It seems hard to countenance, but could academics be right in thinking that Islamist terrorists are driven by 'basically altruistic' thoughts?

Osama bin Laden was the most famous terrorist in the world; he also served as the single biggest distraction from a serious analysis of the roots of terrorism. With his murderous version of Muslim piety and references to a 7th-century caliphate, the al-Qaida head helped define Islamist extremism as ideological, apocalyptic and imperialist. That story bore as much relation to the truth as a skinny man's reflection in a hall of mirrors – but it's the one that US and British politicians bought. Judging by yesterday's comments from US secretary of state Hillary Clinton and defence secretary Liam Fox, it's the version they still believe. Not only is that account wrong; some of the best academic research suggests that following it does little to tackle terrorism.

The conventional view of Islamist terrorism is the one set out by Clinton yesterday, of a "violent ideology that holds no value for human life": evil, inexplicable, and irreconcilable with any civilised values. Yet analysis from social scientists suggests the opposite.

However odd it may seem to use these terms of would-be jihadists and suicide bombers, some researchers describe Islamist terrorists as in the main rational, desperate figures operating in wrecked countries. Over the decades, two academics working in separate disciplines have come up with a particularly compelling, heavily researched account both of what Islamist terrorists are not, and of what drives them on.

The first is Ariel Merari, a psychologist who fought in the Arab-Israeli war of 1973 and has spent the past three decades studying the attitudes of terrorists. Some of his most notable work is on Palestinian suicide bombers. He has spoken to friends and families of suicide bombers, and even to would-be attackers who failed to detonate their explosive belts before being captured.

His first conclusion is that Palestinian suicide bombers are usually not suicidal. They aren't depressed, or otherwise mentally ill, nor do they tend to be drug or alcohol abusers. What's more, these supposed Islamic warriors aren't especially religious. By and large, they didn't suggest religion as their primary motivation, nor was there much hope of a glorious afterlife.

That fits with what we know of suicide bombers elsewhere. The organisation that carried out most suicide attacks in the late 20th century was the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, nominally a neo-Marxist, atheist organisation. The PKK in Turkey is also secular and leftwing, but has encouraged members into suicide attacks.

What Merari's research shows is "a large pool of psychologically healthy, basically altruistic suicide attackers". That description comes from Eli Berman, at the University of California, San Diego. His use of the term "basically altruistic" is surely intended to be provocative, but what the economist means is that terrorists are often acting out of a desire to help others in their group. His work is full of other such terms that will raise hackles. But as someone who has spent years studying the Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah and even the Mahdi Army in Iraq, he is someone you have to read to understand what drives terrorists.

A former Israeli soldier in the 1982 Lebanon war, what Berman stresses is that Islamic terrorist groups survive by providing vital infrastructure and social services. The breakthrough moment for the Taliban came in the mid-90s, when they were able to run a secure toll road from Kandahar in southern Afghanistan to Herat in the west of the country. In a notoriously unsafe country overrun by rival warlords, the Taliban showed they could provide a public utility, and that its militiamen could make a living from the tollroad business.

Berman's work is studded with similar examples. Hezbollah? It runs hospitals and schools, as well as provides a refuse collection service – and even manages an electricity grid. The academic describes these groups as economic clubs, whose members run these services, earning a living, preferential treatment, and popular support.

This is, of course, an economist's account: it is more concerned with incentives than mobilising ideologies and symbols. Berman is also more concerned with organisations than individuals. But if Bush and Obama – and Blair, Brown and Cameron – had followed his ideas they might have saved themselves a wasted decade in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Rather than winning hearts and minds, Berman suggests western powers should always have been focused on providing sewage and schools. Rather than occupying territory, the logical conclusion of his work is that foreign governments should have restricted themselves to supporting aid and development projects carried out by NGOs. The same principle would also apply to Israel's dealings with Hamas: Netanyahu would find it most productive to channel money and development projects into the Gaza Strip.

Some of the economist's prescriptions sound pedestrian and mechanical – do X and Y will happen. But they are no more simplistic than some of the actual policies followed in tackling Islamist extremism.

Towards the end of 2005, members of the Bush administration began making speeches on Osama's desire to establish an Islamic caliphate. One US general likened this supposed masterplan to the importance of Mein Kampf in setting out Hitler's worldview. Rubbish, warned experts – and they were right, of course. But it suited both Bush and Osama better to pretend such threats were in earnest.

The bottom line from reading Berman and Merari is this: Islamist terrorism is deadly and unjustifiable. But it is also, at its root, prosaic. Most of all, it is soluble.

On Wednesday, a historic agreement was reached between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas in Cairo, reconciling the two factions and laying the groundwork for a new, interim government. The impetus for the rapprochement, brokered by the Egyptian government, apparently lies with the thousands of Gazans who protested last month, calling for an end to the four year rift. The rivalry dates back to the 2006 elections to the Palestinian Authority, which Hamas won, threatening the hegemony of Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah movement. Hamas took control of the Gaza strip, leaving the PA in place governing the West Bank.

The subsequent antipathy between the two groups appeared to be forgotten on Wednesday, with the head of the Fatah delegation, Azzam al-Ahmad, saying that ‘(Abbas) has said we want Hamas, Hamas is part of the Palestinian national fabric.’ Moussa Abu Marzouk, the deputy leader of Hamas, said that ‘our rift gave the occupation a chance. Today we turn a new page.’

The Israeli response has been hostile. On Wednesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, stated that the Palestinian Authority had to choose between peace with Israel and peace with Hamas. Speaking in Nicosia on Friday, Israeli Foreign Minister, and head of the ultra right Yisrael Beiteinu party Avigdor Lieberman called on international governments to withhold recognition from any joint government. Citing the repeated missile attacks against Israel by the Islamist Hamas movement’s armed wing, he said such recognition would ‘legitimise’ Hamas.

The US response has been cautious, saying that any Palestinian Unity government would have to renounce violence and recognise the State of Israel. US National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor decried Hamas as a terrorist organisation. Violence between Hamas and Israel has escalated recently, sparking fears of another direct Israeli military intervention in the Gaza Strip, along the lines of the 2009 Operation Cast Lead, which resulted in the deaths of 13 Israeli soldiers and up to 1000 Palestinian civilians.

The openSecurity verdict: The developments on Wednesday represent an unambiguous failure of Israel’s long-standing policy of ‘divide and rule’. It was in pursuit of such a strategy that Israel began to fund Hamas in the late seventies and eighties, in order to undermine the secular Palestinian leadership of the PLO. This strategy appears to have backfired dramatically, in a similar fashion to Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which resulted in the creation of the other asymmetric threat on Israel’s borders, the Shi’ia Hizbollah movement.

In retrospect, such a development was always likely in view of the utter intransigence of Israeli negotiators revealed by the Palestinian Papers. The leaked documents reveal a supine, if not desperate, Palestinian negotiating team making sweeping concessions on refugees right to return, the legal status of the Temple Mount and illegal settlements in East Jerusalem, to no avail. Such obduracy, arguably far in excess of what hardline Zionist Vladamir Jabotinsky was recommending in his doctrine of the Iron Wall, recalls Golda Meir’s stance towards Anwar Sadat in 1971, a stance that led inexorably to the Yom Kippur War.

In the immediate to near term, if Hamas and the PA are able to bridge the numerous logistical obstacles to making this reconciliation practical, the consequences could be very destabilising. If the International Community reacts in a similar fashion to January 2006, when Hamas won the PA elections, the result could be a sharp curtailment of development support to the entirety of the Palestinian territories. More importantly, if violence from Gaza continues, the Israeli government may now have a pretext to implement even harsher measures in the West Bank.

Potentially, in view of Israel’s already darkening security situation following the removal of Hosni Mubarak from power and the ever-present issue of Iran’s nuclear programme, the result could be another war. Such an operation, again, would not be confined to Gaza but would engulf the West Bank as well. The alternative, a human security approach to Israel’s strategic dilemma, would recognise that Israel will never be truly secure as long as its own safety is bought at the price of the repression of Palestinians.

By implementing a two state solution, ceasing its settlement operations and dismantling existing illegal settlements, Israel could more rapidly achieve what sixty years of armed intransigence has failed to accomplish. However, witnessing the statements of Israeli policy-makers over the previous week, and with Washington falling back on the terrorism discourse to hide its own cupidity, this seems more unlikely than ever.

Protesters defy Syrian ban on demonstrations   

On Friday, thousands of protesters in Syria defied a new government crackdown to demonstrate against the regime. After last weeks mixture of concessions and repression, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had deployed tanks and snipers to towns and cities ahead of renewed agitation after Friday prayers. The regime had also issued a blanket ban on demonstrations.

From the Ba’ath party’s perspective, the protests in the coastal city of Latakia are potentially the most worrying. Latakia is in the heartland of the governing Alawite elite, and plain clothes security forces have reportedly opened fire on demonstrators, killing at least five. Other demonstrations have been reported in Banias and Qamishli. Aside from continued anger at the regime and its corruption, a major proximate cause of the demonstrations is fury over the conduct of Syrian security forces in the southern city of Deraa.

Deraa is considered to be at the centre of the anti-government agitation and has been under a virtual state of siege since last Monday, when substantial military forces moved in to subdue to protesters. It has since been sealed off, with electricity and telecommunications cut. At least fifty people are reported to have been killed there in the last week alone, with the national death toll since the start of the demonstrations last month now standing at 450.

16 dead in Thai-Cambodian border clashes

In the early hours on Friday, Thai and Cambodian troops exchanged fire across a disputed border, breaching a cease fire put in place the day before to end a week of such clashes. The violence has flared up in the poorly demarcated Dongrak mountain range, which is home to three 12th century Hindu temples, and has led to the deaths of 16 people in the last week. Over 60,000 inhabitants of the disputed region have been evacuated. The dispute dates back to the 1950s and the end of French colonial rule over what was Indochina. Some analysts suggest that the motivation is political; it is thought that elements of the Thai military, in collusion with nationalist politicians, are attempting to engineer a crisis to force the cancellation of democratic elections due to take place in July.

Now that Bashar al-Assad is crushing opposition with terrible brutality, no one in the West knows how to deal with him

The Observer's encounter with Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad, was an oddly informal one in a country deeply suspicious of the foreign media. An interview with his British-born wife, Asma, had been arranged, but as it ended, an aide to the president invited me to coffee with Assad himself.

Sitting somewhat awkwardly on the vast plush sofas of his reception room in the "official palace" – a place, he explained, where he did not actually live – he asked as many questions as he answered. In a conversational tone, Assad said he wanted peace with Israel, talked about reform, discussed relations with the US, and reflected on his father's harsh line on Islamists.

Syria's new president seemed then, almost a decade ago, a plausible figure, uncertain and almost modest, an impression encouraged by themarketing of him in the west by the British PR agency Bell Pottinger. He had been president for two years, having in 2000 succeeded his authoritarian father Hafez al-Assad, the man who had founded Syria's Ba'athist republic after seizing power during a coup d'etat in 1970. That early image is one that Assad and his wife have continued to promote assiduously, most recently in an interview given by Syria's first lady to a gushing Vogue magazine, which included pictures of Assad playing with his sons.

It is an image that served the London-trained ophthalmologist well, securing him a state visit to London at a time when the government of Tony Blair – as well as other European governments – thought he was a different proposition to his father, who gained notoriety for ordering the deaths in 1982 of up to 20,000 in the town of Hama during a revolt by the Muslim Brotherhood.

But in the last few weeks that early image has seemed sharply at odds with the acts carried out in Assad's name in a murderous clampdown on those demonstrating against the regime, which has so far claimed more than 400 lives as Syrian towns have been put under siege – an entire country locked down.

What is less clear now is who Assad really is and what he represents. Indeed, how powerful he really is. On Friday, when a "day of rage" was called to follow Friday prayers – this time endorsed by the banned Muslim Brotherhood – Assad had taken a leaf out of the book of deposed President Mubarak of Egypt and Colonel Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, flooding the streets with armed security forces even as his opponents demonstrated in more than 50 locations.

Although protests have been taking place weekly after Friday prayers, last week felt different because for the first time, the Assad regime had offered no concessions the day before. There were also the resignations of several hundred members of Assad's Ba'ath party, and reports of clashes between members of the Syrian army's 4th Brigade, commanded by the president's younger brother Maher, and the 5th Brigade outside Deraa, the besieged town that has become the symbol of the Syrian uprising. And last week felt different because of the horrors that have taken place as the regime of Bashar al-Assad has opted for repression rather than concession.

As it has cracked down, so the regime has blamed the violence on a farcically broad range of culprits: armed gangs, Lebanese legislators, Saudis, Palestinian extremists – all with ominous overtones of the 1980s and Assad's father's most infamous massacre.

To underline the message of what might happen should the regime fall, state media and newly printed posters on the streets have pushed fears of chaos, especially of a sectarian nature.

In the coastal city of Latakia, gunmen believed to belong to the shabiha, an Alawite smuggling gang drawn from the extended Assad clan, have shot at Christian neighbourhoods with warnings of a Sunni takeover, before going to Alawite neighbourhoods and warning of Sunni revenge. (The minority Alawite sect, to which the Assads belong, is generally regarded as a branch of Shia Islam.)

But if the tactics used by the regime appear largely identical to that used by Gaddafi, the response by the international community has been markedly different. On Friday, as the US moved to apply sanctions, Assad was noticeably absent from the list of targets, although it named his younger brother Maher as well as his cousin Atif Najib and the Iranian al-Quds forces which the US accuses of channelling riot equipment to the regime. Noticeably absent too has been any threat of military action against a country which – unlike Libya – is seen as having a very well-equipped and trained army and powerful friends, not least Iran.

Officially, the opinion offered by analysts and diplomats in the last few days to explain this difference is that Syria matters in a way that Libya does not in regional and international affairs.

It is for that reason, perhaps, that Qatar, which led the charge against Libya, on Friday quietly absented itself from the UN Human Rights Council's deliberations on Syria.

For Assad, the survival of the police state founded by his father is a very personal affair which he has dressed up as a national necessity to "prevent" his country from slipping into civil war. For the wider region, how events will unfold in Syria is becoming equally pressing.

Gaddafi's regime in Libya has over the decades antagonised most in the Arab region. Syria, however, despite its poverty and waning importance as a leader in regional affairs – not least since its humiliating retreat from Lebanon in 2005 – remains a presence that has to be acknowledged.

It occupies a crucial location, bordering Iraq, Israel and Lebanon. And a Syria plunged into chaos, diplomats fear, would have profound consequences for all of those countries as well as for the Middle East peace process.

Damascus hosts the political bureau of Hamas, including its political leader Khaled Meshaal, although reports emerged yesterday – denied by Hamas – that it is now planning to relocate. Indeed, some have argued that Hamas's peace deal with its Palestinian rival Fatah was prompted by the fear of losing Syria as a patron.

Assad has also allowed weapons to pass over Syria's borders for the rearming of Hezbollah after the 2006 war between that group and Israel.

Despite western efforts to prise it apart from its alliance with Iran, Syria remains close to Tehran. And while Syria played host to a large number of Iraqis fleeing violence, it also allowed passage for foreign fighters travelling to fight the US-led coalition in Iraq.

Joshua Landis of the Middle East Centre at the University of Oklahoma told the Christian Science Monitor last week that Syria epitomised the split nature of the region, describing it as "the cockpit of the Middle East".

"On the one hand," he said, "it has always made a claim to be the beating heart of Arabism, calling for unity and secularism, and on the other, it is a deeply fragmented nation with a regime dominated by a religious minority."

Of most immediate concern to neighbouring countries last week was fear of a flood of migrants fleeing the violence. Cyprus's foreign minister, Markos Kyprianou, announced on Friday that the authorities there are drawing up plans on how to cope with a possible wave of migrants from crisis-hit Syria – a contingency being prepared by other nearby territories.

For others, such as Turkey, with which Syria came close to war at the end of the 1990s over Damascus providing a safe haven for Kurdish separatists, the violence in Syria is deeply embarrassing. These days, the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is personally close to Assad, their families have holidayed together, and visa restrictions were lifted for Syrians travelling to Turkey under Ankara's "Zero Problems" foreign policy.

Mubarak and Gaddafi also tried to play on fear of the chaos that might follow the fall of their regimes, but Assad's warnings appear to have found a more receptive audience.

"It's messy," says Jane Kinninmont, researcher at the foreign affairs thinktank Chatham House. "What makes it different, I think, is the particular nature of the uncertainty over what might follow Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria.

"In Tunisia and Egypt it was known who the opposition were, although it is true that in Libya a recognisable opposition pulled itself together pretty quickly. What is more worrying in Syria, given its geographic position, is the prospect of civil war."

It is a fear that is shared by Syrians themselves. "No one can predict with certainty what would happen if Assad fell," says one Syrian analyst in the capital Damascus who asked for anonymity. "Those suspicions have been stoked by the government alone. We don't trust our neighbours not to be members of the security forces. But the conclusion that there will be chaos is an under-analysed scare tactic. The majority of Syrians want to live together in peace."

The fear of internal violence has been raised by rumours of clashes between different army units outside the key town of Deraa, which has become the symbol of Syria's uprising.

There are some in the region who might actually prefer that to a quick transition to majority – and therefore Sunni – rule, not least Iran, which would see not only the loss of an important ally but also potentially a transit route for weapons to Hezbollah to maintain a kind of proxy strategic balance that threatens Israel's border.

And, unlike Gaddafi, Syria has split international opinion as to the nature of both the regime under Assad and the character of Assad himself, with a significant minority still believing that, despite everything, he can be manoeuvred on to the course of genuine reform that he has spoken about but never delivered.

It is this that explains the absence of Assad himself from the newly announced US sanctions against his state, explained officially as targeting those directly responsible for the violence.

It is a judgment predicated on one reading of Syria's dynamics – that Bashar al-Assad is less powerful than other figures around him, including his brother Maher.

Others, however, believe that, far from being the weak link, Bashar al-Assad is as powerful as his father in a regime which is no longer truly Ba'athist but – like Hosni Mubarak's was in Egypt – one bound together by close and corrupt financial interest.

And whatever the reality, by yesterday there was little evidence that the tactic of selective sanctions was working. A resident of the besieged southern Syrian city of Deraa said yesterday that more troops were being brought in a day after security forces reportedly shot dead dozens.

All of which confirms, for the likes of the Lebanese journalist Hisham Melhem, the naivety that has driven western foreign policy towards Syria for more than a decade.

Writing in Foreign Policy last week, he said: "Over the last 10 years many western politicians and scholars took the road to Damascus, holding out hope that the young Syrian president Bashar al-Assad would lead Syria out of the political wilderness and place it on the path of political and economic reform.

"There was a naive assumption that Bashar had the makings of a modern leader because he was in part western-educated, spoke relatively good English, and married a professional woman who worked as an investment banker in London."

It is the outcome the west is still betting on as the odds get daily longer.

Syria is in its fourth week of unrest as anti-government protests persist, and the death toll climbs with 171 killed thus far according to Amnesty International.

Conflicting reports emanating from Syria provide an unclear picture as to who is perpetrating the violence.

Syrian authorities continue to insist that rogue elements, foreign meddling and armed gangs are responsible for the sporadic violence mostly in the restive southern town of Daraa and the coastal city of Latakia. However, witnesses in the coastal region report that Syrian forces have fired indiscriminately on protesters, with widespread accusations of mass detentions and torture.

Confusion surrounds the deadly events of Monday, when nine Syrian soldiers were shot dead in Banias, another coastal town not far from Latakia.

A Guardian report claims that the Syrian soldiers were shot by fellow security officers for refusing to fire on protesters. However, footage of the killings released by Syrian television appears to support the regime’s contention that the soldiers were in fact ambushed by snipers from a roof of a nearby building.

The Ba’ath regime has accused exiled rogue elements including former Vice President Abdel Halim Khaddam and estranged uncle of the President, Rifa’at al-Assad, of seeking to exploit the unrest by arming militias. The inability to gain a clear understanding of the circumstances in Syria underscores the complexity of the situation.

