward “very promising,” adding:

New Prime Minister Mikati is less conciliatory than partisan. “As such, the faction would never have named (him or anyone else) unless their man agreed to (rescind) cooperation with the (UN-backed) Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL), (as well as reverse) other decisions or policies of the previous Cabinet which did not accord to March 8’s liking (the coalition, including Hezbollah).”

As a result, the “country is a powder keg, and any misstep could have unforeseeable and tragic consequences.”

Profile of Najib Mitaki

A Tripoli-based MP before becoming prime minister, he’s also a billionaire businessman. In 1982, he and his brother, Taha, founded Investcom, a telecommunications company, transforming an enterprise into an empire with investments in the Middle East, Europe and Africa before selling to South Africa’s MTN Group in 2006 for $5.5 billion.

He also co-founded the M1 Group, a multi-billion dollar privately owned financial and industrial conglomerate with interests in telecommunications, real estate, transport, oil and gas.

Since 1998, he’s been an MP, public works and transportation minister, and past prime minister briefly in 2005 after Rafik Hariri’s assassination.

Although considered pro-Syrian, he promotes consensus. He also supports philanthropic causes, and was involved with the “Beirut Pact,” a socio-economic project to improve Lebanon’s developmental standards, including working for regional economic parity.

By Stephen Lendman

26 January, 2011

Countercurrents.org

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/

In defense circles, “cutting” the Pentagon budget has once again become a topic of conversation. Americans should not confuse that talk with reality. Any cuts exacted will at most reduce the rate of growth. The essential facts remain: U.S. military outlays today equal that of every other nation on the planet combined, a situation without precedent in modern history.

The Pentagon presently spends more in constant dollars than it did at any time during the Cold War — this despite the absence of anything remotely approximating what national security experts like to call a “peer competitor.” Evil Empire? It exists only in the fevered imaginations of those who quiver at the prospect of China adding a rust-bucket Russian aircraft carrier to its fleet or who take seriously the ravings of radical Islamists promising from deep inside their caves to unite the Umma in a new caliphate.

What are Americans getting for their money? Sadly, not much. Despite extraordinary expenditures (not to mention exertions and sacrifices by U.S. forces), the return on investment is, to be generous, unimpressive. The chief lesson to emerge from the battlefields of the post-9/11 era is this: the Pentagon possesses next to no ability to translate “military supremacy” into meaningful victory.

Washington knows how to start wars and how to prolong them, but is clueless when it comes to ending them. Iraq, the latest addition to the roster of America’s forgotten wars, stands as exhibit A. Each bomb that blows up in Baghdad or some other Iraqi city, splattering blood all over the streets, testifies to the manifest absurdity of judging “the surge” as the epic feat of arms celebrated by the Petraeus lobby.

The problems are strategic as well as operational. Old Cold War-era expectations that projecting U.S. power will enhance American clout and standing no longer apply, especially in the Islamic world. There, American military activities are instead fostering instability and inciting anti-Americanism. For Exhibit B, see the deepening morass that Washington refers to as AfPak or the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater of operations.

Add to that the mountain of evidence showing that Pentagon, Inc. is a miserably managed enterprise: hide-bound, bloated, slow-moving, and prone to wasting resources on a prodigious scale — nowhere more so than in weapons procurement and the outsourcing of previously military functions to “contractors.” When it comes to national security, effectiveness (what works) should rightly take precedence over efficiency (at what cost?) as the overriding measure of merit. Yet beyond a certain level, inefficiency undermines effectiveness, with the Pentagon stubbornly and habitually exceeding that level. By comparison, Detroit’s much-maligned Big Three offer models of well-run enterprises.

Impregnable Defenses

All of this takes place against the backdrop of mounting problems at home: stubbornly high unemployment, trillion-dollar federal deficits, massive and mounting debt, and domestic needs like education, infrastructure, and employment crying out for attention.

Yet the defense budget — a misnomer since for Pentagon, Inc. defense per se figures as an afterthought — remains a sacred cow. Why is that?

