FP/PASSPORT
9/11/08
How to Catch Osama
Seven years after 9/11, Osama bin Laden remains as elusive as ever. Most analysts believe the al Qaeda leader is hiding out in Pakistan's tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan. So, FP asked five Pakistani experts to tell us how to catch him.
Get Some Intelligence
By Shuja Nawaz
Osama bin Laden needs an extensive logistics network to stay active and in touch with his followers, and that presents an opportunity. Here's how I'd catch him.
Penetrate his network through double agents—locals and Arabs who could slowly work their way into al Qaeda's logistics chain. Over time, they could help map his activities and likely movements. Bin Laden cannot move easily without a sizable group of followers, so watch for the double-cab pickups that traverse the mountainous, wooded terrain of the northern Hindu Kush, his most likely hide-out. Look in Dir and Chitral districts, plus the contiguous Afghan provinces across the border. Bin Laden is not likely to settle in the more open, vegetation-free zone further south. Inventory the hujras or meeting houses that have been hired by foreigners through local Taliban and other sympathizers (bribes will get you everywhere in the tribal areas, so use cash to find out what you need to know). Taliban leaders use satellite phones, which are easy to track. Thurayas are the preferred brand, and there's even a shop in Peshawar that sells them.
The United States and Pakistan must operate independently to prevent leaks. Organize the Pakistani cell as a fresh unit, using carefully screened Afghan and frontier experts from Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and Military Intelligence. Link them to a small team of commandos tasked solely with ferreting out the al Qaeda and Taliban leadership. Locate the team inside Pakistani Army headquarters to avoid any leaks from ISI, and support it with a technology crew that can track electronic communications. Equip the commandos with fast-moving Apache and Mi-17 helicopters for rapid response. They'll need the latest night-vision goggles, not the obsolete models that the United States currently supplies.
Above all, avoid collateral damage. As Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, recently told an interviewer, "I traveled three months to recruit and only got 10-15 persons. One bombing by the Americans that killed innocents, and I got hundreds of recruits!"
Shuja Nawaz is a veteran journalist, analyst, and author of the recently released Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within (Oxford University Press, 2008).
Partner with Pakistan
By Lt. Gen. Talat Masood (Ret.)
The Bush administration is looking for illusive, quick results when a long-term perspective is crucial for success. Frequent U.S. airstrikes by drones in Pakistan's tribal belt and the recent limited land operation in South Waziristan by U.S. forces have sparked anger throughout the country. Outraged moderates are joining hands with religious parties, asking the government to review Pakistan's alliance in the war on terror. The government will resist such pressure, but it will be hard to pacify the public if these strikes escalate.
Indeed, the Taliban and al Qaeda would like nothing more than to fight the Americans on Pakistani soil, giving the impression that they are resisting foreign aggression. It would be extremely politically difficult for the Pakistani military to continue counterinsurgency operations if the United States sent in ground troops.
The United States needs to face the fact that it will not capture Osama bin Laden without Pakistan's help. If U.S. policymakers have misgivings about elements of the ISI or other intelligence agencies, now is the time to address them, given that Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, the Army chief of staff, and the present civilian government are serious about fighting terrorism and militancy.
Working through the tribes is the best approach. Bin Laden is most likely surrounded by several rings of security personnel who are extremely loyal, heavily armed, and constantly on the move. By relying on human intelligence supplemented by technical intelligence, it should be possible to identify his general location. Gathering information from the people will not be easy, however, as they fear reprisal from the militants. The Taliban and al Qaeda's second- and third-tier leadership under detention is another valuable source of intelligence. Capturing pro al-Qaeda warlords can help, as they have considerable knowledge about the location and movement of top leaders.
Today, bin Laden is a source of inspiration for Islamist radicals, not an operational commander. Thus, although his capture may be an important symbolic victory, it will not be a strategic defeat for al Qaeda or the Taliban. But the United States will not accomplish either symbolic or strategic victories against its enemy unless it has Pakistan as a partner.
Lt. Gen. Talat Masood is a retired general of the Pakistani Army.
Help the Pashtuns
By Rahimullah Yusufzai
To kill or capture Osama bin Laden, the United States will above all need to win friends and allies in Pakistan's tribal areas. Unfortunately, U.S. policies are doing precisely the opposite.
Errant airstrikes and cross-border raids that have killed innocent civilians have made a bitter enemy out of the Pashtuns, who live on both sides of the Durand Line and make up the bulk of the Taliban. The Pashtun people are unusual in the sense that they would be willing to do things willingly if asked respectfully, but refuse point-blank if ordered to do so or threatened with force. Bombings and missile strikes won't force them to beg for mercy or cooperate with the attackers. They are made of sterner stuff. Their patience is endless and is born out by their suffering during the past three decades.
To earn the Pashtuns' goodwill and support, the United States and its allies will need to detach them from the Taliban and, in turn, detach the Taliban from al Qaeda. Lumping them together allows them to unite to fight a common enemy. But the Taliban and al Qaeda are different entities with separate agendas and, therefore, must be dealt with differently. Once that is done, bin Laden and other foreigners will find it hard to claim local support and seek sanctuary among the Pashtuns.
How can the United States win them over? One major source of Pashtun rage is the insecurity and killings in their areas, which prevent new jobs and development. Yet the United States has promised just $750 million over five years for Pakistan's tribal areas, peanuts compared with what it is spending in Afghanistan. Substantial, targeted development funds by the United States and its allies are needed to bring the tribal areas up to par with the rest of Pakistan.
Pashtuns, moreover, are angry that their main province—the North-West Frontier Province—has no proper name. They'd like to rename it Pakhtunkhwa, land of Pakhtuns (or Pashtuns), just like Punjab for Punjabis, Sindh for Sindhis, and Baluchistan for Baluchis. Although economic development is crucial, greater provincial autonomy within Pakistan would address some of the Pashtuns' concerns.
Rahimullah Yusufzai is resident editor of The News International, a daily newspaper in Peshawar.
Be Careful What You Wish For
By Hasan-Askari Rizvi
Eliminating top al Qaeda leaders such as Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri via unilateral U.S. military action in Pakistan's tribal areas will undoubtedly be viewed as a major triumph in Washington policy circles. But be careful what you wish for.
First, al Qaeda is now a symbol of resistance for a large number of shadowy, anti-American groups based in different countries that function independently of the organization's central leadership. The decapitation of al Qaeda will be only a temporary setback for them.
Second, what if unilateral U.S. action in Pakistan's tribal areas does not kill or capture the al Qaeda leadership? Failure will only further destabilize Pakistan's fragile civilian elected government, which faces daunting domestic challenges and a powerful military whose current withdrawal from active politics is tactical rather than strategic.
Pakistan's central predicament is not bin Laden per se, but the utter failure of former President Pervez Musharraf and the present leadership to mobilize the country against terrorism. Most Pakistanis think that their government's involvement in the war on terror does not serve the national interest, and anti-U.S. sentiments go far beyond Islamic circles. Unilateral strikes will only fan those flames.
In short, getting bin Laden in a unilateral strike would hardly signal victory in the war on terrorism. The complex situation in Pakistan and Afghanistan requires a more comprehensive and long-range approach, involving supporting the civilian government in Islamabad, establishing a credible government in Kabul, and working jointly with the Pakistani military. Unilateral U.S. military action may or may not displace terrorist groups from the tribal areas in the short term, but it will certainly destabilize and fragment Pakistan in the long run. And nothing would make Osama bin Laden happier than seeing Pakistan become the next failed state.
Hasan-Askari Rizvi is a political and defense analyst based in Lahore.
Dry Up the Cesspool
By Pervez Hoodbhoy
Seven years after 9/11, Osama bin Laden continues to elude the countless fortune seekers, professional spies, intelligence agencies, and Predators prowling the Afghan-Pakistani border. Ground operations have also revealed little. Pakistan's recent offensive around the Taliban stronghold of Bajaur has so far produced more than 250,000 refugees and hundreds of dead Taliban and Arab fighters. The only new intel is that Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's second in command, recently visited the area with his wife. The GPS coordinates of al Qaeda's top leader remain as fuzzy as ever.
But this may scarcely matter. Like Lewis Carol's hotly pursued mythical Snark—who turned out to be just a Boojum at the end—bin Laden's eventual capture or death, however satisfying, is likely to be irrelevant.
Al Qaeda has morphed into a mind-set, a way of thinking that transcends borders and individuals. The speed with which new militant leaders have succeeded slain ones stands as proof. Extremist organizations feed off ignorance, cruelty, misery, poverty, pain, and injustice. Their ranks are being swelled by those wrongfully or mistakenly targeted—the innocent victims of U.S., NATO, and Pakistani artillery and air power.
Even as al Qaeda and its Taliban allies spread their octopus arms into more and more areas of the North-West Frontier Province and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), there is some good news. A people's resistance is developing against atrocities targeting Shiites, massacres of tribal elders, destruction of girls' schools and colleges, and the virtual elimination of revenues from areas dependent on tourism.
These gains need to be followed up. The cesspool in which extremism thrives must be drained. The Pakistani state must firmly enforce its writ and protect ordinary tribal folk who resist religious extremism. It will need to put more Pakistani boots on the ground in FATA, address the causes of human misery in these poverty-stricken and lawless no-man's lands, and cleanse intelligence agencies of pro-Taliban and al Qaeda elements. It may be a tall order, but it is immensely more important than getting bin Laden's head.
Pervez Hoodbhoy is chairman of the department of physics at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad and is a prominent commentator.
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Friday, September 12, 2008
Victory in Iraq declared, not achieved
ABU AARDVARK
9/10/08
Victory in Iraq declared, not achieved
George Bush's justification for the US troop withdrawal from Iraq – that the surge has promoted political reconciliation – is false
Brian Katulis
THE GUARDIAN (UK) - The Iraq troop withdrawals President Bush announced on Tuesday at the National Defence University were much ado about nothing. The slight reduction in troop levels will keep US troop levels several thousand above what they were in January 2007 when he announced the "surge" of US troops. Bush administration critics will say the troop withdrawals are too little and too late, while supporters will echo Bush's "return on success" talking point.
But this debate on troop levels - almost certain to dominate whatever paltry coverage the Iraq war gets in the media these days - misses a more fundamental point: that the surge has failed to achieve its central objective of advancing Iraq's political transition and encouraging power-sharing deals among Iraq's competing factions.
The greatest myth promoted by Bush in his speech was found in this line: "Political reconciliation is moving forward, and the Iraqi government has passed several major pieces of legislation." By overstating the meagre steps taken by Iraq's leaders in barely passing a few relatively insignificant laws in their parliament, Bush's statement ranks right up there with his 2003 "mission accomplished" speech and vice-president Dick Cheney's assertion that the insurgency was in its "last throes" in 2005.
A more honest look at the balance sheet on Iraq's political transition yields an inconvenient conclusion: The surge has frozen into place the accelerated fragmentation that Iraq underwent in 2006 and 2007 and has created disincentives to bridge central divisions between Iraqi factions. Moreover, rather than advancing Iraq's political transition and facilitating power-sharing deals among Iraq's factions, the surge has produced an oil revenue-fuelled, Shia-dominated national government with close ties to Iran. This national government shows few signs of seeking to compromise and share meaningful power with other frustrated political factions.
When Bush announced the surge in January 2007, its stated objective was to improve security in order to provide the space for meaningful political reconciliation. The underlying theory was that violence impeded Iraq's political transition and national reconciliation. But Iraq's brutal violence is better understood as politics by other means rather than as an alternative to politics. Key factions in Iraq used violence to reshape Iraq's internal balance of power and altered the demographic composition of important areas of Iraq like Baghdad.
One of the failures of the 2007-2008 surge of US military forces is that the declines in violence from record levels that it accomplished did not fundamentally alter the strategic calculations of Iraq's leading factions in ways that advance political accommodation and progress toward power-sharing deals. The threats posed by terrorist groups such as al-Qaida in Iraq are much diminished, and militias such as the Mahdi army, though not defeated by any means, operate less freely. These reductions in violence are important, but they have not translated into meaningful progress in Iraq's political transition.
When it comes to true power-sharing - who has control of the guns, money and other key state resources like oil - Iraq has not moved forward substantially. On the state's monopoly on the use of force, Iraq has taken some steps forward like increasing the size of the Iraqi army. But it has also taken some steps backwards. Instead of disbanding key militias, the surge actually created new set of Sunni militias, further undermining the efforts to build a unified central government by supporting independent centres of power. The independent Kurdish Peshmerga military force not only remains in place, but has also become involved in some standoffs with the Iraqi army in disputed territories in places like the Diyala province this summer. Shia militias like Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi army and the Badr organisation have either gone underground or infiltrated parts of the growing Iraqi security forces.
On power-sharing of Iraq's considerable oil wealth, no significant advances have been made since the government was formed in 2006. Constitutional reforms promised as part of a deal to get the Sunni factions to join the political process in 2005 have not been delivered, and a deal on dividing Iraq's oil resources has remained elusive. Even getting to a deal on deciding the rules of the road for a new set of provincial elections proved to difficult for Iraq's divided leadership to complete.
With the surge forces departing and US forces declining, Iraq is a less violent place, but it remains a fragmented country. On the most important questions connected to resolving Iraq's internal conflicts, Iraq has not moved forward. The core question remains the same for Iraq's leaders: how to share power among the diverse ethnic and sectarian groups. By overstating the gains to date on Iraq's political transition, Bush continues to understate the considerable challenges that lie ahead.
Iraq's leaders must address their divisions on their own terms, and at their own pace. The US cannot impose a military solution to the power-sharing disputes among Iraq's leaders, and expending significant resources in an effort to do so is unwise while other pressing national security challenges loom in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. True progress in Iraq requires the US to acknowledge the increasing moves by Iraqis to assert sovereignty and control over their own affairs.
9/10/08
Victory in Iraq declared, not achieved
George Bush's justification for the US troop withdrawal from Iraq – that the surge has promoted political reconciliation – is false
Brian Katulis
THE GUARDIAN (UK) - The Iraq troop withdrawals President Bush announced on Tuesday at the National Defence University were much ado about nothing. The slight reduction in troop levels will keep US troop levels several thousand above what they were in January 2007 when he announced the "surge" of US troops. Bush administration critics will say the troop withdrawals are too little and too late, while supporters will echo Bush's "return on success" talking point.
But this debate on troop levels - almost certain to dominate whatever paltry coverage the Iraq war gets in the media these days - misses a more fundamental point: that the surge has failed to achieve its central objective of advancing Iraq's political transition and encouraging power-sharing deals among Iraq's competing factions.
The greatest myth promoted by Bush in his speech was found in this line: "Political reconciliation is moving forward, and the Iraqi government has passed several major pieces of legislation." By overstating the meagre steps taken by Iraq's leaders in barely passing a few relatively insignificant laws in their parliament, Bush's statement ranks right up there with his 2003 "mission accomplished" speech and vice-president Dick Cheney's assertion that the insurgency was in its "last throes" in 2005.
A more honest look at the balance sheet on Iraq's political transition yields an inconvenient conclusion: The surge has frozen into place the accelerated fragmentation that Iraq underwent in 2006 and 2007 and has created disincentives to bridge central divisions between Iraqi factions. Moreover, rather than advancing Iraq's political transition and facilitating power-sharing deals among Iraq's factions, the surge has produced an oil revenue-fuelled, Shia-dominated national government with close ties to Iran. This national government shows few signs of seeking to compromise and share meaningful power with other frustrated political factions.
When Bush announced the surge in January 2007, its stated objective was to improve security in order to provide the space for meaningful political reconciliation. The underlying theory was that violence impeded Iraq's political transition and national reconciliation. But Iraq's brutal violence is better understood as politics by other means rather than as an alternative to politics. Key factions in Iraq used violence to reshape Iraq's internal balance of power and altered the demographic composition of important areas of Iraq like Baghdad.
One of the failures of the 2007-2008 surge of US military forces is that the declines in violence from record levels that it accomplished did not fundamentally alter the strategic calculations of Iraq's leading factions in ways that advance political accommodation and progress toward power-sharing deals. The threats posed by terrorist groups such as al-Qaida in Iraq are much diminished, and militias such as the Mahdi army, though not defeated by any means, operate less freely. These reductions in violence are important, but they have not translated into meaningful progress in Iraq's political transition.
When it comes to true power-sharing - who has control of the guns, money and other key state resources like oil - Iraq has not moved forward substantially. On the state's monopoly on the use of force, Iraq has taken some steps forward like increasing the size of the Iraqi army. But it has also taken some steps backwards. Instead of disbanding key militias, the surge actually created new set of Sunni militias, further undermining the efforts to build a unified central government by supporting independent centres of power. The independent Kurdish Peshmerga military force not only remains in place, but has also become involved in some standoffs with the Iraqi army in disputed territories in places like the Diyala province this summer. Shia militias like Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi army and the Badr organisation have either gone underground or infiltrated parts of the growing Iraqi security forces.
On power-sharing of Iraq's considerable oil wealth, no significant advances have been made since the government was formed in 2006. Constitutional reforms promised as part of a deal to get the Sunni factions to join the political process in 2005 have not been delivered, and a deal on dividing Iraq's oil resources has remained elusive. Even getting to a deal on deciding the rules of the road for a new set of provincial elections proved to difficult for Iraq's divided leadership to complete.
With the surge forces departing and US forces declining, Iraq is a less violent place, but it remains a fragmented country. On the most important questions connected to resolving Iraq's internal conflicts, Iraq has not moved forward. The core question remains the same for Iraq's leaders: how to share power among the diverse ethnic and sectarian groups. By overstating the gains to date on Iraq's political transition, Bush continues to understate the considerable challenges that lie ahead.
Iraq's leaders must address their divisions on their own terms, and at their own pace. The US cannot impose a military solution to the power-sharing disputes among Iraq's leaders, and expending significant resources in an effort to do so is unwise while other pressing national security challenges loom in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. True progress in Iraq requires the US to acknowledge the increasing moves by Iraqis to assert sovereignty and control over their own affairs.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Bitter Lemons Middle East Roundtable September 11, 2008 Seven Years to 9/11 and the "war on terror"
bitterlemons-international.org
Middle East Roundtable
Edition 36 Volume 6 - September 11, 2008
Seven years to 9/11 and the "war on terror"
• Wholesale change is needed - an interview with Ghazi Hamad
Only by understanding and communicating with different groups, including Hamas and Hizballah, can a new atmosphere arise.
• The battle for Pakistan's soul - Irfan Husain
Pakistan has not yet worked out a political consensus about who the real enemy is.