Despite being hit by the wave of anti-regime uprisings across the Arab world, certain internal dynamics in Syria render the country unique to other Arab states, and the protests must be contextualised accordingly. The Syrian President Bashar al-Assad argued this point in a mostly disappointing and unconvincing speech a fortnight ago. The dictator sought to acknowledge the regional protests, but rightly cautioned that Syria was not a copy of other Arab states: "Syria is not isolated from what is happening in the Arab world. We are part of this region. We influence and are influenced by it, but at the same time we are not a copy of other countries," he said.

Assad refused to discuss any of the unprecedented reforms his adviser Bouthaina Shaaban announced a week prior to the speech, including a free press and a multi-party system. However, the secular regime has attempted to appease Islamists and Kurds by easing restrictions on the Islamic veil in schools, and granting citizenship to stateless Kurds.

Internal complexities

Unique complexities underpin Syrian politics, as well as the protests targeting the regime. Syrians do not enjoy the same level of unity that was displayed in the Egyptian protests.

Syria is a multi-confessional and ethnic state along the lines of its unstable neighbours Iraq and Lebanon, and thus ripe for civil war should a political vacuum remain in the wake of a revolution. The Assad family belongs to the minority Alawite sect – an offshoot of Shi’ite Islam – whose members number approximately 12 per cent of the population. Christians and Kurds also form sizeable minorities, with a combined 20 per cent.The remaining majority are Sunni Arab, itself divided between impoverished masses with sympathies to Islamist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood, and a merchant class still largely loyal to Assad. Indeed, Assad’s wife Asma al-Assad hails from a wealthy Sunni family.

With the exception of the Kurds, Syria’s minorities – including its Christians – are mostly supportive of Assad for fear of a repressive Islamist regime. The Ba’ath party of Syria is a staunchly secular party that has guaranteed the rights of minority Islamic sects and Christians. Many Syrians fear a social breakdown similar to that in Iraq following the fall of Saddam Hussein, and the subsequent targeting of minorities by Islamist militias.

In 1982 Syrians saw a glimpse of the terror that might engulf the country, when an uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood was brutally crushed in Hama by the late Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, father of Bashar, killing thousands.

Tensions between the various sects and classes have remained ever since, and fuel the grievances currently expressed by anti-regime protesters. Thus, for the majority of Syrians, it is a question of stability versus reform. Most Syrians do not want to follow the war paths of Iraq and Lebanon, rendering it a difficult case to sell for anti-government protesters.

For the protests to succeed, it must be presented as a unified Syrian voice, and avoid the perilous sectarian paths of Lebanon and Iraq. Conversely, the protests have prompted a strong reaction from Assad’s supporters among the various minority groups and Sunni loyalists, with mass pro-government rallies held across the country.

At present, Syria appears to be dividing into pro and anti-government camps.

The defection of the Sunni merchant class – elitists who effectively run the economy – is crucial to the success of anti-government protests. Most have benefited significantly from Assad’s recent economic liberalisation, and have so far remained loyal to the regime.Another pillar of power, the Syrian Army, has also declared its support of Assad, and refused to stand neutral as suggested by US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates.

On the fence remains perhaps the most important source of power, the Syrian people. The majority of Syrians fear instability, and despite the detestable repressive methods of Assad, the Ba’ath regime has succeeded in guaranteeing a level of internal stability unknown to Iraqis, Lebanese and Palestinians.

Regional security

A fear of instability in Syria is shared by regional powers and the US. Uncertainty of a Syrian revolt, and the lingering presence of the Muslim Brotherhood, is causing anxiety in regional capitals. All key actors would prefer to keep Assad at the helm for fear of the unknown, or worse, an Islamist Syria.

Regional security stakes are incredibly high as Syria holds a crucial position, geographically and politically, in the Middle East. Syria wields considerable influence in Lebanon, Iraq and the Palestinian Territories, and is Iran’s key regional ally. Its alliance with Iran is crucial to Iranian power projection, and the strength of Hezballah and Hamas.

A Sunni-led Syria would most likely cool its alliance with Iran and Hezballah, dramatically altering regional dynamics, and endangering Lebanon’s delicate sectarian balance. However, the Muslim Brotherhood – as witnessed in Egypt – is unlikely to improve relations with Israel and the US. To the contrary, Israel could not envision a more nightmare scenario than to be completely surrounded by the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, Egypt and Hamas in Gaza.

The emergence of Sunni power in Syria might weaken Iran’s hand in the Middle East, but would empower the new political reality in Egypt and strengthen already deep ties with Turkey, both set to become more active in regional affairs.

Whilst several conservative voices in the US have urged Obama to use the situation to knock out a key Iranian ally, Israel could not think of anything worse. For Israel, it's the predictability of Assad that renders him the preferred option in Damascus.

As Israeli academic, Eyal Zisser, argued: “You know where you stand with him.”

Israel faces the threat of a multiplication of foes in the region should the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt emerge in future years as an active opponent to Israeli interests in the region. No longer will Israel be solely contending with Iran for regional supremacy, a likelihood that is keeping Israel’s hands out of the current Syrian turmoil.

Such a fear was reflected in US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s declaration of Assad as a “reformer”, a far cry from the crazy dictator analogy used to describe Colonel Gaddafi. The US has dismissed calls for military intervention in Syria, and like Israel, is eyeing the protests with great interest and anxiety.

Democracy does indeed come at a price. Perhaps too high of a price in Syria.

Antoun Issa is a commentator on international affairs with a specific interest in the Middle East.

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Interviewee: Robert Danin, Eni Enrico Mattei Senior Fellow for Middle East and Africa Studies
Interviewer: Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor

In contrast to the tumultuous activity throughout the Middle East, there is a tense quiet between Israelis and Palestinians, who are watching closely to see how the region's various revolutions and protests play out, says CFR Middle East expert Robert Danin.

Both sides are using more sophisticated weapons technology, says Danin, which makes the dangers of confrontation more acute.

That's one reason the United States needs to reengage meaningfully in the dispute; another is that when the United States is not involved, both sides become mistrustful and misinterpret the U.S. viewpoint, Danin says.

He also notes that Israelis and Palestinians are feeling uncertain, with Israel feeling isolated internationally and Palestinians concerned about unilaterally seeking statehood at the United Nations this fall.

You've just returned from the Middle East. What's your overall impression?

One of the most striking things for me--as a visitor to Israel and the West Bank over the last thirty years--was that [this time] I had come from Egypt and Jordan, and normally when I would make that trip, Egypt and Jordan would be relatively tranquil and then I would get to Israel and the Palestinian territory and things would be humming. This was the first time I ever experienced the opposite. Egypt and Jordan were the places where things were humming, and when I got to Israel and the Palestinian territories things were not just quiet, but people were watching very closely what is happening elsewhere in the region.

Recently there were rockets fired from Gaza, with Israeli war planes and artillery responding. Then on Sunday there was an unofficial ceasefire and things seemed quiet again.

What happened in Gaza is extremely significant. What you have seen in the last three and a half weeks was the first major challenge to the tenuous calm that had been put in place after the Cast Lead Operation in 2008-2009 [the Israeli attacks on Gaza]. It is not a formal ceasefire, in that there is not an agreement between the two parties, but there are mutual unilateral statements that they will meet calm with calm. It breaks down periodically, and there are certain rules of the game. When it breaks down, Israel will produce intelligence that it has reason to believe that Hamas is about to do something and it will launch an operation. Hamas will then respond.

What happened in the last month were two developments. Israel reacted to what it perceived was an imminent threat by killing some high-ranking Palestinian militants. That led to a military response from Hamas. There was another important development on the battlefield. Last Thursday, Hamas employed the Cornet rocket (Vikn) against Israel. This was significant because this was not indiscriminate mortar fire from Gaza into Israel. The Cornet rocket is a precision- guided weapon that targets specific targets. It is an escalation in the level of technology being employed by Hamas.

Where did they get these rockets from?

These are Russian-made. Israel is quite concerned and is taking follow-up actions with the Russians to find out how this rocket got to Gaza. The Cornet is a sophisticated anti-tank rocket, and it hit an Israeli school bus. The bus had just dropped off all but one of thirty students. The student who was left was injured quite badly. Had those other students been on the bus and had there been mass casualties, we would be today in a very significant military operation, if not war in Gaza.

There is one other significant military development on the ground. Israel has for the first time deployed the Iron Dome anti-rocket system (Haaretz) with which they have been able to successfully intercept rockets that were fired at Israel. Over the last week, Israel intercepted nine rockets that were heading to Israeli population centers. So what you have had is an escalation of sophistication in the weapons technology that is being used by both sides. The situation now has been restored to a certain degree of calm, but what we've seen with this calm is that it can break down very easily.

When you talked to officials in Egypt, did you detect that their attitude toward Israel had changed significantly?

What you have now is that for Egyptians, Israel is not part of the landscape. What is happening in Egypt is consuming the Egyptians. They have a war raging to their west in Libya. Even there, the Egyptians are not really focused on that other than the concerns of a flow of refugees and Egyptian workers coming back to Egypt, which puts economic strain on the country. The Egyptian protestors have not focused on Israel, on Palestine, or on the West. They are focused on domestic issues. The leadership is having to react to that.

One of the things that is important is that in the calm that was brokered over the weekend, the Egyptians did play a role. Egypt is still in the game. President Mahmoud Abbas went to Egypt (JPost) last week, so the Egyptians have not been removed from the equation. But what has happened in Egypt has had a significant effect within the Palestinian leadership. Egypt had provided both encouragement toward being more forthcoming on the peace process and provided a certain cover for the Palestinians to be able to move forward with the Israelis. I think the Palestinians are feeling like they lost their major patron in Egypt, a kind of "elder cousin." They are trying to reassess and reestablish what that means for them. As a result, there is a sense of drift in Palestinian thinking. Despite what is popularly perceived as a hard-headed, calculated drive toward Palestinian statehood that began last December, there is a great deal of uncertainty about how to proceed.

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has been saying the Palestinians are ready for statehood (Reuters). He and others are talking about seeking a UN General Assembly resolution in September granting statehood. Can this happen?

The Palestinians can go to the General Assembly if they don't find success or satisfaction within the Security Council. The United States is trying to urge the Palestinians not to go that route, because there is a question about what would be achieved. Even if the Palestinians succeeded in getting a General Assembly resolution recognizing Palestine as a state, there are questions about what that would really achieve for them.

Israel could annex the Jewish settlements in the West Bank, I suppose. Unless there is a brokered agreement, nothing else is going to happen right?

Statehood would not change anything on the ground. What Israel is likely to do is say that "you have broken the Oslo framework in which you pledged not to take any unilateral steps." As the result, Israel could decide that it, too, will institute unilateral steps. Given its profound power on the ground, this could precipitate steps that are inimical to Palestinian interests. To date, what the threat to go to statehood has done is to exercise the Israelis, and that encourages the Palestinians because they believe they are on to something.

What happened to the Middle East mission of former senator George J. Mitchell, which was launched soon after Obama was inaugurated in 2009?

Mitchell has been to the region just one time since the congressional elections last November. We are not seeing American activism here.

Is it because the United States is so preoccupied by everything else?

That is one possibility. The United States is overstretched and is focused very heavily on what is happening elsewhere in the region. There is a calculation that there may not be a great deal to achieve right now between Israel and Palestinians. There is a certain degree of frustration with both sides. The United States was not happy to cast the veto in the Security Council last Saturday on a Palestinian effort to condemn Israel for its settlements. There is frustration with the Palestinians for having put the United States in that situation. There is also frustration at Israel for not giving the negotiations more to work with. The United States is effectively taking a time out. This is not a wise approach.

What you see in talking to Israelis and Palestinians is that in the absence of engagement by the United States, they start to ascribe to the United States much that is largely untrue. Sometimes diplomacy is important not just to achieve positive outcomes but to prevent negative ones. This is a situation where engagement with the Palestinians would be very important to try to discourage them from following a path that is not necessarily going to lead them to realize what's in their best interests.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also feels the lack of engagement from the United States. It's no secret about the lack of chemistry between Obama and Netanyahu. When I saw Netanyahu the week before last, it was clear he is very concerned about the regional environment. He has seen what happened in Egypt; he has seen what happened in Gaza. He therefore believes that this is a time for Israel to secure itself and is skeptical about now being the time to make dramatic gestures. That being said, he is also concerned about Israel's standing in the international community and recognizes that Israel is under a great deal of pressure by being identified as a recalcitrant state and is being blamed to a certain extent for the stalemate with the Palestinians.

Was there much discussion about a "peace plan" put forward recently (NYT) by some former Israeli officials?

Not really. But the impact of this sort of initiative will only be demonstrated over time. One thing it does is highlight the current government's failure to date to articulate a clear vision for Israel's future with the Palestinians. And that is where I would expect the impact, if there is to be any, to be felt: namely by putting pressure on the government to take some initiative.

Is it time for Obama to stop trying to mediate and come forward with a U.S. plan that is specific about what both sides should do?

Whenever there is an impasse in the Israel and Palestinian peace process, the wise men and women of the Washington policy establishment start to clamor for the president to lay out parameters. Laying out the American vision is a powerful tool. It is one that has to be deployed at the right time, to be effective. What you don't want is a situation where the president stands up, declares his views, and it is met with a thud. To a certain extent, if you recall in 1982 President Reagan announced the Reagan plan. It came after Israel's invasion of Lebanon. It got no traction and effectively took the United States out of the game.

The United States should only deploy an official plan if it believes that it has a prospect of moving the ball forward and getting the parties back to the negotiating table or to a more positive footing. It is sort of like a nuclear weapon; having it in your arsenal may be more powerful than actually deploying it. The threat of deploying a speech can serve as that motivating tool to get the parties to try to take action. It's not altogether clear that the parties will like what the United States has to say. Unless both the Israeli and the Palestinian leaderships are in a position to respond favorably, or have in some way prepared their publics, then this could actually be a very wasted gesture.

I don't believe that now is the time, because I don't believe that either party has prepared their publics. Both Israel and the Palestinian Authority are largely focused on domestic politics and their own internal situations. I believe there is room for American diplomacy. We don't necessarily need to escalate immediately to the "diplomatic nuclear option." For a starter, it is important that that United States starts to really reengage the parties on the ground in a serious way by stepping up American mediation.

This post originally appeared at CFR.org.

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Syria's president is not the only one nervously monitoring the protests. Regime change there will reshape the Middle East

The Syrian regime, long a key player in the Middle East power play, has decided to fight back with full force. It seems determined to defeat the tidal wave of popular protest that smashed the regimes of Tunisia and Egypt, that is threatening rulers in Libya, Yemen and Bahrain, and is now challenging state power in a dozen Syrian cities.

If the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad fails to reassert its authority, and is instead brought down or merely enfeebled by a prolonged period of popular agitation, the geopolitical implications could be considerable. Syria's allies – the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Shia resistance movement Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Hamas government in Gaza – would all come under pressure. For all three, loss of Syrian support would be painful.

Israel would no doubt view such a development with great satisfaction. It has long sought to disrupt the Tehran-Damascus-Hezbollah-Hamas axis, which has challenged its regional supremacy – even acquiring a certain deterrent capability, intolerable in Israel's eyes. But Israel's feelings might be tempered by fear that Assad could be replaced by an Islamist regime, even more threatening to its interests and security.

For the moment, all that can be said is that the concessions and promises made so far by Assad have been too little, too late, and have failed to satisfy the protesters. The last few days have seen a renewed surge of demonstrations that, with their swelling numbers, fury and anti-regime slogans, are beginning to seem like an insurrection. The regime has replied with live fire, curfews, massive arrests and cordons thrown around towns and villages. Some 200 protesters must have been killed.

The gloves are now off. In a chilling warning, the Syrian ministry of interior declared at the weekend: "There is no more room for leniency or tolerance in enforcing the law, preserving the security of the country and citizens, and protecting public order."

By all accounts, hardliners inside the regime have now won the debate with reformers, if indeed debate there was. The protesters have in turn hardened their stance as a result of the regime's harsh response. Pointing a finger at key relatives of the president – his brother Maher al-Assad, commander of the Republican Guard, and his cousin Rami Makhlouf, an exorbitantly rich businessman – some are demanding not mere improvements to the way Syria is governed but a change of regime.

It seems clear that in his speech on 30 March – his only public intervention so far – the president missed a historic opportunity to assert his leadership and pull things back from the brink. Had he announced long overdue measures – such as lifting the state of emergency, freeing political prisoners and human rights activists, bringing to trial the regime's corruption bigwigs, curbing the security services' powers, allowing new political parties to challenge the Ba'th party's monopoly of the past half century – he might have been able to lead his country towards a democracy on the Turkish model, as his friend and ally Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's prime minister, has advised.

He might yet save the day with a dramatic announcement of immediate reforms. But the powerful interests that depend on the regime may make such a radical change impossible. Instead, Syria may be condemned to a bruising contest between regime and opposition, fought out on the street with increasing violence. The regime's armed strength could make sure that it gained the upper hand, but at great cost to its already badly shaken legitimacy.

More broadly, the region is witnessing the unravelling of alliances formed in a critical period three decades ago that saw the Egypt-Israel peace treaty in 1979; the Iranian revolution of the same year; and Israel's devastating invasion of Lebanon in 1982, followed by its 18-year occupation of the south, which led to the emergence of Hezbollah. Having been Syria's ally in the 1973 war, Egypt changed sides and became Israel's partner in peace. Iran, Israel's ally under the shah, changed sides under the Islamic republic, becoming Syria's ally instead. Syria and Israel swapped partners.

These arrangements are now under threat. Post-Mubarak Egypt is likely to distance itself from Israel and rejoin the Arab camp, while Syria's alliance with Iran – unpopular with the Sunni- majority population, – could be endangered by any change of regime in Damascus. Other significant changes to the regional geopolitical map include the emergence of Turkey as a beneficent player, promoting trade and conflict resolution, and Iraq's slow recovery as a major Arab power from the devastation inflicted on it by Tony Blair, George Bush and America's pro-Israel neocons.

Are we then about to witness some reshuffling of alliances formed 30 years ago? Iraq and Iran, who fought a bitter war in the 1980s, could well draw closer now both are under Shia leadership. Together they will form a formidable power block. America's colossal investment in men and treasure in the Iraq war will seem vainer than ever.

Some things, however, could remain the same. Once the crisis abates, Turkey will continue to cultivate its friendship with Syria whatever the nature of its regime, because Syria will remain a key pivot of Turkey's ambitious Arab policy. Turkey may indeed come to replace Iran as Syria's main regional ally.

Nor is the crisis likely to reduce Syria's influence in Lebanon. No Syrian regime of any colour can tolerate a hostile government in Beirut. Its security – especially vis-a-vis Israel – is intimately tied to that of its Lebanese neighbour. The wave of protest engulfing the Arab world has pushed the Arab-Israeli conflict into second place. But that can only be temporary. Until it is resolved, the region will know no stability and little peace.

Rick Francona--

It has been two and a half weeks since the United States and a coalition began military operations in Libya to enforce United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973. That resolution authorized all measures to enforce a no-fly zone over the country and protect civilians from the violence in the country. The impetus for that action was the imminent defeat of opposition forces in Benghazi.

First, a comment on the timing of the military action. It was a last minute rescue of the opposition. Had coalition aircraft and missiles not been committed to the battle on March 19, Mu'amar al-Qadhafi's tanks and infantry, supported by artillery and helicopter gunships, would have entered Benghazi and wreaked havoc on the surviving opposition fighters. Additionally, there may have been thousands of casualties among civilians either caught in the crossfire, or deliberately slaughtered by Qadhafi's forces to send a message to those who would oppose his regime.