The answer lies first in understanding the defenses arrayed around that cow to ensure that it remains untouched and untouchable. Exemplifying what the military likes to call a “defense in depth,” that protective shield consists of four distinct but mutually supporting layers.

Institutional Self-Interest: Victory in World War II produced not peace, but an atmosphere of permanent national security crisis. As never before in U.S. history, threats to the nation’s existence seemed omnipresent, an attitude first born in the late 1940s that still persists today. In Washington, fear — partly genuine, partly contrived — triggered a powerful response.

One result was the emergence of the national security state, an array of institutions that depended on (and therefore strove to perpetuate) this atmosphere of crisis to justify their existence, status, prerogatives, and budgetary claims. In addition, a permanent arms industry arose, which soon became a major source of jobs and corporate profits. Politicians of both parties were quick to identify the advantages of aligning with this “military-industrial complex,” as President Eisenhower described it.

Allied with (and feeding off of) this vast apparatus that transformed tax dollars into appropriations, corporate profits, campaign contributions, and votes was an intellectual axis of sorts — government-supported laboratories, university research institutes, publications, think tanks, and lobbying firms (many staffed by former or would-be senior officials) — devoted to identifying (or conjuring up) ostensible national security challenges and alarms, always assumed to be serious and getting worse, and then devising responses to them.

The upshot: within Washington, the voices carrying weight in any national security “debate” all share a predisposition for sustaining very high levels of military spending for reasons having increasingly little to do with the well-being of the country.

Strategic Inertia: In a 1948 State Department document, diplomat George F. Kennan offered this observation: “We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population.” The challenge facing American policymakers, he continued, was “to devise a pattern of relationships that will permit us to maintain this disparity.” Here we have a description of American purposes that is far more candid than all of the rhetoric about promoting freedom and democracy, seeking world peace, or exercising global leadership.

The end of World War II found the United States in a spectacularly privileged position. Not for nothing do Americans remember the immediate postwar era as a Golden Age of middle-class prosperity. Policymakers since Kennan’s time have sought to preserve that globally privileged position. The effort has been a largely futile one.

By 1950 at the latest, those policymakers (with Kennan by then a notable dissenter) had concluded that the possession and deployment of military power held the key to preserving America’s exalted status. The presence of U.S. forces abroad and a demonstrated willingness to intervene, whether overtly or covertly, just about anywhere on the planet would promote stability, ensure U.S. access to markets and resources, and generally serve to enhance the country’s influence in the eyes of friend and foe alike — this was the idea, at least.

In postwar Europe and postwar Japan, this formula achieved considerable success. Elsewhere — notably in Korea, Vietnam, Latin America, and (especially after 1980) in the so-called Greater Middle East — it either produced mixed results or failed catastrophically. Certainly, the events of the post-9/11 era provide little reason to believe that this presence/power-projection paradigm will provide an antidote to the threat posed by violent anti-Western jihadism. If anything, adherence to it is exacerbating the problem by creating ever greater anti-American animus.

One might think that the manifest shortcomings of the presence/power-projection approach — trillions expended in Iraq for what? — might stimulate present-day Washington to pose some first-order questions about basic U.S. national security strategy. A certain amount of introspection would seem to be called for. Could, for example, the effort to sustain what remains of America’s privileged status benefit from another approach?

Yet there are few indications that our political leaders, the senior-most echelons of the officer corps, or those who shape opinion outside of government are capable of seriously entertaining any such debate. Whether through ignorance, arrogance, or a lack of imagination, the pre-existing strategic paradigm stubbornly persists; so, too, as if by default do the high levels of military spending that the strategy entails.

Cultural Dissonance: The rise of the Tea Party movement should disabuse any American of the thought that the cleavages produced by the “culture wars” have healed. The cultural upheaval touched off by the 1960s and centered on Vietnam remains unfinished business in this country.

Among other things, the sixties destroyed an American consensus, forged during World War II, about the meaning of patriotism. During the so-called Good War, love of country implied, even required, deference to the state, shown most clearly in the willingness of individuals to accept the government’s authority to mandate military service. GI’s, the vast majority of them draftees, were the embodiment of American patriotism, risking life and limb to defend the country.