• A mixed bag - Laurie Mylroie
Confronting the resurgence of the Taliban has become the primary challenge.
• A battleground for the foreseeable future - Chris Toensing
The Washington mandarins, of both parties, care little for international cooperation.
Wholesale change is needed
an interview with Ghazi Hamad
BI: It's seven years since 9/11. What does that mean today?
Hamad: 9/11 was a major curve in history. It was an event that changed the map of the geo-political landscape, especially in the Middle East. One resulting change was in the foreign policy of the US, the "war on terror", which tried to divide countries into axes of good or evil.
The US has not been successful in this primarily because the policy is not approved and has no credibility in the Middle East, even with Arab regimes, even if some countries have tried to protect themselves by cooperating with the US and targeting radical groups to reap some benefit from this US posture.
The "war on terror" has increased hatred against the US, radicalized people and made them more extremist. The reason is that the US has wielded its power in only one way: by using violence and brute force in its occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. This affected the outcome in those countries and the reaction of all Islamic movements in the Middle East who have come to see the US as using its wars here simply as a cover to increase its power in the region and in South Asia.
The US has not succeeded in changing the world, ending Islamic movements or decreasing radicalism. What has happened is the reverse: there is more hatred, more division, more radical groups and greater criticism of the US role in the world.
BI: Do you think the US presence in Iraq and Afghanistan has made the US weaker?
Hamad: Yes. The US failed to establish a democratic regime in Iraq. Instead, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed there: there are daily bombings; there are assassinations; there are Sunni-Shi'ite-Kurdish sectarian conflicts. Saddam Hussein was a dictator, but people now say the situation under him was better. It's the same in Afghanistan where the situation is unstable and becoming more unstable. The use of violence and force will not help create democratic regimes and do not provide a good model for the future.
BI: Have the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan been direct causes of more radicalism?
Hamad: I think there is a clear increase in radical groups. There are now many more people ready to fight the US. There are many who believe that in Iraq, the Americans only came to be the eyes of Israel and to insert itself inside the Muslim world. This has created a very dangerous mood in the Middle East and the Muslim world generally, and there are many who are very angry and upset with US policy. We can see this with the fighters arriving in Iraq from Algeria, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere to fight the US, which they see as the head of evil.
BI: This radicalization also pits Muslim groups against each other, Sunni versus Shi'ite, Arab governments versus Islamic movements. Isn't there a danger of a full-blown conflict among Arab and Muslim groups and countries, and how can this be avoided?
Hamad: I don't support radical groups. They are too often a danger to Islamic society. Islam is a moderate religion and some of these people, under the umbrella of Islam, have been targeting innocent people. This is a misrepresentation of Islam. Even America's "war on terror" does not give these people the right to target Jordanian hotels or tourists in Egypt. These radicals need education. They have been brainwashed.
But the US contributed to this increase in the degree of extremism in the Middle East. It is now the job of Arab governments to find a strategy to deal with such radicals. This cannot be done through violence. It should be done through discussion and dialogue, in an effort to convince radicals that they are on the wrong track.
In general, though, I believe moderate Muslim organizations in the region and Muslim world still dominate the situation while radical groups remain fringe organizations with nowhere near the same kind of popular backing.
BI: The US will soon have a new administration. What could such an administration do to cool the situation?
Hamad: First, I have to say I think the era of George W Bush will be remembered as one of the worst times for America ever. He has caused trouble for the US all over the world, from Iraq to Afghanistan, Korea to Sudan. He has caused more wars and more hatred than any other president. He believed that brute force and military might could suppress people. But he has failed in this and he failed to build democracy at the point of a gun.
I hope that any successor will oversee a comprehensive change in policy, though I am not optimistic judging from the statements we've heard so far from the candidates. Barack Obama shows some willingness to entertain change with his statements on Iraq.
If the candidates really want to serve the US as well as democracy in the world and bring security and stability they have to understand that only by understanding and communicating with different groups, including Islamic movements like Hamas and Hizballah, can they create a new atmosphere. If they insist on keeping groups like Hamas and Hizballah on America's list of "terrorist groups" there will be little change. These groups have deep roots and it will not be easy to eradicate them.- Published 11/9/2008 © bitterlemons-international.org
Ghazi Hamad is a Hamas official from the Gaza Strip.
The battle for Pakistan's soul
Irfan Husain
Immediately after 9/11, when President Pervez Musharraf was forced into a famous U-turn over his support for the Taliban, many in Pakistan heaved a sigh of relief. To liberal, secular Pakistanis who had watched the creeping Talibanization of the tribal areas with dismay, the military ruler's about face raised the hope that his government would now halt the growth of fundamentalism. Alas, this proved to be a false dawn.
Musharraf, despite the lip service he paid to Washington's "war on terror", drew a fine line between al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The former group, with its foreign leadership and global agenda, was hunted with reasonable effectiveness. Many of its operatives were killed or captured and bundled off to Guantanamo. But official policy toward the Taliban has remained deliberately ambiguous for the last eight years. Just as the Taliban were nurtured by the Inter-Services Intelligence at the inception of the group in 1996, they have been secretly armed, shielded and guided by elements in Pakistan's elite intelligence agency ever since.
When western allies first entered Afghanistan in December 2001, the Taliban were broken and scattered. Routed by unrelenting aerial bombardment and the fighters of the Northern Alliance, they sought shelter in the tribal areas of Pakistan. Here, they were beyond the reach of western forces and the Pakistani army. Traditionally, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas enjoy a great degree of autonomy and are outside the jurisdiction of the law. Instead, they are governed by tribal law administered by elders and village councils known as "jirgas".
Taking advantage of this power vacuum, the Taliban found sanctuary and established training camps. Financing came largely from the rapidly growing opium and heroin production in the bordering Afghan provinces of Helmand and Kunar. With a weak government in Kabul, drug production has soared, and with it the coffers of the Taliban have swelled. Young fighters with no prospects of employment in these dirt-poor areas are recruited for as little as five dollars a day, with a bonus if they kill a coalition soldier.
Where there were a number of extremist groups on the Pakistani side of the border, today they have consolidated their efforts under the banner of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan and are led by Baituallah Mehsud, the man widely believed to have masterminded the murder of Benazir Bhutto last December. In 2007, the TTP and its allies within Pakistan launched some 50 suicide attacks in which nearly 1,000 Pakistanis were killed. The recent attack on the prime minister's car along a heavily guarded route near Islamabad indicates how freely they have begun operating.
Musharraf himself, despite his tight security, has been targeted at least three times. What is even more worrying is the number of Taliban sympathizers within the armed forces and intelligence services. According to reliable reports, many retired army and ISI officers are helping extremist groups.
Ethnicity is a factor often overlooked by westerners when assessing the conflict. Virtually all the Taliban are Pashtuns who make up the population of much of the border areas. In fact, they constitute Afghanistan's largest single ethnic group, and in Pakistan they populate virtually all of FATA as well as the North-Western Frontier Province. Since they are strongly represented in Pakistan's armed forces, police and the bureaucracy, it is difficult to portray them as the enemy. Traditionally, tribesmen come and go over the ill-defined border without let or hindrance, and attempts to limit this free access are fiercely resisted.
Military action in the tribal areas triggers protests orchestrated by conservative groups across Pakistan. The recent raid by US Special Forces into Pakistan resulted in the deaths of a number of women and children and has been widely criticized, with the government coming under pressure to cut off military links with Washington.
Another factor that has thwarted a more effective response to the Taliban threat is Pakistan's preoccupation with India. Generations of army officers have been taught that Pakistan's giant neighbor is the real enemy, and this doctrine is reflected in the disposition and concentration of the country's half-million strong army. Troops have been trained to fight a conventional war on the plains of Punjab and Sindh. After 9/11, around 80,000 troops were deployed along the Afghan border, but even this number is insufficient to seal it. Currently, a military alliance between Afghanistan and India is Pakistani military planners' worst nightmare. To thwart such a possibility, the Pakistani army wants to retain the Taliban as proxies and is therefore reluctant to crush them.
Finally, Pakistan has not yet worked out a political consensus about who the real enemy is. Until the day he left office in early August, Musharraf was regularly castigated in the media as Bush's poodle doing America's dirty work by killing his own people. Pakistani TV networks are forever churning out talk shows in which so-called experts criticize the government for fighting fellow-Muslims. They conveniently overlook the fact that these same Muslims are responsible for killing hundreds of innocent Pakistanis and Afghans.
In post-Musharraf Pakistan, the newly-elected government is struggling to find its feet. The coalition of the two largest parties has already split up. Nawaz Sharif, leader of his faction of the Pakistan Muslim League, has made clear his intention to talk to the Taliban rather than fight them. But Asif Zardari, widower of Benazir Bhutto and now president of Pakistan, has declared his intention to take the fight to the terrorists who threaten to seize control. In a recent article in the Washington Post, Zardari called this the "battle for Pakistan's soul". Clearly, this is a battle Pakistan cannot afford to lose.- Published 11/9/2008 © bitterlemons-international.org
Irfan Husain writes two columns a week for Dawn, Pakistan's widest circulating and most influential daily. After a career in the civil service spanning 30 years, he was president of a university in Pakistan for five years.
A mixed bag
Laurie Mylroie
Seven years on, America's war on terror is a mixed bag. The situation reflects neither the substantial fear of further assaults that existed immediately after 9/11 nor the misplaced optimism that suggested the United States could radically transform the broader Middle East, as Ronald Reagan had brought about the collapse of the Soviet bloc.
Patterned on the western diplomacy that ended communism, President George W. Bush's Middle East democracy initiative began in late 2003 when the White House mistakenly believed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were largely won. The impetus for that effort came chiefly from the White House, as former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith explains in "War and Decision". The president was drawn to the idea, and Condoleezza Rice saw the Arabs as an oppressed people whose circumstances resembled those of blacks in the segregated south, her biographer Elizabeth Bumiller relates.
Yet the Middle East is neither the Soviet bloc nor the American south, and the US call for democratic change really only resonated in one Arab country--Lebanon, the most westernized. And even this one success was significantly set back when Washington then failed to support the March 14 coalition against Syrian and Iranian subversion. After the democracy initiative helped produce a Hamas victory in 2006, it was set aside in large part.
Yet American achievements have not been insignificant. There have been no further 9/11-style attacks in the United States. In the years following those assaults, many countries that had not previously experienced significant Muslim violence or had had no such violence for many years suddenly faced major attacks: Britain, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Kenya, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Tunisia and Turkey. From 2002 to 2005, an average of four such attacks occurred annually, killing an average of 214 people each year. But since April 2006, there have been no significant Islamic terrorist attacks in any of them and CIA Director Michael Hayden recently gave an upbeat assessment of US progress against al-Qaeda.
Violence continues, certainly, but it is more narrowly focused geographically. It is up dramatically in Algeria, but that may be related to a decision taken by the Algerian government in 2006 to free 2,500 Muslim extremists from prison rather than to any intrinsic strength of the global jihad. Significant violence also continues in India, but that is probably a function of the support Pakistani intelligence provides Islamic extremists fighting its traditional foe.
Progress also exists elsewhere. Iraq has turned around since the "surge" started in early 2007 and Gen. David Petraeus began to implement a new counter-terrorism strategy focused on protecting the Iraqi population and working with it against the relatively small percentage of "irreconcilables". Although the current situation remains fragile, as Petraeus cautions, America may well win this war, provided it has the stamina.
Failing to maintain public support for the war was a significant shortcoming of the Bush administration. As Feith explains, when weapons of mass destruction could not be found in Iraq by the fall of 2003 the White House ceased to defend its decision to overthrow Saddam. Since the United States was already in Iraq, it reasoned, that was unnecessary. It was better to look forward and focus on the democracy initiative. Of course, when the White House reached that conclusion it did not understand that very significant combat--and the bulk of US casualties--lay in the future.
The major problem now lies elsewhere. Pakistan's security establishment has worked with Islamic extremists for three decades and remains closely tied to them. It provided crucial support for the Taliban in the 1990s, and even after the United States went to war in Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks Pakistan continued to support the Taliban. It appeared to cooperate with the United States as it helped capture al-Qaeda leaders, but its actions were in fact more complex. Yet Pakistan also helped capture al-Qaeda leaders.
Following the apparent Taliban defeat in late 2001, many radicals took refuge in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Over time, the "Talibanization" of a significant part of the FATA ensued. Many tribal leaders were murdered by radical young upstarts and the Taliban established a base from which to attack the fledgling Afghan government. Despite the repeated complaints of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, the White House, focused on al-Qaeda, was slow to recognize the seriousness of the problem and Pakistan's role in contributing to it.
The radicalization of Pakistan's tribal areas has also spilled over into Pakistan proper. Army offensives into the FATA increased popular anger against Islamabad, contributing to a dramatic increase in violence, including attacks against government facilities and personnel. The rise of the Taliban within the FATA also contributed to the emergence of radicals in neighboring areas, including the North West Frontier Province, where they sometimes threaten the provincial capital, Peshawar.
Thus, confronting the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan has become the primary challenge in the war on terror.- Published 11/9/2008 © bitterlemons-international.org
Laurie Mylroie is an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Study of Revenge: The First World Trade Center Attack and Saddam Hussein's War Against America.
A battleground for the foreseeable future
Chris Toensing
Bob Woodward's four books chronicling the wars of President George W. Bush are sensitive barometers of conventional wisdom in Washington. Whereas the first volume, published in 2002 at the height of the self-righteous nationalism gripping the capital after the September 11, 2001 attacks, hailed Bush's self-confidence in acting to protect the homeland, the 2008 installment depicts the same man as cocksure and incurious. More educational are Woodward's hints about the worldviews that will outlast this unpopular administration, embedded in the organs of the national security state.
Consider the words of retired Gen. Jack Keane, reported by Woodward to have been spoken to Gen. David Petraeus in Baghdad in March: "We're going to be here for 50 years minimum, most of the time hopefully preventing wars, and on occasion having to fight one, dealing with radical Islam, our economic interests in the region and trying to achieve stability.... We're going to do it anyway because we don't have a choice."
"Here", in Keane's formulation, was not Iraq, but the sprawling theater of operations for US Central Command, or CENTCOM, of which Petraeus will assume control when his tour in Iraq is over. Keane's message to Petraeus was clear: CENTCOM, whose borders happen to coincide roughly with those of the Islamic world, is where the action is, now and as far as the eye can see.
While Keane is known as the architect of Bush's "surge" in Iraq, and is a favorite of neo-conservatives and other hawks, his ideas about US grand strategy are common across the ideological spectrum that matters in Washington. Hardly anyone of political weight has learned from the Iraq debacle, the disaster in Somalia or the September 11 attacks for that matter, that the United States is too heavily deployed or too bent on having its way in CENTCOM's domain. John McCain and Barack Obama both speak of sending more troops to Afghanistan, though Obama would remove them from Iraq first. No one in a position to work in the next White House has advocated that the US give up its role, inherited from Britain, as praetorian guard of Persian Gulf oil or its more expansive mission to stamp out fires throughout what Carter-era National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski called the "arc of crisis". The arguments are about how this hegemonic stance can be maintained to maximum advantage and at minimum cost.
This is not to suggest, in crude fashion, that the existence of CENTCOM caused the September 11 attacks and will inevitably provoke a reprise. It is rather to say that the American strategic and political classes are acutely aware, as never before 2001, of the importance of a "forward-leaning posture" in the Middle East to the overall health of US superpower status. The threats they perceive to the free flow of the region's oil, two thirds of the world's proven reserves (as cannot be repeated often enough), come not just from radical Islam and failed states, but also from the grasping, and growing, giants Russia and China. The prospects of relative US decline are to be confronted, not managed. The Washington mandarins, of both parties, care little for international cooperation. They believe in power and they trust no one but themselves to wield it.
Of course, both parties prattle, as they do every electoral season, about weaning America off "Middle Eastern oil". But even assuming a series of presidents with the political will and capital to make the necessary policy changes, the task will outlive all of their terms. Denmark, which has so many wind turbines it exports 90 percent of the electricity, still consumes vastly more oil than renewable energy, in large part because of the automobile. The US, with its wide open spaces and exurban subdivisions, will continue to need more and more oil to sustain living standards at home, even as domestic production slips and competition for control of foreign fields toughens. More to the point, the strategic stakes in the Persian Gulf will only heighten. Whosoever polices the Gulf safeguards the single most important commodity for the world economy.
The peoples of the lands under CENTCOM's umbrella can hope for a smarter, more inquisitive, less bellicose American president than the boy-king, whose bungling Woodward reveals. Such a chief executive might have the skill to forestall the wars that Keane foresees. But, barring the advent of a foreign policy establishment in Washington with genuine vision and appropriate humility, the fundamentals of political economy dictate that, in some shape or form, the greater Middle East will remain a battleground for several Septembers to come.- Published 11/9/2008 © bitterlemons-international.org
Chris Toensing is editor of Middle East Report, a publication of the Middle East Research and Information Project (www.merip.org).
Bitterlemons-international.org is an internet forum for an array of world perspectives on the Middle East and its specific concerns. It aspires to engender greater understanding about the Middle East region and open a new common space for world thinkers and political leaders to present their viewpoints and initiatives on the region. Editors Ghassan Khatib and Yossi Alpher can be reached at ghassan@bitterlemons-international.org and yossi@bitterlemons-international.org, respectively.
Middle East Roundtable
Edition 36 Volume 6 - September 11, 2008
Seven years to 9/11 and the "war on terror"
• Wholesale change is needed - an interview with Ghazi Hamad
Only by understanding and communicating with different groups, including Hamas and Hizballah, can a new atmosphere arise.
• The battle for Pakistan's soul - Irfan Husain
Pakistan has not yet worked out a political consensus about who the real enemy is.
• A mixed bag - Laurie Mylroie
Confronting the resurgence of the Taliban has become the primary challenge.
• A battleground for the foreseeable future - Chris Toensing
The Washington mandarins, of both parties, care little for international cooperation.
Wholesale change is needed
an interview with Ghazi Hamad
BI: It's seven years since 9/11. What does that mean today?
Hamad: 9/11 was a major curve in history. It was an event that changed the map of the geo-political landscape, especially in the Middle East. One resulting change was in the foreign policy of the US, the "war on terror", which tried to divide countries into axes of good or evil.
The US has not been successful in this primarily because the policy is not approved and has no credibility in the Middle East, even with Arab regimes, even if some countries have tried to protect themselves by cooperating with the US and targeting radical groups to reap some benefit from this US posture.
