Panetta: "Those lives were not lost in vain."

Thus did US SecDef Leon Panetta proclaim today in Baghdad, where he publicly declared the War in Iraq to be over.

It's over indeed for the US.  (Indeed, for thousands of Americans more caught up in Facebook and "American Idol," it barely mattered to begin with.  They partied on.)

Thomas Ricks noted only a few years ago that Iraq's troubles were nowhere near ending, and that we might be closer to the middle of Iraq's war than to its end.  I fear that he may have been right.  Regardless of the assertions by Panetta and others that Iraq is now stable, there's still way too much there that's not:

1. Maliki has become a Saddam-lite, and as the US completes its pullout and various demons begin to crawl out of the woodwork, he will likely decide to emulate the departed dictator ever more.
2. Saboteurs are blowing up Iraq's pipelines with relative impunity - and the question of who's going to help Iraq extract the oil remains vexed, at best.
   
3. Kirkuk remains up for grabs, as does much of the Arab-Kurd frontier north of Baghdad.
4. Various Iraqi provinces are expressing a growing desire for federalist-style autonomy vs. a centralized state.  (See #1)
5. Syria's blooming civil-sectarian war will surely spill over into Iraq.
6. Iraq still faces a huge problem with internal refugees.
   

I could go on. 

Hey, GOP. Wanna Marginalize America Even Further?

Then make the clown otherwise known as Newt Gingrich your presidential nominee.

At a time when the US is struggling to keep itself relevant in a rapidly changing Middle East, Gingrich - evidently a front-runner now in many of the polls measuring support for possible GOP presidential nominees - surely has managed to alienate most of whatever friends the US had on the "Arab street."  As Michigan's senator Carl Levin commented,  “Gingrich offered no solutions — just a can of gasoline and a match.”

Paul Woodward provides great commentary, and all the links you need, at War in Context.

Ashura Bombings in Iraq - and Afghanistan

The last couple of days in Iraq - and in Shia communities across the Middle East - have been marked by the commemorative activities of Ashura, which remembers the martyrdom of Hussein ibn Ali (grandson of the prophet Muhammad) and his small band of followers at the Battle of Karbala in 680, a pivotal date in the process whereby Shiism distinguished an identity separate from that of the majority Sunni.

But in Iraq, Ashura has brought this year - as in every year since the US invasion in 2003 - numerous bombings by Sunni extremists who set off bombs that maim and kill dozens of the hundreds of thousands of innocent Shia pilgrims who process to Karbala and other Shia shrine-cities in Iraq.

(And also reported today: Ashura bombings in Kabul and Mazar-i-sharif in Afghanistan that have also killed dozens of Shia there.)

The NYT's report of one of the latest bombings notes that one bomb exploded very near a mosque in Babil province associated with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most revered and followed marja-i-taqlid ("source of emulation" - i.e., spiritual guide) among the world's Shia today - and perhaps the single most politically influential figure on what one might call Iraq's Shiite "street."  It was his ability to bring millions of Shia onto the street in protest that forced the US to agree to elections to determine a new Iraqi government.

I shudder to imagine the horrors that even an attempted assassination of Sistani might bring to Iraq.  Remember, the Sunni-Shia civil war that consumed so many thousands of lives in Iraq from 2006 on was kicked off by Sunni extremists bombing another of Iraq's great Shia shrines, the golden-domed al-Askari shrine in Samarra (where the mosque's rebuilding stirs Sunni-Shia antagonisms).

As the deadline for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq looms ever closer (even as withdrawals from Afghanistan are announced), it's certain that Iraq remains a very "unfinished" situation - but that it is not in the power of the US to "finish" or "fix" Iraq.  It never was. Bush was warned in 2002, and he ought to have known better.

Historians will hold him - and the Dick Cheneys and Condi Rices of the time - to account - but the great American people have moved on to whatever new shiny baubles the 24-hour news cycle serially dangles before their eyes.  

And, we can be sure, within months after the last US soldier is out of Iraq, as bombings and assassinations continue, and the ineffectual Iraqi parliament dithers and stalls, oh-so-many still clueless Americans will be scratching their heads, incredulous, wondering: "Gosh, we liberated those people. Why can't those Eye-rack-ee's just get along?"

Israel and American Jews: WTF Was Bibi Thinking?!

The NYT reports that Israel's Ministry for Immigrant Absorption wised up (though hardly in the nick of time) and removed from its website several video promotions that did nothing whatsoever to "promote" good feeling between Israel and the majority of American Jews.

