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White House criticizes Egypt on rights

White House criticizes Egypt on rights:

NEW YORK – The White House on Monday voiced displeasure with recent decisions in Egypt to crack down on dissenting voices within the media and to close a human rights group, saying it is “deeply concerned” about the moves.

“These latest decisions appear to contradict the Egyptian government’s stated commitment to expand democratic rights,” White House press secretary Dana Perino said.

The unusual public statement of discontent with the leadership in Egypt came as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was having dinner in New York with Egypt’s foreign minister.

One supposes that this may have more to do with being embarrassed by the Washington Post again than anything else — another statement that carries no teeth and serves a domestic purpose.

Kassem given award, Diehl on Egyptian press

It’s with great pride that I learned that my friend and former boss Hisham Kassem, until a few months ago the publisher of al-Masri al-Youm, was given a well-earned National Endowment for Democracy 2007 Democracy Award. I also knew that he and the other recipients (from Burma, Thailand and Venezuela) got to spend 55 minutes with President Bush. Today Washington Post columnist Jackson Diehl, who has led the newspaper’s campaign against the Egyptian regime, raises the issue of press freedom in Egypt and debriefed Kassem about his meeting with W:

The Egyptian publisher Hisham Kassem was in Washington last week to pick up the National Endowment for Democracy’s prestigious annual Democracy Award, in recognition of his role in jump-starting a free Egyptian press. Along with two other honorees, he spent nearly an hour in the Oval Office with President Bush, who spoke with feeling about his “freedom agenda” and his intention to pursue it after he leaves office.

But Kassem could not help but feel a little depressed. While he was being honored, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was directing a frontal assault against the island of liberty Kassem helped to create in Cairo — independent newspapers that have subjected Mubarak’s rotting autocracy to serious scrutiny for the first time. And hardly anyone in Washington seemed to care.

“Egypt was the least of his priorities,” Kassem said of Bush, who spoke more enthusiastically during their meeting about pushing for democracy in Burma, Venezuela and Russia. “You can feel Egypt is on the back burner right now. Everyone is in despair about the situation.”

Having spent some time with Egypt-watchers in and out of the administration in Washington last May, I came to the same conclusion.

Carnegie: “U.S. Democracy Promotion During and After Bush”

From the summary of a new Carnegie report, U.S. Democracy Promotion During and After Bush:

Despite sweeping rhetoric about the global spread of democracy, the Bush Administration has significantly damaged U.S. democracy promotion efforts and increased the number of close ties with “friendly tyrants,” concludes a new report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Security interests, such as the war on terrorism, and U.S. energy needs have led the Bush Administration to maintain friendly, unchallenged relations with more than half of the forty-five “non-free” countries in the world.

Carnegie Vice President for Studies Thomas Carothers argues in his new report, U.S. Democracy Promotion During and After Bush, that the main U.S. presidential candidates have voiced support for democracy promotion, but not yet outlined plans to put it back on track. Carothers analyzes the Bush Administration’s record on democracy promotion and its effect on democracy worldwide, and then presents fresh ideas about the role democracy promotion can and should play in future U.S. policies.

Key recommendations after the jump — the report argues for new pressure on Egypt and Pakistan. Here’s the bit on Egypt in the report:

At the same time, the next administration should do more to push America’s many autocratic friends on democracy and human rights issues. Dramatic or decisive measures are almost never available in such situations, and finding a productive balance between the con- tending interests at stake is always difficult. The temptation to follow the path of least resistance—uncritically embracing the friendly tyrant—is inevitably strong. Yet, in some cases a better approach is possible, one that does not overlook democracy yet is still compatible with other interests.

