Questions for Secretary Gates : Part I
Tuesday, January 27, the Senate Armed Services Committee will hold a hearing with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on the question of "the challenges facing the Defense Department." Many questions are sure to be prefaced with statements asserting US armed forces as "the best in the world, if not in history." Such statements are little more than political fluff and steadfastly ignore the deterioration we have been experiencing. A more meaningful question is, how can we reverse the trends that over both Republican and Democratic administrations have made our forces smaller, older, and - most importantly - less effective at increasing cost?
Retired Marine Corps Lt. Col. John Sayen explains the historic trends and lays down the fundamentals for an answer in a commentary, "The Next Shoe to Drop: As Our Economy Slides, Will Our Military Follow?" This piece appeared in the January 26 Defense News. It can be found at www.defensenews.com and below.
Sayen's commentary summarizes his introductory chapter to the new anthology, "America's Defense Meltdown: Pentagon Reform for President Obama and the New Congress." His, and the other chapters, can be found at http://www.cdi.org/friendlyversion/printversion.cfm?documentID=4422.
His commentary in Defense News follows:
Defense News
January 26, 2009
The Next Shoe To Drop
As Our Economy Slides, Will Our Military Follow?
By JOHN SAYEN
We seem to be living in an age where so much that we thought certain and permanent crumbles into dust be fore our eyes. Our once robust economy founders while our once cherished personal liberties fade away.
Less apparent has been the ongoing decay and corruption that could lead to a crisis for our nation’s armed forces.
Many of us view our military as the one sound institution we have left. The press and, of course, the military’s own leaders call it the best in the world. It claims to dominate the full spectrum of conflict from disaster relief to all out war while remaining apolitical and under constitutionally prescribed civilian control.
Yet its constitutional controls are eroding. Although Congress retains authority over the military budget, it has, since 1950, all but formally abrogated its power to declare war. This has left the president, as commander in chief of the armed forces, with de facto power to take us to war on his own. Most presidents have exercised this power with results that have ranged from disappointing to calamitous.
The press has credited the winding down of our war in Iraq to a modest reinforcement of our troops, called the surge. In reality, it took a Sunni-Shia civil war, Iranian intervention and some hefty bribes to persuade enough Iraqis to break off their hitherto successful insurgency against us.
While we have benefited from reduced casualties and relative calm, our real reward has been little more than the right to with draw gracefully from a country from which we had once hoped to dominate the Middle East. In Afghanistan, where our situation continues its steady deterioration, a rather less dignified retreat may be in our future.
After our short-lived success in Operation Desert Storm in 1991, both the military and the press declared that we had finally put the Vietnam War behind us. But have we? Today we fight enemies that don’t even have armies, don’t control defined territories or have recognizable economies. They lack modern heavy weapons, night-vision gear, armor and much else that we consider essential. Yet even after years of costly effort, we have failed to subdue or even to weaken most of them.
What has gone wrong? If our armed forces are not the “greatest in history,” they are certainly the most expensive. Our military budget nearly equals those of all the other nations of the world combined. Though we spend more today than we ever have since 1945, our forces are actually shrinking: Since 1986, our armed services have lost nearly half their force structure.
Worse, this shrinking force must rely on old and deteriorating equipment that our military procurement system cannot replace at affordable cost.
We have also neglected the training and selection of our military leaders. This was a consequence of our “tradition” of only mobilizing for war at the last minute and relying on doctrine that reduces warfare to the engineering problem of overwhelming the enemy with superior resources. Instead of leaders, we train technicians who could put “steel on target,” without necessarily understanding why or how or even if it would help.
Since World War II, this style of warfare has won us tactical successes, but not wars. Worse, our imploding economy coupled with skyrocketing procurement costs could make it impossible for us to continue it, forcing us to fight from scarcity rather than abundance. Even now, our enemies can negate much of our firepower by denying us targets, and letting us hurt ourselves by hitting civilians instead. Our very strength is a weakness because, when we don’t win, it makes us look foolish. When we have successes, we look like bullies and create sympathy for our enemies.
So what can we do about all this? Here are some directions in which real reform may lie.
■ Realize that we have a problem. Drum-and-trumpet hoopla about how great our military is has led us to exaggerate its real capabilities and to give it missions it cannot really perform.
■ Fix the finances. The Defense Department has spent literally trillions of dollars it can’t account for. It has not been able to pass an audit in decades. If we can’t even balance our books, how can we hope to control the ruinous expense of our style of warfare?
Financial exhaustion triggered by a war in Afghanistan brought down the mighty Soviet Union just 20 years ago. Could this be our fate as well?
■ Re-evaluate the military’s governing authority. Should the president exercise anything like sole control over the military?
Should he even control it in peacetime? During our first 120 years, most of the military consisted of militia that the state governors controlled. A decision to go to war had to be based on a national consensus involving both Congress and the states.
That requirement preserved both our liberties and our security at a far lower cost.
■ The toughest and most important direction is to find new leaders, both military and civilian, who are competent, informed and uncommitted to the status quo. What we have now is mainly technicians, politicians and bureaucrats, all dominated by special interests. Leadership reform is a subject that could easily consume a shelf of books, but the books and articles by retired U.S. Army Maj. Don Vandergriff will do for a start. Our military will never be better than its leaders.
The next administration has promised us change. Will there be any for the military?
John Sayen is a retired U.S. Marine Corps lieutenant colonel. He is the author of the introduction, “The Overburden of America’s Outdated Defenses,” to a new anthology, “America’s Defense Meltdown: Pentagon Reform for President Obama and the New Congress.”
**************
From Wall Street to Main Street and everywhere in between, stay up-to-date with the latest news. (http://aol.com?ncid=emlcntaolcom00000023)
_____________________________
Winslow T. Wheeler
Director
Straus Military Reform Project
Center for Defense Information
301 791-2397
CDI | 1779 Massachusetts Ave, NW | Washington, DC 20036 | US
Unsubscribe from future marketing messages from CDI
Email marketing delivered by Bronto
Reflections from news and commentary of the day
Subscribe To
Posts
All Comments
Monday, January 26, 2009
Friday, January 23, 2009
Bin Laden: Gaza is one of the many fronts of "World Jihad" By Walid Phares
Bin Laden: Gaza is one of the many fronts of "World Jihad"
By Walid Phares
Bin Laden.jpg
To Usama Bin Laden, the confrontation in Gaza is not a local national issue but it is part of what he coins as world Jihad against the Kuffars (infidels), or more precisely the “Crusader-Zionist enemy.” This stark ideological reminder came through a new audio message by the leader of al Qaeda at a time Israeli forces and Hamas’Jihadists were still fighting in the enclave. The Bin Laden address was titled “Call to Jihad to stop the aggression against Gaza” and was addressed to the “Umma” (Islamic Nation). The following is my analysis of this latest tape.
Read More »
http://counterterrorismblog.org/2009/01/bin_laden_gaza_is_one_of_the_m.php
By Walid Phares
Bin Laden.jpg
To Usama Bin Laden, the confrontation in Gaza is not a local national issue but it is part of what he coins as world Jihad against the Kuffars (infidels), or more precisely the “Crusader-Zionist enemy.” This stark ideological reminder came through a new audio message by the leader of al Qaeda at a time Israeli forces and Hamas’Jihadists were still fighting in the enclave. The Bin Laden address was titled “Call to Jihad to stop the aggression against Gaza” and was addressed to the “Umma” (Islamic Nation). The following is my analysis of this latest tape.
Read More »
http://counterterrorismblog.org/2009/01/bin_laden_gaza_is_one_of_the_m.php
U.S. Must Back Down on Iranian Uranium Enrichment by Gary Leupp
U.S. Must Back Down on Iranian Uranium Enrichment
by Gary Leupp / January 22nd, 2009 (5)
There’s really only one solution. Only one way for Obama to get himself out of the box his predecessor Bush, Dick Cheney and the neocons have put him in. He has to affirm Iran’s inalienable right under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to enrich uranium.
Somewhere along the road American public opinion, which history shows can be easily persuaded of things that just aren’t true, has bought several highly questionable propositions:
1. Iran has a nuclear weapons program.
2. Iran’s nuclear program can have only one purpose, the production of nuclear weapons.
3. The Iranian leadership wishes to, and has threatened to, wipe Israel off …
(Full article …)
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2009/01/us-must-back-down-on-iranian-uranium-enrichment/
by Gary Leupp / January 22nd, 2009 (5)
There’s really only one solution. Only one way for Obama to get himself out of the box his predecessor Bush, Dick Cheney and the neocons have put him in. He has to affirm Iran’s inalienable right under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to enrich uranium.
Somewhere along the road American public opinion, which history shows can be easily persuaded of things that just aren’t true, has bought several highly questionable propositions:
1. Iran has a nuclear weapons program.
2. Iran’s nuclear program can have only one purpose, the production of nuclear weapons.
3. The Iranian leadership wishes to, and has threatened to, wipe Israel off …
(Full article …)
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2009/01/us-must-back-down-on-iranian-uranium-enrichment/
Saudi patience is running out By Turki al-Faisal
FINANCIAL TIMES Comment
Saudi patience is running out
By Turki al-Faisal
Published: January 22 2009 20:15 | Last updated: January 22 2009 20:15
In my decades as a public servant, I have strongly promoted the Arab-Israeli
peace process. During recent months, I argued that the peace plan proposed
by Saudi Arabia could be implemented under an Obama administration if the
Israelis and Palestinians both accepted difficult compromises. I told my
audiences this was worth the energies of the incoming administration for, as the late
Indian diplomat Vijaya Lakshmi Nehru Pandit said: "The more we sweat in
peace, the less we bleed in war."
But after Israel launched its bloody attack on Gaza, these pleas for
optimism and co-operation now seem a distant memory. In the past weeks, not only
have the Israeli Defence Forces murdered more than 1,000 Palestinians, but they
have come close to killing the prospect of peace itself. Unless the new US
administration takes forceful steps to prevent any further suffering and
slaughter of Palestinians, the peace process, the US-Saudi relationship and the
stability of the region are at risk.
Prince Saud Al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, told the UN Security
Council that if there was no just settlement, "we will turn our backs on you".
King Abdullah spoke for the entire Arab and Muslim world when he said at the
Arab summit in Kuwait that although the Arab peace initiative was on the table,
it would not remain there for long. Much of the world shares these
sentiments and any Arab government that negotiated with the Israelis today would be
rightly condemned by its citizens. Two of the four Arab countries that have
formal ties to Israel – Qatar and Mauritania – have suspended all relations and
Jordan has recalled its ambassador.
America is not innocent in this calamity. Not only has the Bush
administration left a sickening legacy in the region – from the death of hundreds of
thousands of Iraqis to the humiliation and torture at Abu Ghraib – but it has
also, through an arrogant attitude about the butchery in Gaza, contributed to
the slaughter of innocents. If the US wants to continue playing a leadership
role in the Middle East and keep its strategic alliances intact – especially
its "special relationship" with Saudi Arabia – it will have to drastically
revise its policies vis a vis Israel and Palestine.
The incoming US administration will be inheriting a "basket full of snakes"
in the region, but there are things that can be done to help calm them down.
First, President Barack Obama must address the disaster in Gaza and its
causes. Inevitably, he will condemn Hamas's firing of rockets at Israel.
When he does that, he should also condemn Israel's atrocities against the
Palestinians and support a UN resolution to that effect; forcefully condemn the
Israeli actions that led to this conflict, from settlement building in the
West Bank to the blockade of Gaza and the targeted killings and arbitrary
arrests of Palestinians; declare America's intention to work for a Middle East
free of weapons of mass destruction, with a security umbrella for countries that
sign up and sanctions for those that do not; call for an immediate
withdrawal of Israeli forces from Shab'ah Farms in Lebanon; encourage Israeli-Syrian
negotiations for peace; and support a UN resolution guaranteeing Iraq's
territorial integrity.
Mr Obama should strongly promote the Abdullah peace initiative, which calls
on Israel to pursue the course laid out in various international resolutions
and laws: to withdraw completely from the lands occupied in 1967, including
East Jerusalem, returning to the lines of June 4 1967; to accept a mutually
agreed just solution to the refugee problem according to the General Assembly
resolution 194; and to recognise the independent state of Palestine with East
Jerusalem as its capital. In return, there would be an end to hostilities
between Israel and all the Arab countries, and Israel would get full diplomatic
and normal relations.
Last week, President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad of Iran wrote a letter to King
Abdullah, explicitly recognising Saudi Arabia as the leader of the Arab and
Muslim worlds and calling on him to take a more confrontational role over "this
obvious atrocity and killing of your own children" in Gaza. The communiqué is
significant because the de facto recognition of the kingdom's primacy from one
of its most ardent foes reveals the extent that the war has united an entire
region, both Shia and Sunni. Further, Mr Ahmadi-Nejad's call for Saudi
Arabia to lead a jihad against Israel would, if pursued, create unprecedented
chaos and bloodshed in the region.
So far, the kingdom has resisted these calls, but every day this restraint
becomes more difficult to maintain. When Israel deliberately kills
Palestinians, appropriates their lands, destroys their homes, uproots their farms and
imposes an inhuman blockade on them; and as the world laments once again the
suffering of the Palestinians, people of conscience from every corner of the
world are clamouring for action. Eventually, the kingdom will not be able to
prevent its citizens from joining the worldwide revolt against Israel. Today,
every Saudi is a Gazan, and we remember well the words of our late King Faisal:
"I hope you will forgive my outpouring of emotions, but when I think that
our Holy Mosque in Jerusalem is being invaded and desecrated, I ask God that if
I am unable to undertake Holy Jihad, then I should not live a moment more."