One video advertisement shows a Jewish elderly couple distraught that their Israeli granddaughter in the United States thinks Hanukkah is Christmas. Another shows a clueless American boyfriend who does not get why his Israeli expatriate girlfriend is saddened on Israel’s memorial day. A third shows a toddler calling “Daddy! Daddy!” to his napping Israeli expatriate father, who finally awakens when the child switches to Hebrew: “Abba!”

For many American Jews, the Israeli government-sponsored ads, intended to cajole Israelis living in the United States to come home, smacked of arrogance, ignorance and cultural disrespect of America. Jewish groups in the United States expressed outrage, saying they were causing a rift with American Jews who support Israel. On Friday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu aborted the campaign.

The ads — short videos and billboard posters — were intended to touch the sensibilities of Israeli expatriates and tap into their national identity, according to the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, which oversaw the campaign.

But critics said the ads implied that moving to America led to assimilation and an erosion of Jewish consciousness. The Jewish Federations of North America called them insulting. Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, called the videos “heavy-handed, and even demeaning.”

Israeli officials defended the desire to encourage Israeli expatriates to return, but the reaction of American Jewry, a crucial mainstay of support for Israel, clearly caused alarm.

“We are very attentive to the sensitivities of the American Jewish community,” said Mark Regev, a spokesman for Mr. Netanyahu. “When we understood there was a problem, the prime minister immediately ordered the campaign to be suspended.”

The ads were placed by the Ministry for Immigrant Absorption, headed by Sofa Landver, who immigrated to Israel from Russia in 1979. She belongs to the ultra-nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party led by Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman. The party takes a hard line on the peace process with the Palestinians and advocates exchanging parts of Israel heavily populated by Arab citizens for Jewish settlement blocs in the West Bank.

A spokesman for the ministry, Elad Sonn, said no insult had been intended; the ministry “respects and cherishes” the American Jewish community, and “we wish to apologize to those who might have been offended.”

There's a weird disconnect here that leaves one almost breathless.  Netanyahu can come to the US, waltz onto Capitol Hill, be lionized by both houses of Congress (the majority of whose members have publicly sworn their fealty to Lord Bibi), and be reassured that they've got his back.  But then, he (or his government; I wonder how well informed he was about those videos before the ministry posted them; still it's on him, ultimately) has the chutzpah - and, frankly, the gross stupidity - to run videos that clearly demean American Judaism.  (Let's be real: it take a lot to get Abe Foxman to speak so critically of the Israeli government.) 

A lot of Americans are - and will remain - clueless about all of this.  And I suppose that it might take a lot more than this for Pastor Hagee and those "good Christians" who have signed on with CUFI to turn away from Bibi.  (After all, the welfare of Israel and American Jews concerns them only to the extent that ensuring it might hasten the Second Coming, at which point they're all toast, according to Christian scripture.)

But at a time when (as SecDef Leon Panetta has lamented recently) Israel has become dangerously isolated both regionally and globally - and is on the verge of becoming isolated even worse (with the emergence of anti-Israel Islamist parties - and allies of Hamas - in the Egyptian political forefront) - Bibi couldn't have picked a worse time to alienate so many thousands of citizens of the country that (rightly or wrongly) has shielded it, at the UN and in the court of international opinion.

Hillary's Chutzpah: lectures Pakistan for no-show at Bonn Meeting

Only days after a US airstrike killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, Ms. Clinton has the chutzpah to lecture the Pakistani government for deciding to boycott the upcoming meeting in Bonn about Afghanistan.
Clash Between NATO and Pakistani Forces Defused - NYTimes.com

“Frankly, it is regrettable that Pakistan has decided not to attend the conference in Bonn, because this conference has been long in the planning,” Mrs. Clinton said in Busan, South Korea before flying to Myanmar on Wednesday.
“Pakistan, like the United States, has a profound interest in a secure, stable, increasingly democratic Afghanistan. Our gathering in Bonn thiscoming Monday is intended to further that goal.”

America as Middle East's Wallflower

The last couple of days have been chock-full of events and reports that make it clear: as far as the Middle Eastern "room" is concerned, the US has gone from 2-ton gorilla to wallflower.

