Lebanon's elections over . . . and Iran's approach

The votes have been cast (as the NY Times reports, even by patients brought from their hospital beds by ambulance), and the vote seems to have been conducted fairly (although "massaged" with a huge number of votes paid for by foreign money, both Iranian and Saudi - and I imagine that a few American bucks were spread around as needed) and the pro-West, US-backed coalition of parties has retained the majority. But Hezbollah, although it lost, remains a powerful player, with a huge social-political base among the growing (and generally poorer, and underprivileged) Shiite population in Beirut and southern Lebanon. And, as Haaretz reports, it has already declared that it fully intends to retain its military capacity, as an arm of legitimate resistance against Israel (which, let's not forget, has on several occasions either invaded and/or bombed Lebanon, going back to 1978 and as recently as 2006. Remember, the war that Condi Rice so infamously referred to as the "birth pangs of the new Middle East"?)

Iran is being presented as the big loser by some, but another big loser is Michel Aoun, the Christian leader who figured prominently in events of the later years of Lebanon's horrific civil war (1975-1991) and who tied his fortunes (and those of his Free Patriotic Movement) to Hezbollah's. He will remain an influential, prestigious figure in Lebanese politics (which has always been heavily sectarian as well as dominated by clan and feudal ties that are deeply rooted in traditional Lebanese society).

But, as this excellent report from MERIP makes clear, not a whole lot is really going to change in Lebanon, where the political scene is likely to remain a field of battle between pro-West (Christian and Sunni, backed by the US and its allies) and pro-Hezbollah (Shiite and Christian, backed by Iran and Syria) blocs, with local and family interests injecting heavy influence. And it may be that Hezbollah, for its own interests, has done better by losing, since a win would have forced it to play ball with Aoun's Christian allies, who comprise about half of Hezbollah's coalition.

But for the time being, as I noted yesterday, Mr. Obama has dodged a bullet. A Hezbollah win would have complicated his Middle East outreach enormously. Israel will be somewhat relieved, but still fearful of a re-armed Hezbollah, which it sees (but many experts dismiss) as Iran-in-the-Levant.

Speaking of which . . . the really big event looms a few days hence: the Iranian elections, where President Mahmud Ahmadinejad evidently is facing a major challenge from Mir Hosein Koussavi, an Islamic Revolution hero (which gives him some clout among conservative circles there) who has moderated his views (hence, his appeal to more liberal/reformist voters). Perhaps more helpfully for his cause though, even during Iran's war with Iraq (1980-1988), when he was president, he was able to navigate Iran's economy very successfully. Many of the voters now opposed to Ahmadinejad are angry with his lousy economic management, especially after the promises made during his 2005 election campaign. As you may have noticed as well, the US has more or less put its outreach to Iran on hold until after the elections. But an Ahmadinejad defeat will surely inject some new hope into that outreach.

UPDATE: Sami Moubayed publishes in the 9 June Asia Times an excellent update on the election results in Lebanon, and what the future may hold for the new government.

Lebanon's elections . . . and the Obama Reaction

Lebanon's elections - as well as the soon upcoming elections in Iran - are of HUGE importance, as this just-out NYT report notes. If the Hezbollah alliance is victorious, the US will have some major decisions to make with regard to its diplomatic relations and outreach.

And Mr. Obama will be caught in an interesting dilemma. Israel will point to the new Lebanon as an existential threat, and will likely make preparations for war. Netanyahu will likely demand Obama's support against the Hezbollah "terrorist" government (even though one of Hezbollah's political allies here is a Christian faction. Hmmmm . . . .) - and could probably use this new "crisis" as a way to deflect further Obama/Clinton criticism about the West Bank settlements.

But if the US refuses to support a new Hezbollah-led government (a la Bush's 2006 decision not to support a fairly elected Hamas-led government in the Palestinian Authority in 2006), the good effects of Obama's Cairo speech will vanish in the wind, and those millions of Arab listeners across the Middle East who said "OK, Barack Hussein, but let's see what you actually do after your speech," will chalk it up as so much hot air.

