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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

Angry demonstrators in Egypt have torched a police post in the eastern city of Suez, where violence between police and protesters has ratcheted up amid a security crackdown.

Police fled the post before protesters used petrol bombs to set it on fire Thursday morning, witnesses told the Reuters news agency. Police in Suez responded to other demonstrators by firing rubber-coated bullets, water cannons and teargas.

Dozens of protesters gathered in front of a second police post later in the morning, demanding the release of relatives who were detained during a wave of unprecedented protests that authorities have failed to quell since they began on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, activists calling for the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, who has served as Egypt’s president for 30 years, clashed with police in the capital, Cairo, in the early hours of Thursday.

While the situation had calmed later in the morning, the protests are likely to gather momentum with the arrival of Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning former head of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, and a potential presidential rival to Mubarak.

Responding to a reporter’s question as he departed Vienna for Cairo, ElBaradei said on Thursday that he was ready to “lead the transition” in Egypt if asked.

“If people, in particularly young people, if they want me to lead the transition I will not let them down,” ElBaradei told journalists at Vienna airport.

But ElBaradei added: “My priority right now is to see a new Egypt and to see a new Egypt through peaceful transition.”

Demonstrators were planning another major protest for Friday, a day often used for protest in Egypt, and the Muslim Brotherhood – the country’s technically banned but largest opposition movement – said on Thursday for the first time that it would participate.

Mubarak’s whereabouts questioned

Rumours that Mubarak’s son, Gamal, had fled the country have swirled in Egypt since Tuesday, the “day of anger” that ignited the protests. But Al Jazeera’s Dan Nolan, reporting from Cairo, said that Gamal remained in Cairo and was attending a meeting of the ruling National Democratic Party. Footage from that meeting were to be broadcast on television later on Thursday.

But little was known about President Mubarak’s whereabouts, and a senior government official was unable to confirm whether he was in Cairo or the resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh on the Sinai Peninsula.

“You would imagine, with what we’ve been seeing here – these are unprecedented protests, certainly unprecedented under President Mubarak’s rule – that perhaps it might be a good time to address the nation in a televised broadcast or something like that,” our correspondent said.

“There’s been no indication that he’s going to do that. Not even a televised address by the prime minister, only a brief prime ministerial press statement.”

In the statement, Ahmed Nazif, the Egyptian prime minister, said that while people were free to express themselves in a peaceful manner, “there will be swift and strong intervention by police to protect national security”.

In protests that some activists have explicitly connected with the uprising in Tunisia, Egyptians have defied a government ban on political rallies and taken to the streets in the thousands across several cities to vent their anger against Mubarak’s 30-year rule and the emergency national-security laws that have been in place during his entire tenure.

Since the street protests erupted on Tuesday, police have confronted protesters with rubber-coated bullets, tear gas, water cannons and batons, and arrested more than 860 people.

An independent coalition of lawyers said that at least 1,200 people had been detained. At least six people have also been killed.

The turmoil on the streets affected even the country’s stock exchange, where trading had to be temporarily suspended on Thursday after stocks dropped more than six per cent.

Defiant protesters

Our correspondent said the protesters seemed determined and continued to gather at various locations, despite the crackdown.

Protesters have constantly regrouped, using Facebook and Twitter to galvanise and co-ordinate their demonstrations.

Calls for another big protest on Friday gathered 24,000 Facebook supporters within hours of being posted. The Muslim Brotherhood’s promise to join the protest means that police are likely to crack down harder.

Web activists seem to have acted largely independently of more organised opposition movements, including the Brotherhood, which boasts the biggest grassroots network in the country through its social and charity projects.

There have been reports of blocked Internet access and mobile service interruptions in an apparent government move to thwart protesters from communicating among themselves.

Twitter on Wednesday said its service had been blocked in Egypt. But Al Jazeera’s Nolan reported that the site was up and running on Thursday.

Jillian York, who oversees the Herdict web monitoring service at Harvard University, said that Egyptian Facebook users confirmed to her that the website was blocked. Facebook, however, said it had not recorded “major changes” in traffic from Egypt.