The "war on terror" has increased hatred against the US, radicalized people and made them more extremist. The reason is that the US has wielded its power in only one way: by using violence and brute force in its occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. This affected the outcome in those countries and the reaction of all Islamic movements in the Middle East who have come to see the US as using its wars here simply as a cover to increase its power in the region and in South Asia.
The US has not succeeded in changing the world, ending Islamic movements or decreasing radicalism. What has happened is the reverse: there is more hatred, more division, more radical groups and greater criticism of the US role in the world.
BI: Do you think the US presence in Iraq and Afghanistan has made the US weaker?
Hamad: Yes. The US failed to establish a democratic regime in Iraq. Instead, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed there: there are daily bombings; there are assassinations; there are Sunni-Shi'ite-Kurdish sectarian conflicts. Saddam Hussein was a dictator, but people now say the situation under him was better. It's the same in Afghanistan where the situation is unstable and becoming more unstable. The use of violence and force will not help create democratic regimes and do not provide a good model for the future.
BI: Have the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan been direct causes of more radicalism?
Hamad: I think there is a clear increase in radical groups. There are now many more people ready to fight the US. There are many who believe that in Iraq, the Americans only came to be the eyes of Israel and to insert itself inside the Muslim world. This has created a very dangerous mood in the Middle East and the Muslim world generally, and there are many who are very angry and upset with US policy. We can see this with the fighters arriving in Iraq from Algeria, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere to fight the US, which they see as the head of evil.
BI: This radicalization also pits Muslim groups against each other, Sunni versus Shi'ite, Arab governments versus Islamic movements. Isn't there a danger of a full-blown conflict among Arab and Muslim groups and countries, and how can this be avoided?
Hamad: I don't support radical groups. They are too often a danger to Islamic society. Islam is a moderate religion and some of these people, under the umbrella of Islam, have been targeting innocent people. This is a misrepresentation of Islam. Even America's "war on terror" does not give these people the right to target Jordanian hotels or tourists in Egypt. These radicals need education. They have been brainwashed.
But the US contributed to this increase in the degree of extremism in the Middle East. It is now the job of Arab governments to find a strategy to deal with such radicals. This cannot be done through violence. It should be done through discussion and dialogue, in an effort to convince radicals that they are on the wrong track.
In general, though, I believe moderate Muslim organizations in the region and Muslim world still dominate the situation while radical groups remain fringe organizations with nowhere near the same kind of popular backing.
BI: The US will soon have a new administration. What could such an administration do to cool the situation?
Hamad: First, I have to say I think the era of George W Bush will be remembered as one of the worst times for America ever. He has caused trouble for the US all over the world, from Iraq to Afghanistan, Korea to Sudan. He has caused more wars and more hatred than any other president. He believed that brute force and military might could suppress people. But he has failed in this and he failed to build democracy at the point of a gun.
I hope that any successor will oversee a comprehensive change in policy, though I am not optimistic judging from the statements we've heard so far from the candidates. Barack Obama shows some willingness to entertain change with his statements on Iraq.
If the candidates really want to serve the US as well as democracy in the world and bring security and stability they have to understand that only by understanding and communicating with different groups, including Islamic movements like Hamas and Hizballah, can they create a new atmosphere. If they insist on keeping groups like Hamas and Hizballah on America's list of "terrorist groups" there will be little change. These groups have deep roots and it will not be easy to eradicate them.- Published 11/9/2008 © bitterlemons-international.org
Ghazi Hamad is a Hamas official from the Gaza Strip.
The battle for Pakistan's soul
Irfan Husain
Immediately after 9/11, when President Pervez Musharraf was forced into a famous U-turn over his support for the Taliban, many in Pakistan heaved a sigh of relief. To liberal, secular Pakistanis who had watched the creeping Talibanization of the tribal areas with dismay, the military ruler's about face raised the hope that his government would now halt the growth of fundamentalism. Alas, this proved to be a false dawn.
Musharraf, despite the lip service he paid to Washington's "war on terror", drew a fine line between al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The former group, with its foreign leadership and global agenda, was hunted with reasonable effectiveness. Many of its operatives were killed or captured and bundled off to Guantanamo. But official policy toward the Taliban has remained deliberately ambiguous for the last eight years. Just as the Taliban were nurtured by the Inter-Services Intelligence at the inception of the group in 1996, they have been secretly armed, shielded and guided by elements in Pakistan's elite intelligence agency ever since.
When western allies first entered Afghanistan in December 2001, the Taliban were broken and scattered. Routed by unrelenting aerial bombardment and the fighters of the Northern Alliance, they sought shelter in the tribal areas of Pakistan. Here, they were beyond the reach of western forces and the Pakistani army. Traditionally, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas enjoy a great degree of autonomy and are outside the jurisdiction of the law. Instead, they are governed by tribal law administered by elders and village councils known as "jirgas".
Taking advantage of this power vacuum, the Taliban found sanctuary and established training camps. Financing came largely from the rapidly growing opium and heroin production in the bordering Afghan provinces of Helmand and Kunar. With a weak government in Kabul, drug production has soared, and with it the coffers of the Taliban have swelled. Young fighters with no prospects of employment in these dirt-poor areas are recruited for as little as five dollars a day, with a bonus if they kill a coalition soldier.
Where there were a number of extremist groups on the Pakistani side of the border, today they have consolidated their efforts under the banner of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan and are led by Baituallah Mehsud, the man widely believed to have masterminded the murder of Benazir Bhutto last December. In 2007, the TTP and its allies within Pakistan launched some 50 suicide attacks in which nearly 1,000 Pakistanis were killed. The recent attack on the prime minister's car along a heavily guarded route near Islamabad indicates how freely they have begun operating.
Musharraf himself, despite his tight security, has been targeted at least three times. What is even more worrying is the number of Taliban sympathizers within the armed forces and intelligence services. According to reliable reports, many retired army and ISI officers are helping extremist groups.
Ethnicity is a factor often overlooked by westerners when assessing the conflict. Virtually all the Taliban are Pashtuns who make up the population of much of the border areas. In fact, they constitute Afghanistan's largest single ethnic group, and in Pakistan they populate virtually all of FATA as well as the North-Western Frontier Province. Since they are strongly represented in Pakistan's armed forces, police and the bureaucracy, it is difficult to portray them as the enemy. Traditionally, tribesmen come and go over the ill-defined border without let or hindrance, and attempts to limit this free access are fiercely resisted.
Military action in the tribal areas triggers protests orchestrated by conservative groups across Pakistan. The recent raid by US Special Forces into Pakistan resulted in the deaths of a number of women and children and has been widely criticized, with the government coming under pressure to cut off military links with Washington.
Another factor that has thwarted a more effective response to the Taliban threat is Pakistan's preoccupation with India. Generations of army officers have been taught that Pakistan's giant neighbor is the real enemy, and this doctrine is reflected in the disposition and concentration of the country's half-million strong army. Troops have been trained to fight a conventional war on the plains of Punjab and Sindh. After 9/11, around 80,000 troops were deployed along the Afghan border, but even this number is insufficient to seal it. Currently, a military alliance between Afghanistan and India is Pakistani military planners' worst nightmare. To thwart such a possibility, the Pakistani army wants to retain the Taliban as proxies and is therefore reluctant to crush them.
Finally, Pakistan has not yet worked out a political consensus about who the real enemy is. Until the day he left office in early August, Musharraf was regularly castigated in the media as Bush's poodle doing America's dirty work by killing his own people. Pakistani TV networks are forever churning out talk shows in which so-called experts criticize the government for fighting fellow-Muslims. They conveniently overlook the fact that these same Muslims are responsible for killing hundreds of innocent Pakistanis and Afghans.
In post-Musharraf Pakistan, the newly-elected government is struggling to find its feet. The coalition of the two largest parties has already split up. Nawaz Sharif, leader of his faction of the Pakistan Muslim League, has made clear his intention to talk to the Taliban rather than fight them. But Asif Zardari, widower of Benazir Bhutto and now president of Pakistan, has declared his intention to take the fight to the terrorists who threaten to seize control. In a recent article in the Washington Post, Zardari called this the "battle for Pakistan's soul". Clearly, this is a battle Pakistan cannot afford to lose.- Published 11/9/2008 © bitterlemons-international.org
Irfan Husain writes two columns a week for Dawn, Pakistan's widest circulating and most influential daily. After a career in the civil service spanning 30 years, he was president of a university in Pakistan for five years.
A mixed bag
Laurie Mylroie
Seven years on, America's war on terror is a mixed bag. The situation reflects neither the substantial fear of further assaults that existed immediately after 9/11 nor the misplaced optimism that suggested the United States could radically transform the broader Middle East, as Ronald Reagan had brought about the collapse of the Soviet bloc.
Patterned on the western diplomacy that ended communism, President George W. Bush's Middle East democracy initiative began in late 2003 when the White House mistakenly believed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were largely won. The impetus for that effort came chiefly from the White House, as former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith explains in "War and Decision". The president was drawn to the idea, and Condoleezza Rice saw the Arabs as an oppressed people whose circumstances resembled those of blacks in the segregated south, her biographer Elizabeth Bumiller relates.
Yet the Middle East is neither the Soviet bloc nor the American south, and the US call for democratic change really only resonated in one Arab country--Lebanon, the most westernized. And even this one success was significantly set back when Washington then failed to support the March 14 coalition against Syrian and Iranian subversion. After the democracy initiative helped produce a Hamas victory in 2006, it was set aside in large part.
Yet American achievements have not been insignificant. There have been no further 9/11-style attacks in the United States. In the years following those assaults, many countries that had not previously experienced significant Muslim violence or had had no such violence for many years suddenly faced major attacks: Britain, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Kenya, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Tunisia and Turkey. From 2002 to 2005, an average of four such attacks occurred annually, killing an average of 214 people each year. But since April 2006, there have been no significant Islamic terrorist attacks in any of them and CIA Director Michael Hayden recently gave an upbeat assessment of US progress against al-Qaeda.
Violence continues, certainly, but it is more narrowly focused geographically. It is up dramatically in Algeria, but that may be related to a decision taken by the Algerian government in 2006 to free 2,500 Muslim extremists from prison rather than to any intrinsic strength of the global jihad. Significant violence also continues in India, but that is probably a function of the support Pakistani intelligence provides Islamic extremists fighting its traditional foe.
Progress also exists elsewhere. Iraq has turned around since the "surge" started in early 2007 and Gen. David Petraeus began to implement a new counter-terrorism strategy focused on protecting the Iraqi population and working with it against the relatively small percentage of "irreconcilables". Although the current situation remains fragile, as Petraeus cautions, America may well win this war, provided it has the stamina.
Failing to maintain public support for the war was a significant shortcoming of the Bush administration. As Feith explains, when weapons of mass destruction could not be found in Iraq by the fall of 2003 the White House ceased to defend its decision to overthrow Saddam. Since the United States was already in Iraq, it reasoned, that was unnecessary. It was better to look forward and focus on the democracy initiative. Of course, when the White House reached that conclusion it did not understand that very significant combat--and the bulk of US casualties--lay in the future.
The major problem now lies elsewhere. Pakistan's security establishment has worked with Islamic extremists for three decades and remains closely tied to them. It provided crucial support for the Taliban in the 1990s, and even after the United States went to war in Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks Pakistan continued to support the Taliban. It appeared to cooperate with the United States as it helped capture al-Qaeda leaders, but its actions were in fact more complex. Yet Pakistan also helped capture al-Qaeda leaders.
Following the apparent Taliban defeat in late 2001, many radicals took refuge in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Over time, the "Talibanization" of a significant part of the FATA ensued. Many tribal leaders were murdered by radical young upstarts and the Taliban established a base from which to attack the fledgling Afghan government. Despite the repeated complaints of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, the White House, focused on al-Qaeda, was slow to recognize the seriousness of the problem and Pakistan's role in contributing to it.
The radicalization of Pakistan's tribal areas has also spilled over into Pakistan proper. Army offensives into the FATA increased popular anger against Islamabad, contributing to a dramatic increase in violence, including attacks against government facilities and personnel. The rise of the Taliban within the FATA also contributed to the emergence of radicals in neighboring areas, including the North West Frontier Province, where they sometimes threaten the provincial capital, Peshawar.
Thus, confronting the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan has become the primary challenge in the war on terror.- Published 11/9/2008 © bitterlemons-international.org
Laurie Mylroie is an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Study of Revenge: The First World Trade Center Attack and Saddam Hussein's War Against America.
A battleground for the foreseeable future
Chris Toensing
Bob Woodward's four books chronicling the wars of President George W. Bush are sensitive barometers of conventional wisdom in Washington. Whereas the first volume, published in 2002 at the height of the self-righteous nationalism gripping the capital after the September 11, 2001 attacks, hailed Bush's self-confidence in acting to protect the homeland, the 2008 installment depicts the same man as cocksure and incurious. More educational are Woodward's hints about the worldviews that will outlast this unpopular administration, embedded in the organs of the national security state.
Consider the words of retired Gen. Jack Keane, reported by Woodward to have been spoken to Gen. David Petraeus in Baghdad in March: "We're going to be here for 50 years minimum, most of the time hopefully preventing wars, and on occasion having to fight one, dealing with radical Islam, our economic interests in the region and trying to achieve stability.... We're going to do it anyway because we don't have a choice."
"Here", in Keane's formulation, was not Iraq, but the sprawling theater of operations for US Central Command, or CENTCOM, of which Petraeus will assume control when his tour in Iraq is over. Keane's message to Petraeus was clear: CENTCOM, whose borders happen to coincide roughly with those of the Islamic world, is where the action is, now and as far as the eye can see.
While Keane is known as the architect of Bush's "surge" in Iraq, and is a favorite of neo-conservatives and other hawks, his ideas about US grand strategy are common across the ideological spectrum that matters in Washington. Hardly anyone of political weight has learned from the Iraq debacle, the disaster in Somalia or the September 11 attacks for that matter, that the United States is too heavily deployed or too bent on having its way in CENTCOM's domain. John McCain and Barack Obama both speak of sending more troops to Afghanistan, though Obama would remove them from Iraq first. No one in a position to work in the next White House has advocated that the US give up its role, inherited from Britain, as praetorian guard of Persian Gulf oil or its more expansive mission to stamp out fires throughout what Carter-era National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski called the "arc of crisis". The arguments are about how this hegemonic stance can be maintained to maximum advantage and at minimum cost.
This is not to suggest, in crude fashion, that the existence of CENTCOM caused the September 11 attacks and will inevitably provoke a reprise. It is rather to say that the American strategic and political classes are acutely aware, as never before 2001, of the importance of a "forward-leaning posture" in the Middle East to the overall health of US superpower status. The threats they perceive to the free flow of the region's oil, two thirds of the world's proven reserves (as cannot be repeated often enough), come not just from radical Islam and failed states, but also from the grasping, and growing, giants Russia and China. The prospects of relative US decline are to be confronted, not managed. The Washington mandarins, of both parties, care little for international cooperation. They believe in power and they trust no one but themselves to wield it.
Of course, both parties prattle, as they do every electoral season, about weaning America off "Middle Eastern oil". But even assuming a series of presidents with the political will and capital to make the necessary policy changes, the task will outlive all of their terms. Denmark, which has so many wind turbines it exports 90 percent of the electricity, still consumes vastly more oil than renewable energy, in large part because of the automobile. The US, with its wide open spaces and exurban subdivisions, will continue to need more and more oil to sustain living standards at home, even as domestic production slips and competition for control of foreign fields toughens. More to the point, the strategic stakes in the Persian Gulf will only heighten. Whosoever polices the Gulf safeguards the single most important commodity for the world economy.
The peoples of the lands under CENTCOM's umbrella can hope for a smarter, more inquisitive, less bellicose American president than the boy-king, whose bungling Woodward reveals. Such a chief executive might have the skill to forestall the wars that Keane foresees. But, barring the advent of a foreign policy establishment in Washington with genuine vision and appropriate humility, the fundamentals of political economy dictate that, in some shape or form, the greater Middle East will remain a battleground for several Septembers to come.- Published 11/9/2008 © bitterlemons-international.org
Chris Toensing is editor of Middle East Report, a publication of the Middle East Research and Information Project (www.merip.org).
Bitterlemons-international.org is an internet forum for an array of world perspectives on the Middle East and its specific concerns. It aspires to engender greater understanding about the Middle East region and open a new common space for world thinkers and political leaders to present their viewpoints and initiatives on the region. Editors Ghassan Khatib and Yossi Alpher can be reached at ghassan@bitterlemons-international.org and yossi@bitterlemons-international.org, respectively.
MEMO FROM CAIRO 9/11 Rumors That Become Conventional Wisdom
September 9, 2008
MEMO FROM CAIRO
9/11 Rumors That Become Conventional Wisdom
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
CAIRO — Seven years later, it remains conventional wisdom here that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda could not have been solely responsible for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and that the United States and Israel had to have been involved in their planning, if not their execution, too.
This is not the conclusion of a scientific survey, but it is what routinely comes up in conversations around the region — in a shopping mall in Dubai, in a park in Algiers, in a cafe in Riyadh and all over Cairo.
"Look, I don't believe what your governments and press say. It just can't be true," said Ahmed Issab, 26, a Syrian engineer who lives and works in the United Arab Emirates. "Why would they tell the truth? I think the U.S. organized this so that they had an excuse to invade Iraq for the oil."
It is easy for Americans to dismiss such thinking as bizarre. But that would miss a point that people in this part of the world think Western leaders, especially in Washington, need to understand: That such ideas persist represents the first failure in the fight against terrorism — the inability to convince people here that the United States is, indeed, waging a campaign against terrorism, not a crusade against Muslims.
"The United States should be concerned because in order to tell people that there is a real evil, they too have to believe it in order to help you," said Mushairy al-Thaidy, a columnist in the Saudi-owned regional newspaper Asharq al Awsat. "Otherwise, it will diminish your ability to fight terrorism. It is not the kind of battle you can fight on your own; it is a collective battle."
There were many reasons people here said they believed that the attacks of 9/11 were part of a conspiracy against Muslims. Some had nothing to do with Western actions, and some had everything to do with Western policies.
Again and again, people said they simply did not believe that a group of Arabs — like themselves — could possibly have waged such a successful operation against a superpower like the United States. But they also said that Washington's post-9/11 foreign policy proved that the United States and Israel were behind the attacks, especially with the invasion of Iraq.
"Maybe people who executed the operation were Arabs, but the brains? No way," said Mohammed Ibrahim, 36, a clothing-store owner in the Bulaq neighborhood of Cairo. "It was organized by other people, the United States or the Israelis."
