Month: January 2007

John Burns does not know what the shahada is

From the Angry Arab:

An American correspondent in the Middle East sent me this:
“Today the Iraqi government held a one time screening of the most recent execution video of barzan ibrahim and awad hamed al bandar, with no cameras allowed. Bandar was very scared and crying. He was saying the shahada. Journalists asked if Bandar said the shahada. New york times bureau chief and veteran middle east correspondent John Burns asked Basem Ridha, Nouri al Maliki’s spokesman what the shahada was. Basem said that it was the Islamic creed. “whats that?” asked John Burns. Journalists explained that it was “”There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his messenger.”

Wow. At least four or five years in and out in the Middle East, including several as the NYT’s bureau chief in Baghdad, and John Burns doesn’t know what the shahada is. And this is arguably the NYT’s top foreign correspondent. Do you see why I don’t want to read their Middle East coverage? It’s not just the bias, but the caliber of the reporters that’s outrageous.

Secret Israeli-Syrian talks revealed

Haaretz has revealed that secret talks to end the Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights have been taking place since 2004. See the story, the document drafted during the talks, and how the secret talks started, first with Turkish mediation and then through a mysterious European mediator. The deal has described seems fairly favorable to Israel, especially concerning the establishment of a large “park” accessible to both Israelis and Syrians, on military arrangements, and perhaps most importantly in granting a lot of water rights to Israelis. On the other hand, of course, Syria gets back land it would probably otherwise only get back by force.

Haaretz outlines the main points:

The main points of the understandings are as follows:

An agreement of principles will be signed between the two countries, and following the fulfillment of all commitments, a peace agreement will be signed.

As part of the agreement on principles, Israel will withdraw from the Golan Heights to the lines of 4 June, 1967. The timetable for the withdrawal remained open: Syria demanded the pullout be carried out over a five-year period, while Israel asked for the withdrawal to be spread out over 15 years.

At the buffer zone, along Lake Kinneret, a park will be set up for joint use by Israelis and Syrians. The park will cover a significant portion of the Golan Heights. Israelis will be free to access the park and their presence will not be dependent on Syrian approval.

Israel will retain control over the use of the waters of the Jordan River and Lake Kinneret.

The border area will be demilitarized along a 1:4 ratio (in terms of territory) in Israel’s favor.

According to the terms, Syria will also agree to end its support for Hezbollah and Hamas and will distance itself from Iran.

This, combined with economic aid and political guarantees, could be enough to draw the Syrians away from the Iranian camp — which perhaps would make it worth it for Israel to face the domestic opposition to returning the Golan Heights.

Hamas leader has power to speak with punctuation

Do you think there’s a problem with the story below:

GAZA (Reuters) – Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh said on Monday the Islamist militant group Hamas would never recognize Israel.

Haniyeh, a Hamas leader, said in an interview from Gaza with Lebanese guerrilla group Hezbollah’s al-Manar television: “Hamas will never recognize the legitimacy of the occupation (Israel).”

“Hamas will never show flexibility over the issue of recognizing the legitimacy of the occupation,” he added.

Does Ismail Haniyeh have the power to speak in parentheses? Did he do a little sign with his hands and say “Israel” after he said “never recognize the legitimacy of the occupation”?

I am quite willing to believe that Haniyeh would make contradictory statements about his position on Israel, but the above quote hardly seems to be as conclusive as the story’s headline and lead.

natural bedfellows

It’ll be interesting to see whether the IHT hits Cairo newstands (has hit the newsstands? when does the print edition come out?) with a Michael Slackman piece intact. The article is more than a little critical of the Egyptian regime and of Condi’s support for it, and, while it is posted on the IHT and NYT websites, it will give the boys down at the Ministry of Info no great pleasure if they are told they have to let it through here.

Cairo: In the days before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met with officials in Egypt, the news media here were filled with stories detailing charges of corruption, cronyism, torture and political repression.

And Slackman then fills out his lead: police torture on video, contaminated blood being distributed, journalists getting arrested. He gives Ibrahim Eissa space for a quote on regime duplicity and political tensions, lets Hafez Abou Saada say the usual, and runs through a short list of the kind of reforms instituted since 2005 (back when Condi was making those huffy puffy noises that sounded to some like criticism of beating protestors and fixing elections):

Since then, Egypt’s government has piled up a long list of repressive actions, including ordering the police to block people from voting in parliamentary elections; delaying local elections by two years; imprisoning an opposition leader, Ayman Nour, on charges widely seen as politically motivated; battling with judges who have demanded oversight of elections; and imprisoning Talaat el-Sadat, a member of Parliament and the nephew of President Anwar el-Sadat, for a year in a military jail after he criticized the armed forces on television.