OK, OK - "leading from behind" in Libya was perhaps an exception to that.  But as far as the US is concerned, Libya is so "yesterday."  And don't be surprised if Obama/Clinton work hard to distance themselves from the ever messier situation there, as the militias who fought and suffered (especially at Misrata) to eradicate Qaddafi now are proving reluctant to play nice with the Provisional Government.  Even if Libyans now seem ecstatic to see Qaddafi gone, the US may soon look back to his era as the good old days when Libya was stable, and ruled (however badly) by the devil we knew.

And as Patrick Cockburn points out, Libya was a cakewalk compared to finding some solution to the bloody mess in Syria, where (as Anthony Shadid has pointed out) sectarian war is blooming.  American/Western supremacists (like Lee Smith at Billy Kristol's the Weekly Standard) are calling out Obama, and calling for imposing a no-fly zone.  More realistic commentators (like Doug Bandow at the National Interest) point out the hubris of any proposed American attack on Syria.  Odd that Kristol's writers promote ousting a regime that Israel's leaders fear to see vanish (again, Bashar is that devil they know).

Egypt is now in its third day of liberal+Islamists protests against the military junta that imposed its control after ousting Mubarak.  The elections there - which were set to begin this week - are imperiled.  Liberal/progressives may want them held up anyway, as the Muslim Brotherhood stands ready to dominate them.  In any event, it's all beyond the US's ability to control events.  And if the SCAF junta is ousted somehow, and a government more responsive to popular will takes charge, the US will be largely reduced to the role of a window shopper with nose pressed to the glass, looking in, but most assuredly from the outside, even as such a government takes steps to distance itself from Israel - and the 1979 peace treaty - even more.

Same goes for Iraq, where the mess that George W. made in Mesopotamia gets even messier as US troops continue a withdrawal much lamented by Kaganites and other neocons.  The US military's departure from its base near Kirkuk has ratcheted up tensions between the militaries of the Baghdad central government  and the Kurdish Regional Government - while (bless their hearts) our intrepid entrepreneurs at ExxonMobil have stirred the pot even more by signing oil production deals with the Kurds, despite the fact that Iraq's government has yet to conclude a national oil law that will govern the distribution of oil profits.  Leave it to US Big Oil to undermine the efforts of US troops who teamed with Arab and Kurd forces over the last couple of years  in order to promote cooperation between them.  The same corporations who poured big bucks into the election campaigns of the Bush-Cheney team that got so many American soldiers (and Iraqi people) killed in Iraq while helping install "democracy" (or did they?) under Maliki and his predecessors now thumb their noses at that same (still fledgling) government, whose own prospects (Exxon knows) hinge on Exxon's participation in developing the southern Qurna oilfields. 

And now (as Nicholas Pelham suggests), is America's most steadfast pal in the Arab world - king Abdullah II of Jordan - poised for a fall?

Elizabeth Monroe once wrote of Britain's "moment in the Middle East" as spanning 1914-1971.  It may not be premature to plan a companion piece, on America's moment, 1945-2011.

The New "Arab Awakening"

Soon after they began in Tunisia and then spread to Egypt and across much of the Arab Middle East, the political uprisings to demand political rights, basic respect for human dignity, and better social and economic conditions came to be referred to as the "Arab Spring."  (A recent essay by Joshua Keating at Foreign Policy suggests that the term may have been coined, in fact, there.)  Unfortunately, the "spring" metaphor opened the door to various and sundry commentators (many of them naysayers) to ruminate about the "Arab fall" and, recently, the "Arab winter" as demonstrators have been opposed, even killed, in countries like Bahrain and Syria, and, of course, Egypt, one of the "Arab spring's" hearths, where broad popular demands for change and free elections are being thwarted by a deeply entrenched class of high-ranking military officers who seem determined to sustain the almost 60 years of military control of the Egyptian state (as well as the wealth they've built up in the process).

But for months, the astute, prolific analyst and commentator Rami Khouri has been encouraging us to take the long view - to recognize and anticipate that the uprisings of the last year mark only the beginning - an "awakening" - in the process of the empowerment of Arab peoples.  Khouri is channeling here, of course, the title of a celebrated book by George Antonius, published in the 1930as, that came to be regarded as an important signpost in the "awakening" of the pan-Arabism that reached its zenith with the meteoric rise of Gamal Abdul Nasser in the 1950s and 1960s.  But the "awakening" of which Khouri speaks entails a long process, surely to suffer setbacks and interruptions, that, in his view, inexorably will lead to the establishment of a true sovereignty across the Arab world.  That sovereignty will be founded on popular will, in a region that up to now, and even now in many countries, has featured governments - regimes, really - disconnected from their citizens (who barely merit that characterization; "subjects" might be more accurate, even if governments featue leaders with titles like "president") yet maintained in power by a West that has long valued stability, access to the region's petroleum, and the enabling of the region's baddest boy (the state of Israel) over the rights, dignity, and prosperity of the locals.  As one of Khouri's latest essays notes,