The rumors that spread shortly after 9/11 have been passed on so often that people no longer know where or when they first heard them. At this point, they have heard them so often, even on television, that they think they must be true.
First among these is that Jews did not go to work at the World Trade Center on that day. Asked how Jews might have been notified to stay home, or how they kept it a secret from co-workers, people here wave off the questions because they clash with their bedrock conviction that Jews are behind many of their troubles and that Western Jews will go to any length to protect Israel.
"Why is it that on 9/11, the Jews didn't go to work in the building," said Ahmed Saied, 25, who works in Cairo as a driver for a lawyer. "Everybody knows this. I saw it on TV, and a lot of people talk about this."
Zein al-Abdin, 42, an electrician, who was drinking tea and chain-smoking cheap Cleopatra cigarettes in Al Shahat, a cafe in Bulaq, grew more and more animated as he laid out his thinking about what happened on Sept. 11.
"What matters is we think it was an attack against Arabs," he said of the passenger planes crashing into American targets. "Why is it that they never caught him, bin Laden? How can they not know where he is when they know everything? They don't catch him because he hasn't done it. What happened in Iraq confirms that it has nothing to do with bin Laden or Qaeda. They went against Arabs and against Islam to serve Israel, that's why."
There is a reason so many people here talk with casual certainty — and no embarrassment — about the United States attacking itself to have a reason to go after Arabs and help Israel. It is a reflection of how they view government leaders, not just in Washington, but here in Egypt and throughout the Middle East. They do not believe them. The state-owned media are also distrusted. Therefore, they think that if the government is insisting that bin Laden was behind it, he must not have been.
"Mubarak says whatever the Americans want him to say, and he's lying for them, of course," Mr. Ibrahim said of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt's president.
Americans might better understand the region, experts here said, if they simply listen to what people are saying — and try to understand why — rather than taking offense. The broad view here is that even before Sept. 11, the United States was not a fair broker in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and that it then capitalized on the attacks to buttress Israel and undermine the Muslim Arab world.
The single greatest proof, in most people's eyes, was the invasion of Iraq. Trying to convince people here that it was not a quest for oil or a war on Muslims is like convincing many Americans that it was, and that the 9/11 attacks were the first step.
"It is the result of widespread mistrust, and the belief among Arabs and Muslims that the United States has a prejudice against them," said Wahid Abdel Meguid, deputy director of the government-financed Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, the nation's premier research center. "So they never think the United States is well intentioned, and they always feel that whatever it does has something behind it."
Hisham Abbas, 22, studies tourism at Cairo University and hopes one day to work with foreigners for a living. But he does not give it a second thought when asked about Sept. 11. He said it made no sense at all that Mr. bin Laden could have carried out such an attack from Afghanistan. And like everyone else interviewed, he saw the events of the last seven years as proof positive that it was all a United States plan to go after Muslims.
"There are Arabs who hate America, a lot of them, but this is too much," Mr. Abbas said as he fidgeted with his cellphone. "And look at what happened after this — the Americans invaded two Muslim countries. They used 9/11 as an excuse and went to Iraq. They killed Saddam, tortured people. How can you trust them?"
Nadim Audi contributed reporting.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
MEMO FROM CAIRO
9/11 Rumors That Become Conventional Wisdom
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
CAIRO — Seven years later, it remains conventional wisdom here that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda could not have been solely responsible for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and that the United States and Israel had to have been involved in their planning, if not their execution, too.
This is not the conclusion of a scientific survey, but it is what routinely comes up in conversations around the region — in a shopping mall in Dubai, in a park in Algiers, in a cafe in Riyadh and all over Cairo.
"Look, I don't believe what your governments and press say. It just can't be true," said Ahmed Issab, 26, a Syrian engineer who lives and works in the United Arab Emirates. "Why would they tell the truth? I think the U.S. organized this so that they had an excuse to invade Iraq for the oil."
It is easy for Americans to dismiss such thinking as bizarre. But that would miss a point that people in this part of the world think Western leaders, especially in Washington, need to understand: That such ideas persist represents the first failure in the fight against terrorism — the inability to convince people here that the United States is, indeed, waging a campaign against terrorism, not a crusade against Muslims.
"The United States should be concerned because in order to tell people that there is a real evil, they too have to believe it in order to help you," said Mushairy al-Thaidy, a columnist in the Saudi-owned regional newspaper Asharq al Awsat. "Otherwise, it will diminish your ability to fight terrorism. It is not the kind of battle you can fight on your own; it is a collective battle."
There were many reasons people here said they believed that the attacks of 9/11 were part of a conspiracy against Muslims. Some had nothing to do with Western actions, and some had everything to do with Western policies.
Again and again, people said they simply did not believe that a group of Arabs — like themselves — could possibly have waged such a successful operation against a superpower like the United States. But they also said that Washington's post-9/11 foreign policy proved that the United States and Israel were behind the attacks, especially with the invasion of Iraq.
"Maybe people who executed the operation were Arabs, but the brains? No way," said Mohammed Ibrahim, 36, a clothing-store owner in the Bulaq neighborhood of Cairo. "It was organized by other people, the United States or the Israelis."
The rumors that spread shortly after 9/11 have been passed on so often that people no longer know where or when they first heard them. At this point, they have heard them so often, even on television, that they think they must be true.
First among these is that Jews did not go to work at the World Trade Center on that day. Asked how Jews might have been notified to stay home, or how they kept it a secret from co-workers, people here wave off the questions because they clash with their bedrock conviction that Jews are behind many of their troubles and that Western Jews will go to any length to protect Israel.
"Why is it that on 9/11, the Jews didn't go to work in the building," said Ahmed Saied, 25, who works in Cairo as a driver for a lawyer. "Everybody knows this. I saw it on TV, and a lot of people talk about this."
Zein al-Abdin, 42, an electrician, who was drinking tea and chain-smoking cheap Cleopatra cigarettes in Al Shahat, a cafe in Bulaq, grew more and more animated as he laid out his thinking about what happened on Sept. 11.
"What matters is we think it was an attack against Arabs," he said of the passenger planes crashing into American targets. "Why is it that they never caught him, bin Laden? How can they not know where he is when they know everything? They don't catch him because he hasn't done it. What happened in Iraq confirms that it has nothing to do with bin Laden or Qaeda. They went against Arabs and against Islam to serve Israel, that's why."
There is a reason so many people here talk with casual certainty — and no embarrassment — about the United States attacking itself to have a reason to go after Arabs and help Israel. It is a reflection of how they view government leaders, not just in Washington, but here in Egypt and throughout the Middle East. They do not believe them. The state-owned media are also distrusted. Therefore, they think that if the government is insisting that bin Laden was behind it, he must not have been.
"Mubarak says whatever the Americans want him to say, and he's lying for them, of course," Mr. Ibrahim said of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt's president.
Americans might better understand the region, experts here said, if they simply listen to what people are saying — and try to understand why — rather than taking offense. The broad view here is that even before Sept. 11, the United States was not a fair broker in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and that it then capitalized on the attacks to buttress Israel and undermine the Muslim Arab world.
The single greatest proof, in most people's eyes, was the invasion of Iraq. Trying to convince people here that it was not a quest for oil or a war on Muslims is like convincing many Americans that it was, and that the 9/11 attacks were the first step.
"It is the result of widespread mistrust, and the belief among Arabs and Muslims that the United States has a prejudice against them," said Wahid Abdel Meguid, deputy director of the government-financed Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, the nation's premier research center. "So they never think the United States is well intentioned, and they always feel that whatever it does has something behind it."
Hisham Abbas, 22, studies tourism at Cairo University and hopes one day to work with foreigners for a living. But he does not give it a second thought when asked about Sept. 11. He said it made no sense at all that Mr. bin Laden could have carried out such an attack from Afghanistan. And like everyone else interviewed, he saw the events of the last seven years as proof positive that it was all a United States plan to go after Muslims.
"There are Arabs who hate America, a lot of them, but this is too much," Mr. Abbas said as he fidgeted with his cellphone. "And look at what happened after this — the Americans invaded two Muslim countries. They used 9/11 as an excuse and went to Iraq. They killed Saddam, tortured people. How can you trust them?"
Nadim Audi contributed reporting.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
Bush Announces Iraq Troop Cut By Jim Garamone American Forces Press Service
Bush Announces Iraq Troop Cut - Jim Garamone, Armed Forces Press Service
The United States will continue to reduce its troop strength in Iraq, but will increase its footprint in Afghanistan, President Bush said here today.
The president accepted the recommendations of military leaders to reduce US troop levels in Iraq by 8,000 through January. If security conditions continue to improve in the country, further reductions will be possible, Bush said at the National Defense University.
Bush also announced plans to deploy a Marine battalion to train Afghan National Army troops in November and to send an Army brigade to Afghanistan in January.
Bush said security progress in Iraq is responsible for the reduction. The progress is an outgrowth of the success of the surge, launched Jan. 10, 2007, that fed five US Army brigades, a Marine expeditionary unit and two Marine battalions into Iraq through June 2007. Bush called the reductions the “return on success” strategy. That strategy calls for reducing American combat forces in Iraq as conditions on the ground continue to improve.
More at Armed Forces Press Service, Washington Post, Voice of America, Christian Science Monitor, The Times, Daily Telegraph and The Australian.
The United States will continue to reduce its troop strength in Iraq, but will increase its footprint in Afghanistan, President Bush said here today.
The president accepted the recommendations of military leaders to reduce US troop levels in Iraq by 8,000 through January. If security conditions continue to improve in the country, further reductions will be possible, Bush said at the National Defense University.
Bush also announced plans to deploy a Marine battalion to train Afghan National Army troops in November and to send an Army brigade to Afghanistan in January.
Bush said security progress in Iraq is responsible for the reduction. The progress is an outgrowth of the success of the surge, launched Jan. 10, 2007, that fed five US Army brigades, a Marine expeditionary unit and two Marine battalions into Iraq through June 2007. Bush called the reductions the “return on success” strategy. That strategy calls for reducing American combat forces in Iraq as conditions on the ground continue to improve.
More at Armed Forces Press Service, Washington Post, Voice of America, Christian Science Monitor, The Times, Daily Telegraph and The Australian.
All Counterinsurgency Is Local - Thomas H. Johnson and M. Chris Mason, The Atlantic
All Counterinsurgency Is Local - Thomas H. Johnson and M. Chris Mason, The Atlantic
June was the deadliest month for the US military in Afghanistan since the invasion in October 2001. July became the second straight month in which casualties exceeded those in Iraq, where four times as many .. troops are on the ground. More Americans have been killed in Afghanistan since the invasion began than in the first nine years of the Vietnam War, from 1956 to 1964.
As in Vietnam, the US has never lost a tactical engagement in Afghanistan, and this tactical success is still often conflated with strategic progress. Yet the Taliban insurgency grows more intense and gains more popular traction each year. More and more, the American effort in Afghanistan resembles the Vietnam War - with its emphasis on body counts and air strikes, its cross-border sanctuaries, and its daily tactical victories that never affected the slow and eventually decisive erosion of rural support for the counterinsurgency.
As the Russian ambassador to Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, noted in a blunt interview with the BBC in May, the current military engagement is also beginning to look like the Soviets’ decade-long Afghan adventure, which ended ignominiously in 1989. That intervention, like the current one, was based on a strategy of administering and securing Afghanistan from urban centers such as Kabul and the provincial capitals. The Soviets held all the provincial capitals, just as we do, and sought to exert influence from there. The mujahideen stoked insurgency in the rural areas of the Pashtun south and east, just as the Taliban do now.
More at The Atlantic.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200810/afghan
June was the deadliest month for the US military in Afghanistan since the invasion in October 2001. July became the second straight month in which casualties exceeded those in Iraq, where four times as many .. troops are on the ground. More Americans have been killed in Afghanistan since the invasion began than in the first nine years of the Vietnam War, from 1956 to 1964.
As in Vietnam, the US has never lost a tactical engagement in Afghanistan, and this tactical success is still often conflated with strategic progress. Yet the Taliban insurgency grows more intense and gains more popular traction each year. More and more, the American effort in Afghanistan resembles the Vietnam War - with its emphasis on body counts and air strikes, its cross-border sanctuaries, and its daily tactical victories that never affected the slow and eventually decisive erosion of rural support for the counterinsurgency.
As the Russian ambassador to Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, noted in a blunt interview with the BBC in May, the current military engagement is also beginning to look like the Soviets’ decade-long Afghan adventure, which ended ignominiously in 1989. That intervention, like the current one, was based on a strategy of administering and securing Afghanistan from urban centers such as Kabul and the provincial capitals. The Soviets held all the provincial capitals, just as we do, and sought to exert influence from there. The mujahideen stoked insurgency in the rural areas of the Pashtun south and east, just as the Taliban do now.
More at The Atlantic.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200810/afghan
Pakistan's Newest Feudal - Robert Kaplan, The Atlantic opinion
Pakistan's Newest Feudal - Robert Kaplan, The Atlantic opinion
Asif Ali Zardari was sworn in as Pakistan's president, replacing Pervez Musharraf.
Zardari's sole qualification is that he is the widower of the slain leader of the Pakistan's People's Party, Benazir Bhutto. Her main qualification for leading her party and twice serving as prime minister was that she was the daughter of the late prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Pakistan is steeped in feudalism and governed by the cult of personality that arises from it. Political parties have no ideology: they are mere extensions of their leaders' love of self and power.
Zardari, the new president, is an erstwhile polo player and playboy whose singular accomplishment in life is that he got Bhutto to marry him. When his wife was prime minister, he was known as "Mr. Ten Percent," for the commissions on state contracts he allegedly took. During the years his wife was in office, he reportedly made off with many tens of millions of dollars that enabled him to, among other things, buy a massive estate in Britain. For years, Swiss authorities wanted him for money laundering. His life seems to have no higher purpose than joining the ranks of the megarich. He is reputed to be the ultimate bullying rogue. His ascension to the presidency is viewed as another sign that Pakistan will join the ranks of other failed states.
More at The Atlantic.
http://thecurrent.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/09/zardari.php
Asif Ali Zardari was sworn in as Pakistan's president, replacing Pervez Musharraf.
Zardari's sole qualification is that he is the widower of the slain leader of the Pakistan's People's Party, Benazir Bhutto. Her main qualification for leading her party and twice serving as prime minister was that she was the daughter of the late prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Pakistan is steeped in feudalism and governed by the cult of personality that arises from it. Political parties have no ideology: they are mere extensions of their leaders' love of self and power.
Zardari, the new president, is an erstwhile polo player and playboy whose singular accomplishment in life is that he got Bhutto to marry him. When his wife was prime minister, he was known as "Mr. Ten Percent," for the commissions on state contracts he allegedly took. During the years his wife was in office, he reportedly made off with many tens of millions of dollars that enabled him to, among other things, buy a massive estate in Britain. For years, Swiss authorities wanted him for money laundering. His life seems to have no higher purpose than joining the ranks of the megarich. He is reputed to be the ultimate bullying rogue. His ascension to the presidency is viewed as another sign that Pakistan will join the ranks of other failed states.
More at The Atlantic.
http://thecurrent.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/09/zardari.php
Reduced Dominance Is Predicted for US - Joby Warrick and Walter Pincus, Washington Post
Reduced Dominance Is Predicted for US - Joby Warrick and Walter Pincus, Washington Post
An intelligence forecast being prepared for the next president on future global risks envisions a steady decline in U.S. dominance in the coming decades, as the world is reshaped by globalization, battered by climate change, and destabilized by regional upheavals over shortages of food, water and energy.
The report, previewed in a speech by Thomas Fingar, the US intelligence community's top analyst, also concludes that the one key area of continued US superiority -- military power -- will "be the least significant" asset in the increasingly competitive world of the future, because "nobody is going to attack us with massive conventional force."
Fingar's remarks last week were based on a partially completed "Global Trends 2025" report that assesses how international events could affect the United States in the next 15 to 17 years. Speaking at a conference of intelligence professionals in Orlando, Fingar gave an overview of key findings that he said will be presented to the next occupant of the White House early in the new year.
More at The Washington Post.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/09/AR2008090903302.html
An intelligence forecast being prepared for the next president on future global risks envisions a steady decline in U.S. dominance in the coming decades, as the world is reshaped by globalization, battered by climate change, and destabilized by regional upheavals over shortages of food, water and energy.
The report, previewed in a speech by Thomas Fingar, the US intelligence community's top analyst, also concludes that the one key area of continued US superiority -- military power -- will "be the least significant" asset in the increasingly competitive world of the future, because "nobody is going to attack us with massive conventional force."
Fingar's remarks last week were based on a partially completed "Global Trends 2025" report that assesses how international events could affect the United States in the next 15 to 17 years. Speaking at a conference of intelligence professionals in Orlando, Fingar gave an overview of key findings that he said will be presented to the next occupant of the White House early in the new year.
More at The Washington Post.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/09/AR2008090903302.html
A Conversation with Steve Coll of the New Yorker
Charlie Rose Show - A Conversation with Steve Coll of The New Yorker. Topics include Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and General David Petraeus.
Bio
Steve Coll is President & CEO of New America Foundation, and a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. Previously he spent 20 years as a foreign correspondent and senior editor at The Washington Post, serving as the paper's managing editor from 1998 to 2004. He is author six books, including The Deal of the Century: The Break Up of AT&T (1986); The Taking of Getty Oil (1987); Eagle on the Street, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the SEC's battle with Wall Street (with David A. Vise, 1991); On the Grand Trunk Road: A Journey into South Asia (1994), Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (2004); and The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century (2008).
Mr. Coll's professional awards include two Pulitzer Prizes. He won the first of these, for explanatory journalism, in 1990, for his series, with David A. Vise, about the SEC. His second was awarded in 2005, for his book, Ghost Wars, which also won the Council on Foreign Relations' Arthur Ross award; the Overseas Press Club award and the Lionel Gelber Prize for the best book published on international affairs during 2004. Other awards include the 1992 Livingston Award for outstanding foreign reporting; the 2000 Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Award for his coverage of the civil war in Sierra Leone; and a second Overseas Press Club Award for international magazine writing.