US response

Washington, which views Mubarak as a vital ally and bulwark of Middle Eastern peace, has called for calm and urged Egypt to make reforms to meet the protesters’ demands.

“We believe strongly that the Egyptian government has an important opportunity at this moment in time to implement political, economic and social reforms to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people,” Hillary Clinton, US secretary of state, said.

Al Jazeera’s Patty Culhane said that the US must strike a delicate balance.

“Egypt is by far one of the biggest beneficiaries of US foreign aid when it comes to military financing,” our Washington DC correspondent said, adding that Egypt received $1.3bn a year from the US, second only to Israel in that respect.

“It would seem then, that the US has some leverage to push the Egyptian government to not crackdown on the protesters,” Culhane said. Whether the US choses to exercise that leverage remains to be seen.

Like Tunisians, Egyptians complain about surging prices, lack of jobs, and authoritarian rulers who have relied on heavy-handed security to keep dissenting voices quiet.

Egypt’s population of about 80 million is growing by 2 per cent a year. Two thirds of the population is under 30, and that age group accounts for 90 per cent of the jobless. About 40 per cent live on less than $2 a day, and a third are illiterate.

A presidential election is due in September. Egyptians assume that the 82-year-old Mubarak plans either to remain in control or hand power to his son. Father and son both deny that Gamal, 47, is being groomed for the job.

By Aljazeera, 27 January, 2011

Thousands of Yemenis, apparently inspired by events in Tunisia and Egypt, staged a mass demonstration on Thursday calling on President Ali Abdullah Saleh to quit after being in power since 1978.

“Enough being in power for (over) 30 years,” chanted protesters in demonstrations staged by the Common Forum opposition in four different parts of the capital Sanaa.

In reference to the ouster of Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the demonstrators said he was “gone in just (over) 20 years.”

But Yemeni Interior Minister Motahar Rashad al-Masri ruled out any resemblance between the protests in Yemen and the public outcry in the North African country that led to Ben Ali’s departure.

“Yemen is not like Tunisia,” he told AFP, adding that Yemen was a “democratic country” and that the demonstrations were peaceful.

But the slogans chanted in Thursday’s Sanaa demonstration which lasted for two hours were firm in demanding the departure of Saleh.

“No to extending (presidential tenure). No to bequeathing (the presidency),” chanted demonstrators, insisting that it was “time for change.”

“Common Forum go ahead. It is time for change,” proclaimed banners carried in the protests.

Opposition Al-Islah (Reform) party MP Abdulmalik al-Qasuss echoed the demands of the protesters when he addressed them.

“We gather today to demand the departure of President Saleh and his corrupt government,” he said.

A Common Forum activist said that the staging of the demonstration in four separate parts of the capital was aimed at distracting the security forces.

One area chosen for the protest was outside Sanaa University.

Security measures at the demonstrations appeared relaxed, but were tight around the interior ministry and the central bank.

Saleh’s ruling General People’s Congress (GPC), meanwhile, organised four simultaneous counter demonstrations which were attended by thousands of the government’s backers.

“No to toppling democracy and the constitution,” the president’s supporters said on their banners.

On Saturday, hundreds of Sanaa University students held counter protests on campus, with some calling for Saleh to step down and others for him to remain in office.

Saleh, who has been president for decades, was re-elected in September 2006 for a seven-year mandate.

A draft amendment of the constitution, under discussion in parliament despite opposition protests, could allow him — if passed — to remain in office for life.

Saleh had urged the opposition which rejected the amendment to take part in April 27 parliamentary elections to avoid “political suicide.”

The mandate of the current parliament was extended by two years to April under a February 2009 agreement between the GPC and opposition parties to allow dialogue on political reform.

The reforms on the table included a shift from a presidential regime to a proportional representation parliamentary system and further decentralisation of government — measures that have not been implemented.

The dialogue has stalled, and a special committee set up to oversee reform has met only once.

Saleh is also accused of wanting to pass the reins of power in the impoverished Arabian Peninsula state to his eldest son Ahmed, who heads the elite Presidential Guard.

But in a televised address on Sunday, Saleh denied such accusations.

“We are a republic. We reject bequeathing (the presidency)”, he said.