This is a golden chance for Obama to follow through. On the other hand, it's also a chance to completely blow up his promising initiatives with the Muslim world - and, depending on the timing, hand a bunch of votes to Mr. Ahmadinejad in the upcoming elections in Iran. Very delicate stuff here - and they are not going to give Obama a do-over. Stay tuned . . .

Anthony Shadid, Justice, and the West Bank Settlements

First, I want to direct your immediate attention to this marvelous Anthony Shadid report I missed when the WaPo published it this week. (Begging pardon of one and all . . . but I'm trying to hunker down and finish writing my short history of Mesopotamia/Iraq, so I'm casting a somewhat smaller news net these days.) Shadid visited the town of Haditha in Iraq, where in 2005 US marines killed 24 Iraqis in an "incident" for which the marines have largely been exonerated by the US government and military - much to the anger of Iraqis, who feel strongly that justice was not done.

And please note that word - "justice" - because in the eyes of Iraqis specifically and people across the Middle East in general, a sense of justice (a principle deeply held in Islam) has been woefully AWOL over decades of US policy and interventions in the region, as has as a sense of the US taking their concerns with appropriate seriousness. Shadid puts it here very well:

Footnotes of U.S. history have become seminal events in the Muslim world. A half-century on, few people are unaware of the U.S. role in 1953 in helping overthrow Mohammad Mossadegh, the nationalist prime minister in Iran. Many blame the U.S. resupply of Israel in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war for delivering Israel a decisive advantage. Even in Iraq, the narrative before 2003 was rarely the United States against President Saddam Hussein, who enjoyed U.S. support during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. To many Iraqis, it was them against Hussein and the Americans, who backed devastating U.N. sanctions. In their view, he was overthrown only when he was no longer useful.

"They understand justice in the United States, but they've never applied it here," said Sundus Yahya, a clerk at women's clothing store in the Baghdad neighborhood of Karrada.

And we're not talking only about Iraq. Obama took an important step in his Cairo speech by referring to "Palestine," and by declaring that the Israeli settlements were wrong and had to stop. But if justice is to be served, just stopping the expansion of those settlements is too little and too late. They need to be removed, entirely, from the West Bank. Their construction was recognized as illegal in international law and condemned from their very start - both by the UN and by the US - so for the US now to simply say to Israel, "OK, no more expansion," isn't going to be enough, from the standpoint of either international law or justice. It basically gives Israel a pass on illegal behavior over the last 40+ years.

Which is why I find it incredibly short-sighted and, from a historical perspective, lacking in justice when Shadid's WaPo colleague (and Fox News "all-star" Charles Krauthammer excoriates Obama (and Sec of State Hillary Clinton) for insisting on an end to settlement expansion. In Krauthammer's view, justice lies entirely on the side of the Israelis, and to deny the settlers the opportunity of "natural expansion" of existing settlements is to deny them the chance to have babies, etc., etc. - in other words, it is to pose yet another existential threat to the Jewish people.

Krauthammer would do well to read this new essay by the Israeli columnist Gideon Levy - an Israeli Jew who actually lives in Israel and has been witnessing and documenting for years how the settlers (a huge percentage of whom are American immigrants) - with the support of hard-right "Greater Israel" Zionists like Ariel Sharon and Menachem Begin, not to mention Benjamin Netanyahu - have been allowed to shanghai the Israeli government into supporting a colonial enterprise that, perhaps more than anything else, prevents people across the Middle East - Arabs, Persians, and Turks alike - from accepting the presence of a Jewish state in the region. Indeed, one can make a very convincing argument that the settlers themselves are the single most dire threat to Israel's existence.

Obama Calls for New Beginning - and an End to Settlements

President Obama's much-anticipated speech in Cairo today (the full text is here) did not exactly hit the ball out of the park (if you will excuse a baseball analogy), but he certainly hit a double. The problem is, a double is simply a double unless a batter soon drives him in with another hit. And Obama needs to make sure that the hits keep on coming.