Selected Books
The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century
Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001
Latest at The New Yorker
The General's Dilemma
Early in 2007, when David Petraeus became Commanding General of United States and international forces in Iraq, he had in mind a strategy to manage the political pressures he would face because of the unpopularity of the war, then four years old, and of its author, George W. Bush. He pledged to be responsive to “both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue”—to his Commander-in-Chief in the White House, of course, but also to antiwar Democrats on Capitol Hill. Petraeus earned a doctoral degree at Princeton University in 1987; the title of his dissertation was “The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam.” In thinking about how to cope with political divisions in the United States over Iraq, he was influenced, he told me recently, by Samuel Huntington’s 1957 book “The Soldier and the State,” which argues that civilian control over the military can best be achieved when uniformed officers regard themselves as impartial professionals. Petraeus is registered to vote as a Republican in New Hampshire—he once described himself to a friend as a northeastern Republican, in the tradition of Nelson Rockefeller—but he said that around 2002, after he became a two-star general, he stopped voting. As he departed for Baghdad, to oversee a “surge” deployment of additional American troops to Iraq, he sought, as he recalled it, “to try to avoid being pulled in one direction or another, to be in a sense used by one side or the other.” He added, “That’s very hard to do, because you become at some point sort of the face of the surge. So be it. You just have to deal with that.”
Much more at The New Yorker.
Think Tank - Steve Coll's blog at The New Yorker
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2008/09/a-conversation-with-steve-coll/
Bio
Steve Coll is President & CEO of New America Foundation, and a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. Previously he spent 20 years as a foreign correspondent and senior editor at The Washington Post, serving as the paper's managing editor from 1998 to 2004. He is author six books, including The Deal of the Century: The Break Up of AT&T (1986); The Taking of Getty Oil (1987); Eagle on the Street, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the SEC's battle with Wall Street (with David A. Vise, 1991); On the Grand Trunk Road: A Journey into South Asia (1994), Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (2004); and The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century (2008).
Mr. Coll's professional awards include two Pulitzer Prizes. He won the first of these, for explanatory journalism, in 1990, for his series, with David A. Vise, about the SEC. His second was awarded in 2005, for his book, Ghost Wars, which also won the Council on Foreign Relations' Arthur Ross award; the Overseas Press Club award and the Lionel Gelber Prize for the best book published on international affairs during 2004. Other awards include the 1992 Livingston Award for outstanding foreign reporting; the 2000 Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Award for his coverage of the civil war in Sierra Leone; and a second Overseas Press Club Award for international magazine writing.
Selected Books
The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century
Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001
Latest at The New Yorker
The General's Dilemma
Early in 2007, when David Petraeus became Commanding General of United States and international forces in Iraq, he had in mind a strategy to manage the political pressures he would face because of the unpopularity of the war, then four years old, and of its author, George W. Bush. He pledged to be responsive to “both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue”—to his Commander-in-Chief in the White House, of course, but also to antiwar Democrats on Capitol Hill. Petraeus earned a doctoral degree at Princeton University in 1987; the title of his dissertation was “The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam.” In thinking about how to cope with political divisions in the United States over Iraq, he was influenced, he told me recently, by Samuel Huntington’s 1957 book “The Soldier and the State,” which argues that civilian control over the military can best be achieved when uniformed officers regard themselves as impartial professionals. Petraeus is registered to vote as a Republican in New Hampshire—he once described himself to a friend as a northeastern Republican, in the tradition of Nelson Rockefeller—but he said that around 2002, after he became a two-star general, he stopped voting. As he departed for Baghdad, to oversee a “surge” deployment of additional American troops to Iraq, he sought, as he recalled it, “to try to avoid being pulled in one direction or another, to be in a sense used by one side or the other.” He added, “That’s very hard to do, because you become at some point sort of the face of the surge. So be it. You just have to deal with that.”
Much more at The New Yorker.
Think Tank - Steve Coll's blog at The New Yorker
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2008/09/a-conversation-with-steve-coll/
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Israeli President's No to Bomb Iran by Daniel Levy
TALKING POINTS MEMO
8/9/08
Israeli President's No to Bomb Iran
Daniel Levy
Israel's President Shimon Peres came out unequivocally this past weekend against a military strike on Iran. "There are two ways [to deal with Iran] -a military and civilian way. I don't believe in the military option - any kind of military option...it will not solve the problem...an attack can trigger a bigger war." Many have argued, myself included, that Israeli interests would be better served by ratcheting down the military rhetoric and embracing a more far-reaching diplomatic approach - especially given statements by the Pentagon's top brass against a military strike and the impact that war talk has in emboldening and strengthening President Ahmadinejad's hard-line camp in Tehran. What is remarkable though is the political timing of the statements by Israel's president and other senior Israelis coming as it does in the thick of an American political campaign that pits the uber-belligerent "bomb bomb" Iran ticket of McCain-Palin against the more savvy 'tough diplomacy for a tough world' ticket of Obama-Biden.
Apparently, if Israel's president has anything to do with it, all the talk of a possible Israeli strike in the November-January window (if Obama wins out of concern for his possible policies) - would be consigned to the total nonsense file.
This is the first time that Israel's president has come out with such an unequivocal statement. He even criticized American foreign policy stating they are "making a mistake" by relying too much on military intervention rather than economic and diplomatic persuasion. Ok, so the presidency in Israel is not an executive decision making position but rather a ceremonial head of state. Some would even say, well what do you expect from Shimon Peres, given his (largely undeserved) image as a peacenik dove. Yet Peres historically, and especially in his new presidential role, acts as the consensus politician and bellwether for opinion - he developed Israel's own nuclear program, supported the settlements, and vacillates between rejectionism and peace advocacy as the public mood shifts.
More importantly Peres is not alone - both the outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Ehud Barak have been talking down any unilateral Israeli threat posture vis-Ã -vis Iran, and have chided the more bellicose occasional comments emanating from their cabinet colleagues. Foreign Minister (and possible next PM) Tzipi Livni already several months ago was reported as arguing in favor of talking down the Iranian threat and suggesting that it "did not pose an existential threat to Israel." One of the other contenders in next week's leadership primary to replace Olmert as head of the governing Kadima party, the current Interior Minister, Meir Shetreet, went a step further. Here is what Minister Shetreet said during this election campaign (by the way he is unlikely to win that primary): "Israel must on no account attack Iran, speak of attacking Iran or even think about it...it is a megalomaniacal reckless idea...we are not permitted to gamble away Israel's future."
So there is something of a shifting mood in Israel that is beginning to recognize that the current policies have not produced results, that more threats are unlikely to do so, and that other diplomatic options might need to be considered. That does not mean that Israel has definitively dropped the attack option or that there are no voices now advocating for it - but they are beginning to look like the outliers rather than the opposite. The most outspoken hawk remains the other Kadima leadership contestant, Transportation Minister (and former chief of staff) Shaul Mofaz, who was roundly criticized from many quarters when he made headlines earlier this summer by claiming that an Israeli attack was "inevitable."
So there is an interesting convergence here; very highly placed Israelis are no longer talking themselves into a frenzy of fear over Iran and instead are taking a more considered and realistic approach; the international community is stating its clear preference for a diplomatic solution, the latest being the French president Sarkozy who said that an attack would be "a catastrophe" that "must be prevented"; and even the Bush administration sent its third ranking diplomat Under-Secretary William Burns to Geneva recently as part of the P5+1. Of course, presidential candidate Barack Obama has long advocated unconditional hard-bargaining diplomacy with Iran.
So who is left behind in his bunker? Yes, Senator John McCain, the "bomb bomb Iran" man (one assumes that Governor Palin does not have a position given that Iran does not border Alaska). The McCain-Palin ticket seems wedded to a rather peculiar brand of hope and change policy on energy and national security that can best be described as a "drill and kill" policy. What is refreshing is that in the president's residence in Jerusalem and elsewhere in Israel, that is apparently not the kind of change they are willing to believe in.
8/9/08
Israeli President's No to Bomb Iran
Daniel Levy
Israel's President Shimon Peres came out unequivocally this past weekend against a military strike on Iran. "There are two ways [to deal with Iran] -a military and civilian way. I don't believe in the military option - any kind of military option...it will not solve the problem...an attack can trigger a bigger war." Many have argued, myself included, that Israeli interests would be better served by ratcheting down the military rhetoric and embracing a more far-reaching diplomatic approach - especially given statements by the Pentagon's top brass against a military strike and the impact that war talk has in emboldening and strengthening President Ahmadinejad's hard-line camp in Tehran. What is remarkable though is the political timing of the statements by Israel's president and other senior Israelis coming as it does in the thick of an American political campaign that pits the uber-belligerent "bomb bomb" Iran ticket of McCain-Palin against the more savvy 'tough diplomacy for a tough world' ticket of Obama-Biden.
Apparently, if Israel's president has anything to do with it, all the talk of a possible Israeli strike in the November-January window (if Obama wins out of concern for his possible policies) - would be consigned to the total nonsense file.
This is the first time that Israel's president has come out with such an unequivocal statement. He even criticized American foreign policy stating they are "making a mistake" by relying too much on military intervention rather than economic and diplomatic persuasion. Ok, so the presidency in Israel is not an executive decision making position but rather a ceremonial head of state. Some would even say, well what do you expect from Shimon Peres, given his (largely undeserved) image as a peacenik dove. Yet Peres historically, and especially in his new presidential role, acts as the consensus politician and bellwether for opinion - he developed Israel's own nuclear program, supported the settlements, and vacillates between rejectionism and peace advocacy as the public mood shifts.
More importantly Peres is not alone - both the outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Ehud Barak have been talking down any unilateral Israeli threat posture vis-Ã -vis Iran, and have chided the more bellicose occasional comments emanating from their cabinet colleagues. Foreign Minister (and possible next PM) Tzipi Livni already several months ago was reported as arguing in favor of talking down the Iranian threat and suggesting that it "did not pose an existential threat to Israel." One of the other contenders in next week's leadership primary to replace Olmert as head of the governing Kadima party, the current Interior Minister, Meir Shetreet, went a step further. Here is what Minister Shetreet said during this election campaign (by the way he is unlikely to win that primary): "Israel must on no account attack Iran, speak of attacking Iran or even think about it...it is a megalomaniacal reckless idea...we are not permitted to gamble away Israel's future."
So there is something of a shifting mood in Israel that is beginning to recognize that the current policies have not produced results, that more threats are unlikely to do so, and that other diplomatic options might need to be considered. That does not mean that Israel has definitively dropped the attack option or that there are no voices now advocating for it - but they are beginning to look like the outliers rather than the opposite. The most outspoken hawk remains the other Kadima leadership contestant, Transportation Minister (and former chief of staff) Shaul Mofaz, who was roundly criticized from many quarters when he made headlines earlier this summer by claiming that an Israeli attack was "inevitable."
So there is an interesting convergence here; very highly placed Israelis are no longer talking themselves into a frenzy of fear over Iran and instead are taking a more considered and realistic approach; the international community is stating its clear preference for a diplomatic solution, the latest being the French president Sarkozy who said that an attack would be "a catastrophe" that "must be prevented"; and even the Bush administration sent its third ranking diplomat Under-Secretary William Burns to Geneva recently as part of the P5+1. Of course, presidential candidate Barack Obama has long advocated unconditional hard-bargaining diplomacy with Iran.
So who is left behind in his bunker? Yes, Senator John McCain, the "bomb bomb Iran" man (one assumes that Governor Palin does not have a position given that Iran does not border Alaska). The McCain-Palin ticket seems wedded to a rather peculiar brand of hope and change policy on energy and national security that can best be described as a "drill and kill" policy. What is refreshing is that in the president's residence in Jerusalem and elsewhere in Israel, that is apparently not the kind of change they are willing to believe in.
AMERICAN FOOTPRINTS= And Why Not? They Even Look the Same*
AMERICAN FOOTPRINTS
9/9/08
And Why Not? They Even Look the Same*
Eric Martin
This should be unremarkable news:
Al Qaeda has issued a video marking the September 11 attacks, in which deputy group leader Ayman al-Zawahri accuses Iran of taking part in a Western "Crusader" war against Islam, Al Jazeera television said on Monday. [...]
In a segment on the video aired by al Jazeera, Zawahri attacked Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, questioning the Islamic Republic's anti-Western stand.
"The (leader of Iran) collaborates with the Americans in occupying Iraq and Afghanistan and recognizes the puppet regimes in both countries, while he warns of death and destruction to anyone who touches an inch of Iranian soil," Zawahri said.
Al Qaeda, a militant Sunni Islamist group, often criticizes predominantly Shi'ite Iran, which has good relations with Afghanistan's anti-Taliban leaders and Iraq's Shi'ite-led government.
I say this should be unremarkable because al-Qaeda and Iran have visions of the world that are in direct conflict. al-Qaeda, for example, wants to incite the overthrow of regimes led by apostate leaders throughout the Muslim world (which, to them, includes portions of Spain and Asia that were previously under Muslim rule). al-Qaeda's definition of apostasy in this regard amounts to the failure to adhere to a strict interpretation of Sunni Islam (the Salafi interpretation). This made the relatively secular Saddam Hussein a prime target of al-Qaeda. Considering that Iran is a Shiite theocracy (not just insufficiently "pious" in the Sunni-Salafist sense, but not Sunni at all!), one can extrapolate the regard for which al-Qaeda holds Iran's leaders (and citizens).
But one doesn't need to extrapolate alone. The Taliban in Afghanistan was the closest modern day example of the al-Qaeda ideal of piety in terms of ruling regime. The Taliban were, predictably, hostile toward Iran and brutally repressive of the Shiite minority in Afghanistan. Iran, in turn, cooperated closely with the US during the early stages of the US-led Afghan campaign in order to aid in the ouster of the Taliban.
Despite this backstory, Thoreau at Unqualified Offerings caught one pundit treating the Reuters story linked above as some harbinger of a fragmentation within the ranks of a monolithic "Islamofascist" front (a splintering brought about by the US invasion of Iraq, naturally). As if al-Qaeda and Iran were longtime allies that had begun turning on each other due to the guile of the Bush administration.
At the risk of stating the obvious (it passes for wisdom these days), it is absolutely essential that we take the time to differentiate between factions, groups, nations, ethnicities and religious sects in our attempt to implement sound and effective counterterrorism policy. Enough to recognize that Iran and al-Qaeda, while perhaps willing to cooperate in some limited way in certain discrete contexts (possibly), are adversaries that should not be lumped together.
While it's understandable that some pundits might not be entirely familiar with the basic al-Qaeda/Iran animosity, it is much less forgivable that John McCain, the supposed foreign policy "master," can't seem to keep these two distinct groups separate. Repeatedly.
_______________________________________________
9/9/08
And Why Not? They Even Look the Same*
Eric Martin
This should be unremarkable news:
Al Qaeda has issued a video marking the September 11 attacks, in which deputy group leader Ayman al-Zawahri accuses Iran of taking part in a Western "Crusader" war against Islam, Al Jazeera television said on Monday. [...]
In a segment on the video aired by al Jazeera, Zawahri attacked Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, questioning the Islamic Republic's anti-Western stand.
"The (leader of Iran) collaborates with the Americans in occupying Iraq and Afghanistan and recognizes the puppet regimes in both countries, while he warns of death and destruction to anyone who touches an inch of Iranian soil," Zawahri said.
Al Qaeda, a militant Sunni Islamist group, often criticizes predominantly Shi'ite Iran, which has good relations with Afghanistan's anti-Taliban leaders and Iraq's Shi'ite-led government.
I say this should be unremarkable because al-Qaeda and Iran have visions of the world that are in direct conflict. al-Qaeda, for example, wants to incite the overthrow of regimes led by apostate leaders throughout the Muslim world (which, to them, includes portions of Spain and Asia that were previously under Muslim rule). al-Qaeda's definition of apostasy in this regard amounts to the failure to adhere to a strict interpretation of Sunni Islam (the Salafi interpretation). This made the relatively secular Saddam Hussein a prime target of al-Qaeda. Considering that Iran is a Shiite theocracy (not just insufficiently "pious" in the Sunni-Salafist sense, but not Sunni at all!), one can extrapolate the regard for which al-Qaeda holds Iran's leaders (and citizens).
But one doesn't need to extrapolate alone. The Taliban in Afghanistan was the closest modern day example of the al-Qaeda ideal of piety in terms of ruling regime. The Taliban were, predictably, hostile toward Iran and brutally repressive of the Shiite minority in Afghanistan. Iran, in turn, cooperated closely with the US during the early stages of the US-led Afghan campaign in order to aid in the ouster of the Taliban.
Despite this backstory, Thoreau at Unqualified Offerings caught one pundit treating the Reuters story linked above as some harbinger of a fragmentation within the ranks of a monolithic "Islamofascist" front (a splintering brought about by the US invasion of Iraq, naturally). As if al-Qaeda and Iran were longtime allies that had begun turning on each other due to the guile of the Bush administration.
At the risk of stating the obvious (it passes for wisdom these days), it is absolutely essential that we take the time to differentiate between factions, groups, nations, ethnicities and religious sects in our attempt to implement sound and effective counterterrorism policy. Enough to recognize that Iran and al-Qaeda, while perhaps willing to cooperate in some limited way in certain discrete contexts (possibly), are adversaries that should not be lumped together.
While it's understandable that some pundits might not be entirely familiar with the basic al-Qaeda/Iran animosity, it is much less forgivable that John McCain, the supposed foreign policy "master," can't seem to keep these two distinct groups separate. Repeatedly.
_______________________________________________
Kidnapping Ahmadinejad
TIME (Middle East Blog)
9/10/08
Kidnapping Ahmadinejad
Tim McGirk
The Iranians are a little peeved. An Israeli cabinet minister hinted darkly that Mossad ought to kidnap their president.
And this threat comes from Rafi Eitan, an ex-Mossad agent who used to strangle people with a piano wire.
No wonder the Iranians are upset. They've probably sent down word to their underground labs to make their uranium-enriching centrifuges spin faster.
What Eitan says is childish, and a lot of Israelis laugh off Eitan as a clown. They roll their eyes when Eitan comes out with zingers like this. But I dug out a quote from Eitan, about his days as a Mossad assassin. "Whenever I killed, I needed to see their eyes, the whites of their eyes. Then I was calm, very focused, thinking only of what I had to do. Then I did it. That was it," Eitan told Gordon Thomas, author of "Gideon's Spies", a history of the Mossad.
Eitan also knows about kidnapping, too. He led the Mossad team in May 1960 that grabbed Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi architect of the dead camps, off a Buenos Aires street and smuggled him back to Israel where he was tried, executed and his ashes were cast out to sea.
The trickiest part wasn't the actual kidnap. It was sneaking Eichmann past the Argentinian guards at the airport so they could board a waiting El Al plane. First they got Eichmann sozzled on an entire bottle of Scotch. "We played the drunken Jews who couldn't handle strong Argentinian liquor. The guards were amused and never gave Eichmann a second look."