Egypt is one example. The Bush administration has made a mistake in giving up its push for Egyptian political reform. The Mubarak government is indeed a useful regional security partner for the United States. But as some noted Egypt experts have pointed out, the United States maintained good security relations with Cairo even at the height of the short-lived U.S. push on democracy. Mubarak’s current political crackdown is stifling what was a genuine possibility for badly needed inclusive, pluralistic political change in his country. Washington has only limited influence on Egyptian politics, but it does have some. Focusing diplomatic attention on key issues—such as establishing an independent electoral commission, opening up the legalization process of political parties, and reducing human rights violations—would help increase the chance of a more open, democratic leadership succession in Egypt. Such a transition would be good for Egypt’s long-term political health, which in turn would be good for the U.S. government’s long-term security interests in the country.

There are no indications on how to pursue this, however. As a Bush administration official who worked on this subject once told me, there is no one to talk to in Egypt (within the regime) who is willing to go down the path of even limited genuine reform. It’s being blocked at the highest level, and the uncertainty over succession does not encourage bold steps.

Update: Here is a WaPo op-ed by the author of the report, Thomas Carothers.

Continue reading Carnegie: “U.S. Democracy Promotion During and After Bush”

US lying about violence in Iraq!? Say it ain’t so.

Experts Doubt Drop In Violence in Iraq – washingtonpost.com:

The U.S. military’s claim that violence has decreased sharply in Iraq in recent months has come under scrutiny from many experts within and outside the government, who contend that some of the underlying statistics are questionable and selectively ignore negative trends.

Reductions in violence form the centerpiece of the Bush administration’s claim that its war strategy is working. In congressional testimony Monday, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, is expected to cite a 75 percent decrease in sectarian attacks. According to senior U.S. military officials in Baghdad, overall attacks in Iraq were down to 960 a week in August, compared with 1,700 a week in June, and civilian casualties had fallen 17 percent between December 2006 and last month. Unofficial Iraqi figures show a similar decrease.

Others who have looked at the full range of U.S. government statistics on violence, however, accuse the military of cherry-picking positive indicators and caution that the numbers — most of which are classified — are often confusing and contradictory. “Let’s just say that there are several different sources within the administration on violence, and those sources do not agree,” Comptroller General David Walker told Congress on Tuesday in releasing a new Government Accountability Office report on Iraq.

Via Scott Horton, who wrote a letter to the editor of the Washington Post for burying this important story on numbers manipulation in deep inside the newspaper just as whether the US stays in Iraq is the dominant political issue of the day. Walker also notes, as I did with some alarm a few days ago, that the Post appears to be going to its bad old 2003 ways with regards to Iran, notably by publishing this attack on Mohamed al-Baradei several days ago.

For a more general take on Iraq, George Packer has a long piece in the current New Yorker that touches on how compliant the media continues to be:

This week, Ryan Crocker, the U.S. Ambassador in Baghdad, and General David Petraeus, the commander of the multinational forces in Iraq, will give their assessment of the surge to Congress—an event that, in Washington, has taken on the aura of a make-or-break moment for the Administration’s policy. But their testimony is likely to be unremarkable. Administration officials, military officers, and members of Congress described their expectations of it in strikingly similar terms, and a few said that they could write it in advance: military progress, a political stalemate among Iraqis, more time needed.

The Petraeus-Crocker testimony is the kind of short-lived event on which the Administration has relied to shore up support for the war: the “Mission Accomplished” declaration, the deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein, Saddam’s capture, the transfer of sovereignty, the three rounds of voting, the Plan for Victory, the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Every new milestone, however illusory, allows the Administration to avoid thinking ahead, to the years when the mistakes of Iraq will continue to haunt the U.S.

The media have largely followed the Administration’s myopic approach to the war, and there is likely to be intense coverage of the congressional testimony. But the inadequacy of the surge is already clear, if one honestly assesses the daily lives of Iraqis. Though the streets of Baghdad are marginally less lethal than they were during 2006, sixty thousand Iraqis a month continue to leave their homes, according to the International Organization for Migration, joining the two million who have become refugees and the two million others displaced inside Iraq. The militias, which have become less conspicuous as they wait out the surge, are nevertheless growing in strength, as they extend their control over neighborhoods like Ahmed’s. In the backstreets, the local markets, the university classrooms, and other realms beyond the reach of American observers or American troops, there is no rule of law, only the rule of the gun.