Both the NY Times and the WaPo have already provided mostly positive assessments of the speech, and deservedly so. In short, the President calls for

- a new beginning between the US and the Muslim world
- recognition that both Israel and Palestine have the right to exist. That's a haymaker thrown at Netanyahu's refusal to talk about a Palestinian state. And most significantly, Obama said "Palestine," not "Palestinian state". That's huge.
- an end to Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Again, this is huge, although he did not explicitly call for the removal of the already existing major settlements, which (as was recently confirmed) Bush told former Israeli PM Ariel Sharon the US would not try to force Israel to relinquish.

Some things to look for in the weeks ahead:

How will Hamas respond? It will be very useful if they can maintain their recent ratcheting-down of rocket fire from Gaza.

How will the Israeli government respond, as well as the Israeli media? Obama's speech was preceded by several statements from the Netanyahu government denouncing his (and Sec of State Clinton's) refusal to accede to "natural expansion" of existing settlements. The Cairo speech has now enunciated that refusal even more starkly. The leaders of the settlement movement have already come out strongly against Obama's speech, and are demanding that Netanyahu "emulate former prime ministers Begin and Shamir and 'stand up like a proud Jew and reject Obama's fabricated history.'" But liberal Israeli politicians and commentators like Gideon Levy recognize that the settler movement has done nothing but cause Israel to lose standing in the rest of the world since 1967.

How will the US Congress respond? The settlement movement has its hooks very deeply into many congressional supporters of Israel, both Democrat and Republican, and especially those with large Christian evangelical constituencies.

So, it's a landmark speech, but the heavy lifting has yet to come.

Obama Calls for New Beginning With World's Muslims

Iraq's Landmines, Old and New

Two stories today feature landmines in Iraq, of both the physically explosive and the metaphorical kind. As is the nature of landmines, they spell continuing troubles for Iraqis.

The explosive ones are what's left of the millions of mines left in the ground by Saddam Hussein to defend Iraq against Iranian forces 1980-1988, as well as the US-led "coalition" invasions of 1991 and 2003. Add to those the millions of cluster munitions dropped in Iraq by the US in 1991. As the report from McClatchy notes:

The U.N. estimates that during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, American planes dropped 54 million "cluster bombs," small, grenade-like explosives scattered from a single shell. Most fell in southern and central Iraq.

Deputy Environment Minister Kamal Latif said that an estimated 16 percent of those cluster bombs — more than 8 million — failed to explode and now litter the ground. They rest on top of 25 million landmines that the late dictator Saddam Hussein planted during Iraq's war with Iran in the 1980s and before the Gulf War and the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

And let's not forget that Iraqis are hardly alone in this horrible predicament. The Israeli air force dropped hundreds of thousands of these munitions - furnished to them, of course, by US arms manufacturers, courtesy of your tax dollars - on Lebanon in the summer 2006 war. It's common for little kids to pick up the bomblets, thinking to play with them, only to be maimed or killed. And while we're on the subject, let's also not forget that the US also left (is leaving) behind in Iraq the remains of tons of ordnance containing depleted uranium, to which a number of experts have attributed a consequent spike in cancers and blood diseases among US veterans and Iraqis.

According to the report, every day, at least one Iraqi loses life or a limb to unexploded ordnance. And women and girls seem to be especially victimized by this. Once they suffer a disfiguring injury, they're considered unmarriageable - hence, of little worth - so are sent back into the minefields since they've been rendered expendable. Poverty is now so deep and endemic across the countryside that locals are actually trying to harvest areas where unexploded stuff is to be found, hoping to salvage it for sale in order to support their families. Often enough, the buyers have links to the government's mine-clearing operations, but sell the stuff to "insurgents," who can then use it to make bombs to blow up Iraq army or police - or US troops.