If America and its allies had not acted on that Saturday, Benghazi could have become Libya's Hamah, and the "Hamah Rules" could have been rewritten as the "Benghazi Rules." I refer to the incident in Syria in 1982 when a group of Islamic fundamentalists attempted to defy the authoritarian government of then-President Hafiz al-Asad (father of the current president). Asad deployed elements of the Syrian army under the command of his ruthless brother Rifa't. Syrian artillery flattened the center of the city and killed upwards of 25,000 people. The Syrian response has become notorious around the world as the Hamah Rules.

Fortunately, the coalition responded on March 19 - and unfortunately the coalition responded on March 19. If there had been decisive American leadership when the rebels were on the move towards Tripoli and a no-fly zone imposed then, I might not be writing this article about the abdication of American leadership. Instead, we might be discussing the possibilities of a post-Qadhafi Libya.

President Obama is to be commended for committing American military forces to the enforcement of the no-fly zone and protection of Libyan civilians. He is not to be commended for taking so long to make the decision. Hundreds, possibly thousands of Libyans died in the interim.

It goes beyond that, however. It appears the President waited for the United Nations resolution and the agreement of European and at least two Arab allies. That in itself is not a bad thing, but it also appeared to be a further abdication of American leadership. Whether the President likes it or not, the United States is a superpower, a superpower with global interests and global commitments. Whether we like it or not, the world looks to us for leadership in times of crises.

I understand the President's reticence to order American forces to attack an Arab or Muslim countries, given our past record in Iraq and Afghanistan, and earlier operations in other places in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Again, in and of itself not a bad thing. Reticence before placing young American men and women in harm's way is a good thing, however, timidity in the face of adversity is not.

This was one case, maybe the only one we'll see for years to come, in which there was Arab sanction for military action. It was the Arab League that called for the imposition of a no-fly zone over a fellow Arab country, an unprecedented action, knowing full well that the enforcement of a no-fly zone would begin with lethal attacks on the Libyan air defense system.

It was almost what some would call a cry for American leadership. Here was the opportunity to protect Libyan civilians, and hopefully achieve another American policy goal, the removal of Mu'amar al-Qadhafi from power, all with Arab League support. Yet the President chose to deliberately downplay the contribution of American armed forces, couching it in terms of "unique capabilities" and support.

The reality of the initial coalition, and the reality of NATO* that is now in charge of the operation, is that without the United States military, it does not function. Without the American contribution, there would have been only an ineffectual operation. In addition to massive firepower delivered by American aircraft and missiles, the percentage of aerial refueling, airborne command and control, reconnaissance, intelligence and surveillance was overwhelmingly American.

If the intent of downplaying the American role was to convince the Arab nations that this was not another case of the United States trying to interfere in the Middle East, it failed. The Arabs know who is shouldering the load. In this case, we should be claiming that role. It also appeared that the President could not wait to turn command and control of the operation over to NATO, although much of the effort and almost all of the support would still be done by American forces.

Some gratuitous advice:

- Mr. Obama, as you often remind us, you are the President of the United States of America. You are the Commander in Chief of the most powerful military force on the planet. The American people have spent trillions of dollars and invested their most valuable resource, their sons and daughters, to provide you that capability.

- To many people, as President, you are the leader of the free world. They look to you for leadership in these types of crisis. It may not be what you had in mind when you decided to run for the office, but we all play the cards we are dealt. You should not abdicate your leadership role. The rest of the world, and in this case, the Arab world, is counting on you.

- Get back in the fight. NATO cannot do this with the United States sitting in the sidelines "in case they are needed." They are needed. One only need look at the setbacks handed to the Libyan opposition since you decided to sit it out. Only the American armed forces have the specialized and advanced weapons systems to get this done.

- You are the President, you are the Commander in Chief. Act like it.

Lieutenant Colonel Rick Francona is a retired U.S. Air Force intelligence officer, a veteran of the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars, and service in the Balkans. His assignments include the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency, with tours of duty in Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia, and operational duties in virtually every country in the Middle East.

During the last year of the Iran–Iraq war in 1988, Rick was assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad as a liaison officer to the Iraqi armed forces intelligence service, where he served in the field with the Iraqi army and flew with the Iraqi Air Force.  

Throughout the first Gulf War he served as the personal Arabic interpreter and advisor on Iraq to General Norman Schwarzkopf and later co-authored the report to Congress on the conduct of the war.  His is the author of  book, Ally to Adversary – An Eyewitness Account of Iraq’s Fall from Grace.

Following the Gulf War, Rick served as the first air attaché to the U.S. Embassy in Damascus, Syria until 1995.  In 1995 and 1996, Rick served in northern Iraq with the Central Intelligence Agency, where he narrowly escaped an attempt on his life by Iraqi agents.  In 1997 and 1998, he served in the Department of Defense counter terrorism branch and led a special operations team in Bosnia that captured five indicted war criminals.

From 2003 through 2008, Rick was a Middle East military analyst for NBC News.  You'll find Lt. Col Francona online at http://francona.blogspot.com/

MORE FROM RICK FRANCONA'S BLOG OF FAME

Copyright © 2006-2011, Basil & Spice. All rights reserved

by Rafael Noboa y Rivera

Earlier today, in the midst of writing other things, I engaged in a long-running conversation over email about the motivations for our war in Libya. Essentially, the question at heart was this: given that Khaddafy was threatening to massacre tens of thousands of rebels upon his recapture of Benghazi, the rebel capital, how could we not intervene? Could we really stand-by and watch people die, cut down in cold blood?

Let me posit the question in another way.

In the Second Congo War, which lasted from 1998 through, roughly, 2003 – though, really, it’s still going on – over 5.4 million people were killed, in the most horrific, barbarous ways possible.

Five million people. Dead.

And did we intervene? No. Not just no, but hell, no. I guarantee you that until I wrote this essay, there are people reading this who had no earthly clue that this had happened.

So you’ll have to colour me particularly sceptical of the humanitarian case for this war, especially when the rationales keep on slipping and sliding all over the place, depending on who’s making the case for the war. For example, Dr Anne-Marie Slaughter – whom I respect greatly – was on Twitter earlier today making the following argument:

As my friend Spencer Ackerman pointed out, that’s merely an official fiction: we’re providing close air support to the rebel “force,” such as they are, and we’ve sent in covert operatives in order to both assess the rebel forces and call in air strikes. Right now, one of the main topics of debate concerns whether we should arm the rebels (my position: we shouldn’t).

We can assert that the UN/NATO mission continues to be “to protect civilians,” and that we haven’t recognised the rebels as an official government. Our actions, and those of our allies, belie those statements somewhat egregiously.

Think of it this way: are we going to be just as interested in what happens in Libya, from a “responsibility to protect” perspective, once the rebels take over and start killing Khezzaffy loyalists? Yeah, I didn’t think so. I suspect that many people making the humanitarian case for intervention won’t be saying much once the war ends, either.

That also goes for the pro-democracy “argument,” which hasn’t been made as stoutly. I’ve seen people referring to the rebel forces as “pro-democracy” forces which…

STOP. Stop it right there. Unless you’re privy to knowledge and intelligence that no other intelligence agency or army in the world is privy to, there’s no way that anyone can refer to the rebels as being intrinsically “pro-democracy.”

What they are, instead, is anti-Khezzaffy. Which, great! But being anti-Khezzaffy is a far, far cry from being pro-democracy. Near as I can tell, there seems to be about a bajillion different rebel “councils” and groups, none of which seem to be exercising any overarching control over the Libyan rebels. It seems that they agree on getting rid of Khezzaffy; beyond that, it’s markedly unclear.

That’s important, because I’m hearing more and more people referring to the Libyan rebels as being “pro-democracy,” when in fact there’s no evidence whatsoever that that’s the case. They’re in favour of gaining power; that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re in favour of Libyan democracy.

Pay attention, though: that’s going to be the next argument advanced for continued intervention in Libya, and it’s going to be advanced without any evidence of its existence. We should demand evidence of its existence, rather than its mere assertion.

But back to the humanitarian case for war. Had Khezzaffy managed to kill his thousands, it would’ve made him no different from Hafez Assad, who did the same thing in Hama in 1982. We made no note of it then, despite the fact that we were intervening in Lebanon at the time.

That’s what happens in a failed rebellion, as awful as it is. And here’s one more: the fact that we’re not similarly exercised about the repression taking place in Syria or Bahrain or Yemen should tell you volumes about how much we care, intrinsically.

_____

Rafael Noboa y Rivera, 34, is a writer, student, poet, musician, and political activist. A decorated combat veteran of the Iraq War, Noboa y Rivera is currently completing studies in journalism at Ohio University’s Scripps School of Journalism. He can be reached at me@rafaelnoboa.com.

Rick Francona--

Syria's President Bashar al-Asad has been in power for over ten years. He has survived numerous political crises, but nothing compared to what appears to be the beginnings of a popular uprising no doubt fueled by revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, and a host of uprisings across the Arab world. Demonstrations in Yemen, Jordan and Saudi Arabia were met with promises of reform and increased government salaries, an attempt to placate the population and maintain the leaders' grips on power.

Syria has a different tactic - the use of heavily armed police, internal security and military units to break up peaceful demonstrations. It was only a day after the initial protests broke out in the southern Syrian city of Dara' that special regime security troops were helicoptered to the city where they brutally stopped the protests with lethal force. Although it is difficult to obtain reliable information on just how many protesters were killed, the numbers may be in the hundreds.

Having seen what happened in other Arab countries over the past months, al-Asad thought he might try the carrot approach after using the stick. His spokesperson, the polished Dr. Butaynah Sha'ban* claimed that the Syrian president had ordered that a committee be established to talk to "our brothers in Dara" and bring to justice those officials responsible for killing protesters. She continued that the al-Asad government would raise wages, reform the health care system, open election to more political parties, fight corruption and relax tight restrictions on the media.

The claim that action would be taken against those responsible for killing protesters is disingenuous. They were no doubt acting on orders coming directly from the Presidential office. The troops who were dispatched by helicopter were what we at the embassy called "regime protection units."

There are two separate units charged with regime protection, both based in Damascus, but completely separate organizations to make sure the other is not a threat to the regime it is charged to protect. These units do not normally deploy outside Damascus since that is the seat of government and the likely venue for a coup attempt. When they deployed to Dara', they did so with Presidential authority and direction.

The Syrians have a history with handling demonstrators - that history is not lost on the population. In one defining event, the Syrians learned what their government will tolerate and what it will not. It was in 1982 in the northern city of Hamah, the fourth largest city in the country. The Muslim Brotherhood had decided to defy the Syrian government. President Hafiz al-Asad deployed elements of the Syrian army under the command of his ruthless brother Rifa't. Syrian artillery flattened the center of the city and killed upwards of 25,000 people. The Syrian response has become notorious around the world as "The Hamah Rules."

The Syrians learned the rules. Up until now, they really haven't broken the rules. Occasionally, though, in the early and mid-1990's we would hear gunshots in Damascus. Being the inquisitive military attache that I was, I would try to find the source of the gunfire. More often than not, it was a group of Muslim Brotherhood fighters holed up in a house. After a few cursory shots of return fire, the Syrian internal security forces would set the house on fire. I asked one of the officers why they resorted to such drastic action so quickly. He explained that the ikhwan ("brothers") will not surrender, they had to be killed.

It is that history that causes many Middle East observers to be surprised at the tenacity and courage of the protesters. it should have come as no surprise that at the first hint of an uprising, the al-Asad regime put soldiers from its protection units on the streets of Dara' with obvious orders to use whatever force was necessary to put an end to the demonstrations.

It did not. Within days, there were more protests in Dara', but also in the northern coastal city of Latakia, close to the al-Asad family home city of al-Qardahah. Troops were dispatched to both cities and demonstrators were killed.

Al-Asad knew he had to do something to halt the momentum of the protesters. He did two things - he fired his cabinet and orchestrated massive pro-government demonstrations in Damascus.

The Syrian government is good at putting on massive demonstrations comprising hundreds of thousands of people in the street. I was in Damascus when Bashar's late older brother and then-heir apparent was killed in an automobile accident. The Syrians organized huge demonstrations by mobilizing unions and trade organizations - you can do that in a socialist country. A doctor friend was told at work that he was to be present for the doctors' union "spontaneous outpouring of grief" at at specific time and place. What you are seeing on Syrian television is just more of the same organized propaganda.

Firing the cabinet is just another meaningless machination. None of the ministers have any actual power - they do what Bashar al-Asad tells them to do. He will merely replace this batch of yes-men (and women) with a new batch. Nothing will change.

For the Syrian government to react the way it has indicates to me that al-Asad is concerned that at some point his forces, be they police, internal security or military, might well follow the lead of Egyptian military and refuse to act against the civilian population. Or he might fear that the civilian population will continue to rise up as the Libyans have. In any case, he's probably not sleeping well.

______________________

Lieutenant Colonel Rick Francona is a retired U.S. Air Force intelligence officer, a veteran of the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars, and service in the Balkans. His assignments include the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency, with tours of duty in Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia, and operational duties in virtually every country in the Middle East.

During the last year of the Iran–Iraq war in 1988, Rick was assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad as a liaison officer to the Iraqi armed forces intelligence service, where he served in the field with the Iraqi army and flew with the Iraqi Air Force.  

Throughout the first Gulf War he served as the personal Arabic interpreter and advisor on Iraq to General Norman Schwarzkopf and later co-authored the report to Congress on the conduct of the war.  His is the author of  book, Ally to Adversary – An Eyewitness Account of Iraq’s Fall from Grace.

Following the Gulf War, Rick served as the first air attaché to the U.S. Embassy in Damascus, Syria until 1995.  In 1995 and 1996, Rick served in northern Iraq with the Central Intelligence Agency, where he narrowly escaped an attempt on his life by Iraqi agents.  In 1997 and 1998, he served in the Department of Defense counter terrorism branch and led a special operations team in Bosnia that captured five indicted war criminals.

From 2003 through 2008, Rick was a Middle East military analyst for NBC News.  You'll find Lt. Col Francona online at http://francona.blogspot.com/

MORE FROM RICK FRANCONA'S BLOG OF FAME

Copyright © 2006-2011, Basil & Spice. All rights reserved

U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates met with his Israeli counterpart, Ehud Barak, Thursday.

There was no shortage of issues for the defense officials to discuss amid what appears to be an impending Israeli military operation in Gaza; gradually building unrest in Syria; and the fear of an Iranian destabilization campaign spreading from the Persian Gulf to the Levant.

Any of these threats developing in isolation would be relatively manageable from the Israeli point of view, but when taken together, they remind Israel that the past 32 years of relative quietude in Israel’s Arab backyard is anything but the norm.

Israel is a small country, demographically outnumbered by its neighbors and thus unable to field an army large enough to sustain long, high-intensity conflicts on multiple fronts. Israeli national security therefore revolves around a core, strategic need to sufficiently neutralize and divide its Arab neighbors so that a 1948, 1967 and 1973 scenario can be avoided at all costs. After 1978, Israel had not resolved, but had greatly alleviated its existential crisis.

A peace agreement with Egypt, ensured by a Sinai desert buffer, largely secured the Negev and the southern coastal approaches to Tel Aviv. The formalization in 1994 of a peace pact with Jordan secured Israel’s longest border along the Jordan River. Though Syria remained a threat, by itself it could not seriously threaten Israel and was more concerned with affirming its influence in Lebanon anyway. Conflicts remain with the Palestinians and with Hezbollah in Lebanon along the northern front, but these do not constitute a threat to Israeli survival.

The natural Israeli condition is one of unease, but the past three decades were arguably the most secure in modern Israeli history. That sense of security is now being threatened on multiple fronts.

To its west, Israel risks being drawn into another military campaign in the Gaza Strip. A steady rise in rocket attacks penetrating deep into the Israeli interior over the past week is not something the Israeli leadership can ignore, especially when there exists heavy suspicion that the rocket attacks are being conducted in coordination with other acts of violence against Israeli targets: the murder of five members of an Israeli family in a West Bank settlement less than two weeks ago, and the Wednesday bombing at a bus station in downtown Jerusalem. Further military action will likely be taken, with the full knowledge that it will invite widespread condemnation from much of the international community, especially the Muslim world.

The last time Israel Defense Forces went to war with Palestinian militants, in late 2008/early 2009, the threat to Israel was largely confined to the Gaza Strip, and while Operation Cast Lead certainly was not well received in the Arab world, it never threatened to cause a fundamental rupture in the system of alliances with Arab states that has provided Israel with its overall sense of security for the past three decades. This time, a military confrontation in Gaza would have the potential to jeopardize Israel’s vital alliance with Egypt.

Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and others are watching Egypt’s military manage a shaky political transition next door. The military men running the government in Cairo are the same men who think that maintaining the peace with Israel and keeping groups like Hamas contained is a smart policy, and one that should be continued in the post-Mubarak era. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, part of an Islamist movement that gave rise to Hamas, may have different ideas about the treaty; it has even indicated as much during the political protests in Egypt. An Israeli military campaign in Gaza under the current conditions would be fodder for the Muslim Brotherhood to rally the Egyptian electorate (both its supporters and people who may otherwise vote for a secular party) and potentially undermine the credibility of the military-led regime. With enough pressure, the Islamists in Egypt and Gaza could shift Cairo’s strategic posture toward Israel. This scenario is not an assured outcome, but it is likely to be on the minds of those orchestrating the current offensive against Israel from the Palestinian territories.

To the north, in Syria, the minority Alawite-Baathist regime is struggling to clamp down on protests in the southwest city of Deraa near the Jordanian border. As Syrian security forces fired on protesters who had gathered in and around the city’s main mosque, Syrian President Bashar al Assad, like many of his beleaguered Arab counterparts, made promises to order a ban on the use of live rounds against demonstrators, consider ending a 48-year state of emergency, open the political system, lift media restrictions and raise living standards – all promises that were promptly rejected by the country’s developing opposition. The protests in Syria have not reached critical mass due to the relative effectiveness of Syrian security forces in snuffing out demonstrations in the key cities of Damascus, Aleppo, Homs and Hama.

Moreover, it remains to be seen if the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, which led a violent uprising beginning in 1976 aiming to restore power to the Sunni majority, will overcome its fears and join the demonstrations in full force. The 1982 Hama crackdown, in which some 17,000 to 40,000 people were killed, forced what was left of the Muslim Brotherhood underground and is still fresh in the minds of many.

Though Israel is not particularly keen on the al Assad regime, the virtue of the al Assads, from the Israeli point of view, is their predictability. A Syria more concerned with wealth and exerting influence in Lebanon than provoking military engagements to its south, is far more preferable than the fear of what may follow. Like in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood branch in Syria remains the single largest and most organized opposition in the country, even though it has been severely weakened since the massacre at Hama.

To the east, Jordan’s Hashemite monarchy has a far better handle on its political opposition (the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in Jordan is often referred to as the “loyal opposition” by many observers in the region,) but protests continue to simmer there and the Hashemite dynasty remains in fear of being overrun by the country’s Palestinian majority. Israeli military action in Gaza could also be used by the Jordanian MB to galvanize protesters already prepared to take to the streets.

Completing the picture is Iran. The wave of protests lapping at Arab regimes across the region has created an historic opportunity for Iran to destabilize its rivals and threaten both Israeli and U.S. national security in one fell swoop. Iranian influence has its limits, but a groundswell of Shiite discontent in eastern Arabia along with an Israeli war on Palestinians that highlights the duplicity of Arab foreign policy toward Israel, provides Iran with the leverage it has been seeking to reshape the political landscape. Remaining quiet thus far is Iran’s primary militant proxy, Hezbollah, in Lebanon. As Israel mobilizes its forces in preparation for another round of fighting with Palestinian militants, it cannot discount the possibility that Hezbollah and its patrons in Iran are biding their time to open a second front to threaten Israel’s northern frontier. It has been some time since a crisis of this magnitude has built on Israel’s borders, but this is not a country unaccustomed to worst case scenarios.

This post originally appeared at STRATFOR. To subscribe to STRATFOR, click here.