Let us all pray that Mr Obama possesses the foresight, fairness, and resolve
to rein in the murderous Israeli regime and open a new chapter in this most
intractable of conflicts.
Prince Turki is chairman, King Faisal Centre for Research and Islamic
Studies, Riyadh. He has been director of Saudi intelligence, ambassador to the UK
and Ireland and ambassador to the US
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
Saudi patience is running out
By Turki al-Faisal
Published: January 22 2009 20:15 | Last updated: January 22 2009 20:15
In my decades as a public servant, I have strongly promoted the Arab-Israeli
peace process. During recent months, I argued that the peace plan proposed
by Saudi Arabia could be implemented under an Obama administration if the
Israelis and Palestinians both accepted difficult compromises. I told my
audiences this was worth the energies of the incoming administration for, as the late
Indian diplomat Vijaya Lakshmi Nehru Pandit said: "The more we sweat in
peace, the less we bleed in war."
But after Israel launched its bloody attack on Gaza, these pleas for
optimism and co-operation now seem a distant memory. In the past weeks, not only
have the Israeli Defence Forces murdered more than 1,000 Palestinians, but they
have come close to killing the prospect of peace itself. Unless the new US
administration takes forceful steps to prevent any further suffering and
slaughter of Palestinians, the peace process, the US-Saudi relationship and the
stability of the region are at risk.
Prince Saud Al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, told the UN Security
Council that if there was no just settlement, "we will turn our backs on you".
King Abdullah spoke for the entire Arab and Muslim world when he said at the
Arab summit in Kuwait that although the Arab peace initiative was on the table,
it would not remain there for long. Much of the world shares these
sentiments and any Arab government that negotiated with the Israelis today would be
rightly condemned by its citizens. Two of the four Arab countries that have
formal ties to Israel – Qatar and Mauritania – have suspended all relations and
Jordan has recalled its ambassador.
America is not innocent in this calamity. Not only has the Bush
administration left a sickening legacy in the region – from the death of hundreds of
thousands of Iraqis to the humiliation and torture at Abu Ghraib – but it has
also, through an arrogant attitude about the butchery in Gaza, contributed to
the slaughter of innocents. If the US wants to continue playing a leadership
role in the Middle East and keep its strategic alliances intact – especially
its "special relationship" with Saudi Arabia – it will have to drastically
revise its policies vis a vis Israel and Palestine.
The incoming US administration will be inheriting a "basket full of snakes"
in the region, but there are things that can be done to help calm them down.
First, President Barack Obama must address the disaster in Gaza and its
causes. Inevitably, he will condemn Hamas's firing of rockets at Israel.
When he does that, he should also condemn Israel's atrocities against the
Palestinians and support a UN resolution to that effect; forcefully condemn the
Israeli actions that led to this conflict, from settlement building in the
West Bank to the blockade of Gaza and the targeted killings and arbitrary
arrests of Palestinians; declare America's intention to work for a Middle East
free of weapons of mass destruction, with a security umbrella for countries that
sign up and sanctions for those that do not; call for an immediate
withdrawal of Israeli forces from Shab'ah Farms in Lebanon; encourage Israeli-Syrian
negotiations for peace; and support a UN resolution guaranteeing Iraq's
territorial integrity.
Mr Obama should strongly promote the Abdullah peace initiative, which calls
on Israel to pursue the course laid out in various international resolutions
and laws: to withdraw completely from the lands occupied in 1967, including
East Jerusalem, returning to the lines of June 4 1967; to accept a mutually
agreed just solution to the refugee problem according to the General Assembly
resolution 194; and to recognise the independent state of Palestine with East
Jerusalem as its capital. In return, there would be an end to hostilities
between Israel and all the Arab countries, and Israel would get full diplomatic
and normal relations.
Last week, President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad of Iran wrote a letter to King
Abdullah, explicitly recognising Saudi Arabia as the leader of the Arab and
Muslim worlds and calling on him to take a more confrontational role over "this
obvious atrocity and killing of your own children" in Gaza. The communiqué is
significant because the de facto recognition of the kingdom's primacy from one
of its most ardent foes reveals the extent that the war has united an entire
region, both Shia and Sunni. Further, Mr Ahmadi-Nejad's call for Saudi
Arabia to lead a jihad against Israel would, if pursued, create unprecedented
chaos and bloodshed in the region.
So far, the kingdom has resisted these calls, but every day this restraint
becomes more difficult to maintain. When Israel deliberately kills
Palestinians, appropriates their lands, destroys their homes, uproots their farms and
imposes an inhuman blockade on them; and as the world laments once again the
suffering of the Palestinians, people of conscience from every corner of the
world are clamouring for action. Eventually, the kingdom will not be able to
prevent its citizens from joining the worldwide revolt against Israel. Today,
every Saudi is a Gazan, and we remember well the words of our late King Faisal:
"I hope you will forgive my outpouring of emotions, but when I think that
our Holy Mosque in Jerusalem is being invaded and desecrated, I ask God that if
I am unable to undertake Holy Jihad, then I should not live a moment more."
Let us all pray that Mr Obama possesses the foresight, fairness, and resolve
to rein in the murderous Israeli regime and open a new chapter in this most
intractable of conflicts.
Prince Turki is chairman, King Faisal Centre for Research and Islamic
Studies, Riyadh. He has been director of Saudi intelligence, ambassador to the UK
and Ireland and ambassador to the US
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Heading for the Fourth Nuclear Age
Heading for the Fourth Nuclear Age
Ariel E. Levite, Proliferation Paper
In a new Proliferation Paper published by the Institut Français des Relations Internationales' (Ifri) Security Studies Center, Ariel E. Levite examines the evolution of the global nuclear order since the advent of nuclear weapons in 1945 to present by breaking down the sixty-plus years of nuclear history into three analytically distinct "ages," each lasting roughly twenty years. By doing so, Levite traces back the roots of the current nuclear predicament to some early seeds of trouble which have gradually grown more profound.
http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=22655&prog=zgp&proj=znpp
Ariel E. Levite, Proliferation Paper
In a new Proliferation Paper published by the Institut Français des Relations Internationales' (Ifri) Security Studies Center, Ariel E. Levite examines the evolution of the global nuclear order since the advent of nuclear weapons in 1945 to present by breaking down the sixty-plus years of nuclear history into three analytically distinct "ages," each lasting roughly twenty years. By doing so, Levite traces back the roots of the current nuclear predicament to some early seeds of trouble which have gradually grown more profound.
http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=22655&prog=zgp&proj=znpp
Despite Historic Pact, U.S. Firms Are Hampered in Setting Up Reactors in India
Despite Historic Pact, U.S. Firms Are Hampered in Setting Up Reactors in India
Rama Lakshmi, The Washington PostIt took three years of diplomatic wrangling to get a controversial agreement signed late last year to allow India to participate in global civilian nuclear trade, but U.S. business executives now say there are more hurdles to overcome before they can start setting up reactors and selling fuel to India.
Editor's Note: This article correctly highlights some of the challenges that U.S. firms face in selling nuclear-related material, equipment and technology to India, but errs in a few ways. For example, GE and Westinghouse are unlikely to be chafing at the bit to sell reactors before India passes a nuclear liability law since that law should protect them from bankruptcy in the event of an accident. Second, although India has a uranium shortage, U.S. firms are not positioned, now or in the future, to help relieve that problem. India will likely purchase uranium from the big suppliers – Canada or Kazakhstan. Until light water reactors are built, India will have no need for foreign conversion, enrichment and fuel fabrication services because most of its reactors are indigenous heavy-water-moderated reactors that use natural uranium. The only American light water reactors – at Tarapur – have been recently resupplied with fuel by Russia. India may choose to hold up nuclear contracts until the U.S. Congress approves subsequent arrangements detailing consent rights to reprocess, but the urgency of its uranium shortage is not leverage over that process. In general, Russian and French nuclear vendors hold advantages over U.S. vendors in domestic and foreign sales because they are subsidized by their governments. The article should have noted that the U.S.-India Business Council covers a lot of other kinds of commerce, including defense sales, and it would be interesting to see if progress in other areas were being held up by lack of progress in nuclear commerce.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/20/AR2009012004049.html
Rama Lakshmi, The Washington PostIt took three years of diplomatic wrangling to get a controversial agreement signed late last year to allow India to participate in global civilian nuclear trade, but U.S. business executives now say there are more hurdles to overcome before they can start setting up reactors and selling fuel to India.
Editor's Note: This article correctly highlights some of the challenges that U.S. firms face in selling nuclear-related material, equipment and technology to India, but errs in a few ways. For example, GE and Westinghouse are unlikely to be chafing at the bit to sell reactors before India passes a nuclear liability law since that law should protect them from bankruptcy in the event of an accident. Second, although India has a uranium shortage, U.S. firms are not positioned, now or in the future, to help relieve that problem. India will likely purchase uranium from the big suppliers – Canada or Kazakhstan. Until light water reactors are built, India will have no need for foreign conversion, enrichment and fuel fabrication services because most of its reactors are indigenous heavy-water-moderated reactors that use natural uranium. The only American light water reactors – at Tarapur – have been recently resupplied with fuel by Russia. India may choose to hold up nuclear contracts until the U.S. Congress approves subsequent arrangements detailing consent rights to reprocess, but the urgency of its uranium shortage is not leverage over that process. In general, Russian and French nuclear vendors hold advantages over U.S. vendors in domestic and foreign sales because they are subsidized by their governments. The article should have noted that the U.S.-India Business Council covers a lot of other kinds of commerce, including defense sales, and it would be interesting to see if progress in other areas were being held up by lack of progress in nuclear commerce.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/20/AR2009012004049.html
Reassessing the Role of Nuclear Weapons
Reassessing the Role of Nuclear Weapons
Daryl G. Kimball, Arms Control Today
Beginning Jan. 20, U.S. nuclear weapons policy can and must change. The U.S.-Soviet standoff that gave rise to tens of thousands of nuclear weapons is over, but the policies developed to justify their possession and potential use remain largely the same.
http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2009_01-02/Focus
Daryl G. Kimball, Arms Control Today
Beginning Jan. 20, U.S. nuclear weapons policy can and must change. The U.S.-Soviet standoff that gave rise to tens of thousands of nuclear weapons is over, but the policies developed to justify their possession and potential use remain largely the same.
http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2009_01-02/Focus
A Vital Nuclear Step Towards the World After Oil
A Vital Nuclear Step Towards the World After Oil
Charles Ferguson, The NationalThe UAE and the United States opened a new chapter in cooperation last week by signing a nuclear energy agreement. As long as the US Congress does not object, the deal will be enacted, placing the UAE on the road to becoming the first Arab nation with nuclear power plants.
http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090118/OPINION/336753545&SearchID=73342880035478
Charles Ferguson, The NationalThe UAE and the United States opened a new chapter in cooperation last week by signing a nuclear energy agreement. As long as the US Congress does not object, the deal will be enacted, placing the UAE on the road to becoming the first Arab nation with nuclear power plants.
http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090118/OPINION/336753545&SearchID=73342880035478
North Korea Says It Has 'Weaponized' Plutonium
North Korea Says It Has 'Weaponized' Plutonium
Choe Sang-Hun, The New York Times
The North Korean military declared an "all-out confrontational posture" against South Korea on Saturday as an American scholar said North Korean officials told him they had "weaponized" enough plutonium for roughly four or five nuclear bombs.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/18/world/asia/18korea.html?_r=1
Choe Sang-Hun, The New York Times
The North Korean military declared an "all-out confrontational posture" against South Korea on Saturday as an American scholar said North Korean officials told him they had "weaponized" enough plutonium for roughly four or five nuclear bombs.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/18/world/asia/18korea.html?_r=1
Gaza war ended in utter failure for Israel By Gideon Levy
w w w . h a a r e t z . c o m
Last update - 04:19 22/01/2009
Gideon Levy / Gaza war ended in utter failure for Israel
By Gideon Levy
On the morrow of the return of the last Israeli soldier from Gaza, we can determine with certainty that they had all gone out there in vain. This war ended in utter failure for Israel.
This goes beyond the profound moral failure, which is a grave matter in itself, but pertains to its inability to reach its stated goals. In other words, the grief is not complemented by failure. We have gained nothing in this war save hundreds of graves, some of them very small, thousands of maimed people, much destruction and the besmirching of Israel's image.
What seemed like a predestined loss to only a handful of people at the onset of the war will gradually emerge as such to many others, once the victorious trumpeting subsides.
The initial objective of the war was to put an end to the firing of Qassam rockets. This did not cease until the war's last day. It was only achieved after a cease-fire had already been arranged. Defense officials estimate that Hamas still has 1,000 rockets.
The war's second objective, the prevention of smuggling, was not met either. The head of the Shin Bet security service has estimated that smuggling will be renewed within two months.
Most of the smuggling that is going on is meant to provide food for a population under siege, and not to obtain weapons. But even if we accept the scare campaign concerning the smuggling with its exaggerations, this war has served to prove that only poor quality, rudimentary weapons passed through the smuggling tunnels connecting the Gaza Strip to Egypt.
Israel's ability to achieve its third objective is also dubious. Deterrence, my foot. The deterrence we supposedly achieved in the Second Lebanon War has not had the slightest effect on Hamas, and the one supposedly achieved now isn't working any better: The sporadic firing of rockets from the Gaza Strip has continued over the past few days.