All of this, of course, renders the situation even more unbearable for the Iraqi government, which is both trying to deal with the health consequences (even as Iraq's rural health system is failing) and also trying to stop these sales. Hence, the government has stopped its mine-clearing operations altogether.

The other landmines to which I refered above are metaphorical, and of an altogether different nature, but perhaps equally dangerous especially to Iraq's future. The Kurds have just begun to export their oil northward, even though no oil deal has been worked out between the Kurdistan Regional Government and the central government in Baghdad. Quite simply, the central government is starved for funds and expects to get some share of the proceeds, but it is not pleased at all with how this is turning out. At some point, it will surely try to impose its control on the arrangement, but the precedent for Kurdish initiative and control has now been set, and the Kurds will be none too quick to relinquish it. Add this new ingredient to the long-simmering cauldron of Arab-Kurd enmity in Iraq. With the oil issue unresolved, as well as Kirkuk, and the Kurds still hoping to spread their territorial control in Nineveh and Diyala provinces . . . the cauldron can be brought to a boil very quickly.

And US troops can be caught in the middle, or else be witness to a real mess as they depart.

JR's latest op-ed at "War in Context"

Paul Woodward, who runs the indispensable site War in Context, was kind enough to post a new essay from yours truly, here. I hope you'll read it, and am always eager for comments.

Pashtun Refugees and America's Future

Yesterday I wrote a bit about the American culture of self-centeredness and excess. (Again, in re our culture of excess, I highly recommend Andrew Bacevich's recent book, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. In re the American culture of self-centeredness, you need simply have a look around you next time you're on the road, and see how many drivers are yapping into their cell-phones - or even texting - while at high speed.) If you'd like to see an almost heart-rending piece about a very different culture, check out this WaPo report about the Pashtuns of Pakistan, who are accepting impoverishment rather than allow fellow Pashtuns who are refugees from the ongoing fighting go without food and shelter.

But this report also documents the sowing of the seeds of a catastrophe that is largely flying under the American people's radar. More than a million Pakistanis - most of them Pashtun - have been uprooted, made homeless, impoverished by the war that the Pakistani army is now waging with the Taliban, at the US's insistence. Many of the refugees are fed up with the Taliban, whose extremism they often saw firsthand as the Taliban moved into their villages and towns; but many are angry with the Pakistani forces (most of whom are not Pashtuns, but Punjabis - an altogether different ethnic group that has no special affection for Pashtuns) as well as with the US, and see the Pakistani army as fighting the US's war. Such people can be fairly easy pickings for recruitment into the Taliban ranks - and, as the WaPo report makes clear, a situation of thousands displaced and on the move also provides the Taliban a golden opportunity to infiltrate more villages and regions.

My point?

There is no quick fix on the horizon. The US is going to be enmeshed in Pakistan's affairs - and in war in neighboring Afghanistan - for years to come, at great expense in both treasure (of which the US has much less than it did before Mr. Bush launched his Iraq adventure), human lives (American, Pakistani, and Afghan), and human misery. We here in the US have long been pre-occupied with "the troops" - and with "victory." But over the long haul, our futures may hinge much more on what happens to those millions of Afghans and Pakistanis.

A Way Forward from General Motors' Demise

Over the years, I have admired much of Michael Moore's stuff, but at times have been repelled by his tendency to be a bit too personal in his attacks. (For example, I am no fan of Paul Wolfowitz - and would not oppose his being hauled before the World Court on charges related to his promoting the US invasion of Iraq - but his film segment showing Wolfowitz combing his hair by wetting his comb in his mouth was IMHO hardly necessary to make his larger point.)

That said, though, his "letter" of today
MichaelMoore.com : Goodbye, GM ...by Michael Moore

advocates an excellent way forward out of the mess that is the bankruptcy of GM. Whether enough of the American people will buy into it? . . . about that, any drive down the main drag of the small central Michigan city where I live leaves me not too sanguine. Andrew Bacevich explores the reasons why very perceptively in his recent book on "the End of American Exceptionalism." We have become a nation of people who believe that a life of personal mobility, comfort, and excess is our divinely sanctioned birthright. We suck up a huge portion of the planet's resources; yet we have come to believe that the world owes us that, because we are, after all, America. We are very much full of ourselves . . . and, for that reason, very much full of something else.

