Brits planned to cut off Nile in 1956

Freshly released from Her British Majesty’s National Archives:

Military officials believed they could harm agriculture and cut communications by reducing the flow of water, newly-released documents show.

The plan was outlined to Prime Minister Anthony Eden six weeks before British and French forces invaded Egypt.

But it was abandoned because of fears it would trigger a violent backlash.

Under the plan, Britain would have used a dam in Uganda to reduce water levels in the White Nile by seven-eighths.

But planners realised that the scheme would take months to work, and could also harm other states such as Kenya and Uganda.

One British official noted that the plan, while unworkable, could still be useful.

“It might be possible to spread the word among the more illiterate Egyptians that ‘unless Nasser climbs down, Britain will cut off the Nile’,” Cabinet official John Hunt was revealed to have said.

So basically their idea was, hey, maybe if we start a famine in Egypt it will bring down Nasser. Real classy.

Times and Times again

Here we go again. Another attempt at local English-language news reporting, this time in Palestine, according to AP.

The Palestine Times, available on the internet in crude but workable PDF format, is on issue no. 4 as of today.

If, as the editor claims, the Palestine Times isn’t going to be beholden to any particular political or commercial interest, then this could a good thing. Palestine, as much as Egypt, needs a way of laying out local events from a local perspective in a way that is comprehensible and credible to a western audience.

Jamai on the PJD polls

Abou Bakr Jamai, editor of Morocco’s only truly independent publication, Le Journal Hebdo, has an interesting post on his WaPo blog about the biggest political controversy of the moment in Morocco: polls that indicate the Islamist PJD party is set to come about 30% ahead of the next party in next year’s parliamentary election.

When first asked about the party they would vote for, Moroccans chose the socialist party with 13% in support. The Islamist PJD party ranked third with 9%. But more than 55% of the citizens polled claimed to be undecided. When those 55% were asked to make up their mind one way or the other, more than 66% chose the Islamist party. That gives the PJD a tremendous lead over the other parties.

These figures are interesting in that they show that the portion of the electorate that gives the PJD such overwhelming support are not diehard PJD followers. When asked about what qualities a political party should have to be effective, Moroccans cite honesty, fighting corruption, and responsiveness to citizens’ needs as the main attributes. These are attributes that a secular party could perfectly claim.

So true of many other Arab countries.

There was a profile of Bou Bakr in the New Yorker [scanned 7.2MB PDF, it’s not available online] in October, and I highly recommend it. It captures Bou Bakr quite well, including the incredible stubbornness that is his greatest strength and greatest flaw. The Arab world needs more people like him.

Slaughter House Iraq

Trust Patrick Cockburn to see the big pictures that papers like the Post and the Times don’t seem to want to admit.

Civil war is raging across central Iraq, home to a third of the country’s 27 million people. As Shia and Sunni flee each other’s neighbourhoods, Iraq is turning into a country of refugees.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees says that 1.6 million are displaced within the country and a further 1.8 million have fled abroad. In Baghdad, neighbouring Sunni and Shia districts have started to fire mortars at each other. On the day Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death, I phoned a friend in a Sunni area of the capital to ask what he thought of the verdict. He answered impatiently that “I was woken up this morning by the explosion of a mortar bomb on the roof of my next-door neighbour’s house. I am more worried about staying alive myself than what happens to Saddam.”

Iraqi friends used to reassure me that there would be no civil war because so many Shia and Sunni were married to each other. These mixed couples are now being compelled to divorce by their families. “I love my husband but my family has forced me to divorce him because we are Shia and he is Sunni,” said Hiba Sami, a mother, to a UN official. “My family say they [the husband’s family] are insurgents … and that living with him is an offence to God.” Members of mixed marriages had set up an association to protect each other called the Union for Peace in Iraq but they were soon compelled to dissolve it when several founding members were murdered.

Saudis want to ‘protect’ Iraqi Sunnis

The craziest and most dangerous article I have seen in a long time. If the Saudis really started massively arming and financing Sunni insurgent groups in Iraq, we’d probably have a 20-year Persian Gulf war.

Over the past year, a chorus of voices has called for Saudi Arabia to protect the Sunni community in Iraq and thwart Iranian influence there. Senior Iraqi tribal and religious figures, along with the leaders of Egypt, Jordan and other Arab and Muslim countries, have petitioned the Saudi leadership to provide Iraqi Sunnis with weapons and financial support. Moreover, domestic pressure to intervene is intense. Major Saudi tribal confederations, which have extremely close historical and communal ties with their counterparts in Iraq, are demanding action. They are supported by a new generation of Saudi royals in strategic government positions who are eager to see the kingdom play a more muscular role in the region.

Because King Abdullah has been working to minimize sectarian tensions in Iraq and reconcile Sunni and Shiite communities, because he gave President Bush his word that he wouldn’t meddle in Iraq (and because it would be impossible to ensure that Saudi-funded militias wouldn’t attack U.S. troops), these requests have all been refused. They will, however, be heeded if American troops begin a phased withdrawal from Iraq. As the economic powerhouse of the Middle East, the birthplace of Islam and the de facto leader of the world’s Sunni community (which comprises 85 percent of all Muslims), Saudi Arabia has both the means and the religious responsibility to intervene.

On the upside, this would probably bring down the al-Sauds in the long term. But probably even then, it’s not worth it. One also wonders whether its publication (alongside with that leaked Hadley memo) isn’t meant to scare Maliki for his meeting with Bush.