The Packer piece also looks at some suggestions, from an American perspective, of long term strategic issues that will have to be dealt with as a consequence of the Iraqi civil war. One of the more pessimistic views:

Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert at Queen Mary College of the University of London, who also served on the strategic-assessment team, told me, “What has defeated America in Iraq, apart from the failure of the state and its own incompetence, are a bunch of radicals with nothing more sophisticated than reëngineered artillery shells and rocket-propelled grenades. That is a loss of cataclysmic proportions.”
Dodge comes out of the British left and vehemently opposed the war. But this summer, when we met at his London office, he spoke of withdrawal as a prelude to catastrophe. “What are the U.S. troops going to leave?” he said. “They’re going to leave behind a free-for-all where everyone will be fighting everyone else—a civil war that no one actor or organization will be strong enough to win. So that war will go on and on. What will result in the end is the solidification of pockets of geographical coherence. So if you and I were mad enough to jump in a car in Basra—pick a date, 2015—and we tried to drive to Mosul, what we’d be doing is hopping through islands of comparative stability dominated by warlords who, through their own organizational brilliance, or more likely through external support, have managed to set up fiefdoms. Those fiefdoms will be surrounded by ongoing violence and chaos. That looks a lot to me like Afghanistan before the rise of the Taliban. Or Somalia. That’s where Iraq goes when Americans pull out.”

One thing that I would like to see is some local Arab perspective on the long-term impact of the invasion of Iraq. Do Syrians, Jordanians, Saudis, etc. believe it can be contained? Will a country like Egypt, that is not a neighbor of Iraq but an important regional player, also have to suffer the consequences (perhaps losing strategic importance compared to powerful players in Iraq such as Saudi Arabia and Iran)? Will the regional focus shift eastward? Will we have to deal with, from Syria to Morocco, with continuing jihadist agitation and recruitment to fight Americans, or Shias, in Iraq? And, if Iraq today is turning into the Afghanistan of the 1990s, what happens when the veterans of Iraq come back to their countries of origin?

Maryland bans Israel junkets

Ban on Political Junkets to Israel Deals Blow to Lobbying Efforts – Forward.com:

Washington – In a challenge to one of the most powerful lobbying tactics used by the Jewish community, a county in Maryland decided last week that local legislators could no longer go on sponsored trips to Israel.

Montgomery County’s ethics commission decided last month that council members are prohibited from traveling at the expense of the local Jewish community, even when funding is indirectly provided by a private foundation. A trip planned months in advance was subsequently canceled.

“We were stunned by the commission’s decision,” said Ron Halber, executive director of the Greater Washington Jewish Community Relations Council, which organized the trip.

In an e-mail to a Montgomery County legislator, the ethics commission wrote that “the routing of monies through a lobbyist organization to provide travel services makes the gift unacceptable.”

The decision has such weight because sponsored trips to Israel are widely used by Jewish groups both nationally and locally to build support for Israel among non-Jewish leaders and to cultivate one-to-one relationships between American and Israeli leaders. On a national level, the trips have recently come under scrutiny amid the scandals surrounding Washington lobbyists and their relationships with lawmakers. The Montgomery County decision now brings the dilemma to the local level, as communities face the need to adjust to the changing winds in Washington and growing concerns about the power of lobbyists.

Someone needs to campaign to make the ban nationwide.

Military against Iran invasion?

Andrew Exum offers reasons against war on Iran, from a military perspective:

Leaving aside the relative merits of a strike against the Iranians, why might America’s military resist such action? First, consider the fact that the US has at the moment 162,000 troops in Iraq, 30,000 in Kuwait, 4,500 in Bahrain and 3,300 in Qatar – not to mention the two carrier battle groups in the Gulf or the 8,500 troops on the ground in Afghanistan. In the event of an American or Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities, for example, the troops in Iraq, the Gulf and Afghanistan would be in even greater danger than they already are, vulnerable to an Iranian counterattack or, more likely, an Iranian-sponsored terror campaign.