Our way forward will entail rethinking, downsizing, living within our means and not on the tab that, so many of were raised to believe, our planet itself - and our fellow residents thereof - was happy to extend to us.

The Upcoming Elections in Lebanon - and the Wider Regional Stakes

This story from today's The National (Abu Dhabi) offers an image of Sunni-Shia co-existence in the southern Lebanese city of Tyre, where - as the report describes - "on almost every corner, Hizbollah and Amal’s slain fighters peer down from yellowing photographs, honoured even 20 years after their deaths." The people to whom the reporter spoke seem confident in local Hezbollah militias as a deterrent to the IDF.

But beneath that veneer there lurks - or so it seems to me - an awareness that events over the next few weeks may bring real trouble. If Hezbollah and its allies prevail in the upcoming elections in Lebanon, elements in the current Israeli goverment are likely to raise once again the spectre of imminent existential threat and demand some kind of pre-emptive strike against the new government. Netanyahu will lament the new "terrorist" regime (even though it will have been elected by what will likely be a fair democratic process, as was Hamas in 2006); the US may well follow suit. (In his recent visit there, Joe Biden threatened the Lebanese government with being cut off from any further US succor in the event of a Hezbollah win.) European nations, on the other hand, have begun to deal with Hezbollah as a legitimate political entity. It will be more than interesting to track the impact of a Hezbollah win on US-EU relations.

More worrisome, though, is the prospect that Israel might use a Hezbollah victory in Lebanon as a pretext to either launch a military strike into Lebanon or try to decapitate Hezbollah by going after its leader, Hasan Nasrallah - and, in so doing, force Hezbollah's Iranian supporters into a reprisal that would then "legitimate" an Israeli strike against Iran itself. The possible consequences of that are, of course, catastrophic almost beyond imagination.

Haven from politics in Hizbollah heartland an oasis of calm

Mitchell Prothero, Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: June 01. 2009 11:32PM UAE / June 1. 2009 7:32PM GMT

The markets of Tyre, Lebanon’s southern most city, are free of political advertising due to Hizbollah’s dominance in the area. Mitchell Prothero / The National

BEIRUT // Abu Marwan is very old and, thus, when asked about Lebanon’s upcoming parliamentary elections and concerns that they could lead to renewed sectarian violence, he reached back into French history for his answer.

“When Charles de Gaulle lost an election, he said: ‘If 350 different kinds of cheese don’t satisfy these people, what can I do?’” the tailor recounted. His shop is in Tyre’s market, which has been in use for thousands of years.

“In Lebanon, we have 18 different religions and sects. If 18 sects can’t agree on one thing to make the people’s lives better, then there will be no consensus or stability.”

While much of Lebanon fears a return to such violence, as a western-aligned government dominated by Sunnis, Druze and some Christians does battle with mainstream Shiite parties led by the militant group Hizbollah and its Christian allies in Sunday’s elections, Tyre is a remarkable oasis of election calm.

In stark contrast to the rest of Lebanon, few election posters can be seen adorning walls and homes and residents joke that not a single election rally has been held in the picturesque port city just 10km from the tense border with Israel. The lack of election drama can be strongly attributed to Hizbollah and its more secular Shiite ally, the Amal Movement, completely dominating local politics.

Tyre might not have election posters, but on almost every corner, Hizbollah and Amal’s slain fighters peer down from yellowing photographs, honoured even 20 years after their deaths.

Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbollah’s leader, likes to refer to the nearby town of Bint Jibal as the “heart of the resistance” against Israel, but Tyre serves as the group’s brain, as it remains a critical command and control centre for the group both politically and militarily. The largest city in Lebanon’s troubled south, its overwhelmingly Shiite population and a long history of abuse at the hands of the Israelis has made “the Resistance” an almost divine force in the eyes of local residents.