By Agence France Presse

27 January, 2011

© 2011 AFP

 

 

The leaked ‘Palestine Papers’ on concessions offered to Israel show the failure of the US as principal mediator and give the EU an opportunity to step up its role in peace talks, argues Spyros Danellis MEP, a member of the European Parliament’s Palestine delegation, in an opinion piece sent exclusively to EurActiv.

Spyros Danellis is a Greek MEP in the Socialists & Democrats group, He is on the European Parliament’s delegation for relations with the Palestinian Legislative Council.

”It is presumed in foreign policy circles that when a dormant peace process is re-launched, the two negotiating sides will resume where they left off. In other words, they will respect steps of progress made in earlier rounds of talks.

However, thanks to the leaked Palestine Papers it has now surfaced that this was far from the case with Israel and Palestine, not least because they show Israel rejecting increasingly desperate Palestinian concessions that crossed the red lines that were thought to form the cornerstone of their position.

Initial reactions from the Palestinian side have taken aim against its leadership for seemingly betraying long-held positions concerning the form of any final agreement. Considering, however, the unprecedented intransigence that the Palestinians were confronted with in the governments of Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert, the divulged concessions could equally be seen as ultimate attempts at salvaging the much trumpeted but ill-defended two-state solution.

What is interesting about the leaked minutes of the talks is not that Palestinians equivocated publicly; it is that Israeli negotiators – then under Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni – refused to accept Palestinian concessions that in the year 2000 would have delineated their ideal solution.

This can at least in part be attributed to the radicalisation of the settler movement and the gradual shift of Israeli politics towards the right. But it also bears the failure of the US as principal mediator, in as much as it balked at actually resisting the radicalisation that led to today’s stalemate.

The tectonic shift in the parameters of the peace process revealed in the Papers inevitably raises questions about the ability, or the willingness, of the US to guide it to a successful conclusion. In its annual $3bn weapons aid to Israel, among other provisions, the US has had the power to twist Israel’s arm in the direction of the two-state solution.

It chose not to use this leverage over its Middle Eastern partner. In contrast, it chose to use it in 2000, and while the Camp David summit was in full swing, when Israel made plans to sell an airborne early-warning radar system to China. Soon after, the Oslo process would be consigned to the annals of history.

In the years following September 11th, tensions rose and the role of the US as mediator only became less effective. George W. Bush’s road-map failed to convince the parties involved, while Barack Obama’s ambitious rhetoric was sadly succeeded by a practically hands-down acquiescence in the face of increasing illegal settlements. That a deal was not struck despite the Palestinians’ apparent offer of limiting the right of return to 10,000 refugees only serves to confirm US failure.

And where does all this leave the largest economy in the world, the 27-country strong Union that takes pride in its soft power and that only recently launched an External Action Service and a High Representative for Foreign Affairs?

The answer probably is that ‘it depends’. The role it will play in future talks – if the style of direct talks of the past is even the right way forward – will depend on the European Union’s aspirations on the global stage. It will also depend on the level of internal consensus on external matters and on its capacity to foster partnerships.

Crucially, the current impasse threatens to lead to renewed conflict and a new cycle of extremist violence. Among other things, it is an opportunity for Catherine Ashton and her European External Action Service to step up and play an active role in the peace process, with or without the US in the lead.”

Published: 26 January 2011

 

 

For more than a decade, since the collapse of the Camp  avid 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 AlJazeera 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 favorable 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 percent of the half a million Jewish settlers in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and to forgo the rights of all but a few thousand Palestinian refugees.

The Palestinian state was also to be demilitarized. 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 defense?” The Israeli answer was an emphatic “No.”

Interestingly, the Palestinian negotiators are said to have agreed to recognize 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 makes 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 right-wing 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 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, Livni, who was previously 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 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.

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 Erekat asking a US diplomat last year: “What more can I give?”

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

January 26, 2011

Jonathan Cook – Electronic Intifada

Related Link: http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11749.shtml

 

Former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld praised Tunisia as a democracy in 2006.