The GI of World War II had been an American Everyman. Those soldiers both represented and reflected the values of the nation from which they came (a perception affirmed by the ironic fact that the military adhered to prevailing standards of racial segregation). It was “our army” because that army was “us.”

With Vietnam, things became more complicated. The war’s supporters argued that the World War II tradition still applied: patriotism required deference to the commands of the state. Opponents of the war, especially those facing the prospect of conscription, insisted otherwise. They revived the distinction, formulated a generation earlier by the radical journalist Randolph Bourne, that distinguished between the country and the state. Real patriots, the ones who most truly loved their country, were those who opposed state policies they regarded as misguided, illegal, or immoral.

In many respects, the soldiers who fought the Vietnam War found themselves caught uncomfortably in the center of this dispute. Was the soldier who died in Vietnam a martyr, a tragic figure, or a sap? Who deserved greater admiration: the soldier who fought bravely and uncomplainingly or the one who served and then turned against the war? Or was the war resister — the one who never served at all — the real hero?

War’s end left these matters disconcertingly unresolved. President Richard Nixon’s 1971 decision to kill the draft in favor of an All-Volunteer Force, predicated on the notion that the country might be better served with a military that was no longer “us,” only complicated things further. So, too, did the trends in American politics where bona fide war heroes (George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, John Kerry, and John McCain) routinely lost to opponents whose military credentials were non-existent or exceedingly slight (Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama), yet who demonstrated once in office a remarkable propensity for expending American blood (none belonging to members of their own families) in places like Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. It was all more than a little unseemly.

Patriotism, once a simple concept, had become both confusing and contentious. What obligations, if any, did patriotism impose? And if the answer was none — the option Americans seemed increasingly to prefer — then was patriotism itself still a viable proposition?

Wanting to answer that question in the affirmative — to distract attention from the fact that patriotism had become little more than an excuse for fireworks displays and taking the occasional day off from work — people and politicians alike found a way to do so by exalting those Americans actually choosing to serve in uniform. The thinking went this way: soldiers offer living proof that America is a place still worth dying for, that patriotism (at least in some quarters) remains alive and well; by common consent, therefore, soldiers are the nation’s “best,” committed to “something bigger than self” in a land otherwise increasingly absorbed in pursuing a material and narcissistic definition of self-fulfillment.

In effect, soldiers offer much-needed assurance that old-fashioned values still survive, even if confined to a small and unrepresentative segment of American society. Rather than Everyman, today’s warrior has ascended to the status of icon, deemed morally superior to the nation for which he or she fights, the repository of virtues that prop up, however precariously, the nation’s increasingly sketchy claim to singularity.

Politically, therefore, “supporting the troops” has become a categorical imperative across the political spectrum. In theory, such support might find expression in a determination to protect those troops from abuse, and so translate into wariness about committing soldiers to unnecessary or unnecessarily costly wars. In practice, however, “supporting the troops” has found expression in an insistence upon providing the Pentagon with open-ended drawing rights on the nation’s treasury, thereby creating massive barriers to any proposal to affect more than symbolic reductions in military spending.

Misremembered History: The duopoly of American politics no longer allows for a principled anti-interventionist position. Both parties are war parties. They differ mainly in the rationale they devise to argue for interventionism. The Republicans tout liberty; the Democrats emphasize human rights. The results tend to be the same: a penchant for activism that sustains a never-ending demand for high levels of military outlays.

American politics once nourished a lively anti-interventionist tradition. Leading proponents included luminaries such as George Washington and John Quincy Adams. That tradition found its basis not in principled pacifism, a position that has never attracted widespread support in this country, but in pragmatic realism. What happened to that realist tradition? Simply put, World War II killed it — or at least discredited it. In the intense and divisive debate that occurred in 1939-1941, the anti-interventionists lost, their cause thereafter tarred with the label “isolationism.”