The fourth objective, which remained undeclared, was not met either. The IDF has not restored its capability. It couldn't have, not in a quasi-war against a miserable and poorly-equipped organization relying on makeshift weapons, whose combatants barely put up a fight.
The heroic descriptions and victory poems written abut the "military triumph" will not serve to change reality. The pilots were flying on training missions and the ground forces were engaged in exercises that involved joining up and firing weapons.
The describing of the operation as a "military achievement" by the various generals and analysts who offered their take on the operation is plain ridiculous.
We have not weakened Hamas. The vast majority of its combatants were not harmed and popular support for the organization has in fact increased. Their war has intensified the ethos of resistance and determined endurance. A country which has nursed an entire generation on the ethos of a few versus should know to appreciate that by now. There was no doubt as to who was David and who was Goliath in this war.
The population in Gaza, which has sustained such a severe blow, will not become more moderate now. On the contrary, the national sentiment will now turn more than before against the party which inflicted that blow - the State of Israel. Just as public opinion leans to the right in Israel after each attack against us, so it will in Gaza following the mega-attack that we carried out against them.
If anyone was weakened because of this war, it was Fatah, whose fleeing from Gaza and its abandonment have now been given special significance. The succession of failures in this war needs to include, of course, the failure of the siege policy. For a while, we have already come to realize that is ineffective. The world boycotted, Israel besieged and Hamas ruled (and is still ruling).
But this war's balance, as far as Israel is concerned, does not end with the absence of any achievement. It has placed a heavy toll on us, which will continue to burden us for some time. When it comes to assessing Israel's international situation, we must not allow ourselves to be fooled by the support parade by Europe's leaders, who came in for a photo-op with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
Israel's actions have dealt a serious blow to public support for the state. While this does not always translate itself into an immediate diplomatic situation, the shockwaves will arrive one day. The whole world saw the images. They shocked every human being who saw them, even if they left most Israelis cold.
The conclusion is that Israel is a violent and dangerous country, devoid of all restraints and blatantly ignoring the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council, while not giving a hoot about international law. The investigations are on their way.
Graver still is the damage this will visit upon our moral spine. It will come from difficult questions about what the IDF did in Gaza, which will occur despite the blurring effect of recruited media.
So what was achieved, after all? As a war waged to satisfy considerations of internal politics, the operation has succeeded beyond all expectations. Likud Chair Benjamin Netanyahu is getting stronger in the polls. And why? Because we could not get enough of the war.
Last update - 04:19 22/01/2009
Gideon Levy / Gaza war ended in utter failure for Israel
By Gideon Levy
On the morrow of the return of the last Israeli soldier from Gaza, we can determine with certainty that they had all gone out there in vain. This war ended in utter failure for Israel.
This goes beyond the profound moral failure, which is a grave matter in itself, but pertains to its inability to reach its stated goals. In other words, the grief is not complemented by failure. We have gained nothing in this war save hundreds of graves, some of them very small, thousands of maimed people, much destruction and the besmirching of Israel's image.
What seemed like a predestined loss to only a handful of people at the onset of the war will gradually emerge as such to many others, once the victorious trumpeting subsides.
The initial objective of the war was to put an end to the firing of Qassam rockets. This did not cease until the war's last day. It was only achieved after a cease-fire had already been arranged. Defense officials estimate that Hamas still has 1,000 rockets.
The war's second objective, the prevention of smuggling, was not met either. The head of the Shin Bet security service has estimated that smuggling will be renewed within two months.
Most of the smuggling that is going on is meant to provide food for a population under siege, and not to obtain weapons. But even if we accept the scare campaign concerning the smuggling with its exaggerations, this war has served to prove that only poor quality, rudimentary weapons passed through the smuggling tunnels connecting the Gaza Strip to Egypt.
Israel's ability to achieve its third objective is also dubious. Deterrence, my foot. The deterrence we supposedly achieved in the Second Lebanon War has not had the slightest effect on Hamas, and the one supposedly achieved now isn't working any better: The sporadic firing of rockets from the Gaza Strip has continued over the past few days.
The fourth objective, which remained undeclared, was not met either. The IDF has not restored its capability. It couldn't have, not in a quasi-war against a miserable and poorly-equipped organization relying on makeshift weapons, whose combatants barely put up a fight.
The heroic descriptions and victory poems written abut the "military triumph" will not serve to change reality. The pilots were flying on training missions and the ground forces were engaged in exercises that involved joining up and firing weapons.
The describing of the operation as a "military achievement" by the various generals and analysts who offered their take on the operation is plain ridiculous.
We have not weakened Hamas. The vast majority of its combatants were not harmed and popular support for the organization has in fact increased. Their war has intensified the ethos of resistance and determined endurance. A country which has nursed an entire generation on the ethos of a few versus should know to appreciate that by now. There was no doubt as to who was David and who was Goliath in this war.
The population in Gaza, which has sustained such a severe blow, will not become more moderate now. On the contrary, the national sentiment will now turn more than before against the party which inflicted that blow - the State of Israel. Just as public opinion leans to the right in Israel after each attack against us, so it will in Gaza following the mega-attack that we carried out against them.
If anyone was weakened because of this war, it was Fatah, whose fleeing from Gaza and its abandonment have now been given special significance. The succession of failures in this war needs to include, of course, the failure of the siege policy. For a while, we have already come to realize that is ineffective. The world boycotted, Israel besieged and Hamas ruled (and is still ruling).
But this war's balance, as far as Israel is concerned, does not end with the absence of any achievement. It has placed a heavy toll on us, which will continue to burden us for some time. When it comes to assessing Israel's international situation, we must not allow ourselves to be fooled by the support parade by Europe's leaders, who came in for a photo-op with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
Israel's actions have dealt a serious blow to public support for the state. While this does not always translate itself into an immediate diplomatic situation, the shockwaves will arrive one day. The whole world saw the images. They shocked every human being who saw them, even if they left most Israelis cold.
The conclusion is that Israel is a violent and dangerous country, devoid of all restraints and blatantly ignoring the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council, while not giving a hoot about international law. The investigations are on their way.
Graver still is the damage this will visit upon our moral spine. It will come from difficult questions about what the IDF did in Gaza, which will occur despite the blurring effect of recruited media.
So what was achieved, after all? As a war waged to satisfy considerations of internal politics, the operation has succeeded beyond all expectations. Likud Chair Benjamin Netanyahu is getting stronger in the polls. And why? Because we could not get enough of the war.
How Bin Laden Bankrupted America: The Five Ways
How Bin Laden Bankrupted America:
The Five Ways
To: Friends and Contacts
Re: My latest article at http://antiwar.com/utley/
Below is an excerpt from my most recent article at www.antiwar.com, “How Bin Laden Bankrupted America: The Five Ways”:
For a man who spent years living in caves, Osama bin Laden sure knows his Sun Tzu and the basics of jujitsu. Sun Tzu's famous dictum was "know yourself" and "know your enemy." Jujitsu is based upon using your enemy's strength against him, e.g., like Jack in "Jack and the Beanstalk," who used the giant's own size and anger to get him to crash from his own weight. Bin Laden understood that the way to beat America was to turn its power back upon itself. His early stated aim was to bankrupt America. He knew his own weaknesses, and he profoundly understood America's, how its pride and fears could trigger irrational, self-destructive reactions.
The genius of bin Laden's pinprick attacks, costing a few hundred thousand dollars, has left America reeling with two unending multi-trillion-dollar wars it doesn't know how to get out of. He knew that his own strength was mainly in his appeal to the minds of men, particularly to the lost dignity of Muslims trampled under the heel of their own dictators, Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and America's military. Getting rid of the "far" enemy was the way to take on the "near" ones. [Read entire article at http://antiwar.com/utley/.]
The Five Ways
To: Friends and Contacts
Re: My latest article at http://antiwar.com/utley/
Below is an excerpt from my most recent article at www.antiwar.com, “How Bin Laden Bankrupted America: The Five Ways”:
For a man who spent years living in caves, Osama bin Laden sure knows his Sun Tzu and the basics of jujitsu. Sun Tzu's famous dictum was "know yourself" and "know your enemy." Jujitsu is based upon using your enemy's strength against him, e.g., like Jack in "Jack and the Beanstalk," who used the giant's own size and anger to get him to crash from his own weight. Bin Laden understood that the way to beat America was to turn its power back upon itself. His early stated aim was to bankrupt America. He knew his own weaknesses, and he profoundly understood America's, how its pride and fears could trigger irrational, self-destructive reactions.
The genius of bin Laden's pinprick attacks, costing a few hundred thousand dollars, has left America reeling with two unending multi-trillion-dollar wars it doesn't know how to get out of. He knew that his own strength was mainly in his appeal to the minds of men, particularly to the lost dignity of Muslims trampled under the heel of their own dictators, Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and America's military. Getting rid of the "far" enemy was the way to take on the "near" ones. [Read entire article at http://antiwar.com/utley/.]
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
President Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address
January 20, 2009
Text
Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address
Following is the prepared text of President-elect Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address, as provided by the Presidential Inaugural Committee:
My fellow citizens:
I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors. I thank President Bush for his service to our nation, as well as the generosity and cooperation he has shown throughout this transition.
Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath. The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet, every so often the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms. At these moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forbearers, and true to our founding documents.
So it has been. So it must be with this generation of Americans.
That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.
These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land - a nagging fear that America’s decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights.
Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America - they will be met.
On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.
On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.
We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.
In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or se ttling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted - for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things - some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.
For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.
For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.
For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sanh.
Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.
This is the journey we continue today. We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions - that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin a gain the work of remaking America.
For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act - not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.
Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions - who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short. For they have forgotten what this country has already done; what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage.
What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them - that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works - whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account - to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day - because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.
Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control - and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our Gross Domestic Product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart - not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.
As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a=2 0future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.
Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.
We are the keepers of this legacy. Guided by these principles once more, we can meet those new threats that demand even greater effort - even greater cooperation and understanding between nations. We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people, and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan. With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the specter of a warming planet. We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.
For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus - and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have taste d the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.
To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect. To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society’s ills on the West - know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.
To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world’s resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.
As we consider the road that unfolds before us, we remember with humble gratitude those brave Americans who, at this very hour, patrol far-off deserts and distant mountains. They have s omething to tell us today, just as the fallen heroes who lie in Arlington whisper through the ages. We honor them not only because they are guardians of our liberty, but because they embody the spirit of service; a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves. And yet, at this moment - a moment that will define a generation - it is precisely this spirit that must inhabit us all.
For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies. It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter’s courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent’s willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.
Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends - hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism - these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility - a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.
This is the price and the promise of citizenship.
This is the source of our confidence - the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.
This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed - why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent mall, and why a man whose father less than sixty years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.
So let us mark this day with remembrance, of who we are and how far we have traveled. In the year of America’s birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people:
"Let it be told to the future world...that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive...that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it]."
America. In the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words. With hope an d virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children’s children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God’s grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/us/polit...agewanted=print
Text
Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address
Following is the prepared text of President-elect Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address, as provided by the Presidential Inaugural Committee:
My fellow citizens:
I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors. I thank President Bush for his service to our nation, as well as the generosity and cooperation he has shown throughout this transition.
Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath. The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet, every so often the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms. At these moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forbearers, and true to our founding documents.
So it has been. So it must be with this generation of Americans.
That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.
These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land - a nagging fear that America’s decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights.
Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America - they will be met.
On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.
On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.
We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.
In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or se ttling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted - for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things - some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.
For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.
For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.
For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sanh.
Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.
This is the journey we continue today. We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions - that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin a gain the work of remaking America.
For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act - not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.
Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions - who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short. For they have forgotten what this country has already done; what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage.
What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them - that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works - whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account - to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day - because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.
Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control - and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our Gross Domestic Product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart - not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.
As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a=2 0future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.
Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.
We are the keepers of this legacy. Guided by these principles once more, we can meet those new threats that demand even greater effort - even greater cooperation and understanding between nations. We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people, and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan. With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the specter of a warming planet. We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.
For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus - and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have taste d the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.
To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect. To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society’s ills on the West - know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.
To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world’s resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.
As we consider the road that unfolds before us, we remember with humble gratitude those brave Americans who, at this very hour, patrol far-off deserts and distant mountains. They have s omething to tell us today, just as the fallen heroes who lie in Arlington whisper through the ages. We honor them not only because they are guardians of our liberty, but because they embody the spirit of service; a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves. And yet, at this moment - a moment that will define a generation - it is precisely this spirit that must inhabit us all.
For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies. It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter’s courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent’s willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.
Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends - hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism - these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility - a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.
This is the price and the promise of citizenship.
This is the source of our confidence - the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.
This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed - why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent mall, and why a man whose father less than sixty years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.
So let us mark this day with remembrance, of who we are and how far we have traveled. In the year of America’s birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people:
"Let it be told to the future world...that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive...that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it]."
America. In the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words. With hope an d virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children’s children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God’s grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/us/polit...agewanted=print
Poll shows EU voters resistant on Afghan war By James Blitz in London
FT.com logo
Poll shows EU voters resistant on Afghan war
By James Blitz in London
Published: January 20 2009
Any attempt by Barack Obama to get European Union members of Nato to send more troops to Afghanistan will be strongly rebuffed by EU voters, according to a new opinion poll for the Financial Times.