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See Also:

• Libya, The West, And The Narrative Of Democracy
• Israel And Gaza: A Tough Story To Get Right
• The Only Thing Worse Than Going To War Is Losing The War

So now unrest in the Arab world has spread to Syria, where its dictator Bashir Assad is behaving just like Libya's dictator (funny how dictators all seem to behave the same way): killing his own citizens in large numbers. Not a new thing for Syria, of course.

What to do? It seems unlikely that the Arab League and the UN Security Council will call for action, so Obama will be paralyzed from the neck up.

So if we want to see a no-fly zone over Syria, there's one obvious option: Have Israel do it! They've shown before they're quite good at imposing no-fly zones over Syria. I wrote a bit about the 1982 Israel-Syria engagement in my Reagan book:

Armed with the latest Soviet tanks, warplanes and anti-aircraft missile systems, Syrian forces engaged Israel on the ground and in the skies over Lebanon. The outcome was one-sided. Israel destroyed Syria's entire air defense system and shot down 92 Syrian warplanes, including dozens of MIG-23s, the Soviets' best, without the loss of a single Israeli plane. On the ground Israel enjoyed considerable success destroying Syrian T-72 tanks. This represented a startling turnabout from the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, where Israel experienced considerable losses in a more even battle of attrition both in the air and on the ground. Syria grumbled openly about the poor performance of their Soviet-supplied weaponry, and the Soviet press blamed Syrian incompetence for the result.

One anecdote I left out of this account was the Syrian who complained to the Soviets about their Soviet-made ground-to-air missiles: "Next time, can you please send us some ground-to-plane missiles."

To the surprise of many, not least Bashar al-Assad, protests mount in Syria. New York Times:

The government of President Bashar al-Assad, unaccustomed to concessions, rapidly announced a series of reforms, including a salary increase for public workers, greater freedom for the news media and political parties, and a reconsideration of the emergency rule that has clamped down the nation for 48 years.

Mr. Assad also ordered prisoners taken during the crackdown this week to be freed. An adviser said publicly that Mr. Assad had ordered troops not to fire live rounds at protesters in Dara'a and that "there were, maybe, some mistakes."

The concessions did not appear to satisfy the protesters, who were expected to gather in even larger numbers on Friday, the Muslim day of prayer. Fridays have become a central forum during the recent weeks of tumult around the Middle East.

"We totally refuse" the concessions, said one man in a crowd of thousands marching toward the central Omari mosque in Dara'a, according to a witness who was interviewed by telephone.

A raise for public workers - make that man the governor of Wisconsin!

You can also read Guardian-style live-blog updates on the Syrian situation on the website NOW Lebanon, a site whose work I have recommended to you previously.

The other day, I wrote a post about how Ronald Reagan was our last pacifist president. I meant humanitarian crises happened back then and he didn't lift a finger, even when 243 Americans were killed in Beirut. I didn't mean this as praise; just noting the irony.

I failed to mention the biggest thing of all, though, which was the Hama massacre of 1982, in which the Syrian government (then in the hands of the incumbent's father, Hafez) slaughtered maybe 20,000 of its own people to quell a Muslim Brotherhood uprising. It's generally thought to be the largest massacre of its own people by an Arab government in modern times.

Why do I mention it? Merely to say that if things start heading down that kind of road in Syria - is it like father like son, or has fils maybe learned a respectable lesson or two from that? - then the US and the west will have some really, really, really tough choices to make.

In '82, Reagan, true to form, didn't lift a finger in response to Hama. The Syrians were thick with the Russkies back in those days, so piddling around with Syria meant risking Soviet...curiosity, shall we say, which would have made things a whole a new game.

Now, of course, Russia has been replaced by Iran. So air strikes against Syria, the kind we're undertaking in Libya now, could well lead to war with Iran. What would we do if things really heated up there, and Assad vowed to hunt protestors down house by house, and it seemed probably that a civilian slaughter loomed? On the basis of what we're doing now in Libya, we'd have to go in, no? But...

Mind you I've persuaded myself to be for this Libya business, but with qualifiers, the main one being: no moralistic chest thumping by pundits on either side of the sort that was so toxic back in 2002 and 2003 (most of it was done by the hawks, but both sides went thumpety thump). It's too complicated a situation for that, and the only thing to distrust in a situation like this is moral certainty.

The British Government is refusing to release diplomatic cables that could provide fresh leads on the fate of three Israeli soldiers who disappeared during the 1982 war with Lebanon.

Q: Mr. President, in a few days people all over the world - including Christians in Syria - will be celebrating Christmas, the celebration of love and peace. Here in Damascus, we are in the heartland of the Bible. Why has this region had no peace for hundreds of years?

A: In a word: occupation. For centuries, we are living under extremely difficult conditions. But if you look at the social fabric of the region then you will see that it is very peaceful here. Apart from Lebanon during the last three decades there has been no civil war. Look, Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine and the entire region of Syria - there have been no internal conflicts. The cause of all conflicts is occupation: first by the British, then by the French, now by the Israelis. This leads to despair which leads to extremism. This is the reason why we can not find peace.

Tuesday, 19 May 2009, 12:58
S E C R E T CAIRO 000874
NEA FOR FO; NSC FOR KUMAR AND SHAPIRO
EO 12958 DECL: 05/17/2019
TAGS PREL, PGOV, KDEM, ECON, EG, IS, IR, IZ
SUBJECT: SCENESETTER: PRESIDENT MUBARAK'S VISIT TO
WASHINGTON
Classified By: Ambassador Margaret Scobey for reasons 1.4(b) and (d).

1. (S/NF) Introduction: President Mubarak last visited Washington in April 2004, breaking a twenty year tradition of annual visits to the White House. Egyptians view President Mubarak's upcoming meeting with the President as a new beginning to the U.S.-Egyptian relationship that will restore a sense of mutual respect that they believe diminished in recent years. President Mubarak has been encouraged by his initial interactions with the President, the Secretary, and Special Envoy Mitchell, and understands that the Administration wants to restore the sense of warmth that has traditionally characterized the U.S.-Egyptian partnership. The Egyptians want the visit to demonstrate that Egypt remains America's "indispensible Arab ally," and that bilateral tensions have abated. President Mubarak is the proud leader of a proud nation. He draws heavily from his own long experience in regional politics and governance as he assesses new proposals and recommendations for change.

MUBARAK'S PROFILE

-----------------

2. (S/NF) Mubarak is 81 years old and in reasonably good health; his most notable problem is a hearing deficit in his left ear. He responds well to respect for Egypt and for his position, but is not swayed by personal flattery. Mubarak peppers his observations with anecdotes that demonstrate both his long experience and his sense of humor. The recent death of his grandson Mohammad has affected him deeply and undoubtedly will dampen his spirits for the visit which he very much wants to make. During his 28 year tenure, he survived at least three assassination attempts, maintained peace with Israel, weathered two wars in Iraq and post-2003 regional instability, intermittent economic downturns, and a manageable but chronic internal terrorist threat. He is a tried and true realist, innately cautious and conservative, and has little time for idealistic goals. Mubarak viewed President Bush (43) as naive, controlled by subordinates, and totally unprepared for dealing with post-Saddam Iraq, especially the rise of Iran,s regional influence.

3. (S/NF) On several occasions Mubarak has lamented the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the downfall of Saddam. He routinely notes that Egypt did not like Saddam and does not mourn him, but at least he held the country together and countered Iran. Mubarak continues to state that in his view Iraq needs a "tough, strong military officer who is fair" as leader. This telling observation, we believe, describes Mubarak's own view of himself as someone who is tough but fair, who ensures the basic needs of his people.

4. (S/NF) No issue demonstrates Mubarak,s worldview more than his reaction to demands that he open Egypt to genuine political competition and loosen the pervasive control of the security services. Certainly the public "name and shame" approach in recent years strengthened his determination not to accommodate our views. However, even though he will be more willing to consider ideas and steps he might take pursuant to a less public dialogue, his basic understanding of his country and the region predisposes him toward extreme caution. We have heard him lament the results of earlier U.S. efforts to encourage reform in the Islamic world. He can harken back to the Shah of Iran: the U.S. encouraged him to accept reforms, only to watch the country fall into the hands of revolutionary religious extremists. Wherever he has seen these U.S. efforts, he can point to the chaos and loss of stability that ensued. In addition to Iraq, he also reminds us that he warned against Palestinian elections in 2006 that brought Hamas (Iran) to his doorstep. Now, we understand he fears that Pakistan is on the brink of falling into the hands of the Taliban, and he puts some of the blame on U.S. insistence on steps that ultimately weakened Musharraf. While he knows that Bashir in Sudan has made multiple major mistakes, he cannot work to support his removal from power.

5. (S/NF) Mubarak has no single confidante or advisor who can truly speak for him, and he has prevented any of his main advisors from operating outside their strictly circumscribed spheres of power. Defense Minister Tantawi keeps the Armed Forces appearing reasonably sharp and the officers satisfied with their perks and privileges, and Mubarak does not appear concerned that these forces are not well prepared to face 21st century external threats. EGIS Chief Omar Soliman and Interior Minister al-Adly keep the domestic beasts at bay, and Mubarak is not one to lose sleep over their tactics. Gamal Mubarak and a handful of economic ministers have input on economic and trade matters, but Mubarak will likely resist further economic reform if he views it as potentially harmful to public order and stability. Dr. Zakaria Azmi and a few other senior NDP leaders manage the parliament and public politics.

6. (S/NF) Mubarak is a classic Egyptian secularist who hates religious extremism and interference in politics. The Muslim Brothers represent the worst, as they challenge not only Mubarak,s power, but his view of Egyptian interests. As with regional issues, Mubarak, seeks to avoid conflict and spare his people from the violence he predicts would emerge from unleashed personal and civil liberties. In Mubarak,s mind, it is far better to let a few individuals suffer than risk chaos for society as a whole. He has been supportive of improvements in human rights in areas that do not affect public security or stability. Mrs. Mubarak has been given a great deal of room to maneuver to advance women's and children's rights and to confront some traditional practices that have been championed by the Islamists, such as FGM, child labor, and restrictive personal status laws.

SUCCESSION

----------

7. (S/NF) The next presidential elections are scheduled for 2011, and if Mubarak is still alive it is likely he will run again, and, inevitably, win. When asked about succession, he states that the process will follow the Egyptian constitution. Despite incessant whispered discussions, no one in Egypt has any certainty about who will eventually succeed Mubarak nor under what circumstances. The most likely contender is presidential son Gamal Mubarak (whose profile is ever-increasing at the ruling party); some suggest that intelligence chief Omar Soliman might seek the office, or dark horse Arab League Secretary-General Amre Moussa might run. Mubarak's ideal of a strong but fair leader would seem to discount Gamal Mubarak to some degree, given Gamal's lack of military experience, and may explain Mubarak's hands off approach to the succession question. Indeed, he seems to be trusting to God and the ubiquitous military and civilian security services to ensure an orderly transition.

MUBARAK'S EGYPT: 1982 -- 2009

-----------------------------

8. (C) Egypt continues to be a major regional economic, political, and cultural power. However, economic problems have frustrated many Egyptians. Egypt's per capita GDP was on par with South Korea's 30 years ago; today it is comparable to Indonesia's. There were bread riots in 2008 for the first time since 1977. Political reforms have stalled and the GOE has resorted to heavy-handed tactics against individuals and groups, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, whose influence continues to grow.

9. (SBU) Economic reform momentum has slowed and high GDP growth rates of recent years have failed to lift Egypt's lower classes out of poverty. High inflation, coupled with the impact of the global recession, has resulted in an increase in extreme poverty, job losses, a growing budget deficit and projected 2009 GDP growth of 3.5% - half last year's rate.

10. (S/NF) Mubarak himself refuses to discuss economic assistance to Egypt, but other interlocutors may raise it. On May 7, Egypt formally and publicly accepted FY 2009 and FY 2010 assistance levels, ending a stalemate over the FY 2009 program, linked to levels, a perceived lack of consultation, and political conditionality. Based on our assessment of Egypt's most pressing assistance needs, and broad public consensus in Egypt that the educational system is seriously deficient, we would like to focus on education. We believe the Egyptians would welcome a new presidential level initiative in this area, which would also be in U.S. national interests given the critical role education will play in Egypt's political and economic development.

MUBARAK'S REGIONAL OUTLOOK

--------------------------

11. (S/NF) Israeli-Arab conflict: Mubarak has successfully shepherded Sadat,s peace with Israel into the 21st century, and benefitted greatly from the stability Camp David has given the Levant: there has not been a major land war in more than 35 years. Peace with Israel has cemented Egypt,s moderate role in Middle East peace efforts and provided a political basis for continued U.S. military and economic assistance ($1.3 billion and $250 million, respectively). However, broader elements of peace with Israel, e.g. economic and cultural exchange, remain essentially undeveloped.

12. (S/NF) Camp David also presented Mubarak with the perpetual challenge of balancing Egypt,s international image as a moderate with its domestic image as pan-Arab leader. Mubarak has managed this strategic dichotomy most effectively in times of regional stability. However, the Gulf wars, and especially post-Saddam regional crises, have taxed this equation. For example, during the 2006 Lebanon war, the Bush Administration asked Egypt to side against Hizballah; at the same time Egyptian protestors demanded the peace treaty with Israel be vacated. The Egyptians were frozen, and relegated to waiting for the situation to stabilize. More recently, with Iran bringing the battlefield closer with Hamas' actions in Gaza and discovery of the Hizballah cell in Egypt, the Egyptians appear more willing to confront the Iranian surrogates and to work closely with Israel.

13. (S/NF) Mubarak has been effective as an intermediary during various phases of the Israeli-Arab conflict. In the Arafat era, Egypt worked between the Palestinian Authority and Israel. At the outset of the Abbas era, Egypt,s role was unclear as the Israelis and Palestinians communicated directly, and Mubarak for a time was left with no deliverable either to the West or his public. He firmly believes, incorrectly, that the Bush Administration "forced" the Palestinian legislative elections of 2006 (which Hamas won). Hamas' June 2007 takeover of Gaza allowed the Egyptians back into the game as a go-between, and Mubarak,s team has made clear they will not cede the "Palestinian file" to another Arab state. In general, the Egyptian-Israeli strategic relationship is on solid ground, as they face a shared threat from Hamas.

14. (S/NF) The ongoing intra-Arab dispute, which pits Egypt and Saudi Arabia against Syria and Qatar and is primarily driven by Iran's regional influence, is the current test for Mubarak. For the moment the Egyptian-Saudi moderate camp is holding. Mubarak has maneuvered with reasonable effectiveness, brandishing Egyptian clout through a hastily prepared but effective summit in Sharm el Sheikh in February, but Iran,s Arab surrogates (especially Qatar) continue to unsettle the Egyptians. Mubarak will rail against President Bush,s decision to invade Iraq, contending that it opened the door to Iranian influence in the region. That said, the Egyptians recently told Special Envoy Ross they expect our outreach to Iran to fail, and that "we should prepare for confrontation through isolation." Mubarak and his advisors are now convinced that Tehran is working to weaken Egypt through creation of Hizballah cells, support of the Muslim Brotherhood, and destabilization of Gaza. Egypt has warned that it will retaliate if these actions continue.

15. (S/NF) Egypt views the stability and unity of Sudan as essential to its national security because of concern over its access to Nile waters and the potential for increased Sudanese refugee flows. The GOE is using development assistance in South Sudan to encourage unity. Here too, the Egyptians are jealous and sensitive to the Qatari foray into resolving Darfur, a crisis squarely in Egypt's backyard. Mubarak may ask about the potential for cooperation with the U.S. on Sudan and will probably want to hear how the Administration will approach the issue. If he agrees, Mubarak can use his stature and credibility with Bashir to make progress on Darfur and human rights issues.

16. (S/NF) MUBARAK REGIONAL TALKING POINTS

-----------------------------------------

Israeli-Arab peace: He will ask for continued U.S. leadership and highlight Egypt's role as moderate interlocutor. He will stress the primacy of the Palestinian track over efforts with Syria. He will press for concrete action on settlements and resist Arab gestures to Israel until the Arabs can see whether or not Netanyahu is credible.

Iran: He will rail against Iranian regional influence and express pessimism about U.S. outreach to Tehran. He will make clear that there should be no linkage between Israeli-Arab peace and Iran but will agree with the President's assessment that such linkage as does exist argues for progress on the Israeli-Palestinian track to undermine Hamas and Hizballah.

Sudan: He will highlight Egypt's role as provider of humanitarian and military assistance, and stress the need to maintain stability.

Intra-Arab strife: He may criticize Qatar, and perhaps Syria, as Iranian surrogates. He may ask about our plan to engage Damascus and suggest we coordinate our efforts.

Iraq: He may be circumspect, but harbors continuing doubts about Maliki and his Iranian ties. He will say Egypt is open to bilateral improvement but is awaiting Iraqi actions.

SCOBEY

"My mother continues to cry for my brother, as do all mothers. Arab or Jewish, Palestinian or Israeli, armed or unarmed". Aesha Aqtam.

"While I sit here mourning my husband, there is a woman on the other side who is mourning her husband. Where's the sense in that? In war, both sides lose, nothing is achieved".  Piera Edelman.

As members of the Parents Circle Families Forum (PCFF) we recently attended an  interfaith peacebuilding consultation (IFOR) in Cyprus where we talked about our personal stories of bereavement and our search for peace.

Aesha: I am from Nablus in Palestine. I was 18 and my brother and best friend, Mahmoud, was 17 when, on August 27th, 1989, he was walking to our uncle's house. Several youths near him started throwing stones at Israeli soldiers, who retaliated with shooting. A bullet hit Mahmoud in his heart and exited through his back. The doctors said it was a miracle he was still alive, but that his heart could stop beating any minute. My father never told this to any of us. 10 years later, Mahmoud got married. 5 weeks after the wedding, while playing basketball, he felt unwell. A few minutes later, he suffered heart failure and died. The date – August 27th, 1999. He was 27 years old.

His death was the most difficult experience I've had and the pain is still there. After several years, I heard about the PCFF and had no wish to meet the enemy, but as time went by, I was curious how bereaved Palestinian families could meet bereaved Israeli families. I decided to give it a chance. It took me some time to understand the Forum's way of viewing the conflict, yet I realized it's the only way to deal with my personal pain. Today I'm an active member and the Palestinian founder of the women's group.

We are against killing and violence, which can never bring peace and tolerance. We believe in man and humanity. Together we fight for peace and reconciliation because we know the high price we paid and continue to pay in war and conflict. We and the Israeli people have to find a solution that promotes life, not death. This is what I teach my six children, whom I worry about due to the curfews and difficult conditions in which we live and travel.

My mother continues to cry for my brothers, as do all mothers. Arab or Jewish, Palestinian or Israeli, armed or unarmed, everyone has family whom they hold as dear as life itself. 

Piera: I am from Galilee, Israel. I emigrated from South Africa to Israel in 1979. I had been married for six months and was pregnant when my husband, Hovav Menahem Landau, was killed in the battle of Sultan Yakoub in the Lebanon War, on June 10th, 1982. His funeral was on my 21st birthday. During the week of mourning, I said to someone: "While I sit here mourning my husband, who was killed by a soldier from the other side, there is a woman on the other side who is mourning her husband who was killed by Hovav. Where's the sense in that? In war, both sides lose, nothing is achieved".

Our son Menahem (meaning "a comforter") was born six months later and I remarried when he was almost two. Two years later, the impact of Hovav's death started sinking in and I learnt that faith in God couldn't be a substitute for basic human pain. Therapy helped me work through the pain and regain my footing. During those years, I had two more sons. 

As time passed and I learned more about the conflict, I had a growing need to meet Palestinian people directly and learn about their lives and their suffering. Four years ago, I joined the PCFF, identifying wholeheartedly with the message of dialogue, reconciliation and non-violent protest, as well as the right of Palestinians to a State.

Both sides of the conflict must understand that when they vilify and demonize the other side and ignore their legitimate needs, they are thereby giving the other side permission to do the same to them. We must rise above the habit of mutual blaming and start listening, maturely, to each other's needs. 