And he twists it closed nicely at the end, juxtaposing the experience of some Wafd members who tried to do something about sewage in their village (you guessed it, friendly visits from security) and Condi’s latest public message to Egyptians:

“I especially want to thank President Mubarak for receiving me and for spending so much time with me to talk about the issues of common interest here in the Middle East,” Ms. Rice said. “Obviously the relationship with Egypt is an important strategic relationship — one that we value greatly.”

Thanks for clearing that up Condi.

The depressing part, however, is the point that Slackman raises in the middle of his article. Shalit’s still walled up in little cell under Gaza somewhere and Fatah and Hamas are going at it like a bunch of well-armed soccer hooligans. So what does Washington have to gain these days in exchange for its complicity in the very public human rights violations of the Mubarak regime? Are they anticipating an imminent need to outsource the questioning of Gitmo releasees to the Lazoughly Interrogation Company?

Ultimately, Condi’s stance looks at best like knee-jerk retrenchment in the face of the utter failure, and at worst like somebody taking comfort in the arms of like-minded friends.

Politics doesn’t always make strange bedfellows, it seems.

Saddam hanging a wedding gift from Maliki?

From IraqSlogger:

A United Nations source has confirmed what at first seemed like an impossible rumor, that Saddam’s execution may have been a wedding present from Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki to his daughter. Other sources maintain it was his son who was married on the day of Saddam’s execution. It is also possible that this wedding would have been innocuous or coincidental as Shias cannot get married for the next two months because of their holiness, hence many marry on Eid.

I doubt this is true… and if it is it suggests Maliki has the same sense of the grotesque as Saddam did.

More depressingly, posters lamenting the death of Saddam have been sighted across the Arab world, apparently, bearing the inscription “Saddam Hussein: the man died, the hero lives” or some such nonsense. Here’s a pic I took in Attaba near Ezbekeya Gardens. Sorry for the lousy pic quality.

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Egyptian spy satellite

Egypt is about to launch a spy satellite:

Egypt will be able to spy on Israel from outer space if it successfully launches a new spy satellite Tuesday from Kazakhstan. The cameras on the EgyptSat 1 vehicle will be able to transmit photographs of objects four meters (13 feet) wide.

I guess they’re trying to keep track of Rami Lakah.

Updated since 15 Jan: Apparently the satellite will be used for remote sensing — officially at least.

“We need to use the Americans to fight the Shia”

The Guardian has a fascinating article on the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, including this interview with an arms dealer:

Rami was no longer involved in fighting, he said, but made a tidy profit selling weapons and ammunition to men in his north Baghdad neighbourhood. Until the last few months, the insurgency got by with weapons and ammunition looted from former Iraqi army depots. But now that Sunnis were besieged in their neighbourhoods and fighting daily clashes with the better-equipped Shia ministry of interior forces, they needed new sources of weapons and money.

He told me that one of his main suppliers had been an interpreter working for the US army in Baghdad. “He had a deal with an American officer. We bought brand new AKs and ammunition from them.” He claimed the American officer, whom he had never met but he believed was a captain serving at Baghdad airport, had even helped to divert a truckload of weapons as soon as it was driven over the border from Jordan.

These days Rami gets most of his supplies from the new American-equipped Iraqi army. “We buy ammunition from officers in charge of warehouses, a small box of AK-47 bullets is $450 (£230). If the guy sells a thousand boxes he can become rich and leave the country.” But as the security situation deteriorates, Rami finds it increasingly difficult to travel across Baghdad. “Now I have to pay a Shia taxi driver to bring the ammo to me. He gets $50 for each shipment.”

The box of 700 bullets that Rami buys for $450 today would have cost between $150 and $175 a year ago. The price of a Kalashnikov has risen from $300 to $400 in the same period. The inflation in arms prices reflects Iraq’s plunge toward civil war but, largely unnoticed by the outside world, the Sunni insurgency has also changed. The conflict into which 20,000 more American troops will be catapulted over the next few weeks is very different to the one their comrades experienced even a year ago.