Don't think that ploy would work terribly well in Tehran. A drunken Ahmadinejad, howling out songs of unrequited love in the arms of his Israeli kidnappers, might just attract a tiny bit of attention as the getaway car whizzes through Tehran.
Also, there seems to be a lull in classy Israeli kidnappings. During the last Lebanon war, a superbly-executed commando raid netted Hassan Nasrallah, only it wasn't the fugitive Hizballah leader. It was Hassan Nasrallah the green grocer, no relation. Nice try, guys.
Ok, so Eitan's strangler's grip has probably weakened. He's still a tough guy, but he's old, leader of the Pensioners' Party, which did well in the last elections (young, cool Israelis voted for Eitan on a lark) but will probably score zero Knesset seats next time around. This means that Eitan will be unemployed again, and available for nefarious plots and schemes. Trouble is, as a spy he fell into disgrace over the Jonathan Pollard affair, the U.S. naval intelligence specialist arrested in Nov. 1985 and sentenced to life in prison as an Israeli spy.
Don't underestimate the power of Rafi's hands. After carrying out a Mossad job—car-bombings were another specialty—he'd come back to weld and hammer together metal sculptures in his garden. He still sculpts, his hands are sinewy and he may soon be without a job, restless. Sleep well tonight, Mr. Ahmadinejad!
9/10/08
Kidnapping Ahmadinejad
Tim McGirk
The Iranians are a little peeved. An Israeli cabinet minister hinted darkly that Mossad ought to kidnap their president.
And this threat comes from Rafi Eitan, an ex-Mossad agent who used to strangle people with a piano wire.
No wonder the Iranians are upset. They've probably sent down word to their underground labs to make their uranium-enriching centrifuges spin faster.
What Eitan says is childish, and a lot of Israelis laugh off Eitan as a clown. They roll their eyes when Eitan comes out with zingers like this. But I dug out a quote from Eitan, about his days as a Mossad assassin. "Whenever I killed, I needed to see their eyes, the whites of their eyes. Then I was calm, very focused, thinking only of what I had to do. Then I did it. That was it," Eitan told Gordon Thomas, author of "Gideon's Spies", a history of the Mossad.
Eitan also knows about kidnapping, too. He led the Mossad team in May 1960 that grabbed Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi architect of the dead camps, off a Buenos Aires street and smuggled him back to Israel where he was tried, executed and his ashes were cast out to sea.
The trickiest part wasn't the actual kidnap. It was sneaking Eichmann past the Argentinian guards at the airport so they could board a waiting El Al plane. First they got Eichmann sozzled on an entire bottle of Scotch. "We played the drunken Jews who couldn't handle strong Argentinian liquor. The guards were amused and never gave Eichmann a second look."
Don't think that ploy would work terribly well in Tehran. A drunken Ahmadinejad, howling out songs of unrequited love in the arms of his Israeli kidnappers, might just attract a tiny bit of attention as the getaway car whizzes through Tehran.
Also, there seems to be a lull in classy Israeli kidnappings. During the last Lebanon war, a superbly-executed commando raid netted Hassan Nasrallah, only it wasn't the fugitive Hizballah leader. It was Hassan Nasrallah the green grocer, no relation. Nice try, guys.
Ok, so Eitan's strangler's grip has probably weakened. He's still a tough guy, but he's old, leader of the Pensioners' Party, which did well in the last elections (young, cool Israelis voted for Eitan on a lark) but will probably score zero Knesset seats next time around. This means that Eitan will be unemployed again, and available for nefarious plots and schemes. Trouble is, as a spy he fell into disgrace over the Jonathan Pollard affair, the U.S. naval intelligence specialist arrested in Nov. 1985 and sentenced to life in prison as an Israeli spy.
Don't underestimate the power of Rafi's hands. After carrying out a Mossad job—car-bombings were another specialty—he'd come back to weld and hammer together metal sculptures in his garden. He still sculpts, his hands are sinewy and he may soon be without a job, restless. Sleep well tonight, Mr. Ahmadinejad!
A 'Failed Business Model'
A 'Failed Business Model'
Opinion: Steve Forbes: What Next For Fannie & Freddie? A 'Failed Business Model' Washington: Outsiders' Insight May Be Right Thing For GSEs Fannie And Freddie's 15-Month Fix Dodd On The Bailout The Road From Here Wall Street: BofA's Bailout Benefit Some Banks Get Burned The Bailout Boon For Euro Banks Video: Beyond The Bailout Fannie, Freddie And The Taxpayer Banks After GSE Bailout
Henry Paulson's plan is a major disappointment.
Although it was certainly necessary to bail out ailing mortgage giants Fannie Mae (nyse: FNM - news - people ) and Freddie Mac (nyse: FRE - news - people ), the plan put forward by the treasury secretary this weekend prioritizes steering them back to financial health and defers into the future what is to become of the companies.
What's worse, after blaming the collapse of the companies on a "flawed business model," the plan will preserve that model indefinitely, allowing the shareholders of what are now insolvent entities to recover some value.
Long after Paulson is gone from the Treasury, Washington will be wrestling with the problem of what to do about Fannie and Freddie. And if the two companies are eventually nationalized, privatized or liquidated, the government--meaning taxpayers--will have to compensate the existing shareholders in some way.
The plan is relatively simple, but its implications for the future are troubling. First, Fannie and Freddie will be put under government control in an arrangement called a conservatorship. The purpose of a conservatorship is, essentially, to keep things as they are.
A conservator does not have the power to make any significant changes to the business model of a company; rather, its focus is to guide the company back to stability. Why anyone would sustain what Paulson himself called a flawed business model is hard to understand.
It gets worse. Under the plan, the Treasury is committed to providing equity capital to Fannie and Freddie. Another puzzle: Why is it necessary to inject taxpayer funds into these companies as equity? Ordinary companies need capital so that they can meet their obligations, but both these companies will have access to a financial facility at the Treasury that will allow them to borrow all the funds they require.
They don't need capital. The injection of capital is, in fact, a gift to the existing shareholders, who--as the owners of insolvent companies--own nothing and deserve no benefits from the taxpayers. By injecting these taxpayer funds and enabling the companies to survive, the Treasury plan opens the possibility that the existing shareholders will eventually profit from their investments, when, by all rights, they should be wiped out.
The nature of this gift is further emphasized by the fact that the Treasury is taking warrants for its agreement to finance these companies. These warrants will only be worth something--and thereby allow the Treasury to compensate the taxpayers--if the companies are nursed back to financial health under the conservatorship. So the government has created an incentive for itself to keep the companies alive and restore their well-being.
Once that occurs, the current shareholders will again be able to reap the benefits of holding interests in government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs)--only in this case, the two companies will not be implicitly backed by the government; they will be explicitly backed. In that case, the shareholders and the managements will once more profit from the government backing, while the taxpayers will still be the ones taking the losses.
There was an alternative, one that was simpler and much more sensible from a policy perspective. Since Fannie and Freddie operated under this "flawed business model"--by which Paulson probably meant government backing for shareholder-owned companies, the essence of a GSE--the plan should have set things in motion for the elimination of this model.
Instead of a conservatorship, the plan should have provided for a receivership. That system would get rid of the common stockholders while still monitoring the companies for an indefinite period in order to keep the mortgage market functioning smoothly.
Thus, while Paulson's plan was intended to provide some "breathing room" for consideration of the companies' future, what it will do in effect is restore them to health as government-sponsored enterprises, and, more critically, allow them and their newly empowered shareholders to bargain about the companies' collective future from a position of strength.
No wonder U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer of New York--probably the GSEs' most ardent supporter in Congress--issued the following statement after Paulson addressed the press on Sunday: "This plan will be met with broad acceptance in Congress, because it doesn't prejudge the ultimate fate of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.'' Translation: Prepare for a fight--because we intend to keep the GSEs alive.
Republican presidential candidate John McCain has been campaigning against the culture of corruption in the federal government. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has based his campaign on the idea of change in Washington. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are telling illustrations of corporate welfare--the profitable private exploitation of a cozy relationship with the government. And the Paulson plan will foster just what a cynic might expect: more of the same.
Peter J. Wallison is the Arthur F. Burns fellow in financial policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute . General counsel of the Treasury during the Reagan administration, he is the author of Ronald Reagan: The Power of Conviction and the Success of His Presidency and Serving Two Masters, Yet Out of Control: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
The Trouble With Fannie, Freddie
Freddie, Fannie Bailout
http://www.forbes.com/opinions/2008/09/08/...tml?partner=rcm
Opinion: Steve Forbes: What Next For Fannie & Freddie? A 'Failed Business Model' Washington: Outsiders' Insight May Be Right Thing For GSEs Fannie And Freddie's 15-Month Fix Dodd On The Bailout The Road From Here Wall Street: BofA's Bailout Benefit Some Banks Get Burned The Bailout Boon For Euro Banks Video: Beyond The Bailout Fannie, Freddie And The Taxpayer Banks After GSE Bailout
Henry Paulson's plan is a major disappointment.
Although it was certainly necessary to bail out ailing mortgage giants Fannie Mae (nyse: FNM - news - people ) and Freddie Mac (nyse: FRE - news - people ), the plan put forward by the treasury secretary this weekend prioritizes steering them back to financial health and defers into the future what is to become of the companies.
What's worse, after blaming the collapse of the companies on a "flawed business model," the plan will preserve that model indefinitely, allowing the shareholders of what are now insolvent entities to recover some value.
Long after Paulson is gone from the Treasury, Washington will be wrestling with the problem of what to do about Fannie and Freddie. And if the two companies are eventually nationalized, privatized or liquidated, the government--meaning taxpayers--will have to compensate the existing shareholders in some way.
The plan is relatively simple, but its implications for the future are troubling. First, Fannie and Freddie will be put under government control in an arrangement called a conservatorship. The purpose of a conservatorship is, essentially, to keep things as they are.
A conservator does not have the power to make any significant changes to the business model of a company; rather, its focus is to guide the company back to stability. Why anyone would sustain what Paulson himself called a flawed business model is hard to understand.
It gets worse. Under the plan, the Treasury is committed to providing equity capital to Fannie and Freddie. Another puzzle: Why is it necessary to inject taxpayer funds into these companies as equity? Ordinary companies need capital so that they can meet their obligations, but both these companies will have access to a financial facility at the Treasury that will allow them to borrow all the funds they require.
They don't need capital. The injection of capital is, in fact, a gift to the existing shareholders, who--as the owners of insolvent companies--own nothing and deserve no benefits from the taxpayers. By injecting these taxpayer funds and enabling the companies to survive, the Treasury plan opens the possibility that the existing shareholders will eventually profit from their investments, when, by all rights, they should be wiped out.
The nature of this gift is further emphasized by the fact that the Treasury is taking warrants for its agreement to finance these companies. These warrants will only be worth something--and thereby allow the Treasury to compensate the taxpayers--if the companies are nursed back to financial health under the conservatorship. So the government has created an incentive for itself to keep the companies alive and restore their well-being.
Once that occurs, the current shareholders will again be able to reap the benefits of holding interests in government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs)--only in this case, the two companies will not be implicitly backed by the government; they will be explicitly backed. In that case, the shareholders and the managements will once more profit from the government backing, while the taxpayers will still be the ones taking the losses.
There was an alternative, one that was simpler and much more sensible from a policy perspective. Since Fannie and Freddie operated under this "flawed business model"--by which Paulson probably meant government backing for shareholder-owned companies, the essence of a GSE--the plan should have set things in motion for the elimination of this model.
Instead of a conservatorship, the plan should have provided for a receivership. That system would get rid of the common stockholders while still monitoring the companies for an indefinite period in order to keep the mortgage market functioning smoothly.
Thus, while Paulson's plan was intended to provide some "breathing room" for consideration of the companies' future, what it will do in effect is restore them to health as government-sponsored enterprises, and, more critically, allow them and their newly empowered shareholders to bargain about the companies' collective future from a position of strength.
No wonder U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer of New York--probably the GSEs' most ardent supporter in Congress--issued the following statement after Paulson addressed the press on Sunday: "This plan will be met with broad acceptance in Congress, because it doesn't prejudge the ultimate fate of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.'' Translation: Prepare for a fight--because we intend to keep the GSEs alive.
Republican presidential candidate John McCain has been campaigning against the culture of corruption in the federal government. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has based his campaign on the idea of change in Washington. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are telling illustrations of corporate welfare--the profitable private exploitation of a cozy relationship with the government. And the Paulson plan will foster just what a cynic might expect: more of the same.
Peter J. Wallison is the Arthur F. Burns fellow in financial policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute . General counsel of the Treasury during the Reagan administration, he is the author of Ronald Reagan: The Power of Conviction and the Success of His Presidency and Serving Two Masters, Yet Out of Control: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
The Trouble With Fannie, Freddie
Freddie, Fannie Bailout
http://www.forbes.com/opinions/2008/09/08/...tml?partner=rcm
The Rising Cost of the Iraq 'Surge' By Robert Parry
The Rising Cost of the Iraq 'Surge'
By Robert Parry
September 9, 2008
Since Jan. 10, 2007, when George W. Bush announced his troop “surge,” more than 1,000 U.S. soldiers have died in the Iraq War – about a quarter of the total war dead – but now an even higher cost may loom ahead, the indefinite continuation of the conflict under President John McCain.
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Despite strong evidence to the contrary, it has become established conventional wisdom among mainstream Washington journalists that the “surge” was the singular reason for the recent decline in Iraq’s violence. It’s also agreed that McCain deserves great credit for pushing the “surge” idea early.
Barack Obama has been repeatedly chastised – even badgered – for opposing the “surge.” His attempts to refocus the debate more broadly on the wisdom of invading Iraq in the first place are rudely rejected by Big Media interviewers.
The latest example came during an ABC News “This Week” interview on Sept. 7 when George Stephanopoulos demanded of Obama: “How do you escape the logic that … John McCain was right about the surge?”
When Obama responded that he didn’t understand “why people are so focused on what has happened in the last year and a half and not on the previous five,” Stephanopoulos cut him off, saying “Granted, you think you made the right decision about going in, but about the surge?”
In other words, the big-name journalists don’t want a discussion about the decision to illegally invade Iraq under false pretenses in 2003 (presumably because they almost all were cheering the invasion on), but instead they want the debate to center entirely on their latest false assumption, that the “surge” has virtually won the war.
In reality, the “surge” of about 30,000 additional troops sent to Iraq appears to have been only one factor and – according to military officials interviewed for Bob Woodward’s new book, The War Within – possibly a secondary one in explaining the drop-off in the violence that had made Iraq a living hell.
As Woodward writes, “In Washington, conventional wisdom translated these events into a simple view: The surge had worked. But the full story was more complicated. At least three other factors were as important as, or even more important than, the surge.”
Woodward, whose book draws heavily from Pentagon insiders, reported that the Sunni rejection of al-Qaeda extremists in Anbar province (which preceded the surge) and the surprise decision of radical Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr to order a unilateral cease-fire by his militia were two important factors.
A third factor, which Woodward argued may have been the most significant, was the use of new highly classified U.S. intelligence tactics that allowed for rapid targeting and killing of insurgent leaders. Woodward agreed to withhold details of these secret techniques from his book so as not to undercut their continuing success.
But there have been previous glimpses of classified U.S. programs that combine high-tech means of identifying insurgents – such as sophisticated biometrics and night-vision-equipped drones – with old-fashioned brutality on the ground, including on-the-spot executions of suspects. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Bush’s Global Dirty War” and “Iraq’s Laboratory of Repression.”]
Successful Repression
As we’ve reported previously, other brutal factors – that the Washington press corps almost never mentions – help explain the decline in violence:
--Vicious ethnic cleansing has succeeded in separating Sunnis and Shiites to such a degree that there are fewer targets to kill. Several million Iraqis are estimated to be refugees either in neighboring countries or within their own.
--Concrete walls built between Sunni and Shiite areas have made “death-squad” raids more difficult but also have “cantonized” much of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities, making everyday life for Iraqis even more exhausting as they seek food or travel to work.
--During the “surge,” U.S. forces expanded a policy of rounding up so-called “military age males” and locking up tens of thousands in prison.
--Awesome U.S. firepower, concentrated on Iraqi insurgents and civilian bystanders for more than five years, has slaughtered countless thousands of Iraqis and has intimidated many others to look simply to their own survival.
--With the total Iraqi death toll estimated in the hundreds of thousands and many more Iraqis horribly maimed, the society has been deeply traumatized. As tyrants have learned throughout history, at some point violent repression does work.
But this dark side of the “successful surge” is excluded from the U.S. political debate. As during the pre-invasion period, the Washington press corps acts more like Bush’s propagandists than anything close to skeptical journalists.
The only time they get tough in interviews is with Obama, demanding that he get in line with the rest of Washington’s conventional wisdom and hail the media’s old favorite, John McCain, for his courage and wisdom.
In playing this role, the U.S. press is again playing into Bush’s hands and his desire to make sure that outright defeat in Iraq won’t occur on his watch – and that he will leave behind a successor who is committed to the neoconservative strategy of open-ended warfare against Muslim militants.
That is what appears increasingly likely as McCain surges up to – and in some polls moves decisively ahead of – Obama.
Domestic Images
As Woodward’s book makes clear, Bush always understood the importance of controlling American perceptions about the Iraq War, even when that required lying to the public.
Not only did Bush insist in 2006 that the war was being won when he knew differently – and he said he was listening to his commanders when, in reality, he was overruling their judgments – he talked privately about the need to control the Iraq War images to influence the voters back home.
“The U.S. presence helps to keep the lid on,” Bush told the top regional commander, Gen. John Abizaid, in explaining the reasoning for a troop buildup, and “also helps here at home, since for many the measure of success is reduction in violence.” [Washington Post, Sept. 8, 2008]
In that assessment, Bush was politically prescient.
When the catastrophic levels of violence finally declined to the simply terrible, Bush’s partisans – especially the many well-placed neoconservative opinion leaders – began baiting anyone who had doubted the “surge,” much as they had hectored anyone who doubted the wisdom of invading Iraq in 2003.
The conventional wisdom about the “successful surge” has transformed Campaign 2008, throwing Obama onto the defensive in interview after interview, while virtually no journalist presses McCain about his judgment to make a rapid pivot out of Afghanistan in early 2002 toward Iraq.
Arguably, McCain’s advocacy for this premature pivot – while Afghanistan was still in a fragile state and top al-Qaeda leaders were finding new safe haven in northwest Pakistan – was the biggest strategic blunder in modern American military history.