Today, the Arab world is moving in a new direction. We may be witnessing the first tangible impact of the Arab uprisings, citizen revolts and revolutions on those Arab elites that still control most governments in the region. Arab regimes may be starting to pay attention to the sentiments and values of their people, who reject the killing of civilians that has taken place in Syria since March.

Khouri  spotlights a development that, he hopes, marks for the Arab peoples an important re-rousing from their tortured slumber: the re-fashioning of the long-mocked Arab League as a meaningful, empowered instrument of Arab unity and purpose.

The other fascinating new development we see before our eyes is the continued rebirth and reassertion of Arab sovereignty, will and influence within the Arab world, after decades during which the incompetent and politically derelict Arab states largely surrendered their regional security and ideological functions to foreign powers.

The Arab League is now making decisions whose consequences are ricocheting around the region. Consequently, Israel, Iran, Turkey and the U.S. are responding to Arab initiatives, rather than ordering the Arabs around, as they had for decades. The Arab Awakening continues.

And as when any of us has been asleep too long, awakening can be very slow; nor will it look pretty along the way.  Our heads fall back to our pillows; we take mini-naps, feel irritable and cranky, ask our spouses and friends to be patient with us, and we resort to the series of jolts that sequential cups of strong coffee provide.  But in time, we are fully roused, awake and alert, dressed and geared up for action, ready to write the stories of our new day.  

The Arab Awakening of which Khouri writes will likewise need the occasional nap and will tax the patience of friends.  And it will be punctuated by cups full, not of strong coffee, but of the blood of heroes and martyrs.

But Khouri enjoins us to indeed be patient, for once fully awakened, the great Arab people will be poised to pen  a saga that may captivate us all.

The Things That Wouldn't Leave

Slithering back onto the political stage, your favorite neocon heroes.  Be very afraid.

Bush-Era Iraq Hawks Counsel Republican Presidential Hopefuls

By Gopal Ratnam and Tony Capaccio - Nov 18, 2011

Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney, Rick Perry and Herman Cain are turning for national security advice to former officials in the George W. Bush administration, including some who pushed hardest for the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The former officials include Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; and Robert Joseph, a White House National Security Council aide during Bush’s first term and later a State Department official.

Feith, Bolton and Joseph were in the Bush camp that favored U.S. unilateral action and was “skeptical of engagement” with allies as well as foes such as North Korea, said James Mann, a foreign policy scholar at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.

In Bush’s second term, with the nation still at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the pendulum swung back toward engagement. The return of the unilateralists to Republican inner circles “in that sense, it’s going back,” said Mann, who wrote 2004’s “Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet.”

The contenders in the Republican presidential primary field have attacked President Barack Obama’s foreign policies. They say Obama showed weakness by not leading the allied air campaign in Libya, where the U.K and France played prominent roles, and not being tough enough on Iran to stop its nuclear-weapons efforts.

‘Greatest Failing’

Iran is Obama’s “greatest failing from a foreign policy standpoint,” former Massachusetts Governor Romney said at the Republican foreign policy debate Nov. 12 at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. He called for U.S. military action if measures such as economic sanctions and covert operations aren’t successful in thwarting Iran.

Obama’s plan to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq have been criticized by most of the candidates even though the deadline was set by Bush in a 2008 agreement with the country. Obama announced the withdrawal Oct. 22 after the U.S. and Iraq failed to reach an accord to assure immunity for a residual U.S. force there.

“The idea that a commander-in-chief would stand up and signal to the enemy a date certain of which we’re going to pull our troops out I think is irresponsible,” Texas Governor Perry said Oct. 30 on “Fox News Sunday.” Perry also called for cutting off foreign aid to countries that oppose U.S. policies.

Former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman and Texas Representative Ron Paul support the Iraq withdrawal.

‘Decades’ Old Policy

Republican hopefuls advised by the Bush veterans conflate toughness with unilateral U.S. action, said Paula Newberg, director of the Institute for Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University in Washington.