What was unique to the audience we met in Cyprus was that many of the women came from countries that suffer their own conflicts, and they responded to our stories by sharing their own. A young woman from Kashmir described the very difficult conditions in which they live, with curfews and dangerous unrest that leads to killing in the streets.  We felt such a strong sense of identification, solidarity and equality in the room, many of us sharing the same experiences and feelings. The group was moved by our genuine concern for each other. It was refreshing for them to see a Palestinian and an Israeli sitting together, explaining the conflict as it is and acknowledging each other's pain, in contrast to the scenes of hatred seen on television.

Aesha: I felt that these women, who were strangers two days earlier, became my sisters-in-suffering. It made me feel validated.

Piera: At the consultation, it was awe-inspiring to witness the women's ability to constantly switch between connecting to each other's pain and suffering, on the one hand, and yet rising above that experience, and aspiring to work towards a better reality for all, on the other.

But in a way, this ability shouldn't have come as such a surprise to us, because we encounter this time and time again when we share our stories and our views. At our women's meetings, we witness a beautiful process of building trust, through the acknowledgement of each other's pain and a sincere wish to make a better world for our children.   

One of the ways we work towards making this wish a reality, and where the men of the PCFF are also very involved, is through the lectures we give to high-school children, on dialogue and peace.  When we give our talk in Israel, it is usually the first time that the youngsters in the audience have met a Palestinian person and heard an honest and accurate account of the Palestinian side's difficulties (for which Palestinians often hold Israel solely responsible). This creates discomfort in some and a certain antagonism in others, since their side is being held responsible for "bad deeds" which they feel are justifiable and are done "because the other side is at fault".  We both emphasize that both sides are at fault and no side operates in a vacuum, clear of all blame. During the talk this message gets across clearly and it changes their attitude from one of defensiveness to one of openness to Palestinian suffering.

Aesha: The local and visiting youths ask me questions about the necessity for roadblocks to combat infiltration of terrorists; why the Palestinians' vote for Hamas; what they are supposed to do when they become soldiers at a checkpoint and are confronted with Palestinians who could potentially cause harm to Israelis. I tell them that roadblocks aren't the true solution to terrorism. They create more despair which creates more hatred and anger. Only meaningful dialogue can change the situation. I explain that those who voted for Hamas in Gaza, did so in the hope that it would improve their daily lives, and not because of the Hamas's attitude towards Israel. And I tell them that when they meet a Palestinian at the checkpoint, they must do their job and check his papers, but they must remember that he is a human being too, who wants to be treated with respect".

Piera: I am asked how, as a religious Jew, who looks like a settler with her modest attire and her hat or headscarf, I feel about the idea of Greater Israel and how I reconcile my PCFF membership with my religious beliefs; whether I ever go into Palestinian territory for PCFF meetings; and personal questions about faith and bereavement. I say that Judaism emphasises love of one's neighbour, including love of the stranger, far more than love and possession of the land. My membership in the PCFF is a natural extension of this belief. I don't go far into Palestinian territory, as my family worries that I could be hurt due to my resemblance to settlers, who are the enemy. About faith and bereavement, I have learned that belief in God needn't paralyse human pain and sadness".

We are often asked how our relatives and friends react to our membership in the PCFF.

Aesha: I am asked if Palestinian members are in danger from their neighbours, due to their affiliation with Israelis and I explain that our neighbours trust us and know our reputation as faithful Palestinians, so there's no danger. And that when we hold lectures in our villages about non-violent protest, many people see the wisdom in it.

Piera: I'm careful about whom I tell! I've started telling religious relatives and friends, many of whom are rather right-wing. Some are quite shocked, some are more open.

We're asked if we view peace as a real possibility? Can viable peace be created when there is such a strong feeling of hatred, futility and hopelessness?

Aesha: We needn't wait for the governments to make peace. If the man on the street begins with reconciliation and dialogue, then peace is possible.

Piera: Peace will be possible when mature people on both sides listen to each other's needs and wants, and aim for a creative win-win situation.

From the questions and discussion at our talks in Israel, we know that we create optimism and hope that peace is possible. People identify with the importance of our message of reconciliation and encourage us to continue on this path. For, as we always say in our lectures, if we – who paid the highest price – can talk to each other, then everyone should be able to.

In this week’s issue:

•Head of Turkmengaz Fired and Replaced with Deputy
•CYBERCOM to Go Operational This Month
•Govt Takes over Hungarian Plant after Deadly Toxic Spill
•French Transport and Oil Industry Strikes Risks Radicalization
•Bolivia to Start Lithium Production in October
•ISAF’s Torkham AfPak Border Crossing Reopened
•Iran’s President Visits Lebanon in Clear Attempt to Boost Hezbollah

Head of Turkmengaz Fired and Replaced with Deputy

Local media in the Turkmen capital of Ashgabat reported on 8 October that Turkmenistan’s President Gurbangulu Berdimuhammedov fired the head of the state-run Turkmengaz for mismanagement (specifically for “serious miscalculations”), and replaced him with Dovlet Mommayev, who until now had served as the company’s deputy chairman. Turkmengaz head Nuri Mukhamedov was fired by presidential decree on 8 October. It is unclear whether the deputy head is a long-term or temporary replacement. Mukhamedov had served in the position for only one year, and his predecessor had been fired for the same reasons.

Analytical Note: Gas exports are Turkmenistan’s primary revenue source, and Turkmengaz is the largest company in Central Asia that produces and supplies natural gas. According to the country’s president, Turkmenistan has 24.6 trillion cubic meters of gas reserves (though some have contested this figure, saying it is overstated). Local media indicated that the Turkmen president had recently been critical of Mukhamedov for the slow pace of development for new gas fields and pipelines. Turkmenistan is currently participating in discussion for new gas pipelines, including a Caspian Sea pipeline to Russia via Kazakhstan; the Caspian Sea Nabucco pipeline through Azerbaijan; and the TransAfghan pipeline to India via Pakistan. In 2009, a Turkmen pipeline to China went operational, as well as an Iranian branch of that pipeline.

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CYBERCOM to Go Operational This Month

The new US Cyber Command (CYBERCOM) is reportedly ready to go fully operational this month, in coordination with NATO, to create a global cyber warfare system that will involve all major branches of the US armed forces, according to ISAIntel. In September, the Defense Department dismantled its Joint Task Force Global Network Operations command, which is now part of CYBERCOM, which is being sponsored by US Strategic Command (STRATCOM).  CYBERCOM has a “dual mission to conduct offensive and defensive cyber operations,” according to the Pentagon. In May, four-star General Keith Alexander was appointed as CYBERCOM’s first commander. The center will be staffed by around 1,100 personnel to "ensure US/Allied freedom of action in cyberspace and deny the same to our adversaries". In related news, on 7 October Hun Technology Inc. announced the launch of “C2”, a new weapon reportedly designed for CYBERCOM. “Through [C2] we will be able to offer a permanent solution and nuke the problems related to cyber-attacks once and for all," media quoted Ferenc Ledniczky, co-founder and President of the company, as saying. C2 claims to be a technological breakthrough that changes the inherently hackable design of software architecture. Quoted by US media, Ledniczky said: “In developing [C2], we broke away from the traditional approach to computerize the enterprise information management process. Instead we developed an entirely new system which will be un-hackable by virtue of design and without relying on encryption or other protective measures.”

Analytical Note: Apparent CIA malware infecting the operating system of a trans-Siberian gas pipeline led to a massive explosion in the Soviet Union in 1982. Jumping ahead to 2007, Estonia’s national infrastructure came under cyber attacks, shutting down government institutions, banks and media after servers were overloaded. This happened during a political dispute with Russia. In 2008, Georgia experienced a similar cyber attack during a short war with Russia over the separatist region of South Ossetia. In August, the Pentagon revealed information about a cyber attack against the US military’s Central Command in 2008. According to the Pentagon’s account, USB memory sticks were randomly placed in a washroom at a US military base in the Middle East providing support for the war in Iraq. The memory sticks, infected with a computer worm by an undisclosed foreign intelligence agency, were picked up by soldiers who ignored protocol and plugged them into military laptops. The worm took 14 months to kill. In a very similar attack earlier this year, Iran experienced a computer worm (the Stuxnet virus) that infected around 30,000 IP addresses, as well as the computers at the Bushehr nuclear plant. The malware, according to international experts, was custom-made to target and manipulate industrial automation software from remote locations. This worm was also apparently spread by a USB memory stick. Some specialists have referred to the malware as an espionage worm, or a malware sleeper cell, because of its ability to immediately infect but remain latent until activated at a later date. It is not impossible that the malware was a US or Israeli (the latter perhaps more probable) cyberwar offensive. Although US President Barack Obama has said that the administration would not monitor private sector networks or internet traffic in the name of cyber security, this clearly cannot be the case with the launch of CYBERCOM, which was undertaken without public debate largely because of the public’s inability to grasp the issue.

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Govt Takes over Hungarian Plant after Deadly Toxic Spill

Hungarian police have arrested an aluminum plant executive over a fatal toxic sludge crisis, and the state has temporarily seized control of the firm. At least eight people were killed, 150 others injured and scores left homeless when the MAL Hungarian Aluminum Production and Trade Company leaked toxic sludge from its plant in Ajka, some 160 kilometers from the capital, Budapest. Engineers are rushing to complete a dam that would keep the toxic spill from making its way into the area’s reservoir. Company director Zoltan Bakonyi was detained for questioning earlier this week, and the Hungarian parliament voted on 9 October to temporarily take over the company. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said in a statement that the disaster was the result of “human negligence”. The Prime Minister’s Office said that the cause of the chemical disaster was MAL’s practice of overloading a reservoir of toxic waste at its Ajka plant. Last week, the reservoir’s walls cracked and toxic sludge leaked out, contaminating 40 square kilometers of land and seeping into the Danube river. There is risk of a second toxic spill if a new dam is not completed in time.

Analytical Note: Though media is referring to the government takeover of MAL as “nationalization”, government officials have been quick to point out that this is not a nationalization, but a temporary takeover, pending an investigation over how the spill happened. They also said the plant could be reopened later this week. Some are criticizing Orban’s “populist” response to the disaster – in the form of  quick state takeover – but this is typical of Orban’s style of governing, and under pressure from ordinary Hungarians to take immediate action and to be given a sense of protection by the state some say he had little choice. Corruption may also come in to play, alongside human negligence, once the investigation gets under way. Reports said that a state environmental inspection had been undertaken just weeks prior to the disaster, and that everything had been in order. Other company executives and witnesses have already told investigators that Bakonyi was aware of the overloading of the reservoirs before they burst.

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French Transport and Oil Industry Strikes Risks Radicalization

French transport and oil industry workers launched a massive strike this week, disrupting public transportation services on Tuesday and Wednesday and leading a nationwide protest march in which it is believed that as many as 3.5 million workers turned out. The strikers are demanding that the government scrap plans to raise the retirement age. Oil industry workers from Fos-Lavera, the country’s largest oil port, have been on strike for over two weeks, while workers at 12 refineries have voted to join in the protest, reducing crude processing rates and raising the spectre of fuel shortages through the blockage of oil terminals. The French government only has three months of strategic reserves at its disposal, so it not likely to tap into those just yet. The government is not backing down, with President Nicolas Sarkozy vowing to stick to the reforms, which will see the retirement age raised from 60 to 62, and the minimum age to receive a full state pension from 65 to 67. Unions are now talking about open-ended strikes. The strikes took shape on Monday, the day the French senate back the reform bill.

Analytical Note: There is a risk of radicalization, here, and certainly a precedent for it. In 1995 and 2006 similar protests refused to back down and in the end forced the government’s hand. This is the third protest related to the retirement age controversy, and there has been a gradual shift in momentum, with the first two protests drawing hundreds of thousands, while the latest has drawn millions. Similar strikes are affecting many European governments who are faced with implementing very unpopular austerity measures to overcome budget deficits in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. The French austerity package has already been approved by the lower house of parliament, while the Senate is voting on each part of the bill separately. The measures will be problematic for Sarkozy, whose popularity ratings are plunging and who faces presidential elections in 2012.

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Bolivia to Start Lithium Production in October

Bolivia’s minister of mining has announced that the country will begin lithium carbonate and potassium chloride production for export later this month at a plant in Western Bolivia, Bloomberg reports. Production for export will take several months, but the government plans to be able to start exporting by early next year.

Analytical Note: Bolivia is attempting to industrialize its lithium reserves, which stand at an estimated 5.4 metric tons. The country is believed to have the largest lithium reserves in the world, and successful production and export for use in electronic items is expected to provide the country with a major new revenue source. Plant production, according to Bloomberg, should yield around 40 metric tons of lithium carbonate per month, along with 1,000 tons of potassium chloride. For now, the country is still in the market for financing for its lithium development projects. The US imports the most lithium of any country in the world. As reported in the Weekly Geopolitical Summary from 23 September 2010, Iran and Bolivia in early September strengthened ties, with Iran approving a $245 million loan package for Bolivian industrial development. The package will include assistance from Iranian experts in the exploration of mineral deposits, including uranium and lithium.

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UPDATES AND IN BRIEF

ISAF’s Torkham AfPak Border Crossing Reopened

Last weekend, Pakistani officials reopened the Torkham border crossing to ISAF trucks and tankers lined up to supply logistics to the war in Afghanistan after Washington apologized for an airstrike in which Pakistani soldiers were killed (see last week’s geopolitical summary). Some 150 NATO vehicles were destroyed in Taliban attacks on the queuing convoy. The move highlighted the power Pakistan has over the US war in Afghanistan, and how effective the Taliban can be in such a situation.

Iran’s President Visits Lebanon in Clear Attempt to Boost Hezbollah

Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s two-day visit to Beirut on Wednesday started out with official diplomatic speak, and then returned to the expected rhetoric when the Iranian leader addressed a cheering crowd of Hezbollah supporters, calling the group a leader in the fight against Western tyrants. The visit was first and foremost intended to boost Hezbollah’s popularity after its 2009 election losses, and as the UN tribunal’s investigation into the assassination of former prime minister Rafik al-Hariri is hovering over the movement. Iran is hoping to get Lebanon to cease its partial financing of the UN tribal for the case, and this visit had that in mind.

By. Jen Alic of the Global Intelligence Report

Source: http://www.globalintelligencereport.com/articles/weekly-geopolitical-summary-7-october-2010

Rick Francona--

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made an official state visit to Lebanon on October 13 and 14. In addition to the warm reception he received in Beirut, he also was honored repeatedly as he visited towns in mostly Shi'a southern Lebanon. The area is dominated by Hizballah members and sympathizers; that was obvious by the sea of yellow Hizballah flags in the crowds.

Ahmadinejad took advantage of being close to his archenemy Israel by going to the border between Lebanon and Israel. Not only did he visit the border, he chose several significant towns on that border. Two of them, Marun al-Ra's and Bint Jubayl, were scenes of bloody fighting in the 2006 war between Israel and Hizballah.

While the Iranian president toured the area around Marun al-Ra's, Israeli helicopters patrolled over the closest Israeli town, Moshav* Avivim. Marun al-Ra's was the first village to be assaulted by Israeli ground forces in 2006; those forces staged from Avivim. I was a military analyst for MSNBC at the time. The signs in Hebrew and Arabic were easily visible during the preparations for the Israeli ground offensive.

Ahmadinejad also visited Bint Jubayl, just over two miles from the Israeli border. Bint Jubayl has always been a Hizballah stronghold. As such, it as the scene of brutal fighting in the 2006 war. In the end, it was virtually flattened by Israeli forces.

Why shouldn't the Iranian president visit southern Lebanon? After all, Iran funded much of the recovery, both to the general population and to Hizballah.

After the end of hostilities in 2006, Iran immediately resupplied Hizballah in direct violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701. Hizballah claims, and Israeli intelligence agencies agree, that they have more and better weapons than prior to the fighting in 2006. These weapons include rockets and missile capable of reaching Tel Aviv. There have been press reports, likely leaked by Israeli military intelligence, that Syria is training Hizballah personnel on the Scud missile system. This would represent a major increase in the Hizballah capabilities. See my earlier piece, Hizballah and Scuds - an Israeli red line.

Not only did Iran provide weapons to Hizballah, they provided millions of dollars to the devastated villages and towns of southern Lebanon and the Shi'a sections of west and south Beirut. While western aid agencies were trying to get organized, Iranian aid officials took advantage of Hizballah's existing social network in the area and provided much needed, and appreciated, aid quickly and effectively. The Shi'a of southern Lebanon regard both Hizballah and Iran as their protectors and rescuers. It is no wonder that large crowds of cheering Shi'a turned out to welcome Ahmadinejad.

I am not naive enough to think that Iran's assistance is totally altruistic. It is true that the Iranians share a common heritage through the Shi'a sect of Islam. It was Lebanese Shi'a who brought that branch of the faith to Iran centuries ago. However, it goes beyond that. Iran now has a proxy armed force on Israel's northern border, one that responds to its tasking, after all, they provide virtually all the money, weapons and training necessary for the group's existence.

Iran's ties to Hizballah date back to 1982; it was elements of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' Syria and Lebanon contingent** that created Hizballah as a resistance group targeted against the Israeli occupation of the southern part of Lebanon. Over the intervening years, Hizballah has received hundreds of millions of dollars from Iran, not to mention an impressive arsenal of weapons, including long-range rockets, that it has used continuously against Israel.

Using Iranian money, Hizballah has been able to become one, if not the, most powerful political forces in the country. The group has won a large number of seats in the country's legislature and has even secured veto power over virtually all actions of the Lebanese government. Iran can call this a success; Ahmadinejad was here to take a victory lap.

The U.S. State Department has made the usual statements that the visit was "a provocation that undermines Lebanon's sovereignty." At that fearsome tirade, I am reminded of the axiom, "Money talks." The Iranians have again outmaneuvered the rest of the world by providing a needed service. The United States provides platitudes, while the Iranians rebuild schools and medical clinics, and handout cash to displaced residents. Ahmadinejad embodies that assistance.

Western-backed parties in Lebanon (that normally means Christians) warned that Ahmadinejad is seeking to transform Lebanon into "an Iranian base on the Mediterranean."

News flash: They already have.

The Israelis, who live in the region, were much more cogent in their analysis. Their spokesman said that Iran "has turned Lebanon into an Iranian satellite and made Lebanon a hub for regional terror and instability."

That about sums it up.
______________
* A moshav is a type of cooperative that is less communal than a kibbutz. In a moshav, people own their own homes and work their own land. They are popular among American Jews exercising aliyah (Jews returning to live in Israel). More here.

** This force later became the nucleus of the IRGC special operations group known as The Qods Force.

Lieutenant Colonel Rick Francona is a retired U.S. Air Force intelligence officer, a veteran of the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars, and service in the Balkans. His assignments include the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency, with tours of duty in Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia, and operational duties in virtually every country in the Middle East.

During the last year of the Iran–Iraq war in 1988, Rick was assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad as a liaison officer to the Iraqi armed forces intelligence service, where he served in the field with the Iraqi army and flew with the Iraqi Air Force.  

Throughout the first Gulf War he served as the personal Arabic interpreter and advisor on Iraq to General Norman Schwarzkopf and later co-authored the report to Congress on the conduct of the war.  His is the author of  book, Ally to Adversary – An Eyewitness Account of Iraq’s Fall from Grace.

Following the Gulf War, Rick served as the first air attaché to the U.S. Embassy in Damascus, Syria until 1995.  In 1995 and 1996, Rick served in northern Iraq with the Central Intelligence Agency, where he narrowly escaped an attempt on his life by Iraqi agents.  In 1997 and 1998, he served in the Department of Defense counter terrorism branch and led a special operations team in Bosnia that captured five indicted war criminals.