It has locked the United States into two open-ended wars with costs likely to soar into the trillions of dollars, while the security situation in Afghanistan deteriorates and nuclear-armed Pakistan slides toward instability.
But the political commentators place none of the blame on John McCain.
No Drawdown
Meanwhile, in Iraq, the supposedly “successful surge” apparently does not mean the United States can withdraw significant numbers of troops in the foreseeable future. President Bush has decided to leave U.S. troop levels in Iraq at about where they are now.
That means the number of American soldiers on the ground in Iraq at the end of January 2009 may well be about the same – or even slightly higher – than when the “surge” was announced two years earlier.
However, the likeliest long-term outcome for the United States in Iraq appears to be that eventually the U.S. occupation forces will be told to leave by an increasingly nationalistic Iraqi government, a kind of thanks for all the help but don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
The odds then would be that any post-U.S.-occupied Iraq would remain divided by bitter sectarianism as the country has been for centuries and that any democratic institutions would be fragile at best. The likeliest regional winner would be Iran, which has seen its Shiite allies gain the upper hand over the old Sunni power structure.
A possible alternative outcome, of course, would be a unilateral decision by Washington to refuse to leave.
That may be what the victorious neoconservatives in a McCain administration would want, but that would come at an even higher price in blood and treasure. It also would mean that the few remnants of the old American Republic would be wiped away by the arrival of a new American Empire.
Yet, the U.S. news media, which mostly has cheered on the Iraq War from its “shock and awe” beginning through today’s “successful surge,” has no time to assess the future cost of the Iraq War in lives, money and American principles. That staggering price tag is simply not in the media's frame of reference.
Instead, it’s all about hailing McCain and bashing Obama.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/090808.html
By Robert Parry
September 9, 2008
Since Jan. 10, 2007, when George W. Bush announced his troop “surge,” more than 1,000 U.S. soldiers have died in the Iraq War – about a quarter of the total war dead – but now an even higher cost may loom ahead, the indefinite continuation of the conflict under President John McCain.
Share this article
Despite strong evidence to the contrary, it has become established conventional wisdom among mainstream Washington journalists that the “surge” was the singular reason for the recent decline in Iraq’s violence. It’s also agreed that McCain deserves great credit for pushing the “surge” idea early.
Barack Obama has been repeatedly chastised – even badgered – for opposing the “surge.” His attempts to refocus the debate more broadly on the wisdom of invading Iraq in the first place are rudely rejected by Big Media interviewers.
The latest example came during an ABC News “This Week” interview on Sept. 7 when George Stephanopoulos demanded of Obama: “How do you escape the logic that … John McCain was right about the surge?”
When Obama responded that he didn’t understand “why people are so focused on what has happened in the last year and a half and not on the previous five,” Stephanopoulos cut him off, saying “Granted, you think you made the right decision about going in, but about the surge?”
In other words, the big-name journalists don’t want a discussion about the decision to illegally invade Iraq under false pretenses in 2003 (presumably because they almost all were cheering the invasion on), but instead they want the debate to center entirely on their latest false assumption, that the “surge” has virtually won the war.
In reality, the “surge” of about 30,000 additional troops sent to Iraq appears to have been only one factor and – according to military officials interviewed for Bob Woodward’s new book, The War Within – possibly a secondary one in explaining the drop-off in the violence that had made Iraq a living hell.
As Woodward writes, “In Washington, conventional wisdom translated these events into a simple view: The surge had worked. But the full story was more complicated. At least three other factors were as important as, or even more important than, the surge.”
Woodward, whose book draws heavily from Pentagon insiders, reported that the Sunni rejection of al-Qaeda extremists in Anbar province (which preceded the surge) and the surprise decision of radical Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr to order a unilateral cease-fire by his militia were two important factors.
A third factor, which Woodward argued may have been the most significant, was the use of new highly classified U.S. intelligence tactics that allowed for rapid targeting and killing of insurgent leaders. Woodward agreed to withhold details of these secret techniques from his book so as not to undercut their continuing success.
But there have been previous glimpses of classified U.S. programs that combine high-tech means of identifying insurgents – such as sophisticated biometrics and night-vision-equipped drones – with old-fashioned brutality on the ground, including on-the-spot executions of suspects. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Bush’s Global Dirty War” and “Iraq’s Laboratory of Repression.”]
Successful Repression
As we’ve reported previously, other brutal factors – that the Washington press corps almost never mentions – help explain the decline in violence:
--Vicious ethnic cleansing has succeeded in separating Sunnis and Shiites to such a degree that there are fewer targets to kill. Several million Iraqis are estimated to be refugees either in neighboring countries or within their own.
--Concrete walls built between Sunni and Shiite areas have made “death-squad” raids more difficult but also have “cantonized” much of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities, making everyday life for Iraqis even more exhausting as they seek food or travel to work.
--During the “surge,” U.S. forces expanded a policy of rounding up so-called “military age males” and locking up tens of thousands in prison.
--Awesome U.S. firepower, concentrated on Iraqi insurgents and civilian bystanders for more than five years, has slaughtered countless thousands of Iraqis and has intimidated many others to look simply to their own survival.
--With the total Iraqi death toll estimated in the hundreds of thousands and many more Iraqis horribly maimed, the society has been deeply traumatized. As tyrants have learned throughout history, at some point violent repression does work.
But this dark side of the “successful surge” is excluded from the U.S. political debate. As during the pre-invasion period, the Washington press corps acts more like Bush’s propagandists than anything close to skeptical journalists.
The only time they get tough in interviews is with Obama, demanding that he get in line with the rest of Washington’s conventional wisdom and hail the media’s old favorite, John McCain, for his courage and wisdom.
In playing this role, the U.S. press is again playing into Bush’s hands and his desire to make sure that outright defeat in Iraq won’t occur on his watch – and that he will leave behind a successor who is committed to the neoconservative strategy of open-ended warfare against Muslim militants.
That is what appears increasingly likely as McCain surges up to – and in some polls moves decisively ahead of – Obama.
Domestic Images
As Woodward’s book makes clear, Bush always understood the importance of controlling American perceptions about the Iraq War, even when that required lying to the public.
Not only did Bush insist in 2006 that the war was being won when he knew differently – and he said he was listening to his commanders when, in reality, he was overruling their judgments – he talked privately about the need to control the Iraq War images to influence the voters back home.
“The U.S. presence helps to keep the lid on,” Bush told the top regional commander, Gen. John Abizaid, in explaining the reasoning for a troop buildup, and “also helps here at home, since for many the measure of success is reduction in violence.” [Washington Post, Sept. 8, 2008]
In that assessment, Bush was politically prescient.
When the catastrophic levels of violence finally declined to the simply terrible, Bush’s partisans – especially the many well-placed neoconservative opinion leaders – began baiting anyone who had doubted the “surge,” much as they had hectored anyone who doubted the wisdom of invading Iraq in 2003.
The conventional wisdom about the “successful surge” has transformed Campaign 2008, throwing Obama onto the defensive in interview after interview, while virtually no journalist presses McCain about his judgment to make a rapid pivot out of Afghanistan in early 2002 toward Iraq.
Arguably, McCain’s advocacy for this premature pivot – while Afghanistan was still in a fragile state and top al-Qaeda leaders were finding new safe haven in northwest Pakistan – was the biggest strategic blunder in modern American military history.
It has locked the United States into two open-ended wars with costs likely to soar into the trillions of dollars, while the security situation in Afghanistan deteriorates and nuclear-armed Pakistan slides toward instability.
But the political commentators place none of the blame on John McCain.
No Drawdown
Meanwhile, in Iraq, the supposedly “successful surge” apparently does not mean the United States can withdraw significant numbers of troops in the foreseeable future. President Bush has decided to leave U.S. troop levels in Iraq at about where they are now.
That means the number of American soldiers on the ground in Iraq at the end of January 2009 may well be about the same – or even slightly higher – than when the “surge” was announced two years earlier.
However, the likeliest long-term outcome for the United States in Iraq appears to be that eventually the U.S. occupation forces will be told to leave by an increasingly nationalistic Iraqi government, a kind of thanks for all the help but don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
The odds then would be that any post-U.S.-occupied Iraq would remain divided by bitter sectarianism as the country has been for centuries and that any democratic institutions would be fragile at best. The likeliest regional winner would be Iran, which has seen its Shiite allies gain the upper hand over the old Sunni power structure.
A possible alternative outcome, of course, would be a unilateral decision by Washington to refuse to leave.
That may be what the victorious neoconservatives in a McCain administration would want, but that would come at an even higher price in blood and treasure. It also would mean that the few remnants of the old American Republic would be wiped away by the arrival of a new American Empire.
Yet, the U.S. news media, which mostly has cheered on the Iraq War from its “shock and awe” beginning through today’s “successful surge,” has no time to assess the future cost of the Iraq War in lives, money and American principles. That staggering price tag is simply not in the media's frame of reference.
Instead, it’s all about hailing McCain and bashing Obama.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/090808.html
Worshiping the Indispensable Nation by Andrew Bacevich and Tom Engelhardt
Worshiping the
Indispensable Nation
by Andrew Bacevich and Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch
Can anyone be surprised that, once again, the attacks of 9/11/01 were reflexively ground zero for embattled Republicans? George W. Bush led the way at the Republican National Convention, saying of John McCain, "We need a president who understands the lessons of Sept. 11, 2001." In his convention keynote address, Rudy Giuliani followed suit, zapping Obama and his supporters this way: "The Democrats rarely mentioned the attacks of Sept. 11. They are in a state of denial about the threat that faces us now and in the future." Post-convention, it's evidently time to assure the nation that Sarah Palin is just the pit bull to handle the next 9/11. Now comes the news that this Thursday, the endless presidential election campaign will finally make it – quite literally – to Ground Zero. Barack Obama and John McCain will "put aside politics" and appear together for the yearly ceremonies. By now, however, it's far too late to "put aside" 9/11, much less remove it from American politics. Our world has been profoundly reshaped, after all, by the decisions Bush and his top officials made in the wake of those attacks.
Still, taking up the president's implied question, what "lessons" exactly should be drawn, seven years later, other than that you stand a reasonable chance of winning elections by invoking 9/11 ad nauseam? As Andrew Bacevich, author of the New York Times best-selling book, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, indicates below, there are indeed lessons to be drawn. They are, in fact, devastating to the Bush administration, and unless they are grasped, further disaster is undoubtedly in the offing. (To watch a video of Bacevich discussing those post-9/11 lessons, click here.) Tom
9/11 Plus Seven
by Andrew J. Bacevich
The events of the past seven years have yielded a definitive judgment on the strategy that the Bush administration conceived in the wake of 9/11 to wage its so-called Global War on Terror. That strategy has failed, massively and irrevocably. To acknowledge that failure is to confront an urgent national priority: to scrap the Bush approach in favor of a new national security strategy that is realistic and sustainable – a task that, alas, neither of the presidential candidates seems able to recognize or willing to take up.
On Sept. 30, 2001, President Bush received from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld a memorandum outlining U.S. objectives in the War on Terror. Drafted by Rumsfeld's chief strategist Douglas Feith, the memo declared expansively: "If the war does not significantly change the world's political map, the U.S. will not achieve its aim." That aim, as Feith explained in a subsequent missive to his boss, was to "transform the Middle East and the broader world of Islam generally."
Rumsfeld and Feith were co-religionists: Along with other senior Bush administration officials, they worshipped in the Church of the Indispensable Nation, a small but intensely devout Washington-based sect formed in the immediate wake of the Cold War. Members of this church shared an exalted appreciation for the efficacy of American power, especially hard power. The strategy of transformation emerged as a direct expression of their faith.
The members of this church were also united by an equally exalted estimation of their own abilities. Lucky the nation to be blessed with such savvy and sophisticated public servants in its hour of need!
The goal of transforming the Islamic world was nothing if not bold. It implied far-reaching political, economic, social, and even cultural adjustments. At a press conference on Sept. 18, 2001, Rumsfeld spoke bluntly of the need to "change the way that they live." Rumsfeld didn't specify who "they" were. He didn't have to. His listeners understood without being told: "They" were Muslims inhabiting a vast arc of territory that stretched from Morocco in the west all the way to the Moro territories of the Southern Philippines in the east.
Yet boldly conceived action, if successfully executed, offered the prospect of solving a host of problems. Once pacified (or "liberated"), the Middle East would cease to breed or harbor anti-American terrorists. Post-9/11 fears about weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of evildoers could abate. Local regimes, notorious for being venal, oppressive, and inept, might finally get serious about cleaning up their acts. Liberal values, including rights for women, would flourish. A part of the world perpetually dogged by violence would enjoy a measure of stability, with stability promising not so incidentally to facilitate exploitation of the region's oil reserves. There was even the possibility of enhancing the security of Israel. Like a powerful antibiotic, the Bush administration's strategy of transformation promised to clean out not simply a single infection but several; or to switch metaphors, a strategy of transformation meant running the table.
When it came to implementation, the imperative of the moment was to think big. Just days after 9/11, Rumsfeld was charging his subordinates to devise a plan of action that had "three, four, five moves behind it." By December 2001, the Pentagon had persuaded itself that the first move – into Afghanistan – had met success. The Bush administration wasted little time in pocketing its ostensible victory. Attention quickly shifted to the second move, seen by insiders as holding the key to ultimate success: Iraq.
Fix Iraq and moves three, four, and five promised to come easily. Writing in the Weekly Standard, William Kristol and Robert Kagan got it exactly right: "The president's vision will, in the coming months, either be launched successfully in Iraq, or it will die in Iraq."
The point cannot be emphasized too strongly: Saddam Hussein's (nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction and his (imaginary) ties to al-Qaeda never constituted the real reason for invading Iraq – any more than the imperative of defending Russian "peacekeepers" in South Ossetia explains the Kremlin's decision to invade Georgia.
Iraq merely offered a convenient place from which to launch a much larger and infinitely more ambitious project. "After Hussein is removed," enthused Hudson Institute analyst Max Singer, "there will be an earthquake through the region." Success in Iraq promised to endow the United States with hitherto unprecedented leverage. Once the United States had made an example of Saddam Hussein, as the influential neoconservative Richard Perle put it, dealing with other ne'er-do-wells would become simple: "We could deliver a short message, a two-word message: 'You're next.'" Faced with the prospect of sharing Saddam's fate, Syrians, Iranians, Sudanese, and other recalcitrant regimes would see submission as the wiser course – so Perle and others believed.
Members of the administration tried to imbue this strategic vision with a softer ideological gloss. "For 60 years," Condoleezza Rice explained to a group of students in Cairo, "my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East – and we achieved neither." No more. "Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people." The world's Muslims needed to know that the motives behind the U.S. incursion into Iraq and its actions elsewhere in the region were (or had, at least, suddenly become) entirely benign. Who knows? Rice may even have believed the words she spoke.
In either case – whether the strategy of transformation aimed at dominion or democratization – today, seven years after it was conceived, we can assess exactly what it has produced. The answer is clear: next to nothing, apart from squandering vast resources and exacerbating the slide toward debt and dependency that poses a greater strategic threat to the United States than Osama bin Laden ever did.
In point of fact, hardly had the Pentagon commenced its second move, its invasion of Iraq, when the entire strategy began to unravel. In Iraq, President Bush's vision of regional transformation did die, much as Kagan and Kristol had feared. No amount of CPR credited to the so-called surge will revive it. Even if tomorrow Iraq were to achieve stability and become a responsible member of the international community, no sensible person could suggest that Operation Iraqi Freedom provides a model to apply elsewhere. Sen. John McCain says that he'll keep U.S. combat troops in Iraq for as long as it takes. Yet even he does not propose "solving" any problems posed by Syria or Iran (much less Pakistan) by employing the methods that the Bush administration used to "solve" the problem posed by Iraq. The Bush Doctrine of preventive war may remain nominally on the books. But, as a practical matter, it is defunct.
The United States will not change the world's political map in the ways top administration officials once dreamed of. There will be no earthquake that shakes up the Middle East – unless the growing clout of Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas in recent years qualifies as that earthquake. Given the Pentagon's existing commitments, there will be no threats of "you're next" either – at least none that will worry our adversaries, as the Russians have neatly demonstrated. Nor will there be a wave of democratic reform – even Rice has ceased her prattling on that score. Islam will remain stubbornly resistant to change, except on terms of its own choosing. We will not change the way "they" live.
In a book that he co-authored during the run-up to the invasion, Kristol confidently declared, "The mission begins in Baghdad, but it does not end there." In fact, the Bush administration's strategy of transformation has ended. It has failed miserably. The sooner we face up to that failure, the sooner we can get about repairing the damage.
Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His best-selling new book is The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. You can read excerpts from it by clicking here, and here, or watch a video of him discussing the lessons of 9/11, seven years later, by clicking here.
Copyright 2008 Andrew J. Bacevich
http://www.antiwar.com/engelhardt/?articleid=13437
Indispensable Nation
by Andrew Bacevich and Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch
Can anyone be surprised that, once again, the attacks of 9/11/01 were reflexively ground zero for embattled Republicans? George W. Bush led the way at the Republican National Convention, saying of John McCain, "We need a president who understands the lessons of Sept. 11, 2001." In his convention keynote address, Rudy Giuliani followed suit, zapping Obama and his supporters this way: "The Democrats rarely mentioned the attacks of Sept. 11. They are in a state of denial about the threat that faces us now and in the future." Post-convention, it's evidently time to assure the nation that Sarah Palin is just the pit bull to handle the next 9/11. Now comes the news that this Thursday, the endless presidential election campaign will finally make it – quite literally – to Ground Zero. Barack Obama and John McCain will "put aside politics" and appear together for the yearly ceremonies. By now, however, it's far too late to "put aside" 9/11, much less remove it from American politics. Our world has been profoundly reshaped, after all, by the decisions Bush and his top officials made in the wake of those attacks.
Still, taking up the president's implied question, what "lessons" exactly should be drawn, seven years later, other than that you stand a reasonable chance of winning elections by invoking 9/11 ad nauseam? As Andrew Bacevich, author of the New York Times best-selling book, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, indicates below, there are indeed lessons to be drawn. They are, in fact, devastating to the Bush administration, and unless they are grasped, further disaster is undoubtedly in the offing. (To watch a video of Bacevich discussing those post-9/11 lessons, click here.) Tom
9/11 Plus Seven
by Andrew J. Bacevich
The events of the past seven years have yielded a definitive judgment on the strategy that the Bush administration conceived in the wake of 9/11 to wage its so-called Global War on Terror. That strategy has failed, massively and irrevocably. To acknowledge that failure is to confront an urgent national priority: to scrap the Bush approach in favor of a new national security strategy that is realistic and sustainable – a task that, alas, neither of the presidential candidates seems able to recognize or willing to take up.