On complex issues from the Arab Spring to China’s rising wealth, they don’t show “anywhere near the kind of nuance that’s required and have instead returned to a recap of foreign policy of decades earlier.”

Voters, while focused on the economy more than foreign policy, still want to know that a candidate is able to handle the hypothetical 3 a.m. crisis phone call in the White House --a prospect which candidate Hillary Clinton used in a 2008 primary ad against Obama. A stumble, like Cain’s response to a question on Libya in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel newspaper, may resonate with voters.

In October, Romney announced a slate of 23 national security advisers and another group of 17 experts on specific subjects.

Romney’s Team

Romney’s advisers include Joseph; Cofer Black, a former head of Central Intelligence Agency’s counterterrorism center and executive of the security firm Blackwater, now Xe Services; Meghan O’Sullivan, a Bloomberg View columnist and former White House official who oversaw Iraq and Afghanistan policy; Eliot Cohen, director of the Strategic Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and a former counselor at Rice’s State Department; Dov Zakheim, the former Pentagon comptroller; and John Lehman, Ronald Reagan’s Navy secretary.

While a number of Romney advisers are associated with the Bush administration’s wars, Zakheim this year wrote a critical assessment of Afghanistan reconstruction as well as of the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath.

Perry Advisers

Perry’s list of informal advisers includes Feith; Bolton; Zalmay Khalilzad, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and later ambassador to Afghanistan; and Daniel Blumenthal, former Pentagon international security affairs director for China and Taiwan, according to a person familiar with the campaign who asked not to be named.

Victoria Coates, a former research associate to Rumsfeld and an art historian, is a Perry foreign policy adviser, and Emily Domenech, a former Pentagon trip planner, is a defense adviser, the campaign said Nov. 2.

Romney’s campaign spokeswoman, Andrea Saul, did not respond to questions on advisers. Perry spokesman Mark Miner said the candidate consulted various people and declined to confirm advisers’ names.

Cain, former chief executive officer of the Godfather’s Pizza Inc. chain, has consulted retired ambassadors and defense officials including Bolton. He had a 90-minute breakfast meeting in New York with Henry Kissinger, President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser and secretary of state, the candidate’s spokesman, retired Navy Commander J.D. Gordon.

Extending Reagan

Cain’s world view is “an extension of Reagan’s philosophy of peace through strength and clarity,” and he intends to lay out his views soon in a white paper, Gordon said. A Pentagon public affairs officer from 2005 to 2009 and a spokesman on Guantanamo Bay detention operations, Gordon said he was also Cain’s main foreign policy adviser.

Perry plans to make a foreign policy speech in the near future, spokesman Miner said in an e-mail.

“I’m fairly regularly in contact with” the Perry campaign and “have met Perry more than once,” Feith said in a telephone interview. They’ve discussed Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as “things like the relationship of strategy to the defense budget,” Feith said.

Feith, Bolton, Khalilzad, and Cohen were among 10 so-called neoconservatives who were national security officials in the Bush administration, Jeffery Record, a professor at the Air Force War College, wrote in his 2010 book “Wanting War -- Why the Bush Administration Invaded Iraq.”

Overthrowing Saddam Hussein “became a neoconservative mantra during the 1990s that culminated in the U.S. invasion,” he wrote.

Faulty Intelligence

As the Pentagon’s policy chief Feith, set up separate cells within the department that cited links between Iraq and al- Qaeda, as well as evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that the CIA doubted. Subsequent investigations found no proof of either and concluded that Feith’s information came from the Iraqi National Congress and other exile groups seeking U.S. help to overthrow Hussein.

A February 2007 Pentagon Inspector General report criticized the actions of Feith’s cells as “inappropriate” because they didn’t “clearly show the variance with the consensus of the intelligence community.” In his book “War and Decision,” Feith called the conclusion a “misguided notion” because the briefings were meant to critique other intelligence and not to replace it, he wrote.

Joseph was a member of a “White House Information Group” that coordinated a pre-war white paper called “A Grave and Gathering Danger: Saddam Hussein’s Quest for Nuclear Weapons.”

‘Not Strong Enough’

It was never published after five drafts, in part because Joseph considered it “not strong enough,” a White House spokesman told the Washington Post in an August 2003 article. Later inquiries concluded that Hussein’s quest for nuclear weapons had been moribund.

As Bush’s undersecretary of state for arms control, Bolton was part of the “politics of persuasion” that stressed “the most sensational” intelligence scenarios, according to an Atlantic Monthly article by former CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack.