From 2003 through 2008, Rick was a Middle East military analyst for NBC News.  You'll find Lt. Col Francona online at http://francona.blogspot.com/

MORE FROM RICK FRANCONA'S BLOG OF FAME

Copyright © 2006-2011, Basil & Spice. All rights reserved

Hezbollah gets a visit from a powerful friend just as it faces UN prosecution over the assassination of Rafiq al-Hariri

Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is enjoying a far warmer welcome in Lebanon than he usually gets on his foreign trips – certainly more than at the UN last month when he provoked outrage by suggesting that the US might have organised the 9/11 attacks to protect Israel.

Beset by economic problems and infighting in Tehran, he is being received as a VIP by the Lebanese government – though he is not actually a head of state – but more significantly as a hero of the resistance by the Shia movement Hezbollah in Beirut's southern suburbs and tomorrow in their strongholds near the border with Israel.

Ahmadinejad's reception is an uncomfortable reminder that Iran is a Middle Eastern power to be reckoned with far beyond its own backyard.

Even if he does not now carry out a reported plan to symbolically throw stones across the frontier at the "Zionist enemy", there is an unmistakeable sense that he is symbolically and defiantly inspecting Iran's "frontline" against Israel.

Hezbollah is delighted. Al-Manar, its TV station, has been building up to the two-day visit with a combination of extravagant praise and saracastic asides about how the US and Israel have no right to object to Ahmadinejad's presence.

Links between Iran and Lebanon, especially the Shia heartland of Jebel Amel in the south, go back centuries, but it is the relationships that were forged at the time of the Iranian revolution in 1979, and nurtured since, that matter today.

Hezbollah began life as the Islamic Revolution in Lebanon, and its clenched fist and Kalashnikov rifle logo echoes inspiration from Iran. It emerged from the shadows after Israel's invasion of 1982, which struck hard at the Yasser Arafat's PLO but created a powerful new enemy.

Not all Lebanese attitudes are based on sectarian affiliation. The president, Michel Suleiman, is a Maronite Christian, as laid down in the constitution. General Michel Aoun, the Christian leader of the Free Patriotic Movement, allied with Hezbollah in parliament, has welcomed the visit. So, formally at least, has Samir Geagea of the Lebanese Forces.

Nervousness amongst Sunni Muslims is palpable: one group publicly urged Ahmadinejad not to use Lebanon to "spearhead" attacks on Israel. Memories of the devastating war of 2006 are still fresh and Israel is overhwhelmingly the superior power – even if Hezbollah has restocked its rocket arsenal since the last round. It will be fascinating to see if Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, meets Ahmadinejad in public: he usually addresses meetings on a giant video screen because of fears for his security.

For Lebanon's ever volatile internal politics the timing of Ahmadinejad's visit could hardly be worse. Tensions have been mounting in recent weeks over the explosive issue of the UN tribunal investigating the 2005 assassination of Rafiq al-Hariri, the former Sunni prime minister and father of the current incumbent, Sa'ad. Expectations that the court will shortly issue indictments against members of Hezbollah have already raised the political temperature several degrees. The guest from Iran is a reminder that Hezbollah has powerful friends.

The memory of the Sabra and Shatila massacre makes Palestinians in Lebanon reluctant to give up their weapons

This month, Palestinians in Lebanon commemorated the 28th anniversary of a crime whose perpetrators remain unpunished and whose victims still wait for justice. In September 1982, the Israeli army surrounded the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Beirut. For nearly three days, Israeli forces allowed their allies in the rightwing Lebanese Christian Phalange militia to enter the camps and massacre more than 1,000 Palestinian refugees and Lebanese citizens. All of the victims – men, women and children – were unarmed civilians.

Prior to this sombre anniversary, Ahmed Moor argued in an article for Cif that Palestinian weapons are the key issue preventing Palestinian refugees from obtaining basic civil rights in Lebanon, which the state has denied them for 62 years. He described the camps as "heavily armed" and their Palestinians as gripped by an "illusion of martial security."

As someone who has lived in Lebanon for several years, I was struck by these assertions. Anyone familiar with Lebanese politics recognises them as the typical refrain of the right wing, whose adherents object not only to providing Palestinians refugees with basic rights but to their very presence on Lebanese soil. Nor do these characterisations come close to accurately describing the camps or the Palestinians in Lebanon I know. The camps today are far from heavily armed, especially when compared to the various Lebanese militias or the Lebanese army.

I thought I would visit the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, which today are essentially one camp resembling a slum, and speak with Palestinian refugees about the issue of trading in their weapons for rights.

Inside a small call centre in the camp, frequented by Palestinians without credit on their mobile phones and foreign workers calling home, I spoke to a young man named Osama. "The issue of our arms and our civil rights are unrelated," he told me. "Lebanese should give us rights as Arabs, as human beings living among them like Palestinian refugees in Jordan and Syria."

He added: "Our weapons don't necessarily make me feel safer, especially with the internal problems that we have in the camps here like in Palestine. But if we were to give them up, we'd have no protection. At least with our weapons if we die, we die standing and not like in Sabra and Shatila when we were massacred without even one weapon to resist. If the Lebanese army was able to protect us from Israel, then there would be no need for Palestinians to have weapons."

At the headquarters of the Najdeh Association just outside the camp, I spoke with executive director Laila al-Ali. Founded in the 1970s, Najdeh is an NGO that runs social programmes in Lebanon's Palestinian refugee camps and is the leading organisation behind the Right to Work Campaign for Palestinian refugees. Al-Ali, a Palestinian refugee who grew up in Shatila, explained: "It's not the Lebanese who are looking for assurances or guarantees from the Palestinians, it's the Palestinians who need this guarantee from the Lebanese. Palestinians don't feel safe."

Al-Ali said that only a few groups and individuals have weapons in the camps. She added that the argument claiming these small arms are an obstacle to granting Palestinians rights is merely "Lebanese [rhetoric] trying to deny Palestinians their human and civil rights".

I asked her about a recent law passed by the Lebanese parliament that made minor changes to the restrictions on the ability of Palestinian refugees to work in the country. Al-Ali stated bluntly: "It gives them nothing. The Lebanese mentality needs to be changed, they cannot continue dealing with Palestinians from the security perspective [alone]."

Back in Shatila, others shared her sentiments. I walked into a barbershop owned by Ahmed, who explained while snipping away at a man's hair: "We keep weapons for protection. Even between the Lebanese there is no stability. Today they are together and tomorrow they're not. In the past we only had our weapons to protect ourselves, like during the (1985-88) war of the camps, our weapons protected us from the [Lebanese Shia] Amal movement."

I turned to a young man named Omar who was finishing a deep pore cleansing. Bearing a pistol on his hip, Omar is a member of one of the camp's security branches. He told me: "The weapons are not the reason for denying us rights, this is a pretext for the Lebanese to take our weapons. If we lose our weapons, we lose the right to go back to Palestine. I carry my weapon because it's not worth throwing away. The weapons are the peoples' property."

Unprompted, a taxi driver named Mahmoud said: "Once we lose the weapons we'll be slapped from all directions. I will never accept to give up our weapons. The Lebanese will never be able to protect our cause. It's not their cause, and nobody can protect it but ourselves."

After speaking with dozens of individuals in the camp, all of whom refused to give up their right to bear arms, I asked a friend to take me to someone in the camp who he thought would disagree. He brought me to his 66-year-old grandmother, Miyasar, a refugee who has been forced to flee her home at least five times since 1948. She now lives in Shatila, where we sat overlooking a newly constructed multimillion dollar water well that has yet to be used.

Before I could even finish asking her the first questions about trading rights for arms, Miyasar closed her eyes, shook her head and said: "The Lebanese cannot give us rights, they can't even give themselves rights. Each group is by itself with its own weapons – Hezbollah has guns, Amal has guns, Future [Movement] has guns, The Lebanese are the ones who need help, not the Palestinians.

"When the Israelis came they said give up our guns, and we did and look what happened! Even a donkey that falls in one spot learns not to fall in that same spot again. We have no faith in Lebanese to give us rights. We will keep our weapons until we go back to Palestine."

Rick Francona--

Most of us who follow the Middle East are of the opinion that nothing happens in Lebanon that sooner or later does not involve Syria. The two countries are bound by history, geography and their unique dialect of the Arabic language. If it had been left up to the people who actually live in the area, it is doubtful that Lebanon would even exist as a separate entity.

Overshadowed by events in Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, most casual observers probably missed an important development in the Lebanese-Syrian relationship. On a visit to Damascus to meet with Syrian President Bashar al-Asad, Lebanese Prime Minister Sa'ad al-Din al-Hariri recanted his earlier accusations that Syria was behind the 2005 assassination of his father, former Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri, in Beirut. In his words, "We made a mistake. At one point we accused Syria...That was a political accusation, and that political accusation is over."

Hariri's change of mind is interesting because regardless of who actually detonated the massive bomb that killed the elder Hariri, there is no way that one of the Syrian intelligence agencies was not involved. Recent suspicion has fallen on Iranian-backed Hizballah, which is nothing more than a proxy for its masters in Damascus and Tehran. Which Syrian intelligence agency is unknown, but I'd put my money on either Syrian Military Intelligence because of their long history of operations in Lebanon, or the much more sinister Syrian Air Force Intelligence who specialize in these sorts of mass killings. Hariri knows the Syrians did it, the Saudis know the Syrians did it, we know the Syrians did it, and what is more, the Syrians know that we all know. Welcome to the Byzantine world of Lebanese politics.

The Hariri-Asad meeting was likely the result of Saudi King 'Abdullah's visit to Beirut less than two weeks ago. The Saudi monarch was accompanied by Syrian President al-Asad; there was no chance that Asad would allow a meeting in Beirut of this import to take place without his involvement. The simple message from 'Abdullah to Hariri: make your peace with Damascus or your country is likely to slip back into civil war.

For its part, Syria views Lebanon as lost territory. Lebanon, much like Syria itself, as well as Iraq and Jordan, is a country created by the European powers in the aftermath of World War One. Following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, the area which had been under Ottoman rule for 400 years came under League of Nations mandates given to Britain and France. The British mandate included the areas that now comprise Israel, Jordan, Iraq and part of Saudi Arabia. The French mandate included what is now Syria and Lebanon.

In 1920, France created Greater Lebanon, a largely Christian (mostly Maronites) enclave but also included areas containing many Muslims and Druze. In 1926, France declared Greater Lebanon to be the Lebanese Republic (the official name of the country today). Lebanon gained independence (on paper) in 1943 from the Vichy French government; the British occupied Lebanon and Syria during the war; the last French troops withdrew in 1946. The Syrians were never happy with the creation of Lebanon, calling it the vestiges of European colonialism and mandatory rule.

To understand how the Syrians view Lebanon, here is a portion of a phone call (Skype, actually) I had not long ago with the wife of a Syrian doctor friend.

Rick: Layla, wayn al-"docteur"? (Where is the doctor?)

Lalya: Huwa 'ambi-"shopping" fi l-mhafazih. (He's shopping in the province.)

Rick: Ayni mhafazih? Huwa mu fi Sham? (Which province? He's not in Damascus?)

Layla: La la, huwa fi l-mhafizih, Bayrut y'ani. (No, no - he's in the province, Beirut, I mean.)

Lebanon, the province.

In 2005, Syria suffered a setback in its attempt to maintain control of its neighbor, its "province." In the aftermath of the Hariri assassination, there was a popular nonviolent uprising nicknamed the "Cedar Revolution." The mass demonstrations forced Damascus to withdraw its troops, leaving Lebanon without Syrian military occupation troops for the first time since 1976. I remember quite clearly that day when Syrian tanks rolled into Beirut, but I digress.

So why do we now have the Saudis encouraging the Lebanese to come back under Damascus's wing, despite the fact that everyone knows the Syrians had to be involved in the Hariri assassination?

One word: Iran.

The Saudis are Iran's main rival to be the main power broker in the Persian Gulf. With Iran embarking on a nuclear weapons program, Saudi Arabia is concerned that it will be relegated to a position of irrelevance in the region. Syria is Iran's main and really only ally in the Arab world. Iran exercises great influence over not only Syria, but over Lebanese Hizballah as well. It was the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that created Hizballah in 1982; they have been intimately involved ever since, providing most of the weapons, money and training that allows the organization to survive and play a substantial role in Lebanese politics.

Hizballah also operates as a proxy for the Syrians in Lebanon. A closer Damascus-Beirut relationship, read that as a closer Hariri-Asad relationship, negates the necessity for an independent Hizballah. It therefore lessens Syria's reliance on Iran. That serves Saudi Arabia's interests - break the Iran-Syria-Hizballah axis and regain what Riyadh believes is its rightful place as key nation among the Arab states. Of course, Egypt might have something to say about that...

Make no mistake about Syrian political acumen. The Syrians have been playing this game since there was a game. I think they will encourage the Lebanese to come back into "the Syrian tent." Will it achieve Saudi Arabia's goal, a laudable one, of crating a wedge between Tehran and Damascus? I doubt it.

I think this round goes to Syria.

Lieutenant Colonel Rick Francona is a retired U.S. Air Force intelligence officer, a veteran of the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars, and service in the Balkans. His assignments include the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency, with tours of duty in Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia, and operational duties in virtually every country in the Middle East.

During the last year of the Iran–Iraq war in 1988, Rick was assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad as a liaison officer to the Iraqi armed forces intelligence service, where he served in the field with the Iraqi army and flew with the Iraqi Air Force.  

Throughout the first Gulf War he served as the personal Arabic interpreter and advisor on Iraq to General Norman Schwarzkopf and later co-authored the report to Congress on the conduct of the war.  His is the author of  book, Ally to Adversary – An Eyewitness Account of Iraq’s Fall from Grace.

Following the Gulf War, Rick served as the first air attaché to the U.S. Embassy in Damascus, Syria until 1995.  In 1995 and 1996, Rick served in northern Iraq with the Central Intelligence Agency, where he narrowly escaped an attempt on his life by Iraqi agents.  In 1997 and 1998, he served in the Department of Defense counter terrorism branch and led a special operations team in Bosnia that captured five indicted war criminals.

From 2003 through 2008, Rick was a Middle East military analyst for NBC News.  You'll find Lt. Col Francona online at http://francona.blogspot.com/

MORE FROM RICK FRANCONA'S BLOG OF FAME

Copyright © 2006-2010, Basil & Spice. All rights reserved

While many studies in the literature evaluate PTSD following a discrete traumatic occurrence, the recent article by Shalev and colleagues evaluates the effect of continuous terror by examining the occurrence of general distress, PTSD symptoms, and full-blown PTSD, in two suburbs of Jerusalem (Shalev and colleagues, Am. J. Psychiatry 2006).

While Efrat (the directly exposed community) and Bet Shemesh (an indirectly exposed community) are located at similar distances from Jerusalem (11 miles for Efrat and 15 miles for Bet Shemesh), during the eight months preceding the data collection, the directly exposed community was practically under siege, whereas the indirectly exposed community was not. Specifically, shooting incidents occurred frequently, and erratically blocked the roads leading to Efrat.
Stoning of cars occurred daily. Snipers killed and wounded several residents.

While stress exposure was far more pervasive in the directly exposed community of Efrat, the prevalence of PTSD symptoms (26.95%) for the directly exposed community sample compared with that of 21.35% for the indirectly exposed community was not statistically significant.1 These findings reflect a high frequency of traumatic anxiety in neighborhood communities exposed either directly or indirectly to continuous threat.

When comparing the effects of circumscribed catastrophic events with those of a continuous terror paradigm, a spectrum emerges representing two contrasting stress models with differing psychological, behavioral, neurobiological, and sociological implications.

In fact, the fear-conditioning model has guided the neurocircuitry theories of PTSD and its pathophysiology (Southwick, Psychiatric Annals, August 1998).
Previous exposure to trauma is the important risk factor for PTSD. Furthermore, studies have shown that previous history of stressors may alter the HPA axis response to subsequent stressors.

Fear conditioning leads to heightened threat responsiveness, overgeneralization of fear responses, and failure of extinction.5 kindling and sensitization within the Amygdala is the accumulative result of multiple traumas and predicts the development of PTSD (Davis, M. , "The Role of Amygdala in Fear and Anxiety". Annual Rev. Neurosc. 1992).

In the Continuous Terror Model, because of sensitization to repeated fear conditioned cues and neurological kindling, PTSD is more likely to endure (McEwen: "The Effects of Stress on Structural and Functional Plasticity in the Hippocampus", Neurobiology of Mental Illness, Oxford University Press, 1999).

The mechanisms involved here may include both long-term potentiation as well as lasting changes in the genetic regulation of neurotransmitters, intracellular messengers, and cellular structures. These changes affect primarily the Amygdala, hippocampus, and medial prefrontal cortex-the triad of structures implicated in fear conditioning.

In "The Continuous Terror Study", conducted by Shalev and colleagues, the investigators expressed concern regarding the implications of living under continuous terror, where recuperation may not occur as it does following a discrete occurrence.

These observations are consistent with the findings of the "Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Aging Study (CALAS), funded by the U.S. National Institute on Aging." Thirteen hundred and sixty nine Holocaust survivors interviewed from the Israel National Population Registry reported a high incidence of cumulative life events distress, a lower level of lifestyle activity, and poorer social functioning ("A Broad-Scope View of Holocaust Survivors in Late Life", Shmotkin and colleagues, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 2003).

Overall, the findings indicated that older Holocaust survivors randomly approached in a nonclinical setting still endure the sequelae of their trauma. These findings are consistent with the theory of sensitization, and are particularly pertinent to the Continuous Terror model posed by Dr. Shalev and colleagues.

Not only does this bode poorly for life quality on a long-term time trajectory, but also raises concern for the potential impact in the U.S .of a major national disaster of the magnitude of a September 11th event in a pre-traumatized population.

In fact, Solomon and Prager reported this vulnerability to re-traumatization, when survivors of the Nazi Holocaust showed more pronounced psychological symptoms following the SCUD missile attacks during the Persian Gulf War than the rest of the population (Am. J. Psychiatry 1992).

Dr Shalev responds:

Dr Trappler expands the implications of our study, of the effects of continuous terror, by commenting on the potential long-term effects of repeated trauma exposure.

These are very important points, since our study only concerned reactions during adversity, whereas Dr Trappler`s comment implies that there might be a hidden sensitizing effect masked by an external resilience.
This could lead to currently resilient survivors becoming more sensitive to subsequent stressors and developing PTSD in the future.

The debate regarding the sensitizing or immunizing effect of exposure has not been resolved. A study of Israeli soldiers exposed to two successive wars (Yom Kippur War of 1973 and Lebanon I in 1982), supports both views ("Reactivation of combat-related PTSD", Solomon et al, Am J Psych, 1987).

Those who developed combat stress reactions during the first war were more likely to develop PTSD in 1982 (a sensitizing effect). In contrast, soldiers who did not develop combat stress showed lower stress-reactions in 1982 than newly exposed combatants (an immunizing effect).

Clarifying these issues is of particular relevance in an era where US soldiers may be called for second or third tour of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Moreover, some specifics of current warfare and terrorism (including the vivid visual communication of suffering) significantly extends the circle of those affected by these traumatic events.

Theory suggests that controllable stress tends to immunize, whereas uncontrollable stress sensitizes (Brewin, J Consult Clin Psychol, 2000).

Poor social support after a trauma is a major risk factor for PTSD (Liu, Science, 1997).
A series of animal studies have established the role of soothing body contact in reversing the stress-sensitizing effects of early maternal separation ("Increased CRF concentrations in the spinal fluid of non-human primates exposed to adverse experiences as infants" Proceedings for the National Academy of Science, Coplan, Rosenblum, Gorman, Nemeroff, 1996, Ed).

We therefore come back to the old adage: Hug a veteran today.

It behooves us, during these dire times, to protect and support those among us who have been repeatedly exposed to stress, by giving them as much personal support as we can.

This might not prevent exposure to stress, but helps those already exposed.

Dr Trappler responds:

My comments on the "Continuous Terror" model proposed by Dr Shalev, focused on a continuous compounding effect of repeated trauma exposure.

Neurological kindling theory would suggest that the Sympathetic Nervous System becomes more prone to both hyper-arousal, and more likely to heightened stress-responses to trauma-triggers.