Second, there exists a tremendous sense of guilt among the US senior officer corps for what is seen as a failure to stand up to the civilian leadership in the rush to go to war against Iraq in 2002 and 2003. Much of the current divide between America’s generals and its junior officer corps boils down to a sense on the part of junior officers that their superiors largely acquiesced to whatever Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in the run-up to the Iraq war. The charge of spinelessness is one that hurts America’s generals, especially as it comes from lieutenants and captains who have proven themselves on the battlefield of Iraq.

Third, in the wake of the Iraq war, professional military officers are more suspicious than ever of think-tank types with theories on how easy military victories can be achieved. As an active-duty US Army officer recently told me: “If I hear one more lawyer with no military experience explain to me how air power alone really can do it this time, I’m going to kill him.”

Can’t we just have a military coup right now, please?

The Great Iraq Swindle

As the controversy over a dodgy arms procurement contract involving someone close to General David “Jesus Christ The Savior” Petraeus evolves, becoming both a corruption and a security scandal, do read the fantastic and expletive-filled Rolling Stone article on the contracting in Iraq. Choice excerpts below.

The Great Iraq Swindle – Rolling Stone:

A few months later, in March 2004, your company magically wins a contract from the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq to design and build the Baghdad Police College, a facility that’s supposed to house and train at least 4,000 police recruits. But two years and $72 million later, you deliver not a functioning police academy but one of the great engineering clusterfucks of all time, a practically useless pile of rubble so badly constructed that its walls and ceilings are literally caked in shit and piss, a result of subpar plumbing in the upper floors.

You’ve done such a terrible job, in fact, that when auditors from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction visit the college in the summer of 2006, their report sounds like something out of one of the Saw movies: “We witnessed a light fixture so full of diluted urine and feces that it would not operate,” they write, adding that “the urine was so pervasive that it had permanently stained the ceiling tiles” and that “during our visit, a substance dripped from the ceiling onto an assessment team member’s shirt.” The final report helpfully includes a photo of a sloppy brown splotch on the outstretched arm of the unlucky auditor.

. . .

The system not only had the advantage of eliminating red tape in a war zone, it also encouraged the “entrepreneurship” of patriots like Custer and Battles, who went from bumming cab fare to doing $100 million in government contracts practically overnight. And what business they did! The bid that Custer claimed to have spent “three sleepless nights” putting together was later described by Col. Richard Ballard, then the inspector general of the Army, as looking “like something that you and I would write over a bottle of vodka, complete with all the spelling and syntax errors and annexes to be filled in later.” The two simply “presented it the next day and then got awarded about a $15 million contract.”

The deal charged Custer Battles with the responsibility to perform airport security for civilian flights. But there were never any civilian flights into Baghdad’s airport during the life of their contract, so the CPA gave them a job managing an airport checkpoint, which they failed miserably. They were also given scads of money to buy expensive X-ray equipment and set up an advanced canine bomb-sniffing system, but they never bought the equipment. As for the dog, Ballard reported, “I eventually saw one dog. The dog did not appear to be a certified, trained dog.” When the dog was brought to the checkpoint, he added, it would lie down and “refuse to sniff the vehicles” — as outstanding a metaphor for U.S. contractor performance in Iraq as has yet been produced.

Like most contractors, Custer Battles was on a cost-plus arrangement, which means its profits were guaranteed to rise with its spending. But according to testimony by officials and former employees, the partners also charged the government millions by making out phony invoices to shell companies they controlled. In another stroke of genius, they found a bunch of abandoned Iraqi Airways forklifts on airport property, repainted them to disguise the company markings and billed them to U.S. tax payers as new equipment. Every time they scratched their asses, they earned; there was so much money around for contractors, officials literally used $100,000 wads of cash as toys. “Yes — $100 bills in plastic wrap,” Frank Willis, a former CPA official, acknowledged in Senate testimony about Custer Battles. “We played football with the plastic-wrapped bricks for a little while.”