As Mr Obama prepares to be sworn in as US president today, a Harris poll for the FT shows that clear majorities in the UK, France, Italy and Germany believe their governments must not send more forces to Afghanistan, irrespective of demands that the new American head of state might make.
The opinion poll shows that Mr Obama continues to enjoy high approval ratings in these four EU states. At least three-quarters of people in each of the countries surveyed, which also included Spain, believe the new president will have "a positive impact on the course of international events".
While the poll underscores the considerable respect Mr Obama enjoys in these countries, it also reveals the resistance he will face if, as strongly expected, he calls on Europe to do more in the fight against the Taliban.
Some 60 per cent of German respondents to the survey said they would not wish Berlin to send more troops to Afghanistan under any circumstances. Even in the UK, the second largest contributor to Nato's mission in Afghanistan, some 57 per cent of respondents rejected calls for any more British troops to be sent.
In both France and Italy, some 53 per cent of people said their countries should not send troops. Only in Spain is there a majority willing to consider sending additional troops.
The opinion poll, which was conducted online among a total of 6,299 adults between January 8 and January 15, reveals that voters in Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain believe the international financial crisis must be at the top of the list of issues for Mr Obama.
A clear majority of respondents in four of the five European countries surveyed - Spain being the exception - said they had no concerns at all that Mr Obama's relative lack of experience would hinder an economic recovery in the US or Europe.
The poll also reveals that voters would like to see the new president reaching out to Iran, amid fears in many western states that Tehran is attempting to develop nuclear weapons. At least two-thirds of adults in all five European countries, as well as the US, agreed that Mr Obama "should personally meet leading figures in the Iranian government".
Some 45 per cent of US respondents said that Mr Obama should continue to place the fight against international terrorism at the top of his list of priorities. However, in the UK, only 24 per cent of respondents said fighting international terrorism should be top of Mr Obama's priorities, while in Germany the figure was as low as 13 per cent.
Analysis of the results: www.ft.com/obama
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
Poll shows EU voters resistant on Afghan war
By James Blitz in London
Published: January 20 2009
Any attempt by Barack Obama to get European Union members of Nato to send more troops to Afghanistan will be strongly rebuffed by EU voters, according to a new opinion poll for the Financial Times.
As Mr Obama prepares to be sworn in as US president today, a Harris poll for the FT shows that clear majorities in the UK, France, Italy and Germany believe their governments must not send more forces to Afghanistan, irrespective of demands that the new American head of state might make.
The opinion poll shows that Mr Obama continues to enjoy high approval ratings in these four EU states. At least three-quarters of people in each of the countries surveyed, which also included Spain, believe the new president will have "a positive impact on the course of international events".
While the poll underscores the considerable respect Mr Obama enjoys in these countries, it also reveals the resistance he will face if, as strongly expected, he calls on Europe to do more in the fight against the Taliban.
Some 60 per cent of German respondents to the survey said they would not wish Berlin to send more troops to Afghanistan under any circumstances. Even in the UK, the second largest contributor to Nato's mission in Afghanistan, some 57 per cent of respondents rejected calls for any more British troops to be sent.
In both France and Italy, some 53 per cent of people said their countries should not send troops. Only in Spain is there a majority willing to consider sending additional troops.
The opinion poll, which was conducted online among a total of 6,299 adults between January 8 and January 15, reveals that voters in Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain believe the international financial crisis must be at the top of the list of issues for Mr Obama.
A clear majority of respondents in four of the five European countries surveyed - Spain being the exception - said they had no concerns at all that Mr Obama's relative lack of experience would hinder an economic recovery in the US or Europe.
The poll also reveals that voters would like to see the new president reaching out to Iran, amid fears in many western states that Tehran is attempting to develop nuclear weapons. At least two-thirds of adults in all five European countries, as well as the US, agreed that Mr Obama "should personally meet leading figures in the Iranian government".
Some 45 per cent of US respondents said that Mr Obama should continue to place the fight against international terrorism at the top of his list of priorities. However, in the UK, only 24 per cent of respondents said fighting international terrorism should be top of Mr Obama's priorities, while in Germany the figure was as low as 13 per cent.
Analysis of the results: www.ft.com/obama
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
Ban tells Israel to open Gaza borders By Anna Fifield in Gaza City
FT.com logo
Ban tells Israel to open Gaza borders
By Anna Fifield in Gaza City
Published: January 20 2009
The United Nations secretary-general called on Israel on Tuesday to reopen the borders with the Gaza Strip immediately to allow the free movement of Palestinian people and goods.
Ban Ki-moon said he was promoting the idea of a third party – perhaps the European Union or Turkey – to police the border crossing to ensure that weapons could not be smuggled to Hamas.
"I hope that all the parties can agree on the border situation, to prevent any smuggling of illegal arms and weapons into Gaza," Mr Ban told the Financial Times after visiting damaged areas and a bombed UN food storage centre in Gaza City.
Stopping Hamas from re-arming, after a three-week conflict aimed at wiping out the militant group's ability to attack Israel, is the top priority of the Jewish state.
"In the absence of Palestinians manning the crossing, then the idea of having a European or Turkish presence [on the border] has to be discussed," said Mr Ban, who was promoting the idea among political leaders in Israel, the Palestinian territories and the other countries. "I think this should happen."
Mr Ban also said Israel should "fully open" the borders to the Gaza Strip as soon as possible – Hamas's key demand – to allow normal transport to flow.
Standing in front of the still burning warehouse, Mr Ban said he was "appalled" by the destruction in Gaza and again called for a full investigation into the conflict, which claimed the lives of 1,300 Palestinians and injured more than 5,000.
He said he would call world leaders, including Barack Obama, the US president, to encourage new political will for progress.
Israel had said it would withdraw its tanks before Mr Obama's inauguration, and when the FT visited the Erez Crossing on the northern border with Israel on Tuesday afternoon, there was no sign of any Israeli military activity on the Gaza side of the border.
But in spite of Mr Ban's calls, the crossings remained closed.
Mohammad Sadiq, a teacher from Khan Yunis in southern Gaza, said: "The Israelis bombed homes, schools, mosques. The problem is that now there are no materials to rebuild anything. The Israelis will not allow anything to come in."
The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics and a Palestinian economic development council have estimated that $1.9bn in damage had been caused by the three-week incursion.
More than 4,100 homes, about 1,500 factories and workshops, 20 mosques and 31 security compounds were destroyed in the attacks, according to the estimate, leaving about 50,000 people homeless.
Half a million people are without running water, and electricity supplies are intermittent.
Arab governments have pledged at least $1.25bn (€940m, £850m) for reconstruction in Gaza, and European leaders have also promised aid, but Palestinians say they cannot use the money to rebuild as long as the borders remain sealed.
Faysal Shawa, the owner of a construction company and head of the Palestinian Businessmen's Association, said: "The most important thing is for the borders to be opened. Of course we need a lot of money to rebuild but we can get money. We need the borders to be opened not just for cement and steel but completely."
Israel said this week that it would consider allowing traffic through the border on a case by case basis, indicating its intention to decide what gets through to Gaza in spite of the international pledges to help rebuild.
"Anything less than opening the borders will make the disaster even worse," Mr Shawa said. "People have no homes so we need immediate action to rehouse them."
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
Ban tells Israel to open Gaza borders
By Anna Fifield in Gaza City
Published: January 20 2009
The United Nations secretary-general called on Israel on Tuesday to reopen the borders with the Gaza Strip immediately to allow the free movement of Palestinian people and goods.
Ban Ki-moon said he was promoting the idea of a third party – perhaps the European Union or Turkey – to police the border crossing to ensure that weapons could not be smuggled to Hamas.
"I hope that all the parties can agree on the border situation, to prevent any smuggling of illegal arms and weapons into Gaza," Mr Ban told the Financial Times after visiting damaged areas and a bombed UN food storage centre in Gaza City.
Stopping Hamas from re-arming, after a three-week conflict aimed at wiping out the militant group's ability to attack Israel, is the top priority of the Jewish state.
"In the absence of Palestinians manning the crossing, then the idea of having a European or Turkish presence [on the border] has to be discussed," said Mr Ban, who was promoting the idea among political leaders in Israel, the Palestinian territories and the other countries. "I think this should happen."
Mr Ban also said Israel should "fully open" the borders to the Gaza Strip as soon as possible – Hamas's key demand – to allow normal transport to flow.
Standing in front of the still burning warehouse, Mr Ban said he was "appalled" by the destruction in Gaza and again called for a full investigation into the conflict, which claimed the lives of 1,300 Palestinians and injured more than 5,000.
He said he would call world leaders, including Barack Obama, the US president, to encourage new political will for progress.
Israel had said it would withdraw its tanks before Mr Obama's inauguration, and when the FT visited the Erez Crossing on the northern border with Israel on Tuesday afternoon, there was no sign of any Israeli military activity on the Gaza side of the border.
But in spite of Mr Ban's calls, the crossings remained closed.
Mohammad Sadiq, a teacher from Khan Yunis in southern Gaza, said: "The Israelis bombed homes, schools, mosques. The problem is that now there are no materials to rebuild anything. The Israelis will not allow anything to come in."
The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics and a Palestinian economic development council have estimated that $1.9bn in damage had been caused by the three-week incursion.
More than 4,100 homes, about 1,500 factories and workshops, 20 mosques and 31 security compounds were destroyed in the attacks, according to the estimate, leaving about 50,000 people homeless.
Half a million people are without running water, and electricity supplies are intermittent.
Arab governments have pledged at least $1.25bn (€940m, £850m) for reconstruction in Gaza, and European leaders have also promised aid, but Palestinians say they cannot use the money to rebuild as long as the borders remain sealed.
Faysal Shawa, the owner of a construction company and head of the Palestinian Businessmen's Association, said: "The most important thing is for the borders to be opened. Of course we need a lot of money to rebuild but we can get money. We need the borders to be opened not just for cement and steel but completely."
Israel said this week that it would consider allowing traffic through the border on a case by case basis, indicating its intention to decide what gets through to Gaza in spite of the international pledges to help rebuild.
"Anything less than opening the borders will make the disaster even worse," Mr Shawa said. "People have no homes so we need immediate action to rehouse them."
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
Will all Palestinian factions honor Hamas's cease-fire? Hamas may not be able to prevent other factions from attacking Israel, analysts say. Shane B
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
1/21/09
Will all Palestinian factions honor Hamas's cease-fire?
Hamas may not be able to prevent other factions from attacking Israel, analysts say.
Shane Bauer
Damascus, Syria - The rockets fired by Palestinian militants into southern Israel throughout the 22-day war in Gaza and in the weeks leading up to the devastating Israeli operation have stopped. The cease-fire declared by Hamas is holding.
But while the Hamas movement and its weapons caches were Israel's primary target throughout the offensive, numerous militant groups fought alongside Hamas against Israeli soldiers, including a splinter faction of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, the armed wing of the Fatah Party, according to a senior Fatah official in Damascus.
The question now is whether these groups, who are often at odds with Hamas over how to carry out Palestinian resistance, will adhere to Hamas's decision to hold its fire or continue to shoot rockets into southern Israel and perhaps spark another round of fighting.
On Sunday, the deputy of Hamas's political bureau, Musa Abu Marzuq, appeared on Syrian television, speaking not in the name of Hamas, but "in the name of Palestinian resistance factions" to declare a one-week cease-fire and insist that all Israeli troops leave within that time period and open all border crossings.
But some Middle East analysts say Hamas might not be able to hold together an alliance of such disparate and mutually hostile groups. One faction, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), has already dissented.
Maher Taher, PFLP's representative in Damascus, where much of the Palestinian leadership structure is based, declined to comment on their decision, but in an interview with Al Jazeera, he insisted "The Israeli attack is continuing."
"The PFLP is fighting on the ground against this barbaric invasion by Israel," he said in the interview last week, before the cease-fire. "This is a battle involving all of the Palestinian people."
Last week, several other Palestinian factions in Damascus issued a statement refusing "any security arrangements that affect the resistance and its legitimate right to struggle against the occupation." The coalition was composed of representatives of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the PFLP, Al Saiqa, the Popular Struggle Front, the Revolutionary Communist Party, Palestinian Liberation organization, Fatah's "Intifada" faction, and a number of other Palestinian factions.
They categorically refused the presence of international forces in Gaza, a proposition put forth in part by Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas. They said that any peace initiatives must include the immediate secession of Israeli attacks, the full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, an end to the economic blockade, and an opening of all of Gaza's crossings, including the Rafah crossing with Egypt.
Some regional observers say there are two probable outcomes, neither of which bode well for Israel. Either factions continue to stand behind Hamas, bolstering the group's legitimacy in Gaza, or they break away and start launching rockets in violation of cease-fires.
Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) sources say some 750 rockets were shot into Israel (more than 200 of those were claimed by Islamic Jihad) since "Operation Cast Lead" began on Dec. 27, killing three civilians. The IDF says it killed hundreds of militants, most of whom were probably members of Hamas, the largest group in Gaza, but that number undoubtedly includes members of other militias.
Leaders of the secular Fatah Party that controls the PA say the group bears no responsibility for its members in the armed wing fighting in Gaza, according to the group's representative in Damascus, Sameer Rifai. He says that a faction of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades has been acting without the consent of the leadership, but adds that they were engaged in a "legitimate form of defense."
"The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades are a part of the Palestinian people in Gaza," he says. "They are defending their homes, their lives, and themselves. They are people fighting an occupation."
1/21/09
Will all Palestinian factions honor Hamas's cease-fire?
Hamas may not be able to prevent other factions from attacking Israel, analysts say.