What Dr Shalev identified was two subgroups of combat-exposed veterans. The sub-group who developed controlled stressed was "immunized", while the sub-group that experienced "uncontrolled stress" became "sensitized".

This is relevant in terms of predicting which victims are more prone to PTSD in the long run.

There are important neurobiological ramifications to this concept, which will determine the long-term prognosis (in terms of life-quality) of trauma survivors.

I found two interesting publications that illustrate "controlled" versus "uncontrolled" stress in terrorist situations.

In a study on the "Psychiatric Aspects of Terrorist Violence in Northern Ireland", Peter Curran found that what began in the late 1960s as legitimate unrest, soon gave way to widespread street rioting, evolving into social upheaval, as thousands scurried to the comparative safety of ghettos, within which paramilitary organizations constellated.

When the British Army entered the scene as "peacemakers", the IRA launched a campaign of bombing targets throughout Northern Ireland and Great Britain.

As the killings rose from indiscriminate bombings and sectarian executions, former Home Secretary Reginald Maudling imposed direct rule from Westminster as he tightened control to "an acceptable level of violence".

At 18-year follow-up, Curran found, that except for the small proportion of actual victims, the rest of the community rebounded to a state of psychological well-being (Br J Psychiatry, 1988).

In contrast, in a study by David Kinzie and colleagues, previously traumatized Bosnian and Somali refugees living in New York showed significant deterioration in their sense of safety and security, as well as PTSD reactivation, in response to widely televised images of the Twin Tower bombings (Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 2002).

While the first study demonstrates the effect of stress-containment leading to an immunizing effect, the second study illustrates the "sensitizing effect" of an uncontrolled stress. (The idea that nowhere is safe).

Another valuable variable mentioned by Dr Shalev is the issue of duration of exposure by veterans within the combat theatre, in proportion to shorter tours of active duty with longer periods of respite.

This very short turn-around between of active tours duty will certainly put returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan at greater risk.

The clinical significance returns to the physiology of stress circuitry and the imperative to shorten periods of sustained "stress-activation" in order to protect limbic brain structures from the deleterious effects of toxic stress-induced neurohormones.

Stress sensitization and reactivation is also relevant in the treatment of victims with Complex Trauma: Victims of prolonged trauma, as described in the "Continuous Trauma" syndrome, may be prone to chronic over-arousal, a failure to regulate affective responses and social-skill deficits (Herman, "Trauma and Recovery", Basic Books, 1992).

According to Marylene Cloitre, victims of chronic trauma may first need "Skill Training In Affective Regulation" known by the acronym "STAIR", in order to help victims identify their fears, learn how to self-soothe, and regain a sense of autonomy ("Treating Survivors of Childhood Abuse", Cloitre and colleagues, Guilford Press, 2006).

A failure to insert this into the treatment might result in a patient when exposed to trauma narratives.

When "Sensitized" patients are "therapeutically challenged"to re-visit "split-off" traumatic memory fragments, they might experience the unmanageable dread for which Cloitre advocates the STAIR method.

Ultimately, the most effective way of restoring a personal sense of security is by creating a safe holding environment, one with a secure boundary that keeps the predator well away.

By Gus Bridi (Sabbah Report)

“There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia. The time for double standards that allow Islamists to behave aggressively toward us while they demand our weakness and submission is over.”- Newt Gingrich

Has Lebanon officially become more tolerant and progressive than the United States?

Let’s talk about Lebanon’s Ground Zero and you can decide for yourself.

One must first understand what “Ground Zero” means to most Lebanese.

In a country with about the same land mass as Los Angeles County which has been at war off and on for nearly four decades, “Ground Zero” for the Lebanese is arguably their entire country-and at the center of their Ground Zero is downtown Beirut, captured and occupied by the Israeli Defense Force in 1982 and which was almost entirely reduced to rubble from Muslim West Beirut to Christian East Beirut, and all points in between.

Once upon a time not too long ago, there was scarcely a building left standing or unscarred by shrapnel in all of Beirut. I know, because I was in Beirut in 1991, and witnessed first hand a city once described as “the Paris of the Middle East” reduced to ruins, pock marked with unexploded munitions and a haphazard “network” of open sewers.

Miraculously, Beirut was rebuilt and reclaimed its prominence. It once again became the jewel of the Arab world, remarkably able to bridge the ancient mystique of the east with the modern allure of the west.

Upon the first completion of its “rebuilding” process however–after 15 years and tens of billions of dollars spent on reconstructing Lebanon and its Ground Zero from rubble to splendor, Israel did what Israel does…

In July and August of 2006, Israel again followed through on its promise to “bomb Lebanon back into the Stone Age,” and in so doing displaced 1,000,000 Lebanese civilians (nearly a quarter of the country’s population), completely destroyed the country’s infrastructure (again), its only airport, at least 64 bridges, leveled entire buildings and neighborhoods to rubble (again), including the country’s largest milk factory, a food factory, two pharmaceutical plants, water treatment centers, power plants, grain silos, a Greek Orthodox Church, several mosques, and a handful of hospitals (in a country which only had a handful of hospitals to begin with).

Over 1,200 hundred Lebanese civilians were killed and over 5,000 wounded.

Read the full story here:

http://mycatbirdseat.com/2010/08/the-ground-zero-synagogue-%e2%80%93-l...

The presenter will return to host the BBC4 World Cinema awards in October, less than three months after his departure from the corporation

Jonathan Ross is to return to the BBC less than three months after his high-profile departure, to host a BBC4 film awards show.

Ross, whose contract with the corporation ended in July, spelling the end for his BBC1 Friday-night chatshow and Radio 2 Saturday programme, will host the BBC4 World Cinema awards in October.

He had talked of taking a year's sabbatical before hosting a chat show for ITV1 from late next year, although he will be returning to TV in the interim for one-off events, including hosting the British Comedy awards on Channel 4 later this year.

Ross has previously hosted the BBC4 event, which celebrates international film-making and is now in its seventh year.

Richard Klein, controller of BBC4, said: "As the home of arts and culture, BBC4 is committed to world cinema. It's really important to encourage the viewing of such important stories from the world around us – this year's shortlist is further proof of an exceptional year for international film."

The shortlist for the awards was also announced today and includes the animated memoir about the 1982 Lebanon war, Waltz With Bashir. Nominees are drawn up by UK film writers.

Other nominees are Let The Right One In, I Am Love, A Prophet and The White Ribbon.

The awards take place at the BFI Southbank in London on 7 October 7 and will be screened on BBC4 on 9 October.

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By: Greg Beals

Americans often fail to understand the ways in which domestic debates about Islam resonate beyond borders. In the Middle East, U.S. cultural quarrels can at times appear to be needlessly confusing. On other occasions they threaten to provoke real confrontation. The behavior of Terry Jones -- the pastor of Florida's Dove Church, who is planning to burn copies of the Quran on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks -- and the bickering over the cultural center near Ground Zero provide two examples of how America's clashes over Islam play out in unexpected ways.

In Beirut, Cairo, Baghdad and other Middle East capitals, there is a general understanding that cultural conflict always carries the potential of being fought not with placards and facile talking heads but with bullets and missiles. Victims of religious bigotry know that the values associated with tolerance and secularism are seen by extremists as inconvenient obstacles to conflict.

In Egypt, Islamist fanatics earlier this year killed members of the Coptic Church for no other reason than their religion. Settlers in Israel see the confiscation of Palestinian land as a holy mission and have had no problem with killing anyone who gets in the way -- including their own prime minister. In 1982 Lebanon, Christian Phalange militiamen were supported by Israeli authorities in the slaughter of Palestinian women and children in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Shiites have killed Sunnis, and vice versa, in greater numbers than we can count.

Regarding the "Ground Zero mosque" debate, intellectuals I speak with from Cairo to Beirut tell me this: The location of a cultural center is a zoning dispute cum midterm-election ploy trying to pass itself off as a cosmic battle. In this tiff, there is space for elegance, generosity and flexibility. There is general amazement that the issue is taken so seriously in the U.S.

"Both sides are wrong on this issue. Of course America is not at war with Islam. Yes, Muslims have the right to build a mosque on Ground Zero," Mohamed Selim El-Awa, the former secretary-general of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, told The Root. "But it is not necessary. They can have a center or a mosque anywhere else. It symbolizes nothing. Nobody should want to offend."

This view is repeated from the West Bank to Saudi Arabia. "Muslims do not aspire for a mosque next to the Sept. 11 cemetery," said Abd Al-Rahman Al-Rashed, general manager of Al-Arabiya television. "The mosque [near Ground Zero] is not an issue for Muslims, and they [had] not heard of it until the shouting became loud between the supporters and the objectors, which is mostly an argument between non-Muslim U.S. citizens!"

With 70 percent of Americans opposing the site, the founders of Cordoba House may win the legal battle and lose the larger struggle for hearts and minds. Besides, Masjid Manhattan, a mosque two blocks north of the Cordoba House site, has been open since 1970.

The threatened bonfire burning of the Quran, however, is a different matter -- with more severe connotations. Even if undertaken by Jones, a Florida bigot with a minuscule congregation, most of whom likely could not find the Middle East on a map, it is seen as an act of religious warfare. Domestically, the Dove Church may already feel like old news, but in the Middle East, the resonance is deep, clear and threatening.

"Attacking the religious symbols of others is a kind of terrorism," the Rev. Andrea Zaki Stephanous, vice-general director of the Protestant Church of Egypt, told The Root. "It dehumanizes and is a form of violence."

Zaki believes that the first people to suffer in such a conflict would be in the Middle East. In 2005, after caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad were published by a Danish newspaper, churches were burned and innocents killed throughout the Muslim world. It took years for Denmark to repair its diplomatic image.

As U.S. midterm debates over Islam heat up, we would do well to realize that in a globalized world, cultural conflict is not just about getting elected but also carries the potential to provoke serious confrontation abroad.

Greg Beals is The Root's Middle East correspondent. You can contact him here.

Like The Root on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter.

Palestine is belligerently occupied. Threats continue against Iran and Syria as well as Lebanon, specifically Hezbollah, elected partner in the nation's unity government, bogusly designated a US State Department Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), what Israel also calls it, repeating veiled and overt warnings, suggesting violence or an impending attack. Why not, after so many earlier in 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996, and 2006.

Hezbollah was born out of Israel's 1982 Lebanon invasion, its horrific war slaughtering around 18,000 people, mostly civilians, including in the Sabra and Shatila camps, what journalist Robert Fisk called "one of the most shocking war crimes of the 20th century."

Rick Francona--

The recent border clash between soldiers of the Lebanese Army and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) highlights the fragile cease-fire in place there. It's pretty clear what happened. Several Israeli soldiers used a crane to trim a tree that was preventing observation into Hizballah-controlled southern Lebanon. The tree, although on the outside of the border fence, was still located in Israeli territory.

The fact that the tree was in Israeli terrirtory was confirmed by the United Nations. As a friend of mine remarked when he read the story, when the United Nations backs the Israeli version of events, you know it must be true.

In response to the tree-trimming, Lebanese soldiers fired on the Israelis; the Israelis returned fire. Three Lebanese soldiers and a journalist were killed on the Lebanese side, while one Israeli officer was killed and another wounded.

It is easy to understand how these seemingly minor events - trimming a tree - can lead to an international incident. The Lebanese saw an Israeli crane on what they perceived to be Lebanese territory - a logical assumption. United Nations observers from UNIFIL (United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon) warned the Israelis that the Lebanese claimed a violation of the border. The situation along that border is an incident waiting to erupt, and on this day, it did just that.

According to press reports from Lebanon, the Lebanese army officer in charge of the area in which this incident occurred is a Shi'a Muslim and an avowed supporter of Hizballah. Americans may find it curious that the press would report a military commander's religious affiliation and political leaning, but in Lebanon, it's normal. Sectarian divisions have caused problems for the country since its inception by the French in the aftermath of World War One.

Now we have some representatives in the U.S. Congress demanding that we re-assess our support of the Lebanese armed forces. Since the end of the war between the IDF and Hizballah in 2006, the United States has provided almost three quarters of a billion dollars worth of aid to the Lebanese. That aid includes military equipment, training and humanitarian assistance.

In FY2010, the United States allocated $100 million in assistance to the Lebanese armed forces, plus $109 million in economic (non-military) aid as well as $20 million to support Lebanese anti-drug efforts. The Obama Administration has proposed slightly more for FY2011.

While the United States is providing this money to the Lebanese, Iranian and Syrian backed Hizballah is growing stronger as both a political party and as a militia that many observers believe is more capable than the Lebanese Army. They are certainly more committed and have more combat experience.

Since the end of the war in 2006, despite UN Resolution 1701 that demands the disarmament of Hizballah and a pull back from the area south of the Litani River, Hizballah is deployed in force throughout southern Lebanon and now has more rockets and missiles than at any time since its founding by the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in 1982.

If some of these representatives in Congress have their way and the assistance is not provided to the Lebanese armed forces and government, where will they turn for the money, weapons and training? No doubt this will force them even more into the sphere of influence of Syria and Iran. They key beneficiary here will be Hizballah, already arguably the key power broker in the country.

Are we willing to cede that to them? If so, halt the assistance and write Lebanon off as what the Syrians already call it - al-muhafazih, "the province."

Lieutenant Colonel Rick Francona is a retired U.S. Air Force intelligence officer, a veteran of the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars, and service in the Balkans. His assignments include the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency, with tours of duty in Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia, and operational duties in virtually every country in the Middle East.

During the last year of the Iran–Iraq war in 1988, Rick was assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad as a liaison officer to the Iraqi armed forces intelligence service, where he served in the field with the Iraqi army and flew with the Iraqi Air Force.  

Throughout the first Gulf War he served as the personal Arabic interpreter and advisor on Iraq to General Norman Schwarzkopf and later co-authored the report to Congress on the conduct of the war.  His is the author of  book, Ally to Adversary – An Eyewitness Account of Iraq’s Fall from Grace.

Following the Gulf War, Rick served as the first air attaché to the U.S. Embassy in Damascus, Syria until 1995.  In 1995 and 1996, Rick served in northern Iraq with the Central Intelligence Agency, where he narrowly escaped an attempt on his life by Iraqi agents.  In 1997 and 1998, he served in the Department of Defense counter terrorism branch and led a special operations team in Bosnia that captured five indicted war criminals.

From 2003 through 2008, Rick was a Middle East military analyst for NBC News.  You'll find Lt. Col Francona online at http://francona.blogspot.com/

MORE FROM RICK FRANCONA'S BLOG OF FAME

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What... are we to make of a recent survey for the Al Arabiya television network finding that a staggering 71 percent of the Arabic respondents have no interest in the Palestinian-Israeli peace talks? “This is an alarming indicator,” lamented Saleh Qallab, a columnist for the pan-Arab newspaper Al Sharq al Awsat. “The Arabs, people and regimes alike, have always been as interested in the peace process, its developments and particulars, as they were committed to the Palestinian cause itself.”

But the truth is that Arab policies since the mid-1930s suggest otherwise. While the “Palestine question” has long been central to inter-Arab politics, Arab states have shown far less concern for the well-being of the Palestinians than for their own interests.

For example, it was common knowledge that the May 1948 pan-Arab invasion of the nascent state of Israel was more a scramble for Palestinian territory than a fight for Palestinian national rights. As the first secretary-general of the Arab League, Abdel Rahman Azzam, once admitted to a British reporter, the goal of King Abdullah of Transjordan “was to swallow up the central hill regions of Palestine, with access to the Mediterranean at Gaza. The Egyptians would get the Negev. Galilee would go to Syria, except that the coastal part as far as Acre would be added to the Lebanon.”

From 1948 to 1967, when Egypt and Jordan ruled the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, the Arab states failed to put these populations on the road to statehood. They also showed little interest in protecting their human rights or even in improving their quality of life — which is part of the reason why 120,000 West Bank Palestinians moved to the East Bank of the Jordan River and about 300,000 others emigrated abroad. “We couldn’t care less if all the refugees die,” an Egyptian diplomat once remarked. “There are enough Arabs around.”

Not surprisingly, the Arab states have never hesitated to sacrifice Palestinians on a grand scale whenever it suited their needs. In 1970, when his throne came under threat from the Palestine Liberation Organization, the affable and thoroughly Westernized King Hussein of Jordan ordered the deaths of thousands of Palestinians, an event known as “Black September.”

Six years later, Lebanese Christian militias, backed by the Syrian Army, massacred some 3,500 Palestinians, mostly civilians, in the Beirut refugee camp of Tel al-Zaatar. These militias again slaughtered hundreds of Palestinians in 1982 in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, this time under Israel’s watchful eye. None of the Arab states came to the Palestinians’ rescue.

Worse, in the mid-’80s, when the P.L.O. — officially designated by the Arab League as the “sole representative of the Palestinian people” — tried to re-establish its military presence in Lebanon, it was unceremoniously expelled by President Hafez al-Assad of Syria.

This history of Arab leaders manipulating the Palestinian cause for their own ends while ignoring the fate of the Palestinians goes on and on. Saddam Hussein, in an effort to ennoble his predatory designs, claimed that he wouldn’t consider ending his August 1990 invasion of Kuwait without “the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Israel from the occupied Arab territories in Palestine.”

Shortly after the Persian Gulf War, Kuwaitis then set about punishing the P.L.O. for its support of Hussein — cutting off financial sponsorship, expelling hundreds of thousands of Palestinian workers and slaughtering thousands. Their retribution was so severe that Arafat was forced to acknowledge that “what Kuwait did to the Palestinian people is worse than what has been done by Israel to Palestinians in the occupied territories.”

Against this backdrop, it is a positive sign that so many Arabs have apparently grown so apathetic about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. For if the Arab regimes’ self-serving interventionism has denied Palestinians the right to determine their own fate, then the best, indeed only, hope of peace between Arabs and Israelis lies in rejecting the spurious link between this particular issue and other regional and global problems.

The sooner the Palestinians recognize that their cause is theirs alone, the sooner they are likely to make peace with the existence of the State of Israel and to understand the need for a negotiated settlement.

Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah delivered a speech during a ceremony honoring children of the party’s martyrs.

He started out by defending the resistance and pointing out its achievements in 1982 , 2000 and 2006 .

He said :” [Lebanon's enemies] may bargain on gas and oil but they can never bargain on the Resistance.”

He concluded that the “Resistance is the most precious of what we have. We will not allow any small or big person in this world to touch any of its dignity. ”

Nasrallah used the occasion to attack the Special Tribunal for Lebanon for the third time in 10 days.

He accused the UN investigation team of being formed from officers closely associated with Israeli Mossad spy agency :

“Should an Investigation Committee made of Americans and the British government where investigating officers are brought from intelligence services closely linked to the Mossad be entrusted with a big issue at this level?” , he said.

Nasrallah also attacked the March 14 leaders who were critical of his previous two speeches:

“Is the behavior of some political forces in Lebanon and the Attorney General and the International Tribunal the behavior of those who seek the truth?, he said

Nasrallah suggested setting up a Lebanese committee to investigate the issue of false witnesses, who he said “misled the investigation for 4 years.”

“Distortion of the Resistance, the dearest to us, will not be allowed,” he added.

On the face of it, Thursday night’s speech by Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah marked another milestone in the party’s proud policy of intimidation. Those of us who lived through the attempted coup of May 7, 2008 know only too well what Hezbollah and its allies in the opposition March 8 bloc can and will do if they feel their agenda is under threat.

Nasrallah’s speech, the second in which he has sought to discredit the Special Tribunal for Lebanon – the court formed to find the killers of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and 21 others as well as the victims of subsequent political violence – targeted the March 14 bloc and urged its members to reconsider the “choices they made.” In short, as March 14 General Secretariat Coordinator Fares Soueid said in an interview on Saturday with Radio Free Lebanon, Nasrallah was suggesting March 14 surrender the ideals forged in the heat of the 2005 Independence Intifada.