The conclusion:

According to the most reliable estimates, we have doled out more than $500 billion for the war, as well as $44 billion for the Iraqi reconstruction effort. And what did America’s contractors give us for that money? They built big steaming shit piles, set brand-new trucks on fire, drove back and forth across the desert for no reason at all and dumped bags of nails in ditches. For the most part, nobody at home cared, because war on some level is always a waste. But what happened in Iraq went beyond inefficiency, beyond fraud even. This was about the business of government being corrupted by the profit motive to such an extraordinary degree that now we all have to wonder how we will ever be able to depend on the state to do its job in the future. If catastrophic failure is worth billions, where’s the incentive to deliver success? There’s no profit in patriotism, no cost-plus angle on common decency. Sixty years after America liberated Europe, those are just words, and words don’t pay the bills.

But don’t expect anyone to be held accountable.

Think-tanker calls for Bush dictatorship, genocide of Arabs

Philip Atkinson, a writer for the conservative think tank Family Security Matters has penned a call for US President George W. Bush to commit genocide in Iraq, settle the country with Americans and then take power for life, modeling himself on Julius Caesar after the Gaul campaign.

Before anyone answers that any cooky idiot can write what they want on these internets, pause to consider that this man works with former CIA Director James Woolsey, former Reagan administration official Frank Gaffney and other PNACers who make up the Center for Security Policy and have great stature within the neo-conservative moment (that is, the movement whose only fixed belief is Israel).

Here are some choice excerpts from the piece, which has been taken off the think tank site but is reproduced in full in this article:

The wisest course would have been for President Bush to use his nuclear weapons to slaughter Iraqis until they complied with his demands, or until they were all dead. Then there would be little risk or expense and no American army would be left exposed. But if he did this, his cowardly electorate would have instantly ended his term of office, if not his freedom or his life.

The simple truth that modern weapons now mean a nation must practice genocide or commit suicide. Israel provides the perfect example. If the Israelis do not raze Iran, the Iranians will fulfill their boast and wipe Israel off the face of the earth. Yet Israel is not popular, and so is denied permission to defend itself. In the same vein, President Bush cannot do what is necessary for the survival of Americans. He cannot use the nation’s powerful weapons. All he can do is try and discover a result that will be popular with Americans.

. . .

When the ancient Roman general Julius Caesar was struggling to conquer ancient Gaul, he not only had to defeat the Gauls, but he also had to defeat his political enemies in Rome who would destroy him the moment his tenure as consul (president) ended.

Caesar pacified Gaul by mass slaughter; he then used his successful army to crush all political opposition at home and establish himself as permanent ruler of ancient Rome. This brilliant action not only ended the personal threat to Caesar, but ended the civil chaos that was threatening anarchy in ancient Rome – thus marking the start of the ancient Roman Empire that gave peace and prosperity to the known world.

If President Bush copied Julius Caesar by ordering his army to empty Iraq of Arabs and repopulate the country with Americans, he would achieve immediate results: popularity with his military; enrichment of America by converting an Arabian Iraq into an American Iraq (therefore turning it from a liability to an asset); and boost American prestiege while terrifying American enemies.

He could then follow Caesar’s example and use his newfound popularity with the military to wield military power to become the first permanent president of America, and end the civil chaos caused by the continually squabbling Congress and the out-of-control Supreme Court.

I know the recent HBO-BBC production Rome is excellent and great fun, but really this is taking it a bit far.

The lesson to take from this, of course, is not that this is representative of how Americans see the mess of Iraq, but I do think it is telling of how neo-conservatives, with their single-minded obsession with Israeli dominion over the Middle East, care nothing for American institutions, democracy, or human life — never mind that of other people. You are known by the company you keep.

More looniness at Atkin’s website, OurCivilization.com, including that AIDS is not caused by HIV and that everything went downhill after the French revolution overthrew the old aristocracy. Sometimes I wonder if these guys exist just to make the crowd that’s advising Rudy Giuliani (now featuring the terrible trio of Podhoretz-Kramer-Pipes) look more reasonable.