Such is the faith in the decision-making of the Hizbollah leadership that hardly anyone seemed bothered that the largest military manoeuvres in Israeli history are occurring just over the border, close enough that artillery explosions could be heard through the city streets yesterday. Throughout the region, rumours fly that an opposition win that brings Hizbollah into national power will be quickly followed by war with Israel, but the people of Tyre have simply seen too many wars to really care. “The people who live here, we trust the resistance,” said Abu Ali, working at a clothing stall in the market. “We have no fear of war any more as long as the resistance is taking the decisions.”

Abu Marwan agrees.

“The people here are used to a situation of war and damage,” he said. “I lost my old shop in 1978 when the Israelis invaded. So I opened this one. We’re immune to the fear of damage.”

Tyre bustles with confidence that residents say came after the 2006 summer war with Israel. Although the city was damaged and its outlaying villages completely destroyed, the area quickly bounced back economically, voiding many of the sectarian problems in the rest of Lebanon because of close ties between the majority Shiite and the small Christian and Sunni communities.

“Last May, while Beirut burnt, we didn’t even see one fistfight, even in the civil war we never had any sectarian violence,” bragged Abu Mazloun, who runs the bustling Salinas restaurant along Tyre’s lovely seafront. Popular with United Nations personnel, western aid workers and even Hizbollah officials, his business is the best its ever been, he boasted.

“We’re not worried about Israel either,” he said. “As southerners, if there’s a war, it’s nothing new to us. If we have a mentality of being afraid, then we’d never go out. So we just act like it won’t happen and then rebuild if it does. No problem.”

Part of what instils this confidence is the booming economy, which despite the damage in 2006, was jump-started by the arrival of tens of thousands of UN peacekeepers, non-governmental agencies and other Lebanese who returned home to help their country rebuild.

“The economy is really good,” Abu Mazloun said. “Unifil and the NGOs employ a lot of locals and they spend a lot of money here and in the villages. People are really happy.”

But part of the secret, according to the elderly tailor, Abu Marwan, is that for once there appears to be a sense of equilibrium along the troubled border that he thinks could lead to stability after decades of watching wars break out.

“Before 2006, people were always afraid of the Israelis,” he said. “I have been hiding in bomb shelters for half my life. But in 2006, the resistance did such a good job, that people have relaxed.”

“Since before 1970, the Israelis would bomb us and we would have to run away. I used to sit for weeks inside a bomb shelter and pray to God, not to kill the Israelis, but just to show them how it feels to have to hide. So God sent us Hassan Nasrallah, who in 2006 taught the Israelis that they couldn’t just attack us without a problem. If they attack, now, they have to hide just like we did. He’s my hero.”

U.S. Weighs Tactics on Israeli Settlement - NYTimes.com

President Obama is scheduled to make an address Thursday, in Cairo, directed at the "Muslim world" (as many have noted, a rather unfortunate locution, as it dismisses tremendous diversity under an all-encompassing umbrella). The site is both unfortunate and highly symbolic.

Unfortunate, in that Obama has selected as the venue for this address a country whose repressive leadership under President Hosni Mubarak epitomizes in the eyes of many across the Middle East one of the evils that have retarded the advance of democracy and human rights across the region. By making his address from there, Obama will be seen as at least implicitly sanctifying, rather than sanctioning, the US's embrace of that regime. Many will be watching hopefully for any phraseology censuring that regime, but one of the central and most enduring values of traditional Arab society is hospitality: that it be offered to a guest, and that when it is offered, the guest accept it graciously and uncritically. Therefore, any criticism that Obama expresses will have to be sheathed in the most velvetized of gloves.