Shane Bauer
Damascus, Syria - The rockets fired by Palestinian militants into southern Israel throughout the 22-day war in Gaza and in the weeks leading up to the devastating Israeli operation have stopped. The cease-fire declared by Hamas is holding.
But while the Hamas movement and its weapons caches were Israel's primary target throughout the offensive, numerous militant groups fought alongside Hamas against Israeli soldiers, including a splinter faction of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, the armed wing of the Fatah Party, according to a senior Fatah official in Damascus.
The question now is whether these groups, who are often at odds with Hamas over how to carry out Palestinian resistance, will adhere to Hamas's decision to hold its fire or continue to shoot rockets into southern Israel and perhaps spark another round of fighting.
On Sunday, the deputy of Hamas's political bureau, Musa Abu Marzuq, appeared on Syrian television, speaking not in the name of Hamas, but "in the name of Palestinian resistance factions" to declare a one-week cease-fire and insist that all Israeli troops leave within that time period and open all border crossings.
But some Middle East analysts say Hamas might not be able to hold together an alliance of such disparate and mutually hostile groups. One faction, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), has already dissented.
Maher Taher, PFLP's representative in Damascus, where much of the Palestinian leadership structure is based, declined to comment on their decision, but in an interview with Al Jazeera, he insisted "The Israeli attack is continuing."
"The PFLP is fighting on the ground against this barbaric invasion by Israel," he said in the interview last week, before the cease-fire. "This is a battle involving all of the Palestinian people."
Last week, several other Palestinian factions in Damascus issued a statement refusing "any security arrangements that affect the resistance and its legitimate right to struggle against the occupation." The coalition was composed of representatives of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the PFLP, Al Saiqa, the Popular Struggle Front, the Revolutionary Communist Party, Palestinian Liberation organization, Fatah's "Intifada" faction, and a number of other Palestinian factions.
They categorically refused the presence of international forces in Gaza, a proposition put forth in part by Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas. They said that any peace initiatives must include the immediate secession of Israeli attacks, the full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, an end to the economic blockade, and an opening of all of Gaza's crossings, including the Rafah crossing with Egypt.
Some regional observers say there are two probable outcomes, neither of which bode well for Israel. Either factions continue to stand behind Hamas, bolstering the group's legitimacy in Gaza, or they break away and start launching rockets in violation of cease-fires.
Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) sources say some 750 rockets were shot into Israel (more than 200 of those were claimed by Islamic Jihad) since "Operation Cast Lead" began on Dec. 27, killing three civilians. The IDF says it killed hundreds of militants, most of whom were probably members of Hamas, the largest group in Gaza, but that number undoubtedly includes members of other militias.
Leaders of the secular Fatah Party that controls the PA say the group bears no responsibility for its members in the armed wing fighting in Gaza, according to the group's representative in Damascus, Sameer Rifai. He says that a faction of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades has been acting without the consent of the leadership, but adds that they were engaged in a "legitimate form of defense."
"The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades are a part of the Palestinian people in Gaza," he says. "They are defending their homes, their lives, and themselves. They are people fighting an occupation."
LRB contributors react to events in Gaza Tariq Ali
London Review of Books
* 15 January 2009
LRB contributors react to events in Gaza
Tariq Ali
A few weeks before the assault on Gaza, the Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army published a levelheaded document on 'Hamas and Israel', which argued that 'Israel's stance towards the democratically-elected Palestinian government headed by Hamas in 2006, and towards Palestinian national coherence – legal, territorial, political and economic – has been a major obstacle to substantive peacemaking.' Whatever their reservations about the organisation, the authors of the paper detected signs that Hamas was considering a shift of position even before the blockade:
It is frequently stated that Israel or the United States cannot 'meet' with Hamas (although meeting is not illegal; materially aiding terrorism is, if proven) because the latter will not 'recognise Israel'. In contrast, the PLO has 'recognised' Israel's right to exist and agreed in principle to bargain for significantly less land than the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip, and it is not clear that Israel has ever agreed to accept a Palestinian state. The recognition of Israel did not bring an end to violence, as wings of various factions of the PLO did fight Israelis, especially at the height of the Second (al- Aqsa) Intifada. Recognition of Israel by Hamas, in the way that it is described in the Western media, cannot serve as a formula for peace. Hamas moderates have, however, signaled that it implicitly recognises Israel, and that even a tahdiya (calming, minor truce) or a hudna, a longer-term truce, obviously implies recognition. Khalid Mish'al states: 'We are realists,' and there is 'an entity called Israel,' but 'realism does not mean that you have to recognise the legitimacy of the occupation.'
The war on Gaza has killed the two-state solution by making it clear to Palestinians that the only acceptable Palestine would have fewer rights than the Bantustans created by apartheid South Africa. The only acceptable alternative is a single state for Jews and Palestinians with equal rights for all. Certainly it seems utopian at the moment with the two Palestinian parties in Israel – Balad and the United Arab List – both barred from contesting the February elections. Avigdor Lieberman, the chairman of Yisrael Beitenu, has breathed a sigh of satisfaction: 'Now that it has been decided that the Balad terrorist organisation will not be able to run, the first battle is over.' But even victory has its drawbacks. After the Six-Day War in 1967, Isaac Deutscher warned his one-time friend Ben Gurion: 'The Germans have summed up their own experience in the bitter phrase "Mann kann sich totseigen!" — you can triumph yourself to death. This is what the Israelis have been doing. They have bitten off much more than they can swallow.'
Five hundred courageous Israelis have sent a letter to Western embassies calling for sanctions and other measures to be applied against their country, echoing the 2005 call by numerous Palestinian organisations for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) on the South African model. This will not happen overnight but it is the only non-violent way to help the struggle for freedom and equality in Israel-Palestine.
Tariq Ali's latest book is The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power.
Alastair Crooke
'We have to ask the West a question: when the Israelis bombed the house of Sheikh Nizar Rayan, a Hamas leader, killing him, his wives, his nine children, and killing 19 others who happened to live in adjoining houses – because they saw him as a target – was this terrorism? If the West's answer is that this was not terrorism, it was self-defence – then we must think to adopt this definition too.'
This was said to me by a leading Islamist in Beirut a few days ago. He was making a point, but behind his rhetorical question plainly lies the deeper issue of what the Gaza violence will signify for mainstream Islamists in the future.
Take Egypt. Mubarak has made no secret of his wish to see Israel teach Hamas a 'lesson'. Hamas are sure that his officials urged Israel to proceed, assuring Amos Yadlin, Israel's Head of Military Intelligence, at a meeting in Cairo that Hamas would collapse within three days of the Israeli onslaught.
Islamists in Egypt and other pro-Western 'moderate' alliance states such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan have noted Israel's wanton disregard for the deaths of civilians in its desire to crush Hamas. They have seen the barely concealed pleasure of the regimes that run those states. The message is clear: the struggle for the future of this region is going to be uncompromising and bloody.
For all Islamists, the events in Gaza will be definitive: they will tell the story of a heroic stand in the name of justice against overwhelming odds. This archetype was already in place on the day of Ashura – which fell this year on 7 January — when Shi'ites everywhere commemorate the martyrdom of Hussein, the Prophet's grandson, killed by an overwhelming military force at Kerbala. The speeches given by Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbullah's secretary general, were avidly followed; the ceremony of Ashura drove home the message of martyrdom and sacrifice.
Islamists are likely to conclude from Gaza that Arab regimes backed by the US and some European states will go to any lengths in their struggle against Islamism. Many Sunni Muslims will turn to the salafi-jihadists, al-Qaida included, who warned Hamas and others about the kind of punishment being visited on them now. Mainstream movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Hizbullah will find it hard to resist the radical trend. The middle ground is eroding fast.
At one level Gaza will be seen as a repeat of Algeria. At another, it will speak to wider struggles in the Arab world, where elites favoured by the West soldier on with no real legitimacy, while the weight of support for change builds up. The overhang may persist for a while yet, but a small event could trip the avalanche.
Alastair Crooke is co-director of Conflicts Forum and has been an EU mediator with Hamas and other Islamist movements. Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution will come out next month.
Yitzhak Laor
We've been here before. It's a ritual. Every two or three years, our military mounts another bloody expedition. The enemy is always smaller, weaker; our military is always larger, technologically more sophisticated, prepared for full-scale war against a full-scale army. But Iran is too scary, and even the relatively small Hizbullah gave us a hard time. That leaves the Palestinians.
Israel is engaged in a long war of annihilation against Palestinian society. The objective is to destroy the Palestinian nation and drive it back into pre-modern groupings based on the tribe, the clan and the enclave. This is the last phase of the Zionist colonial mission, culminating in inaccessible townships, camps, villages, districts, all of them to be walled or fenced off, and patrolled by a powerful army which, in the absence of a proper military objective, is really an over-equipped police force, with F16s, Apaches, tanks, artillery, commando units and hi-tech surveillance at its disposal.
The extent of the cruelty, the lack of shame and the refusal of self-restraint are striking, both in anthropological terms and historically. The worldwide Jewish support for this vandal offensive makes one wonder if this isn't the moment Zionism is taking over the Jewish people.
But the real issue is that since 1991, and even more since the Oslo agreements in 1993, Israel has played on the idea that it really is trading land for peace, while the truth is very different. Israel has not given up the territories, but cantonised and blockaded them. The new strategy is to confine the Palestinians: they do not belong in our space, they are to remain out of sight, packed into their townships and camps, or swelling our prisons. This project now has the support of most of the Israeli press and academics.
We are the masters. We work and travel. They can make their living by policing their own people. We drive on the highways. They must live across the hills. The hills are ours. So are the fences. We control the roads, and the checkpoints and the borders. We control their electricity, their water, their milk, their oil, their wheat and their gasoline. If they protest peacefully we fire tear gas at them. If they throw stones, we fire bullets. If they launch a rocket, we destroy a house and its inhabitants. If they launch a missile, we destroy families, neighbourhoods, streets, towns.
Israel doesn't want a Palestinian state alongside it. It is willing to prove this with hundreds of dead and thousands of disabled, in a single 'operation'. The message is always the same: leave or remain in subjugation, under our military dictatorship. We are a democracy. We have decided democratically that you will live like dogs.
On 27 December just before the bombs started falling on Gaza, the Zionist parties, from Meretz to Yisrael Betenu, were unanimously in favour of the attack. As usual – it's the ritual again – differences emerged only over the dispatch of blankets and medication to Gaza. Our most fervent pro-war columnist, Ari Shavit, has suggested that Israel should go on with the assault and build a hospital for the victims. The enemy is wounded, bleeding, dying, desperate for help. Nobody is coming unless Obama moves – yes, we are all waiting for Godot. Maybe this time he shows up.
Yitzhak Laor lives in Tel Aviv. He is the editor of Mita'am.
John Mearsheimer
The Gaza war is not going to change relations between Israel and the Palestinians in any meaningful way. Instead, the conflict is likely to get worse in the years ahead. Israel will build more settlements and roads in the West Bank and the Palestinians will remain locked up in a handful of impoverished enclaves in Gaza and the West Bank. The two-state solution is probably dead.
'Greater Israel' will be an apartheid state. Ehud Olmert has sounded a warning note on this score, but he has done nothing to stop the settlements and by starting the Gaza war he doomed what little hope there was for creating a viable Palestinian state.
The Palestinians will continue to resist the occupation, and Hamas will still be able to strike Israel with rockets and mortars, whose range and effectiveness are likely to improve. Palestinians will increasingly make the case that Greater Israel should become a democratic binational state in which Palestinians and Jews enjoy equal political rights. They know that they will eventually outnumber the Jews, which would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state. This proposal is already gaining ground among Israel's Palestinian citizens, striking fear into the hearts of many Israelis, who see them as a dangerous fifth column. This fear accounts in part for the recent Israeli decision to ban the major Arab political parties from participating in next month's parliamentary elections.
There is no reason to think that Israel's Jewish citizens would accept a binational state, and it's safe to assume that Israel's supporters in the Diaspora would have no interest in it. Apartheid is not a solution either, because it is repugnant and because the Palestinians will continue to resist, forcing Israel to escalate the repressive policies that have already cost it significant blood and treasure, encouraged political corruption, and badly tarnished its global image.
Israel may try to avoid the apartheid problem by expelling or 'transferring' the Palestinians. A substantial number of Israeli Jews – 40 per cent or more – think that the government should 'encourage' their fellow Palestinian citizens to leave. Indeed, Tzipi Livni recently said that if there is a two-state solution, she expects the Palestinians inside Israel to move to the new Palestinian state.
Why would American and European leaders intervene? The Bush administration, after all, backed Israel's creation of a major humanitarian crisis in Gaza, first with a devastating blockade and then with a brutal war. European leaders reacted to this collective punishment, which violates international law, not to mention basic decency, by upgrading Israel's relationship with the European Union.
Many in the West expect Barack Obama to ride into town and fix the situation. Don't bet on it. As his campaign showed, Obama is no match for the Israel lobby. His silence during the Gaza war speaks volumes about how tough he is likely to be with the Israelis. His chief Middle East adviser is likely to be Dennis Ross, whose deep attachment to Israel helped squander opportunities for peace during the Clinton administration.
In a recent op-ed about the Gaza war, Benny Morris said that 'it would not be surprising if more powerful explosions were to follow.' I rarely agree with Morris these days, but I think he has it right in this case. Even bigger trouble is in the offing for Israel – and above all for the Palestinians.
John Mearsheimer is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and co-author of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy.