On Sept. 30, 2001, President Bush received from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld a memorandum outlining U.S. objectives in the War on Terror. Drafted by Rumsfeld's chief strategist Douglas Feith, the memo declared expansively: "If the war does not significantly change the world's political map, the U.S. will not achieve its aim." That aim, as Feith explained in a subsequent missive to his boss, was to "transform the Middle East and the broader world of Islam generally."
Rumsfeld and Feith were co-religionists: Along with other senior Bush administration officials, they worshipped in the Church of the Indispensable Nation, a small but intensely devout Washington-based sect formed in the immediate wake of the Cold War. Members of this church shared an exalted appreciation for the efficacy of American power, especially hard power. The strategy of transformation emerged as a direct expression of their faith.
The members of this church were also united by an equally exalted estimation of their own abilities. Lucky the nation to be blessed with such savvy and sophisticated public servants in its hour of need!
The goal of transforming the Islamic world was nothing if not bold. It implied far-reaching political, economic, social, and even cultural adjustments. At a press conference on Sept. 18, 2001, Rumsfeld spoke bluntly of the need to "change the way that they live." Rumsfeld didn't specify who "they" were. He didn't have to. His listeners understood without being told: "They" were Muslims inhabiting a vast arc of territory that stretched from Morocco in the west all the way to the Moro territories of the Southern Philippines in the east.
Yet boldly conceived action, if successfully executed, offered the prospect of solving a host of problems. Once pacified (or "liberated"), the Middle East would cease to breed or harbor anti-American terrorists. Post-9/11 fears about weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of evildoers could abate. Local regimes, notorious for being venal, oppressive, and inept, might finally get serious about cleaning up their acts. Liberal values, including rights for women, would flourish. A part of the world perpetually dogged by violence would enjoy a measure of stability, with stability promising not so incidentally to facilitate exploitation of the region's oil reserves. There was even the possibility of enhancing the security of Israel. Like a powerful antibiotic, the Bush administration's strategy of transformation promised to clean out not simply a single infection but several; or to switch metaphors, a strategy of transformation meant running the table.
When it came to implementation, the imperative of the moment was to think big. Just days after 9/11, Rumsfeld was charging his subordinates to devise a plan of action that had "three, four, five moves behind it." By December 2001, the Pentagon had persuaded itself that the first move – into Afghanistan – had met success. The Bush administration wasted little time in pocketing its ostensible victory. Attention quickly shifted to the second move, seen by insiders as holding the key to ultimate success: Iraq.
Fix Iraq and moves three, four, and five promised to come easily. Writing in the Weekly Standard, William Kristol and Robert Kagan got it exactly right: "The president's vision will, in the coming months, either be launched successfully in Iraq, or it will die in Iraq."
The point cannot be emphasized too strongly: Saddam Hussein's (nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction and his (imaginary) ties to al-Qaeda never constituted the real reason for invading Iraq – any more than the imperative of defending Russian "peacekeepers" in South Ossetia explains the Kremlin's decision to invade Georgia.
Iraq merely offered a convenient place from which to launch a much larger and infinitely more ambitious project. "After Hussein is removed," enthused Hudson Institute analyst Max Singer, "there will be an earthquake through the region." Success in Iraq promised to endow the United States with hitherto unprecedented leverage. Once the United States had made an example of Saddam Hussein, as the influential neoconservative Richard Perle put it, dealing with other ne'er-do-wells would become simple: "We could deliver a short message, a two-word message: 'You're next.'" Faced with the prospect of sharing Saddam's fate, Syrians, Iranians, Sudanese, and other recalcitrant regimes would see submission as the wiser course – so Perle and others believed.
Members of the administration tried to imbue this strategic vision with a softer ideological gloss. "For 60 years," Condoleezza Rice explained to a group of students in Cairo, "my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East – and we achieved neither." No more. "Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people." The world's Muslims needed to know that the motives behind the U.S. incursion into Iraq and its actions elsewhere in the region were (or had, at least, suddenly become) entirely benign. Who knows? Rice may even have believed the words she spoke.
In either case – whether the strategy of transformation aimed at dominion or democratization – today, seven years after it was conceived, we can assess exactly what it has produced. The answer is clear: next to nothing, apart from squandering vast resources and exacerbating the slide toward debt and dependency that poses a greater strategic threat to the United States than Osama bin Laden ever did.
In point of fact, hardly had the Pentagon commenced its second move, its invasion of Iraq, when the entire strategy began to unravel. In Iraq, President Bush's vision of regional transformation did die, much as Kagan and Kristol had feared. No amount of CPR credited to the so-called surge will revive it. Even if tomorrow Iraq were to achieve stability and become a responsible member of the international community, no sensible person could suggest that Operation Iraqi Freedom provides a model to apply elsewhere. Sen. John McCain says that he'll keep U.S. combat troops in Iraq for as long as it takes. Yet even he does not propose "solving" any problems posed by Syria or Iran (much less Pakistan) by employing the methods that the Bush administration used to "solve" the problem posed by Iraq. The Bush Doctrine of preventive war may remain nominally on the books. But, as a practical matter, it is defunct.
The United States will not change the world's political map in the ways top administration officials once dreamed of. There will be no earthquake that shakes up the Middle East – unless the growing clout of Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas in recent years qualifies as that earthquake. Given the Pentagon's existing commitments, there will be no threats of "you're next" either – at least none that will worry our adversaries, as the Russians have neatly demonstrated. Nor will there be a wave of democratic reform – even Rice has ceased her prattling on that score. Islam will remain stubbornly resistant to change, except on terms of its own choosing. We will not change the way "they" live.
In a book that he co-authored during the run-up to the invasion, Kristol confidently declared, "The mission begins in Baghdad, but it does not end there." In fact, the Bush administration's strategy of transformation has ended. It has failed miserably. The sooner we face up to that failure, the sooner we can get about repairing the damage.
Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His best-selling new book is The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. You can read excerpts from it by clicking here, and here, or watch a video of him discussing the lessons of 9/11, seven years later, by clicking here.
Copyright 2008 Andrew J. Bacevich
http://www.antiwar.com/engelhardt/?articleid=13437
US 'In Need of Rebellion'
US 'In Need of Rebellion'
An Interview With Howard Zinn:
Al Jazeera speaks to Howard Zinn, the author, American historian, social critic and activist, about how the Iraq war damaged attitudes towards the US and why the US "empire" is close to collapse. Continue http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20721.htm
An Interview With Howard Zinn:
Al Jazeera speaks to Howard Zinn, the author, American historian, social critic and activist, about how the Iraq war damaged attitudes towards the US and why the US "empire" is close to collapse. Continue http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20721.htm
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Risking Armageddon for Cold, Hard Cash
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/05/AR2008090502659.html
Risking Armageddon for Cold, Hard Cash
Mira Kamdar, The Washington Post
While everyone has been abuzz about Georgia, the Beijing Olympics and Sarah Palin, perhaps the most important development in the world has been unfolding with almost no attention. India and the United States, along with deep-pocketed corporations, have been steadily pushing along a lucrative and dangerous new nuclear pact, the U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Agreement.
Risking Armageddon for Cold, Hard Cash
Mira Kamdar, The Washington Post
While everyone has been abuzz about Georgia, the Beijing Olympics and Sarah Palin, perhaps the most important development in the world has been unfolding with almost no attention. India and the United States, along with deep-pocketed corporations, have been steadily pushing along a lucrative and dangerous new nuclear pact, the U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Agreement.
U.S. Plans $7 Billion Missile-Defense Sale to UAE Jim Wolf, Reuters
U.S. Plans $7 Billion Missile-Defense Sale to UAE
Jim Wolf, Reuters
The Bush administration is planning to sell the United Arab Emirates an advanced U.S. missile defense system valued at up to $7 billion that could be used to defend against Iran, people who have attended briefings on the matter said on Monday.
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSN0845547120080908
Jim Wolf, Reuters
The Bush administration is planning to sell the United Arab Emirates an advanced U.S. missile defense system valued at up to $7 billion that could be used to defend against Iran, people who have attended briefings on the matter said on Monday.
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSN0845547120080908
Comrades Bush, Paulson and Bernanke Welcome You to the USSRA (United Socialist State Republic of America) Nouriel Roubini
Comrades Bush, Paulson and Bernanke Welcome You to the USSRA (United Socialist State Republic of America)
Nouriel Roubini | Sep 9, 2008 The now inevitable nationalization of Fannie and Freddie is the most radical regime change in global economic and financial affairs in decades. For the last twenty years after the collapse of the USSR, the fall of the Iron Curtain and the economic reforms in China and other emerging market economies the world economy has moved away from state ownership of the economy and towards privatization of previously stated owned enterprises. This trends was aggressively supported the United States that preached right and left the benefits of free markets and free private enterprise.
Today instead the US has performed the greatest nationalization in the history of humanity. By nationalizing Fannie and Freddie the US has increased its public assets by almost $6 trillion and has increased its public debt/liabilities by another $6 trillion. The US has also turned itself into the largest government-owned hedge fund in the world: by injecting a likely $200 billion of capital into Fannie and Freddie and taking on almost $6 trillion of liabilities of such GSEs the US has also undertaken the biggest and most levered LBO (" leveraged buy-out") in human history that has a debt to equity ratio of 30 ($6,000 billion of debt against $200 billion of equity).
So now Comrades Bush, Paulson and Bernanke (as originally nicknamed by Willem Buiter) have now turned the USA into the USSRA (the United Socialist State Republic of America). Socialism is indeed alive and well in America; but this is socialism for the rich, the well connected and Wall Street. A socialism where profits are privatized and losses are socialized with the US tax-payer being charged the bill of $300 billion.
This biggest bailout and nationalization in human history comes from the most fanatically and ideologically zealot free-market laissez-faire administration in US history. These are the folks who for years spewed the rhetoric of free markets and cutting down government intervention in economic affairs. But they were so fanatically ideological about free markets that they did not realize that financial and other markets without proper rules, supervision and regulation are like a jungle where greed – untempered by fear of loss or of punishment – leads to credit bubbles and asset bubbles and manias and eventual bust and panics.
The ideologue "regulators" who literally held a chain saw at a public event to smash "unnecessary regulations" are now communists nationalizing private firms and socializing their losses: the bailout of the Bear Stearns creditors, the bailout of Fannie and Freddie, the use of the Fed balance sheet (hundreds of billions=2 0of safe US Treasuries swapped for junk toxic illiquid private securities), the use of the other GSEs (the Federal Home Loan Bank system) to provide hundreds of billions of dollars of "liquidity" to distressed, illiquid and insolvent mortgage lenders, the use of the SEC to manipulate the stock market (restrictions on short sales), the use of the US Treasury to manipulate the mortgage market (Treasury will now for the first time outright buy agency MBS to manipulate and prop up this market), the creation of a whole host of new bailout facilities (TAF, TSLF, PDCF) to prop and rescue banks and, for the first time since the Great Depression,to bail out non-bank financial institutions, and a whole range of other executive and legislative actions (including the recent bill to provide a public guarantee to mortgage for banks willing to reduce their face value).
This is the biggest and most socialist government intervention in economic affairs since the formation of the Soviet Union and Communist China. So foreign investors are now welcome to the USSRA (the United Socialist State Republic of America) where they can earn fat spreads relative to Treasuries on agency debt and never face any credit risks (not even the subordinated debt holders who made a fortune yesterday as those claims were also made whole).
Like scores of evangelists and hypocrites and moralists who spew and praise family values and pretend to be holier than thou and are then regularly caught cheating or cross dressing or found to be perverts these Bush hypocrites who spewed for years the glory of unfettered wild west laissez faire jungle capitalism (and never believed in any sensible and appropriate regulation and supervision of financial markets) allowed the biggest debt bubble ever to fester without any control, have caused the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression and are now forced to perform the biggest government intervention and nationalizations in the recent history of humanity, all for the benefit of the rich and the well connected. So Comrades Bush and Paulson and Bernanke will rightly pass to the history books as a troika of Bolsheviks who turned the USA into the USSRA. Fanatic zealots of any religion are always pests that cause havoc and destruction with their inflexible fanaticism; but they usually don't run the biggest economy in the world. But these laissez faire voodoo-economics zealots in charge of the USA have now caused the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression and the nastiest economic crisis in decades. So let them be shamed in public for their hypocrisy and zealotry that has caused so much financial and economic damage.
Nouriel Roubini | Sep 9, 2008 The now inevitable nationalization of Fannie and Freddie is the most radical regime change in global economic and financial affairs in decades. For the last twenty years after the collapse of the USSR, the fall of the Iron Curtain and the economic reforms in China and other emerging market economies the world economy has moved away from state ownership of the economy and towards privatization of previously stated owned enterprises. This trends was aggressively supported the United States that preached right and left the benefits of free markets and free private enterprise.
Today instead the US has performed the greatest nationalization in the history of humanity. By nationalizing Fannie and Freddie the US has increased its public assets by almost $6 trillion and has increased its public debt/liabilities by another $6 trillion. The US has also turned itself into the largest government-owned hedge fund in the world: by injecting a likely $200 billion of capital into Fannie and Freddie and taking on almost $6 trillion of liabilities of such GSEs the US has also undertaken the biggest and most levered LBO (" leveraged buy-out") in human history that has a debt to equity ratio of 30 ($6,000 billion of debt against $200 billion of equity).
So now Comrades Bush, Paulson and Bernanke (as originally nicknamed by Willem Buiter) have now turned the USA into the USSRA (the United Socialist State Republic of America). Socialism is indeed alive and well in America; but this is socialism for the rich, the well connected and Wall Street. A socialism where profits are privatized and losses are socialized with the US tax-payer being charged the bill of $300 billion.
This biggest bailout and nationalization in human history comes from the most fanatically and ideologically zealot free-market laissez-faire administration in US history. These are the folks who for years spewed the rhetoric of free markets and cutting down government intervention in economic affairs. But they were so fanatically ideological about free markets that they did not realize that financial and other markets without proper rules, supervision and regulation are like a jungle where greed – untempered by fear of loss or of punishment – leads to credit bubbles and asset bubbles and manias and eventual bust and panics.
The ideologue "regulators" who literally held a chain saw at a public event to smash "unnecessary regulations" are now communists nationalizing private firms and socializing their losses: the bailout of the Bear Stearns creditors, the bailout of Fannie and Freddie, the use of the Fed balance sheet (hundreds of billions=2 0of safe US Treasuries swapped for junk toxic illiquid private securities), the use of the other GSEs (the Federal Home Loan Bank system) to provide hundreds of billions of dollars of "liquidity" to distressed, illiquid and insolvent mortgage lenders, the use of the SEC to manipulate the stock market (restrictions on short sales), the use of the US Treasury to manipulate the mortgage market (Treasury will now for the first time outright buy agency MBS to manipulate and prop up this market), the creation of a whole host of new bailout facilities (TAF, TSLF, PDCF) to prop and rescue banks and, for the first time since the Great Depression,to bail out non-bank financial institutions, and a whole range of other executive and legislative actions (including the recent bill to provide a public guarantee to mortgage for banks willing to reduce their face value).
This is the biggest and most socialist government intervention in economic affairs since the formation of the Soviet Union and Communist China. So foreign investors are now welcome to the USSRA (the United Socialist State Republic of America) where they can earn fat spreads relative to Treasuries on agency debt and never face any credit risks (not even the subordinated debt holders who made a fortune yesterday as those claims were also made whole).
Like scores of evangelists and hypocrites and moralists who spew and praise family values and pretend to be holier than thou and are then regularly caught cheating or cross dressing or found to be perverts these Bush hypocrites who spewed for years the glory of unfettered wild west laissez faire jungle capitalism (and never believed in any sensible and appropriate regulation and supervision of financial markets) allowed the biggest debt bubble ever to fester without any control, have caused the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression and are now forced to perform the biggest government intervention and nationalizations in the recent history of humanity, all for the benefit of the rich and the well connected. So Comrades Bush and Paulson and Bernanke will rightly pass to the history books as a troika of Bolsheviks who turned the USA into the USSRA. Fanatic zealots of any religion are always pests that cause havoc and destruction with their inflexible fanaticism; but they usually don't run the biggest economy in the world. But these laissez faire voodoo-economics zealots in charge of the USA have now caused the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression and the nastiest economic crisis in decades. So let them be shamed in public for their hypocrisy and zealotry that has caused so much financial and economic damage.
A Bad Deal The New York Times
A Bad Deal The New York Times
President Bush has failed to achieve so many of his foreign policy goals, but last weekend he proved that he can still get what he really wants. The administration bullied and wheedled international approval of the president's ill-conceived nuclear deal with India.
The decision by the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group (which sets rules for nuclear trade) means that for the first time in more than 30 years — since New Delhi used its civilian nuclear program to produce a bomb — the world can sell nuclear fuel and technology to India.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/09/opinion/09tue2.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
* Final Version of NSG Statement on India
http://www.carnegieendowment.org/npp/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=21950
* Atomic Club Votes to End Restrictions on India
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/world/asia/07india.html?_r=2&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin
* Goodbye to Nuclear Export Controls
http://www.thehindu.com/2008/09/09/stories/2008090956071100.htm
President Bush has failed to achieve so many of his foreign policy goals, but last weekend he proved that he can still get what he really wants. The administration bullied and wheedled international approval of the president's ill-conceived nuclear deal with India.
The decision by the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group (which sets rules for nuclear trade) means that for the first time in more than 30 years — since New Delhi used its civilian nuclear program to produce a bomb — the world can sell nuclear fuel and technology to India.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/09/opinion/09tue2.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
* Final Version of NSG Statement on India
http://www.carnegieendowment.org/npp/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=21950
* Atomic Club Votes to End Restrictions on India
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/world/asia/07india.html?_r=2&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin
* Goodbye to Nuclear Export Controls
http://www.thehindu.com/2008/09/09/stories/2008090956071100.htm
Why The Fannie-Freddie Bailout Will Fail
Why The Fannie-Freddie Bailout Will Fail
By Martin D. Weiss, Ph.D.
With yesterday's announcement of the most massive federal bailout of all time, it's now official: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two largest mortgage lenders on Earth, are bankrupt. Continue http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20707.htm
By Martin D. Weiss, Ph.D.
With yesterday's announcement of the most massive federal bailout of all time, it's now official: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two largest mortgage lenders on Earth, are bankrupt. Continue http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20707.htm
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