Most of the article is about the shift in the Sunni insurgency in their view towards US troops. Here’s what one insurgent said:

He was more despondent than angry. “We Sunni are to blame,” he said. “In my area some ignorant al-Qaida guys have been kidnapping poor Shia farmers, killing them and throwing their bodies in the river. I told them: ‘This is not jihad. You can’t kill all the Shia! This is wrong! The Shia militias are like rabid dogs – why provoke them?’ “

Then he said: “I am trying to talk to the Americans. I want to give them assurances that no one will attack them in our area if they stop the Shia militias from coming.”

This man who had spent the last three years fighting the Americans was now willing to talk to them, not because he wanted to make peace but because he saw the Americans as the lesser of two evils. He was wrestling with the same dilemma as many Sunni insurgent leaders, beginning to doubt the wisdom of their alliance with al-Qaida extremists.

Well they should have thought of that a long time ago… Do read the whole article, it’s quite provocative.

Update: Here is a related report from regular Arabist reader Andrew Exum that argues that the Iraqi civil war is a war of militias. He concludes:

It is by no means clear that the U.S. military has sufficient resources to accomplish the tasks outlined by civilian policymakers, namely the pacification of Iraq. In particular, although it may still be possible to constrain the Iraqi militias, the U.S. military does not have the resources on the ground necessary to fight a major battle in which militia elimination is the goal. It would be better instead to concentrate on training the Iraqi military, while keeping order on the streets as much as possible and working with the Iraqi government to provide jobs and security and to preempt the worst sectarian violence. Admittedly, these modest goals are not necessarily sufficient to achieve the ambitious victory articulated by President Bush this week, but are nevertheless as much as can realistically be expected from U.S. soldiers and Marines in the current environment.

I find that conclusion a rather tall order — judging from past performance and the sheer amount of hatred involved (not to mention incitation from Iran and Saudi Arabia among others), even this outcome is not realistic. I hope I am wrong, since the alternative that will sooner or later prove tempting will be letting one side win to stop the war.

The Economist does its bit for Zion

The Economist, true to its (for the last few years at least) increasingly pro-Israel tilt (in the leaders, not the reporting), attempts at an analysis of Khaled Meshaal’s recent remark that Israel exists:

Why, then, the stubborn refusal to just go the extra yard and recognise Israel now, especially as the result is the crushing sanctions regime? Many members of Hamas say that they will not recognise Israel’s right to exist and may not do so even if Israel were to withdraw right back to the pre-1967 “green line”. The official ideology of Hamas is clear enough. It refuses in principle the idea of a Jewish state in any part of Palestine at all. Israel’s position, on the other hand, is that it accepts the right of the Palestinians to a state in the West Bank and Gaza, but says that the final border should be set by negotiation. (Although Israel also says it wants to keep some of the West Bank’s land for existing settlements and security purposes.) There may be another reason for Hamas’s intransigence that has nothing to do with Israel’s stance: recognising Israel could lose it the support of its biggest foreign ally, Iran.

So if Hamas recognized an Israeli state, but was not willing to settle on borders, and perhaps had in mind just Tel Aviv, would that be ok? Accepting the Israelis’ definition of what they recognize Palestine to be is ridiculous — particularly as their “negotiated” plans have been unacceptable to Palestinians, or for that matter international law. You might even argue that Meshaal’s statement is in fact a much more honest and generous one since he delineated Israel along the 1967 borders — even though the Palestinian claim to 1948 Palestine is entirely legitimate. It is completely dishonest to label Hamas, which appears to be making efforts towards a 1967 borders compromise, as the unreasonable partner here. And the throwaway comment about Iran at the end is risible if not backed with some sort of evidence that Hamas is thinking this way.

More pathetic even is the following:

In its attempts to regain control, Hamas is resorting to the same tactics of co-option and strong-arming that made Fatah despised. Even if it were to do an about-face and accept all the world’s conditions, it is doubtful that it could reassert the role it was meant to play as an elected government. The hair-splitting dispute over words is just another a depressing indication that neither side is yet ready to make a serious push for peace.

Basically, a position that benefits the status quo, and thus Israel. You’re not likely to see the Economist pressing the Israelis anytime soon, it seems.