ISSN 0260-9592 Copyright © LRB Ltd., 1997-2009
* 15 January 2009
LRB contributors react to events in Gaza
Tariq Ali
A few weeks before the assault on Gaza, the Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army published a levelheaded document on 'Hamas and Israel', which argued that 'Israel's stance towards the democratically-elected Palestinian government headed by Hamas in 2006, and towards Palestinian national coherence – legal, territorial, political and economic – has been a major obstacle to substantive peacemaking.' Whatever their reservations about the organisation, the authors of the paper detected signs that Hamas was considering a shift of position even before the blockade:
It is frequently stated that Israel or the United States cannot 'meet' with Hamas (although meeting is not illegal; materially aiding terrorism is, if proven) because the latter will not 'recognise Israel'. In contrast, the PLO has 'recognised' Israel's right to exist and agreed in principle to bargain for significantly less land than the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip, and it is not clear that Israel has ever agreed to accept a Palestinian state. The recognition of Israel did not bring an end to violence, as wings of various factions of the PLO did fight Israelis, especially at the height of the Second (al- Aqsa) Intifada. Recognition of Israel by Hamas, in the way that it is described in the Western media, cannot serve as a formula for peace. Hamas moderates have, however, signaled that it implicitly recognises Israel, and that even a tahdiya (calming, minor truce) or a hudna, a longer-term truce, obviously implies recognition. Khalid Mish'al states: 'We are realists,' and there is 'an entity called Israel,' but 'realism does not mean that you have to recognise the legitimacy of the occupation.'
The war on Gaza has killed the two-state solution by making it clear to Palestinians that the only acceptable Palestine would have fewer rights than the Bantustans created by apartheid South Africa. The only acceptable alternative is a single state for Jews and Palestinians with equal rights for all. Certainly it seems utopian at the moment with the two Palestinian parties in Israel – Balad and the United Arab List – both barred from contesting the February elections. Avigdor Lieberman, the chairman of Yisrael Beitenu, has breathed a sigh of satisfaction: 'Now that it has been decided that the Balad terrorist organisation will not be able to run, the first battle is over.' But even victory has its drawbacks. After the Six-Day War in 1967, Isaac Deutscher warned his one-time friend Ben Gurion: 'The Germans have summed up their own experience in the bitter phrase "Mann kann sich totseigen!" — you can triumph yourself to death. This is what the Israelis have been doing. They have bitten off much more than they can swallow.'
Five hundred courageous Israelis have sent a letter to Western embassies calling for sanctions and other measures to be applied against their country, echoing the 2005 call by numerous Palestinian organisations for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) on the South African model. This will not happen overnight but it is the only non-violent way to help the struggle for freedom and equality in Israel-Palestine.
Tariq Ali's latest book is The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power.
Alastair Crooke
'We have to ask the West a question: when the Israelis bombed the house of Sheikh Nizar Rayan, a Hamas leader, killing him, his wives, his nine children, and killing 19 others who happened to live in adjoining houses – because they saw him as a target – was this terrorism? If the West's answer is that this was not terrorism, it was self-defence – then we must think to adopt this definition too.'
This was said to me by a leading Islamist in Beirut a few days ago. He was making a point, but behind his rhetorical question plainly lies the deeper issue of what the Gaza violence will signify for mainstream Islamists in the future.
Take Egypt. Mubarak has made no secret of his wish to see Israel teach Hamas a 'lesson'. Hamas are sure that his officials urged Israel to proceed, assuring Amos Yadlin, Israel's Head of Military Intelligence, at a meeting in Cairo that Hamas would collapse within three days of the Israeli onslaught.
Islamists in Egypt and other pro-Western 'moderate' alliance states such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan have noted Israel's wanton disregard for the deaths of civilians in its desire to crush Hamas. They have seen the barely concealed pleasure of the regimes that run those states. The message is clear: the struggle for the future of this region is going to be uncompromising and bloody.
For all Islamists, the events in Gaza will be definitive: they will tell the story of a heroic stand in the name of justice against overwhelming odds. This archetype was already in place on the day of Ashura – which fell this year on 7 January — when Shi'ites everywhere commemorate the martyrdom of Hussein, the Prophet's grandson, killed by an overwhelming military force at Kerbala. The speeches given by Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbullah's secretary general, were avidly followed; the ceremony of Ashura drove home the message of martyrdom and sacrifice.
Islamists are likely to conclude from Gaza that Arab regimes backed by the US and some European states will go to any lengths in their struggle against Islamism. Many Sunni Muslims will turn to the salafi-jihadists, al-Qaida included, who warned Hamas and others about the kind of punishment being visited on them now. Mainstream movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Hizbullah will find it hard to resist the radical trend. The middle ground is eroding fast.
At one level Gaza will be seen as a repeat of Algeria. At another, it will speak to wider struggles in the Arab world, where elites favoured by the West soldier on with no real legitimacy, while the weight of support for change builds up. The overhang may persist for a while yet, but a small event could trip the avalanche.
Alastair Crooke is co-director of Conflicts Forum and has been an EU mediator with Hamas and other Islamist movements. Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution will come out next month.
Yitzhak Laor
We've been here before. It's a ritual. Every two or three years, our military mounts another bloody expedition. The enemy is always smaller, weaker; our military is always larger, technologically more sophisticated, prepared for full-scale war against a full-scale army. But Iran is too scary, and even the relatively small Hizbullah gave us a hard time. That leaves the Palestinians.
Israel is engaged in a long war of annihilation against Palestinian society. The objective is to destroy the Palestinian nation and drive it back into pre-modern groupings based on the tribe, the clan and the enclave. This is the last phase of the Zionist colonial mission, culminating in inaccessible townships, camps, villages, districts, all of them to be walled or fenced off, and patrolled by a powerful army which, in the absence of a proper military objective, is really an over-equipped police force, with F16s, Apaches, tanks, artillery, commando units and hi-tech surveillance at its disposal.
The extent of the cruelty, the lack of shame and the refusal of self-restraint are striking, both in anthropological terms and historically. The worldwide Jewish support for this vandal offensive makes one wonder if this isn't the moment Zionism is taking over the Jewish people.
But the real issue is that since 1991, and even more since the Oslo agreements in 1993, Israel has played on the idea that it really is trading land for peace, while the truth is very different. Israel has not given up the territories, but cantonised and blockaded them. The new strategy is to confine the Palestinians: they do not belong in our space, they are to remain out of sight, packed into their townships and camps, or swelling our prisons. This project now has the support of most of the Israeli press and academics.
We are the masters. We work and travel. They can make their living by policing their own people. We drive on the highways. They must live across the hills. The hills are ours. So are the fences. We control the roads, and the checkpoints and the borders. We control their electricity, their water, their milk, their oil, their wheat and their gasoline. If they protest peacefully we fire tear gas at them. If they throw stones, we fire bullets. If they launch a rocket, we destroy a house and its inhabitants. If they launch a missile, we destroy families, neighbourhoods, streets, towns.
Israel doesn't want a Palestinian state alongside it. It is willing to prove this with hundreds of dead and thousands of disabled, in a single 'operation'. The message is always the same: leave or remain in subjugation, under our military dictatorship. We are a democracy. We have decided democratically that you will live like dogs.
On 27 December just before the bombs started falling on Gaza, the Zionist parties, from Meretz to Yisrael Betenu, were unanimously in favour of the attack. As usual – it's the ritual again – differences emerged only over the dispatch of blankets and medication to Gaza. Our most fervent pro-war columnist, Ari Shavit, has suggested that Israel should go on with the assault and build a hospital for the victims. The enemy is wounded, bleeding, dying, desperate for help. Nobody is coming unless Obama moves – yes, we are all waiting for Godot. Maybe this time he shows up.
Yitzhak Laor lives in Tel Aviv. He is the editor of Mita'am.
John Mearsheimer
The Gaza war is not going to change relations between Israel and the Palestinians in any meaningful way. Instead, the conflict is likely to get worse in the years ahead. Israel will build more settlements and roads in the West Bank and the Palestinians will remain locked up in a handful of impoverished enclaves in Gaza and the West Bank. The two-state solution is probably dead.
'Greater Israel' will be an apartheid state. Ehud Olmert has sounded a warning note on this score, but he has done nothing to stop the settlements and by starting the Gaza war he doomed what little hope there was for creating a viable Palestinian state.
The Palestinians will continue to resist the occupation, and Hamas will still be able to strike Israel with rockets and mortars, whose range and effectiveness are likely to improve. Palestinians will increasingly make the case that Greater Israel should become a democratic binational state in which Palestinians and Jews enjoy equal political rights. They know that they will eventually outnumber the Jews, which would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state. This proposal is already gaining ground among Israel's Palestinian citizens, striking fear into the hearts of many Israelis, who see them as a dangerous fifth column. This fear accounts in part for the recent Israeli decision to ban the major Arab political parties from participating in next month's parliamentary elections.
There is no reason to think that Israel's Jewish citizens would accept a binational state, and it's safe to assume that Israel's supporters in the Diaspora would have no interest in it. Apartheid is not a solution either, because it is repugnant and because the Palestinians will continue to resist, forcing Israel to escalate the repressive policies that have already cost it significant blood and treasure, encouraged political corruption, and badly tarnished its global image.
Israel may try to avoid the apartheid problem by expelling or 'transferring' the Palestinians. A substantial number of Israeli Jews – 40 per cent or more – think that the government should 'encourage' their fellow Palestinian citizens to leave. Indeed, Tzipi Livni recently said that if there is a two-state solution, she expects the Palestinians inside Israel to move to the new Palestinian state.
Why would American and European leaders intervene? The Bush administration, after all, backed Israel's creation of a major humanitarian crisis in Gaza, first with a devastating blockade and then with a brutal war. European leaders reacted to this collective punishment, which violates international law, not to mention basic decency, by upgrading Israel's relationship with the European Union.
Many in the West expect Barack Obama to ride into town and fix the situation. Don't bet on it. As his campaign showed, Obama is no match for the Israel lobby. His silence during the Gaza war speaks volumes about how tough he is likely to be with the Israelis. His chief Middle East adviser is likely to be Dennis Ross, whose deep attachment to Israel helped squander opportunities for peace during the Clinton administration.
In a recent op-ed about the Gaza war, Benny Morris said that 'it would not be surprising if more powerful explosions were to follow.' I rarely agree with Morris these days, but I think he has it right in this case. Even bigger trouble is in the offing for Israel – and above all for the Palestinians.
John Mearsheimer is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and co-author of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy.
ISSN 0260-9592 Copyright © LRB Ltd., 1997-2009
Obama should tell Israel to face facts By Roula Khalaf
FT.com logo
Obama should tell Israel to face facts
By Roula Khalaf
Published: January 19 2009
For the past year the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas has negotiated with Israel on a peace settlement, knowing full well that nothing would come out of it. Why bother? Palestinian officials insisted a "process" was worth pursuing if only to hand the new American administration something to work with as soon as it takes office.
Barack Obama will be dragged into the Middle East conflict from day one. Unfortunately, before he picks up a peace process, he has to manage the aftermath of a devastating Gaza crisis, where a fragile ceasefire needs urgent American attention, an enraged Middle East urgently needs calm, and America's sinking image needs urgent damage control.
During Israel's 22-day offensive in Gaza, Mr Obama said very little beyond expressing concern about civilian casualties and underlining US commitment to peace. But unless he is planning to adopt a different attitude from the outgoing administration, the Middle East can brace for more bloodshed.
There have been many surreal moments over the past three weeks. One of the strangest was watching Condoleezza Rice on her last day in office as secretary of state signing a deal with Tzipi Livni, the Israeli foreign minister, and promising US assistance to curb the smuggling of weapons to Hamas in Gaza.
The memorandum of understanding made it easier for Israel to claim that it had met one of the war's main objectives and so wrap up its offensive. But as they stood in Washington congratulating each other, both officials seemed oblivious to the fact that they were making a deal about an illegal trade on someone else's border – Egypt in this case. The next day, an Egyptian official described the memorandum as "fictional".
Which brings us to one of the most important aspects of a new US approach to the region: recognition of reality. Israel may convince its public that Hamas is a thing of the past. Israelis may even buy into the claim of Ehud Olmert, the prime minister, that Hamas is the enemy of Gazans and Israel is their true friend.
But the reality is that however belligerent and unpleasant Hamas's policies may be, its popular support will not evaporate, and the organisation itself will not disappear.
So if the Obama administration wants to help Israel find security, its advice must be to face reality. Luckily for Mr Obama, there is a blueprint that recognises this and which can consolidate the ceasefire: an Egyptian initiative with which Israel played along for a few days then in effect ignored by declaring a unilateral ceasefire instead of one negotiated with Hamas, through Cairo.
Both Israel and Hamas need a way out of this conflict. Israeli leaders are basking in higher approval ratings ahead of the February 10 elections, and they want to maintain the momentum. Hamas, too, will want to avoid another punishing assault on Gaza. And the Syrian regime that backs Hamas is desperate to open a new page with the Obama administration. The US, in short, has plenty of leverage to bring about a compromise.
A ceasefire, however, will not be enough. Palestinian reconciliation, between Hamas and Mr Abbas's Palestinian Authority, which was driven out of Gaza in 2007, is the third element in the Egyptian plan – but the most important. If the US backs reconciliation instead of promoting division, as the Bush administration did, then it also has a chance to restore some legitimacy to the PA.