Symbolic, in that since the mid-10th century CE, Cairo has been one of the great political and cultural capitals of the Arab world (another umbrella concept, admittedly) - and the region of what became Cairo included the most ancient of Egyptian capitals, Memphis, founded around 3000 BCE by (according to ancient Egyptian legend) the unifier king known as Menes. The pyramids at Giza, which now lie within the confines of Cairo, were once one of several huge royal cemeteries devoted to Egypt's earliest rulers. In 1798, on the eve of the Battle of the Pyramids, which ensured the French conquest (albeit a temporary one) of Egypt, Napoleon Bonaparte admonished his soldiers that thousands of years of history were looking down upon them. Now, more than two centuries later, Mr. Obama would do well to take heed of Napoleon's admonition. For, depending on what he says, his address may be about to assume for future generations the status of a major episode, even a turning point, in "histories" : the "(Middle) East" vs. the "West," Israel vs. the Arab world, Jewish Israelis vs. Muslim and Christian Palestinian Arabs, and, within the United States, those who assume its prerogative of global hegemony as a righteous, militarized "Christian nation" vs. those who advocate its example of global leadership as a largely secular, tolerant democracy. These histories are, of course, hardly segregated from each other. Rather, they are intertwined - or perhaps, nestled within each other, like a series of Russian dolls. The scores of books and articles produced on each of them over just the last few years are too numerous to catalog here. But the vast majority of them show that those histories have been drenched in tension, conflict, and all too often, death, destruction, and the continual ramping-up of distrust and hatred.

Ever since his election - indeed, even during the months that led up to it - a mountain of expectation has been piled upon Mr. Obama's shoulders by those who deeply hope that he might have an important impact on all these histories. Already, in some of his actions, he has moved to inaugurate a new era of US global outreach and partnership - specifically, in both improving international relations and combating global warming. It is perhaps too much to ask that Mr. Obama's upcoming speech in Cairo will mark a turning point in each of the histories I've noted above. But seldom in recent memory has one man positioned himself so well to pull the planet away from the precipice at whose edge his predecessor's policies poised it.

U.S. Weighs Tactics on Israeli Settlement - NYTimes.com

Israeli ministers: No West Bank settlement freeze

The line in the sand is being etched into concrete, and Israeli officials are whining about unfair concessions to the Palestinians - and are seemingly aghast that the "understandings" made with the Bush administration (specifically, about "established realities" regarding West Bank settlement construction) are no longer in force.

Oh, come on! If they want to play that card . . . what about earlier understandings with Israel about a two-state solution - about the need for a Palestinian state - that go back as far as Yitzhak Rabin and the Oslo Accords, and most recently, Ehud Olmert, the Annapolis meetings, etc.? Now Netanyahu/Lieberman reject any such understanding, but they cry foul over West Bank settlement construction? Something long recognized as illegal by both international law and UN resolutions?

Stick to your guns, President Obama,

Israeli ministers: No West Bank settlement freeze - Haaretz - Israel News

Anthony Shadid on the Effects of US Occupation in Iraq

Today's WaPo has what is absolutely a must-read in today's issue - by Anthony Shadid, who is one of the most intrepid - and surely the most lyrical and expressive - American journalists in Iraq today. As I've pointed out before, and as is well known among journalists, he has the distinct advantage of being an Arabic speaker. That enables him to move among people on the streets, to converse and elicit responses and impressions directly from them. It's invaluable. You can learn more about Iraq from one Anthony Shadid piece than you can from a hundred press releases from the US military command there.

Shadid's piece today is on the cultural impact of the American conquest and occupation of Iraq: American words, movies, music, even haircuts and dipping tobacco - along with an awareness that some important aspects of Iraqi custom and tradition are disappearing.

Or perhaps, I should think, just going underground. And if the re-emerging Sunni resistance to the US occupation is indeed as strong as it appears, and if the Muslim fundamentalist influences persist (they remain very strong in the predominantly Shiite south of Iraq), and if the US withdrawal from Iraqi cities proceeds as scheduled, one has to wonder about the possibility of an anti-American reaction in the years ahead.