The passage of time has transformed World War II from a massive tragedy into a morality tale, one that casts opponents of intervention as blackguards. Whether explicitly or implicitly, the debate over how the United States should respond to some ostensible threat — Iraq in 2003, Iran today — replays the debate finally ended by the events of December 7, 1941. To express skepticism about the necessity and prudence of using military power is to invite the charge of being an appeaser or an isolationist. Few politicians or individuals aspiring to power will risk the consequences of being tagged with that label.

In this sense, American politics remains stuck in the 1930s — always discovering a new Hitler, always privileging Churchillian rhetoric — even though the circumstances in which we live today bear scant resemblance to that earlier time. There was only one Hitler and he’s long dead. As for Churchill, his achievements and legacy are far more mixed than his battalions of defenders are willing to acknowledge. And if any one figure deserves particular credit for demolishing Hitler’s Reich and winning World War II, it’s Josef Stalin, a dictator as vile and murderous as Hitler himself.

Until Americans accept these facts, until they come to a more nuanced view of World War II that takes fully into account the political and moral implications of the U.S. alliance with the Soviet Union and the U.S. campaign of obliteration bombing directed against Germany and Japan, the mythic version of “the Good War” will continue to provide glib justifications for continuing to dodge that perennial question: How much is enough?

Like concentric security barriers arrayed around the Pentagon, these four factors — institutional self-interest, strategic inertia, cultural dissonance, and misremembered history — insulate the military budget from serious scrutiny. For advocates of a militarized approach to policy, they provide invaluable assets, to be defended at all costs.

By Andrew J. Bacevich

27 January, 2011

TomDispatch.com

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His most recent book is Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War.

And as these dreadful papers are revealed, the Egyptian people are calling for the downfall of President Mubarak, and the Lebanese are appointing a prime minister who will supply the Hezbollah. Rarely has the Arab world seen anything like this.

To start with the Palestine Papers, it is clear that the representatives of the Palestinian people were ready to destroy any hope of the refugees going home.

It will be – and is – an outrage for the Palestinians to learn how their representatives have turned their backs on them. There is no way in which, in the light of the Palestine Papers, these people can believe in their own rights.

They have seen on film and on paper that they will not go back. But across the Arab world – and this does not mean the Muslim world – there is now an understanding of truth that there has not been before.

It is not possible any more, for the people of the Arab world to lie to each other. The lies are finished. The words of their leaders – which are, unfortunately, our own words – have finished. It is we who have led them into this demise. It is we who have told them these lies. And we cannot recreate them any more.

In Egypt, we British loved democracy. We encouraged democracy in Egypt – until the Egyptians decided that they wanted an end to the monarchy. Then we put them in prison. Then we wanted more democracy. It was the same old story. Just as we wanted Palestinians to enjoy democracy, providing they voted for the right people, we wanted the Egyptians to love our democratic life. Now, in Lebanon, it appears that Lebanese “democracy” must take its place. And we don’t like it.

We want the Lebanese, of course, to support the people who we love, the Sunni Muslim supporters of Rafiq Hariri, whose assassination – we rightly believe – was orchestrated by the Syrians. And now we have, on the streets of Beirut, the burning of cars and the violence against government.

And so where are we going? Could it be, perhaps, that the Arab world is going to choose its own leaders? Could it be that we are going to see a new Arab world which is not controlled by the West? When Tunisia announced that it was free, Mrs Hillary Clinton was silent. It was the crackpot President of Iran who said that he was happy to see a free country. Why was this?

In Egypt, the future of Hosni Mubarak looks ever more distressing. His son, may well be his chosen successor. But there is only one Caliphate in the Muslim world, and that is Syria. Hosni’s son is not the man who Egyptians want. He is a lightweight businessman who may – or may not – be able to rescue Egypt from its own corruption.

Hosni Mubarak’s security commander, a certain Mr Suleiman who is very ill, may not be the man. And all the while, across the Middle East, we are waiting to see the downfall of America’s friends. In Egypt, Mr Mubarak must be wondering where he flies to. In Lebanon, America’s friends are collapsing. This is the end of the Democrats’ world in the Arab Middle East. We do not know what comes next. Perhaps only history can answer this question.

By Robert Fisk

27 January, 2011

The Independent

©independent.co.uk