In spite of Mr Olmert's claims that his offensive has bolstered the PA and in spite of world leaders' embrace of Mr Abbas, he comes out of this war diminished. In Palestinian and Arab minds, those who appear to be resisting Israel's occupation and its military machine – even if they do it badly – gain legitimacy. The PA's legitimacy rests on the peace process, which has gone nowhere. So if and when Gaza has a sustainable ceasefire, the world community, now to be led by Mr Obama, will have to give the PA a fresh reason to exist.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
Obama should tell Israel to face facts
By Roula Khalaf
Published: January 19 2009
For the past year the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas has negotiated with Israel on a peace settlement, knowing full well that nothing would come out of it. Why bother? Palestinian officials insisted a "process" was worth pursuing if only to hand the new American administration something to work with as soon as it takes office.
Barack Obama will be dragged into the Middle East conflict from day one. Unfortunately, before he picks up a peace process, he has to manage the aftermath of a devastating Gaza crisis, where a fragile ceasefire needs urgent American attention, an enraged Middle East urgently needs calm, and America's sinking image needs urgent damage control.
During Israel's 22-day offensive in Gaza, Mr Obama said very little beyond expressing concern about civilian casualties and underlining US commitment to peace. But unless he is planning to adopt a different attitude from the outgoing administration, the Middle East can brace for more bloodshed.
There have been many surreal moments over the past three weeks. One of the strangest was watching Condoleezza Rice on her last day in office as secretary of state signing a deal with Tzipi Livni, the Israeli foreign minister, and promising US assistance to curb the smuggling of weapons to Hamas in Gaza.
The memorandum of understanding made it easier for Israel to claim that it had met one of the war's main objectives and so wrap up its offensive. But as they stood in Washington congratulating each other, both officials seemed oblivious to the fact that they were making a deal about an illegal trade on someone else's border – Egypt in this case. The next day, an Egyptian official described the memorandum as "fictional".
Which brings us to one of the most important aspects of a new US approach to the region: recognition of reality. Israel may convince its public that Hamas is a thing of the past. Israelis may even buy into the claim of Ehud Olmert, the prime minister, that Hamas is the enemy of Gazans and Israel is their true friend.
But the reality is that however belligerent and unpleasant Hamas's policies may be, its popular support will not evaporate, and the organisation itself will not disappear.
So if the Obama administration wants to help Israel find security, its advice must be to face reality. Luckily for Mr Obama, there is a blueprint that recognises this and which can consolidate the ceasefire: an Egyptian initiative with which Israel played along for a few days then in effect ignored by declaring a unilateral ceasefire instead of one negotiated with Hamas, through Cairo.
Both Israel and Hamas need a way out of this conflict. Israeli leaders are basking in higher approval ratings ahead of the February 10 elections, and they want to maintain the momentum. Hamas, too, will want to avoid another punishing assault on Gaza. And the Syrian regime that backs Hamas is desperate to open a new page with the Obama administration. The US, in short, has plenty of leverage to bring about a compromise.
A ceasefire, however, will not be enough. Palestinian reconciliation, between Hamas and Mr Abbas's Palestinian Authority, which was driven out of Gaza in 2007, is the third element in the Egyptian plan – but the most important. If the US backs reconciliation instead of promoting division, as the Bush administration did, then it also has a chance to restore some legitimacy to the PA.
In spite of Mr Olmert's claims that his offensive has bolstered the PA and in spite of world leaders' embrace of Mr Abbas, he comes out of this war diminished. In Palestinian and Arab minds, those who appear to be resisting Israel's occupation and its military machine – even if they do it badly – gain legitimacy. The PA's legitimacy rests on the peace process, which has gone nowhere. So if and when Gaza has a sustainable ceasefire, the world community, now to be led by Mr Obama, will have to give the PA a fresh reason to exist.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
Monday, January 19, 2009
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Bitter pill after the mourning
Bitter pill after the mourning
Paul McGeough
January 17, 2009
War sets its own hideous pace but there has to be a morning after. If, as anticipated, the smoke and ash start to clear over Gaza in the coming days, the crying by the wounded and bereaved soon will be drowned out by claim and counterclaim over who won the war.
And unless the world has taken leave of its senses, Hamas will have achieved a remarkable breakthrough - a lifting of the internationally backed siege that has made a prison of the Gaza Strip for its 1.5 million people. No doubt there will be conditions that will temper that sense of victory.
Hamas will insist that it fired rockets to the end - 25 lobbed into Israel on Thursday. But it will be a long time before it fires another.
David Horvitz, editor of the Jerusalem Post, observed: "The practical success or failure of Israel's resort to force will be measured in two areas: the degree to which Hamas is deterred from further rocket fire and the extent to which it is prevented from recovering and then expanding its military capacity."
Other yardsticks will also apply. At $US1.4 billion ($2.08 billion), the first estimate of the cost of damage caused by more than 2300 Israeli air strikes alone seems too low. In an interview with The Times in London, an Israeli officer who was in Gaza described the damage as unimaginable: "It doesn't look like we have been there for [just] a few weeks. It looks destroyed, demolished, like we were bombing it for years."
After almost three weeks of being pummelled by one of the world's bigger and technologically superior military machines, Hamas lost only a fraction of its fighters and still holds a big stockpile of rockets and other weapons, Israeli officers concede.
On the battlefield, Hamas seemed to be playing for time and that seemed to be paying off. Most estimates put its fighting force at 15,000-plus and so far Israel estimates it has killed 300 to 400 of them.
As the third week of the conflict ends, Israel is diminished in the eyes of the world. Speaking of the hundreds of dead children in Gaza, a Tel Aviv-based ambassador was quoted as telling Israel: "Your action is brutal … I don't know how to explain these things to myself, never mind to my government."
At the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem, a senior official indicated this ambassador was not alone. Acknowledging the overwhelming negativity of dispatches from embassies in Israel even before the onslaught to come - when foreign media finally gets into ravaged Gaza - the official groaned: "You see the reports in the morning and you feel ill."
The serial wrong-headedness by the US, the Europeans and Israel in their collective handling of the Palestinian issue after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington has been breathtaking. The first mistake was to paint the legitimate national claims of the Palestinians into the so-called "war on terror". That error was compounded by the global collective punishment of Palestinians for electing a Hamas government in 2006.
The siege, as described by the Ha'aretz analyst Amira Hass this week, had existed since the early 1990s and was merely refined after Hamas's election victory. "We're all big boys and girls and we know … Israel's goal was to thwart the two-state solution … ," Hass wrote.
It was then that Israel and its international sponsors decided they needed to deal with the nice "moderates" of Fatah rather than Hamas "hardliners" who had been endorsed by Palestinians because of Fatah's decades of failure.
Describing as a "dangerous idea" Israel's belief that it has a right to choose who represents the Palestinians, the Israeli commentator Yossi Alpher warned this week: "Israel has failed whenever it has tried to manipulate the structure of the Arab leadership … Israel removed the PLO from Lebanon and instead got Hezbollah. There is no telling what we'll get in Gaza if we remove Hamas, but the return of Fatah-PLO is improbable."
Speculating on the inevitable key elements of a ceasefire - rocket fire and weapons smuggling cease and border-crossings re-open - Britain's former ambassador to the United Nations, Jeremy Greenstock, lamented the tragedy in these terms: "It underlines the folly of maintaining the fiction that Hamas is beyond the pale and cannot be a partner in talks … when Hamas leaders have already indicated that they could, in the right circumstances, accept a two-state solution."
Undaunted, Israel's Foreign Ministry has already set up a "morning after" taskforce, with a key challenge to keep both Hamas and Iran out of what is expected to be a major international effort to rebuild Gaza, lest either reaps the kind of kudos Hezbollah did in the reconstruction of south Lebanon after an Israeli invasion in 2006.
Notwithstanding that Hamas is the elected government of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel wants Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority "as well as Arab and international entities" to do the work.
But the war seems to have further eroded Abbas's parlous position. West Bank Palestinians who have dared to protest against Israel's campaign in Gaza have been clubbed and beaten by Abbas's security forces and anecdotal reports from across the West Bank indicate a steady rise in support for Hamas. "[Abbas] is one of the main losers in this war," the independent Palestinian analyst Ghassan Khatib observed this week.
One of the deal-breaker issues that will cause some to scratch their heads is the smuggling tunnels between Gaza and Egypt - hundreds of them delivering everyday goods as well as arms for Hamas.
All originate on the Egyptian side of the border, which suggests Israel went to war against Gaza to achieve an outcome that could have been had in the Washington-Jerusalem-Cairo cosy corner, without squandering so much military, political and diplomatic capital.
If Israel was unable to do a deal with Egypt to close the tunnels, it might have asked for more help from Washington, which gives the Cairo regime an annual pay cheque second in largesse only to that paid to Israel. Such a deal was reportedly to be signed in Washington yesterday.
The outcome of the war will be assessed with the passage of time and, for Israel, there will be a dangerous sleeper effect - the impact of the war on the attitudes and thinking of Gazans, especially that half of the population who are teenagers or younger, and their judgment of who is to blame.
"The children of Gaza who survive this war will remember," the Ha'aretz commentator Gideon Levy wrote on Thursday. "A significant majority of the children killed in Gaza did not die because they were used as human shields or because they worked for Hamas.
"They were killed because the [Israeli Defence Forces] bombed, shelled or fired at them, their families or their apartment buildings.
"That is why the blood of Gaza's children is on our hands, not on Hamas's hands and we'll never be able to escape that responsibility. A child who has seen his house destroyed, his brother killed and his father humiliated will not forgive."
Levy's "what next?" theme was taken up by the provocative former Knesset-member Avraham Burg. Writing on Israel's repeated refusal to accept the Palestinians' chosen interlocutors, he wrote: "On the day Gaza becomes a stronghold of al-Qaeda and global radical Islam, we will discover that it was Hamas, the Hamas of today, that was not so awful."
There were signs this week that Israel's political leadership had split. Already being bundled from office on corruption allegations, the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, seemed out of touch as he manipulated ministerial meetings to prolong the Gaza war and in his public bragging of how the Israeli tail wagged the Washington dog when it came to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's vote in the UN Security Council.
The Israeli historian Avi Shlaim has a wonderful knack of tracing the arcs of Israel's history to reveal today's reality - all the talk of successive governments about the peace process has been lip service which has conceded nothing on the ground.
Even before the events of this week, when Washington dismissed Olmert as - well, as a liar, and the UN used similar language to dismiss Israel's attempt to blame Hamas for the white phosphorous bombing of the UN's emergency stores of food and medicine in Gaza, Shlaim was in his library, re-evaluating the words of John Troutbeck.
In June 1948, Troutbeck vented to Ernest Bevin, the British foreign secretary of the day, that the US had been responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders".
"I used to think this judgment was too harsh," Shlaim wrote in The Guardian. "But Israel's vicious assault on the people of Gaza and the Bush Administration's complicity, have reopened the question."
Paul McGeough is the Herald's Chief Correspondent.
This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2009/01/16/1231608986441.html
Paul McGeough
January 17, 2009
War sets its own hideous pace but there has to be a morning after. If, as anticipated, the smoke and ash start to clear over Gaza in the coming days, the crying by the wounded and bereaved soon will be drowned out by claim and counterclaim over who won the war.
And unless the world has taken leave of its senses, Hamas will have achieved a remarkable breakthrough - a lifting of the internationally backed siege that has made a prison of the Gaza Strip for its 1.5 million people. No doubt there will be conditions that will temper that sense of victory.
Hamas will insist that it fired rockets to the end - 25 lobbed into Israel on Thursday. But it will be a long time before it fires another.
David Horvitz, editor of the Jerusalem Post, observed: "The practical success or failure of Israel's resort to force will be measured in two areas: the degree to which Hamas is deterred from further rocket fire and the extent to which it is prevented from recovering and then expanding its military capacity."
Other yardsticks will also apply. At $US1.4 billion ($2.08 billion), the first estimate of the cost of damage caused by more than 2300 Israeli air strikes alone seems too low. In an interview with The Times in London, an Israeli officer who was in Gaza described the damage as unimaginable: "It doesn't look like we have been there for [just] a few weeks. It looks destroyed, demolished, like we were bombing it for years."
After almost three weeks of being pummelled by one of the world's bigger and technologically superior military machines, Hamas lost only a fraction of its fighters and still holds a big stockpile of rockets and other weapons, Israeli officers concede.
On the battlefield, Hamas seemed to be playing for time and that seemed to be paying off. Most estimates put its fighting force at 15,000-plus and so far Israel estimates it has killed 300 to 400 of them.
As the third week of the conflict ends, Israel is diminished in the eyes of the world. Speaking of the hundreds of dead children in Gaza, a Tel Aviv-based ambassador was quoted as telling Israel: "Your action is brutal … I don't know how to explain these things to myself, never mind to my government."
At the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem, a senior official indicated this ambassador was not alone. Acknowledging the overwhelming negativity of dispatches from embassies in Israel even before the onslaught to come - when foreign media finally gets into ravaged Gaza - the official groaned: "You see the reports in the morning and you feel ill."
The serial wrong-headedness by the US, the Europeans and Israel in their collective handling of the Palestinian issue after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington has been breathtaking. The first mistake was to paint the legitimate national claims of the Palestinians into the so-called "war on terror". That error was compounded by the global collective punishment of Palestinians for electing a Hamas government in 2006.
The siege, as described by the Ha'aretz analyst Amira Hass this week, had existed since the early 1990s and was merely refined after Hamas's election victory. "We're all big boys and girls and we know … Israel's goal was to thwart the two-state solution … ," Hass wrote.