Bolton, now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, has “spoken to a number of those running,” his aide Christine Samuelian said. He hasn’t endorsed any candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, she said.

Joseph and Bolton also opposed Bush’s second-term diplomacy with North Korea on its nuclear weapons program.

Public opinion polls show Obama gained on foreign policy after launching a covert mission that killed terrorist leader Osama bin Laden and supporting the popular uprising that toppled and killed Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi.

Obama Critique

Seeking to undermine Obama’s strength, Romney’s October foreign policy white paper said the president is “threatening to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory” in Iraq and faulted him for making “apologies for America in speeches delivered in France, England, Turkey and Egypt.”

In a July article in Commentary, Feith criticized the Obama doctrine because it “emerges from the conviction that in the post-George W. Bush world, the United States cannot and should not exercise the kind of boldness and independence characteristic” of post-World War II foreign policy.

The article has been “the topic of some discussion” between Perry and his advisers, said Feith, who added said he doesn’t know whether Perry embraced those ideas.

Mann, of Johns Hopkins, said that Obama’s challengers, lacking enough material to criticize his foreign policy, “have fallen back on the old Republican trope” about a Democratic administration being weak and apologizing to the world.

Bibi Smooches Abbas!

Well, at least in this Benetton ad.  Keep hope alive!

A Visit to Hebron

A serendipitous discovery via visit to Roger Cohen's tweet-land . . . a damning, must-read essay from the Guardian's Jonathan Freedland about his recent visit to the West Bank city of Hebron, where the IDF has rendered the center of the city effectively Arab-rein in order to isolate and defend the small community of Jewish settlers there.  The stench of anti-Arab racism is overwhelming:

What I saw there would shock even those who think they know all there is to know about Israel and its conflict with the Palestinians. The centre of a city of 175,000 people has been utterly emptied, its streets deserted, its shops vacant, thanks to a policy the Israeli army calls "sterilisation" - ensuring the area is clear and safe for Hebron's 800 Jewish settlers.

In what was once a throbbing market district, a place teeming with life, successive restrictions have been placed on Hebron's Palestinian population. A map shows purple roads where no Palestinian cars are permitted, yellow roads where no Palestinian shops are allowed to open and red roads where no Palestinians are even allowed to walk.

I watched an old man, a bag of cement on his shoulder, ascend a steep bypass staircase because his feet were forbidden from going any further along the road. Those unlucky enough to live on a red road have had their front doors sealed: they have to leave their own houses by a back door and climb out via a ladder.

All this has made life so impossible that an estimated 42 per cent of the families who once lived in this central part of town have now moved out.

What they have left behind is eerie. Israelis can walk freely down streets that are barred to Palestinians, surveying the shuttered shops that have been covered with some of the most vile graffiti I have ever seen. The familiar "Death to the Arabs" is there, but so is "You have Arabs, you have mice," the words covered up, but still legible. Perhaps most shocking are the Stars of David, daubed on Arab shopfronts and doors. To see that cherished symbol used to spit in the eye of a population hounded out of their homes is chilling.

All right, some will say, Hebron is an extreme case. Not according to my guide, Yehuda Shaul, a kippah-wearing army reservist who served two long tours in Hebron and who now works with the Breaking the Silence movement which, via the new Yachad organisation, has shown several Anglo-Jewish Zionist youth leaders and synagogue activists around the city. Shaul believes that Hebron simply reveals the reality of the occupation in an intense, distilled form.

But let's say Hebron is too much to stomach. Contemplate instead the bill that would formally make Israeli democracy subordinate to the state's Jewish identity, altering the nation's Basic Law and elevating, in the words of the Knesset's legal adviser, Eyal Yinon, "values such as national strength, honour and Jewish identity, even at the expense of values...such as freedom of expression, the right to equality and minority rights".

It would be consoling if this proposal to turn Israel into a kind of Jewish Prussia - high on nationalism with democracy an afterthought - had at least come from the far right, with no prospects of success. But behind it is Avi Dichter of the supposedly centrist Kadima party.

Or visit the ultra-orthodox Mea She'arim neighbourhood of Jerusalem, where the streets themselves now have a mechitza, men walking on one side of the barrier, women the other. That is until they get on a bus, where the women are required to sit at the back, leaving the seats at the front for the men.