Former US ambassador to Tunisia Robert Godec’s ominous warnings in a confidential embassy cable about his nation’s North African ally in 2008 and 2009 have an additional political juiciness when read against the backdrop of unfolding events in the country.

“Tunisia is a police state, with little freedom of expression or association, and serious human rights problems,” Godec said.

And in another extract, “The problem is clear: Tunisia has been ruled by the same president for 22 years. He has no successor. And, while president Ben Ali deserves credit for continuing many of the progressive policies of president Bourguiba, he and his regime have lost touch with the Tunisian people.

“They tolerate no advice or criticism, whether domestic or international. Increasingly, they rely on the police for control and focus on preserving power. And, corruption in the inner circle is growing. Even average Tunisians are now keenly aware of it, and the chorus of complaints is rising. Tunisians intensely dislike, even hate, first lady Leila Trabelsi and her family. In private, regime opponents mock her; even those close to the government express dismay at her reported behaviour.

“Meanwhile, anger is growing at Tunisia’s high unemployment and regional inequities. As a consequence, the risks to the regime’s long-term stability are increasing.”

Despite these warnings from the ambassador, it was never intimated that the United States would take any action against the government, not even reducing the lucrative business relationship enjoyed by the two nations.

Choosing its words carefully

Now, as the country bubbles with political fervour after that chain of events that organically emerged from the youth, although choosing its words carefully, the superpower has backed the protesters.

“The people of Tunisia have spoken,” said state department official PJ Crowley. Endorsing the movement that toppled Zein El Abidine Ben Ali, Crowley said the US hopes for “a genuine transition to democracy” – of course strongly implying that there never was democracy there in the first place.

It is worth rewinding and noting some choice words that former US secretary of state Colin Powell had to say about the country when he visited in December 2003.

“Our bilateral relationship is very, very strong,” said Powell. “We are great admirers of Tunisia and the progress that has been achieved under president Ben Ali’s leadership.”

Just days before his trip, Human Rights Watch had urged Powell in a press release to pressure the country on human rights violations.

And it was only a few months earlier, in February of that year, that he gave his famous presentation to the UN, about the rationale to invade Iraq.

After his stirring performance listing the conclusive proof of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, and his unquestionable ties to al-Qaeda, Powell completed the slam dunk by moving towards the conclusion of his speech with this, “My friends, this has been a long and a detailed presentation, and I thank you for your patience. But there is one more subject that I would like to touch on briefly, and it should be a subject of deep and continuing concern to this council: Saddam Hussein’s violations of human rights.“

‘Constructive leadership’

A visit to Tunisia by defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld in February 2006 proves even more revealing:

“We have a very long relationship with Tunisia,” Rumsfeld remarked after the meetings.

“Tunisia is a moderate Muslim nation that has been and is today providing very constructive leadership in the world. The struggle that’s taking place within that faith is a serious one, an important one. There’s a very small number of violent extremists on the one side against a broad, overwhelming majority of people who are moderate.”

And with regards those within the government’s ruling elite that US officials called “The Family” in one of the WikiLeaks, who it was said are above the law in the country, Rumsfeld had a glowing reference, “They have demonstrated, if one looks at this successful country…the ability to create an environment that’s hospitable to investment, to enterprise, and to opportunity for their people.” Hardly sounds like the type of country whose people’s economic desperation would lead to self-immolation.

He spoke of a “very constructive military and diplomatic co-operation” between the two nations.

“Both of our countries have been attacked by violent extremists, so we know well the stakes involved in the struggle that’s being waged.

“Tunisia has long been an important voice of moderation and tolerance in this region, and has played a key role in confronting extremists not just within this country, but in the area as well.”

The Associated Press news agency quoted Rumsfeld as saying Tunisia was a “democracy”, but that it was moving “at different paces” on the social, economic and political levels.

All three moving at such a rapid pace now, that the geo-political trade-offs, where stability trumps democracy, despite preaching the sanctity of the latter and the policy of aligning with the best worst guys around because of the national interest, no matter how they treat their own people whose freedom you claim to champion, may be up for reassessment.

What happened to that nice democratic country that Rumsfeld and Powell told us about?

By Imran Garda

January 20th, 2011.