It was then that Israel and its international sponsors decided they needed to deal with the nice "moderates" of Fatah rather than Hamas "hardliners" who had been endorsed by Palestinians because of Fatah's decades of failure.
Describing as a "dangerous idea" Israel's belief that it has a right to choose who represents the Palestinians, the Israeli commentator Yossi Alpher warned this week: "Israel has failed whenever it has tried to manipulate the structure of the Arab leadership … Israel removed the PLO from Lebanon and instead got Hezbollah. There is no telling what we'll get in Gaza if we remove Hamas, but the return of Fatah-PLO is improbable."
Speculating on the inevitable key elements of a ceasefire - rocket fire and weapons smuggling cease and border-crossings re-open - Britain's former ambassador to the United Nations, Jeremy Greenstock, lamented the tragedy in these terms: "It underlines the folly of maintaining the fiction that Hamas is beyond the pale and cannot be a partner in talks … when Hamas leaders have already indicated that they could, in the right circumstances, accept a two-state solution."
Undaunted, Israel's Foreign Ministry has already set up a "morning after" taskforce, with a key challenge to keep both Hamas and Iran out of what is expected to be a major international effort to rebuild Gaza, lest either reaps the kind of kudos Hezbollah did in the reconstruction of south Lebanon after an Israeli invasion in 2006.
Notwithstanding that Hamas is the elected government of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel wants Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority "as well as Arab and international entities" to do the work.
But the war seems to have further eroded Abbas's parlous position. West Bank Palestinians who have dared to protest against Israel's campaign in Gaza have been clubbed and beaten by Abbas's security forces and anecdotal reports from across the West Bank indicate a steady rise in support for Hamas. "[Abbas] is one of the main losers in this war," the independent Palestinian analyst Ghassan Khatib observed this week.
One of the deal-breaker issues that will cause some to scratch their heads is the smuggling tunnels between Gaza and Egypt - hundreds of them delivering everyday goods as well as arms for Hamas.
All originate on the Egyptian side of the border, which suggests Israel went to war against Gaza to achieve an outcome that could have been had in the Washington-Jerusalem-Cairo cosy corner, without squandering so much military, political and diplomatic capital.
If Israel was unable to do a deal with Egypt to close the tunnels, it might have asked for more help from Washington, which gives the Cairo regime an annual pay cheque second in largesse only to that paid to Israel. Such a deal was reportedly to be signed in Washington yesterday.
The outcome of the war will be assessed with the passage of time and, for Israel, there will be a dangerous sleeper effect - the impact of the war on the attitudes and thinking of Gazans, especially that half of the population who are teenagers or younger, and their judgment of who is to blame.
"The children of Gaza who survive this war will remember," the Ha'aretz commentator Gideon Levy wrote on Thursday. "A significant majority of the children killed in Gaza did not die because they were used as human shields or because they worked for Hamas.
"They were killed because the [Israeli Defence Forces] bombed, shelled or fired at them, their families or their apartment buildings.
"That is why the blood of Gaza's children is on our hands, not on Hamas's hands and we'll never be able to escape that responsibility. A child who has seen his house destroyed, his brother killed and his father humiliated will not forgive."
Levy's "what next?" theme was taken up by the provocative former Knesset-member Avraham Burg. Writing on Israel's repeated refusal to accept the Palestinians' chosen interlocutors, he wrote: "On the day Gaza becomes a stronghold of al-Qaeda and global radical Islam, we will discover that it was Hamas, the Hamas of today, that was not so awful."
There were signs this week that Israel's political leadership had split. Already being bundled from office on corruption allegations, the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, seemed out of touch as he manipulated ministerial meetings to prolong the Gaza war and in his public bragging of how the Israeli tail wagged the Washington dog when it came to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's vote in the UN Security Council.
The Israeli historian Avi Shlaim has a wonderful knack of tracing the arcs of Israel's history to reveal today's reality - all the talk of successive governments about the peace process has been lip service which has conceded nothing on the ground.
Even before the events of this week, when Washington dismissed Olmert as - well, as a liar, and the UN used similar language to dismiss Israel's attempt to blame Hamas for the white phosphorous bombing of the UN's emergency stores of food and medicine in Gaza, Shlaim was in his library, re-evaluating the words of John Troutbeck.
In June 1948, Troutbeck vented to Ernest Bevin, the British foreign secretary of the day, that the US had been responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders".
"I used to think this judgment was too harsh," Shlaim wrote in The Guardian. "But Israel's vicious assault on the people of Gaza and the Bush Administration's complicity, have reopened the question."
Paul McGeough is the Herald's Chief Correspondent.
This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2009/01/16/1231608986441.html
The Impact of Gaza by Rami G. Khouri
The Impact of Gaza
by Rami G. Khouri Released: 19 Jan 2009
BEIRUT -- Just as the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza three years ago triggered a tumultuous series of political developments that brought Palestinians and Israelis to this latest war and political confrontation, the unilateral Israeli ceasefire in Gaza that started early Sunday morning will usher in profound political changes that will transform the regional landscape for years to come.
The historic changes are already underway in three parallel arenas: within Palestinian society, between Palestine and Israel, and between the Middle East and the Western powers.
And all three have been on display this week, with four (!) different Arab summit meetings in four cities (Riyadh, Doha, Sharm esh-Sheikh and Kuwait City) -- where the military battle between Gaza and Israel continues as political battles of regional and global implication.
An ideological struggle started in the 1970s: That was when the pan-Arab nationalism of the 1950s and 60s died, organized Palestinian guerrilla groups challenged Israel and some Arab regimes, and Iranian Islamist-nationalists overthrew the Shah of Iran. The past 30 years in the Middle East has witnessed a tug-of-war between two broad camps of people and movements: those who would anchor their nationalism and development in the indigenous Arab-Islamic, Iranian-Islamic, or Turkish-Islamic identities; and those who would link their fate to the material and military inducements of vassal-like acceptance of American and Israeli interests.
The battle for Gaza captures all these elements simultaneously in a way that has never been so clear before. On the one hand, Israel relies on American, European, and some Arab support as it tries to bludgeon and starve the Palestinians of Gaza into submission, and tries to replace the surging Hamas with the wilted and discredited Palestinian Authority's President Mahmoud Abbas.
On the other hand, half a dozen major Arab, Iranian, and Turkish actors, and a clear and growing majority of regional and world public opinion, support Palestinian rights. This support is sometimes reflected in explicit support for Hamas, but mostly in solidarity with the Palestinian civilians who have stood their ground in the face of Israel's gruesome onslaught.
The unilateral Israeli ceasefire will emphasize and aggravate these trends, and will set the stage for a prolonged political struggle – a struggle that will mirror the dynamics we have witnessed on the battlefield for the past three weeks.
The core issue to watch in the coming weeks and months is the balance between Israel's desire for unilateral control and dominance versus the Palestinians' determination to achieve liberation from the Israeli-American-led siege of Gaza and desire for explicit political legitimacy by formal diplomatic engagement.
The core problem in the short run has been the Israeli desire to make unilateral decisions that affirm its total control of the situation without engaging the rising power of the Hamas movement and allied Palestinian Islamists and nationalists. Israel occupied the Gaza Strip in 1967, colonized it unilaterally, brutalized it unilaterally, pauperized it unilaterally, withdrew unilaterally, laid siege to it unilaterally, and now has attacked it and ceased-fire unilaterally. Every one of Israel's unilateral actions in recent years has failed to achieve its objectives -- and this unilateral ceasefire is also likely to fail.
The lesson that Israel seems too frenzied or stubborn to learn is that resolving the underlying Palestinian-Israeli conflict needs a negotiated agreement between two sides -- and cannot be achieved unilaterally. The historic importance of Hamas rests on its challenging Israel's unilateralist penchant in a manner that previous Palestinian movements -- especially Yasser Arafat's Fateh -- could not or dared not do.
It took advantage of the Israeli withdrawal and siege of Gaza to prepare for a military faceoff. Hamas knew it could not match Israel's superior firepower and technology, but it calculated correctly that it would gain politically by taking its stand -- and a beating -- and still emerging as the most credible Palestinian leadership.
Hamas' willingness to absorb Israel's military overkill and emerge on its feet mirrors Hizbullah's experience in Lebanon in 2006. It must be dealt with, if not today then in a few months down the road, because it represents the sort of legitimacy that few other Arab leaderships can boast. The cost in civilian lives and infrastructure has been high, which means it will be reluctant to go through the war experience again any time soon – again, similar to Hizbullah after it emerged on its feet from 34 days of fighting.
Hamas' most important immediate goal remains relieving the Israeli-American siege of Gaza, which is likely to emerge from the diplomatic discussions to come in the weeks ahead. Israel will have to stop attacking and strangulating Gaza, in return for Hamas holding its fire against southern Israel.
Both sides will say they achieved their key goals -- but Hamas will be the bigger political winner in the wake of the fighting. It will now have to use its greater political capital to operate more subtly in domestic, regional and global forums, where it will enjoy much more credibility, legitimacy and impact.
Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon.
Copyright © 2009 Rami G. Khouri – distributed by Agence Global
by Rami G. Khouri Released: 19 Jan 2009
BEIRUT -- Just as the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza three years ago triggered a tumultuous series of political developments that brought Palestinians and Israelis to this latest war and political confrontation, the unilateral Israeli ceasefire in Gaza that started early Sunday morning will usher in profound political changes that will transform the regional landscape for years to come.
The historic changes are already underway in three parallel arenas: within Palestinian society, between Palestine and Israel, and between the Middle East and the Western powers.
And all three have been on display this week, with four (!) different Arab summit meetings in four cities (Riyadh, Doha, Sharm esh-Sheikh and Kuwait City) -- where the military battle between Gaza and Israel continues as political battles of regional and global implication.
An ideological struggle started in the 1970s: That was when the pan-Arab nationalism of the 1950s and 60s died, organized Palestinian guerrilla groups challenged Israel and some Arab regimes, and Iranian Islamist-nationalists overthrew the Shah of Iran. The past 30 years in the Middle East has witnessed a tug-of-war between two broad camps of people and movements: those who would anchor their nationalism and development in the indigenous Arab-Islamic, Iranian-Islamic, or Turkish-Islamic identities; and those who would link their fate to the material and military inducements of vassal-like acceptance of American and Israeli interests.
The battle for Gaza captures all these elements simultaneously in a way that has never been so clear before. On the one hand, Israel relies on American, European, and some Arab support as it tries to bludgeon and starve the Palestinians of Gaza into submission, and tries to replace the surging Hamas with the wilted and discredited Palestinian Authority's President Mahmoud Abbas.
On the other hand, half a dozen major Arab, Iranian, and Turkish actors, and a clear and growing majority of regional and world public opinion, support Palestinian rights. This support is sometimes reflected in explicit support for Hamas, but mostly in solidarity with the Palestinian civilians who have stood their ground in the face of Israel's gruesome onslaught.
The unilateral Israeli ceasefire will emphasize and aggravate these trends, and will set the stage for a prolonged political struggle – a struggle that will mirror the dynamics we have witnessed on the battlefield for the past three weeks.
The core issue to watch in the coming weeks and months is the balance between Israel's desire for unilateral control and dominance versus the Palestinians' determination to achieve liberation from the Israeli-American-led siege of Gaza and desire for explicit political legitimacy by formal diplomatic engagement.
The core problem in the short run has been the Israeli desire to make unilateral decisions that affirm its total control of the situation without engaging the rising power of the Hamas movement and allied Palestinian Islamists and nationalists. Israel occupied the Gaza Strip in 1967, colonized it unilaterally, brutalized it unilaterally, pauperized it unilaterally, withdrew unilaterally, laid siege to it unilaterally, and now has attacked it and ceased-fire unilaterally. Every one of Israel's unilateral actions in recent years has failed to achieve its objectives -- and this unilateral ceasefire is also likely to fail.
The lesson that Israel seems too frenzied or stubborn to learn is that resolving the underlying Palestinian-Israeli conflict needs a negotiated agreement between two sides -- and cannot be achieved unilaterally. The historic importance of Hamas rests on its challenging Israel's unilateralist penchant in a manner that previous Palestinian movements -- especially Yasser Arafat's Fateh -- could not or dared not do.
It took advantage of the Israeli withdrawal and siege of Gaza to prepare for a military faceoff. Hamas knew it could not match Israel's superior firepower and technology, but it calculated correctly that it would gain politically by taking its stand -- and a beating -- and still emerging as the most credible Palestinian leadership.
Hamas' willingness to absorb Israel's military overkill and emerge on its feet mirrors Hizbullah's experience in Lebanon in 2006. It must be dealt with, if not today then in a few months down the road, because it represents the sort of legitimacy that few other Arab leaderships can boast. The cost in civilian lives and infrastructure has been high, which means it will be reluctant to go through the war experience again any time soon – again, similar to Hizbullah after it emerged on its feet from 34 days of fighting.
Hamas' most important immediate goal remains relieving the Israeli-American siege of Gaza, which is likely to emerge from the diplomatic discussions to come in the weeks ahead. Israel will have to stop attacking and strangulating Gaza, in return for Hamas holding its fire against southern Israel.
Both sides will say they achieved their key goals -- but Hamas will be the bigger political winner in the wake of the fighting. It will now have to use its greater political capital to operate more subtly in domestic, regional and global forums, where it will enjoy much more credibility, legitimacy and impact.
Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon.
Copyright © 2009 Rami G. Khouri – distributed by Agence Global
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)