The point is that if the Israel we love is the Jewish, democratic state established in the Declaration of Independence then we need to fight for it. It is under threat and not only from the usual suspects, the hostile media and the "delegitimisers". It is also threatened from within, by Israel's own actions. Put simply, if we are true friends of Israel we would take on those who would transform the country into a place most pro-Israeli Jews in Britain would not even recognise.

And by the way, I also recommend Roger Cohen's piece today on "containing and constraining Iran," not bombing it.

Assad on the Outs with the Arab League. Now What?

As widely reported, the Arab League (in a move that, as Juan Cole notes, is largely symbolic) has suspended Syria from membership - and infuriated Syrians have attacked the Saudi embassy in Damascus in reprisal.  To borrow from Iraq's ancient history (the episode of Belshazzar's feast, as recorded in the Hebrew Bible and memorialized in Rembrandt's famous painting), the writing is on the wall in re Bashar al-Assad's fate.  Prof. Cole suggests, with good reason, that Bashar ought to take a lesson from Libya.

By taking a lesson from Libya, I assume he means that Bashar ought to get out while the gettin’s good.

But where might he go where he might feel (a) reasonably safe and secure, and (b) out of the reach of the ICC? Who would host him? Maybe Iran? But would he be content, as a supposedly secular Baathist, to live under the umbrella of a religious Islamist regime in a predominantly Persian milieu?

Maybe Iraq, where President Nuri al-Maliki has been supportive of Assad and his Alawi (quasi-Shia) ruling family? But would Maliki’s already conflicted political supporters look kindly on sheltering a Baathist? Or would Bashar's father Hafez’s conflicts with Saddam Hussein years ago (under Hafez al-Assad, Syria supported the US-led coalition against Saddam's Iraq during the 1991 "Desert Storm" war) trump the Baathist connection?

And can you imagine how Obama/Clinton – and their detractors – might react to Maliki sheltering Bashar?

Isolating Syria: Be Careful What You Wish For

The Arab League has voted to suspend Syria - a move that will isolate Bashar al-Assad even more in the region and beyond.  As WaPo notes,

until now, Arab states have indeed seemed hesitant to criticize Syria. The Arab League did not meet to discuss the spiraling violence until August, five months after the protests erupted, and Saturday’s measures came only after weeks of deliberation, deadlines and unfulfilled promises by the Assad government.

The slow response contrasts with the swift measures taken to suspend Libya weeks after the February uprising, opening the door to the adoption of the U.N. resolution that authorized NATO airstrikes and helped bring about Moammar Gaddafi’s demise. The United States cited the Arab censure of Libya as being instrumental in determining its decision to support military action.

International military intervention in Syria is still considered a remote possibility despite repeated calls by protesters for NATO to enforce a no-fly zone. But the lifting of Arab “cover” will make it harder for Russia and China to justify their vetoes of tougher action, including possible sanctions, at the U.N. Security Council, said Shaikh.

Turkey, which has repeatedly condemned Assad but taken no concrete steps against him, may also be encouraged to fall in line with the rest of the region and adopt economic sanctions that could have a significant effect on its neighbor’s economy, he said.

Assad can count on the support of Iran as well as neighboring Lebanon, whose government is controlled by the militant Shiite Hezbollah movement. Fears of triggering a regionwide war in which Iran and Hezbollah spring to Syria’s defense are among the reasons why world powers have been reluctant to intervene.

The Shiite-led government in Baghdad, which abstained in the vote, is concerned that regime change in Syria would destabilize Iraq’s delicate sectarian balance, and it has shown no inclination to support measures against Assad.

Of the countries that either voted against the suspension (Lebanon and Yemen) or abstained (Iraq), two have Shia majorities - and the third - Yemen - has a significant Shia minority, but probably voted against because President Saleh is on the way to being run out on a rail just as Assad is; one dictator standing by another.  (And frankly, President al-Maliki of Iraq is steadily creeping into the dictator ranks himself - as much as the US touts Iraq as a model democracy for the putative "new Middle East."

But we really have no idea what a post-Assad Syria is going to look like, except that Syria's Sunni Arab majority - especially the more Islamist elements among them - are going to insist on better representation in any new government.  That will worry Iraq's Shia majority, still triumphant but paranoid after the termination of so many decades of Sunni rule - and it may not sit well with Iraq's Kurds (not to mention Syria's own substantial Kurdish population).

It's entirely possible that Syria will spin out into sectarian warfare, at least in some regions.  And some in the West - and Israel - may find themselves wishing for the good old days of the Assads, pere et fils.