If we follow Hezbollah’s advice, we will have allowed threats and intimidation to derail justice, even if it is sold as a move to avoid civil violence. Nasrallah wants us to believe that the Resistance is more important than justice and that we should give up our pursuit of it because he will allow nothing to harm the Resistance.

Meaning what? That Hezbollah and its allies will take their gunmen onto the streets once again? That the government will be toppled and another more pliant cabinet installed to derail the tribunal? Both courses of action are hardly likely. They would not only be an admission of guilt to all but the most blinkered supporters, but would also once again prove that Hezbollah has no policy for advancing Lebanon as a modern state and no blueprint for building state institutions. It can only offer violence and conflict on behalf of its Iranian clients.

In fact, since 2005, Hezbollah’s contribution to the national whole has been one war, one downtown sit-in and one bout of murderous, civil violence. Let us also not forget the vast array of tools it has at its disposal for obstructing basic constitutional processes, such as elections, the selecting of a president and the forming of a government.

But short of throwing out the tried and tested, but ultimately weary Zionist card, Nasrallah has few options. This has been demonstrated by the mixed signals he has sent in the previous 24 hours. He will not allow the Resistance to be harmed, and yet he will enter into talks on the matter, either within the cabinet or at the national dialogue table, but only on the condition that the talks do not start on the basis of Hezbollah’s presumed guilt. These provisos have all the hallmarks of desperation.

Thus whatever the function of the camel-section maybe as part of the panegyrical ode, it certainly belonged originally to the poet’s self-praise, where the description of the camel and the perilous desert-journey hold a prominent place…. It further appears that the poet’s pride in his camel and his display of courage in crossing the desert form two separate motifs although they are closely related and often linked together in such a way that the travel-theme is introducing the description of the camel.²

Legends clustered around this school (MECAS) throughout its life, forming one of the minor myths of Middle-Eastern politics. To the Israelis MECAS was the place where Britain trained its bright young men to be sentimental about the Arabs and hostile to Zionism. To many Arabs it was simply the ‘School for Spies’, the heart of Britain’s postwar strategy of dominating the Middle East through its intelligence agencies.³

The Israelis, and even some of the British, hold the. fanciful belief that MECAS was where British diplomatists were indoctrinated with anti-Zionism. There was indeed for a long time a perverse conviction, held all over the world except (and what an irritating exception) among the Arabs, that the British Foreign Office was pro-Arab and anti-Israel. This thesis usually went on to argue that the generator of the prejudice was a clique of Middle Eastern specialists, trained speakers of Arabic, in the Diplomatic Service, a kind of Arabist mafia (the sinister word is often used) which controlled Foreign Office policy on the Middle East; and that these specialists were in love with the notion of Araby, with the tent, the camel, and the lonely desert sands:

He is crazed with spell of far Arabia,
They have stolen his wits away.⁴

It is fair to add — it is necessary to add — that among the speeches that night was an ode in my honour composed and recited by Mr Theodry and that a houseguest of mine, himself an Arab scholar and poet, who had with characteristic Arab hospitality been included in the party, found the ode skilful and touching. I have kept it among my souvenirs.⁶

Later in that same year, 1973, Carden’s successor, Moberly, wrote to say that he had had an enquiry from a man in America with a Jewish name. He had written back, hoping to put the man off by telling him that the fees had recently been increased to £250 a month and that the Arab University of Beirut (name and address supplied) offered an Arabic course for foreigners free of charge. He had added: ‘No doubt you realise it is not in the interests of the student or the Centre for a student of Jewish faith or background to come here at present. If you wish to pursue your enquiry please confirm this is not a problem.’ The student did not pursue; whether it was the fees or the warning that put him off is not clear.⁷

People went to MECAS primarily to learn Arabic. It is a highly ingenious, subtle and complex language which excites passion in the linguist. But not every diplomat or banker is entranced by the adverbial accusative and the forty types of broken plural. The students learnt other things besides: that the Arabs are a warm and generous society, that they all, westernized liberals and Muslim fundamentalists alike, burn with a fierce resentment at the loss of Palestine, that they remember the past when they led the world in all the arts of civilisation, that they founded one of the world’s great religions and that they are now enjoying an economic revival. Empires come and go. The Middle East today is at centre of the world and crucial to the peace and prosperity of mankind. It is necessary that the rest of us try to understand it. That, on a small scale, was the purpose of MECAS.⁸

I had brought out to Egypt in the Spring of 1973, three performers from a small tenting circus (a ‘Count of Bulgarian descent’ a boy, Carlos Michelli, aged fifteen, and ‘Princess Sakina’, aged nine). The party stayed with me in my rambling house by the Pyramids. They were invited to perform jointly with the Egyptian State Circus for a week…. My party, under the banner ‘Circus Britannia’, presented three separate acts: stilt walking, which included a traditional belly dance, a high-wire act, which included Carlos Michelli, blindfolded, throwing knives around Princess Sakina, billed as his betrothed, and a snake act. For the latter we visited Cairo Zoo where we chose a ten-foot python which lived for the duration in a laundry basket in my bathroom with a large brick on top. The opening night saw the Union Jack and the Egyptian flag flying side by side above the Big Top, perhaps the first time such juxtapositioning had been exhibited since pre-Suez days. At the start of the show the youngest performers from the British and Egyptian sides exchanged flags as the National Anthems of both countries were played. On the opening night, the Egyptian Deputy Prime Minister, the Minister of Culture and representatives from various ministries attended from the host side, and the Ambassador Sir Phillip and Lady Adams, and her mother, the Lady Oaksey, from the British. It was, after all, an historic occasion and perhaps even a useful one diplomatically…. [T]he Egyptian periodical, Roze Al Yussif, couldn’t resist the headline: ‘The British Lion is Back in Egypt — But in a Circus Cage.’¹⁰

Tourist Jihad Central

Florian Rötzer, July 13, 2010

For the purposes of better propaganda, Hezbollah has opened a kind of “War Disneyland” in south Lebanon for the “Islamic Resistance” against Israeli occupation.

Hezbollah (the Party of God) in Lebanon has reportedly armed itself for a renewed confrontation with Israel. Since the end of the Lebanon war in 2006, the UN has been trying to prevent weapons-smuggling with its UNIFIL Mission.

To be sure, there is a “robust mandate” for securing the peace and the accomplishment of goals, but Hezbollah, it is said, will not only have filled its arsenals with new weapons and rockets with a longer range, but also built up its bases in southern Lebanon and constructed new ones. The 15,000 UN troops are also responsible for making sure that there are no militias in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah is in place in Lebanon, where it is so strongly represented in the government that there can be no thought of disarmament, and the UN mission, which costs more than 500 million US dollars a year, can only be carried out with the support or forbearance of Hezbollah. While Hezbollah is arming itself, Israel is regularly flying warplanes over southern Lebanon.

Recently Israel noted on the basis of hitherto secret aerial photographs and maps that Hezbollah has established armories in schools, clinics, and residences, and transformed whole villages near the Israeli border into bases. Israel also reported that Hezbollah is expanding its communication infrastructure and collecting information about the Israeli army. After the Lebanon war. Hezbollah fighters, because of the presence of UNIFIL troops, apparently withdrew to the villages, whereas they had previously had their bases in bunkers and tunnels in open country.

Hezbollah reacted by announcing that it had made a list of attack points in Israel in case of war. The argument could be made that Israel was planning an attack and was therefore preparing the world public for it. Apparently the assumption within Hezbollah is that such an attack could happen as soon as July, i.e. in the month when Israel’s successful Lebanon war began four years ago.

Hezbollah is memorializing the still unfinished war in a theme park. Hezbollah has also used the four years since the end of the war to make its propagandized “Islamic resistance” into a tourist experience. At the cost of four million US dollars, a former post in the hills of southern Lebanon in the former Israeli occupation zone, 44 kilometers from Beirut, was rebuilt and expanded for Hezbollah-Disneyland Mleeta, to become a “tourist landmark of the resistance.” Israel marched into Lebanon in 1982 and Israeli troops were withdrawn in 2000. The area of Shebaa Farms, however, is still occupied. Hezbollah was founded in 1982. With this martial center, it is celebrating its decades-long battle against the invaders and the anniversary of the Israeli withdrawal.

Naturally the Hezbollah Open-Air War Museum in the “land that speaks to heaven” represents the paramilitary organization as victorious. In the middle of the facility, the “Abyss” was enthusiastically constructed: a wild, “interactive” still-life or sculpture park with Israeli soldiers’ boots, bombs, ranged artillery, overturned cars and tanks. It was made out of a crater left behind by an Israeli bomb. Everything seems to have been blown into it. A Merkava-4 tanks is connected with weighty symbolism to a hitch. At the opening ceremony in May, the Hezbollah chief was present only by video and declared that this “Jihad Center for Tourists” was important to document the undistorted history of the resistance.

It is said that the idea for the theme park came from Hezbollah top terrorist, Imad Mugniyeh, who was a mythic figure for the organization and was declared responsible for numerous attacks. After hiding in the underground for the last twenty years, he was killed in early 2008 by an auto bomb attack. Hezbollah swore revenge and pointed at Israel.

Otherwise, the “museum” to the continuing war is laid out for entertainment. There is a cafeteria. Pictures and films of “victories” are shown. Naturally there is also a gift and memento shop, and a place for prayer. Tunnels, caves, bunkers, disguised launch chutes for the Katyusha rockets, trenches — everything is offered to support the romanticism of armed resistance and probably awaken young people’s interest in joining the organization. There is detailed information on all weapons, including their use. On a path lined with oaks, dummies are lined up, dressed in camouflage. On display are command centers, kitchens and armories, katyusha rockets, American TOW rockets (which may have been acquired during the Iran-Contra affair), or a remote-controlled Kornet-E antitank weapon, with which Hezbollah was able to stop Israeli tanks in the last Lebanon war.

On the wall of the exhibition hall are listed the names of all Israeli military, from President Peres to the simplest soldier. Also on view are satellite pictures of possible targets in Israel: Ben-Gurion airport, the railroad station or power plants in Haifa. On the tour, one comes upon an observation deck from which it is possible to see the hills and villages which were liberated.

But because it is a Disneyland for an allegedly successful and legitimate war, there is nothing to be seen aside from plunder — from the horrors of a war and the consequences of terror attacks. Hezbollah too seems to want to conduct a clean war which has nothing to do with pain, blood, death and destruction. Members of Hezbollah say that it is clear to them that, in case of war with Israel, the tourist center would be destroyed. It would just be rebuilt. Two more tourist centers of the resistance are planned, and a hotel on the border with Israel.

The Ceasefire That Refreshes!

Western media “analysts” and Western military pundits have, for the past two years, been forecasting the imminent military strike by Israel — sometimes by Israel in company with the US — against “nuclear” targets in Iran. The Chicken Little version of “the sky is falling” — the alarmist, naïve, technology-fixated, and ill-informed hysteria — is provocative and dangerous.

The reality that an Israeli military strike against Iran, except as a retaliatory strike following an Iranian strategic-level first strike attack on Israel, is unlikely, or only feasible under conditions which do not currently apply. The cost/benefit ratio in favor of strategic military action by either side is not evident, and medium- to long-term downsides are attached to the initiation of major military action by either party.

Of course, it is entirely possible that the “war hysteria” could drive political actions which are, in fact, irrational.

The Western speculation of an Israeli military strike against Iran is done in complete denial of logic, and the metrics — the mathematics — of conflict, even though military action is often initiated by one state or another in the absence of logic. It is almost as though, in this present portrayal by the Western media, there is a desire to push Israel into a military strike against Iran to “resolve the Iranian nuclear issue” without the US having to become involved. Or as a means of forcing the US to join with Israel against Iran.

A realistic gaming of the strategic situation, however, would indicate that there is the chance that Iran could initiate a nuclear first strike against Israel, provided that such an action is preceded and accompanied by a general escalation and a concerted assault with missiles and surrogate ground force action (HizbAllah and possibly Syria). Such a situation would presuppose a substantial general escalation of tensions to create a climate which would legitimize Iranian actions, or make decisive Iranian military action appear less provocative. Indeed, the HizbAllah assault against Israel in 2006 was a doctrinal test of such a process, and, in fact, did not show that such an approach would be successful on the part of Iran as the initiator of such an action.
Clearly, much has changed since then. Iran can quite rightly feel that Israel has become strategically isolated to a greater degree; that its overland flight access to Iranian targets has been constrained by the loss of alliance support from Turkey and the greater readiness of Syrian air defenses; and so on. Even the increased control of the Horn of Africa by pro-Iranian forces is a corresponding loss for Israel’s ability to freely access the Indian Ocean with its submarines, in the broader picture.

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Iran knows, however, that by initiating a nuclear first strike — or even a repetition of an indirect (ie: third party) conventional missile barrage against Israel — it would invite unpredictable destructive consequences. The only hope for the Iranian ruling clerics, who are totally unversed in historical strategic thinking, would be that an external strike against Iran would unify the fractious Iranian public around the clerical leadership. That happened in the past, in particular in the case of the Iran-Iraq war, which came at a time when the Iranian public abandoned its galvanizing dislike of the clerical rule of “Ayatollah” Ruhollah Khomeini in favor of the even more galvanizing desire to protect the homeland.

A similar approach was tried in 1982 by the alcoholic leadership of Argentina by Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri, whose last-ditch bid to retain power was to throw his country into a failed invasion of the Falkland Islands.

In the case of Israel and Iran, the cost/benefit ledger must be calculated on both sides. This has not been done by the West, or, arguably, by the Iranian clerics. It is too easy for Western pundits, and their Middle Eastern counterparts, to assume that the leadership in Iran or Israel is “irrational”, and that cost/benefit analysis will play no role in decision making. This merely highlights the cultural ignorance of the pundits with regard to the subjects of their “analysis”.

Moreover, the puerile debate highlights the fact that fewer and fewer people in the US, Europe, or even Israel have actually studied nuclear strategy. In the case of the Iranian clerics, one hampering factor is that the clerics do not appear to have studied nuclear strategy at all, and have no comprehension of the real capabilities and limitations of nuclear weapons. Most in the Western and Middle Eastern media, and in government, have become obsessed with nuclear weapons without comprehending that they are merely just relatively big bombs; they are not doomsday weapons. Even former US President “Jimmy” Carter, a onetime nuclear engineer (although he called himself a “nucular scientist”) had no comprehension of the actual efficacy and mission of nuclear weapons (even as a nuclear engineer, he was working on propulsion systems, not bombs).

Part of the problem has been that the study and debate of nuclear strategy has been politically incorrect in recent years. To study it seemed to imply an approval of it; to de-mystify it seemed to imply that nuclear warfare would become more “normal” and therefore possible. Such an approach equally implies that a study of cancer is the first step toward accepting it and therefore making it more possible.

The 1949 study by Dr Stefan Possony, Strategic Air Power,1 forecast a world which looks remarkably familiar today. But he put the nuclear equation into a comprehensible format. He defined what is possible, and what is not possible, with nuclear weapons. Possony went on to be the US Air Force strategist, and had already established his credentials in grand strategy, and in the area of strategic targeting, among other things. He created the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) concept as a means of providing an effective global countermeasure against nuclear (and other strategic) weapons being delivered by ballistic missiles, but SDI was subsequently butchered by its opponents — the “anti-nuclear” lobby — in such a way which has led to the perpetuation of the political mythology of fear which has drifted further and further away from realism in the public and political arenas. And opposition to SDI ensured that nuclear weapons remained efficacious.

So we must return to the argument about Iran and Israel, and what either side could hope to achieve by nuclear strikes, or by pre-emptive strikes against nuclear facilities. What are the probable consequences? What can either side hope to achieve through its actions?

Both Western and Middle Eastern analysts have approached the debate as though a single action could definitively define or achieve a known outcome. The reality is that the consequences of any proposed action — an Iranian nuclear strike or a pre-emptive Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear facilities — are completely unpredictable, except that a range of uncontrollable, and largely undesirable (from the initiator’s standpoint) are probable.

The US Bipartisan Policy Center in late June 2010 issued a report which said that the Israel Defense Force (IDF) could “shelve plans” for a “massive fighter-jet attack on Iran” because of the difficulty in winning approval for overflight of states along the route between Israel and Iran, and instead opt to use Israeli missile capabilities to attack Iranian nuclear facilities. The report cited the possible use by Israel of its Jericho-2 and Jericho-3 intermediate-range, solid-fuel ballistic missiles, or use its submarine-launched Popeye land-attack cruise missiles. The report2 was authored by former US Senators Daniel Coats and Charles Robb, working with retired Gen. Charles F. “Chuck” Wald, USAF.

Of course this is possible, or feasible. But then what? Moreover, the report continues the “sky is falling” view that nuclear weapons cannot be discussed rationally, and postulate as axiomatic the belief that the acquisition of nuclear weapons ends all ability to resolve a situation. Already is forgotten the fact that South Africa had nuclear weapons, and that these proved militarily and strategically useless, and, indeed, counterproductive. Other than the fact that the West has psychologically defeated itself by accepting that Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons would make the clerics invulnerable — a psychosis which only feeds Iranian clerical belief that they are on the right course just as Western self-paralysis and its empowerment of terrorism through media multipliers has defeated many in the West; terrorism itself has not done that — the reality of just what Iran could do with the weapons has not been discussed.

Most Israeli analysts are aware that the problem is not the ability to strike — by air, ballistic missile, or by cruise missile — or even in matter of target selection. The Israeli intelligence services certainly have a good idea of where the Iranian nuclear-related targets are situated, along with the layout of the Iranian command and control network: its National Command Authority (NCA). However, a strike against these target sets, even if successful, does not necessarily guarantee long-term security or victory for Israel.

Iran in 2010 is not Iraq as it was on June 7, 1981, when the Israeli Air Force (IAF) struck at the Tammuz 1 nuclear reactor at Osirak, Central Iraq, in Operation Babylon/Mivtza Opera. That was a contained situation, and the Iranians — and everyone else — learned from it; and the operation was against a capability which was identified with the Iraqi leadership, not the Iraqi population which was opposed to that leadership. The Iraqi people are not the Iranian people.

But the US fixation is with technology; with what weapons – rather than strategy – can do. History shows, of course, that advanced weapons in the hands of primitive minds are far more useless than primitive weapons controlled by advanced minds. The thinking of an exchange between Iran and Israel must go beyond initial military strikes. Clearly, in the case of strategic weapons, an Iran-Israel conflict is doctrinally asymmetric, as it would be between India and Pakistan, because of the different geographic realities of the competing parties. In the case of India and Pakistan there is an absolute awareness that nuclear weapons represent merely an early phase of a potential conflict which must be concluded on the ground through occupation.

Possony discussed, in 1949, the numbers of weapons which would be required for basic strategic effectiveness, and neither Iran nor even the substantially better-equipped Israelis have the capacity to achieve that strategic effectiveness in a conflict constrained by the lack of geographic contiguity of the combatants. Iran may argue that its use of Syria and HizbAllah in Lebanon give it the ground-force occupation capability, but that is a matter of considerable speculation, a case of the Iranian clerics fighting to the last Syrian or Lebanese.

As a result, an Iranian strategic strike against Israel, if it ever became sufficiently direct (in other words, beyond the use of proxy HizbAllah and Syrian forces), would invite massive retaliation from Israel’s extremely capable forces, rendering any Iranian victory pyrrhic, and possibly leading directly to the break-up of Iran. An Israeli first strike against Iran — ie: a preventive strike in the fashion of the 1982 Osirak attack — would be equally counter-productive for Israel. It would force Iranians to support their national integrity reluctantly (as in the Iran-Iraq war) siding with the clerics against an external threat. It would also trigger either a launch-through-warning or a retaliatory strike from the mobile Iranian strategic missile force against Israel.

This would be, in part, a nuclear retaliatory attack, even at this stage, because Iran has a core of externally-acquired nuclear weapons, something which the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) of the US indirectly admitted on March 11, 20093. This is a reality which has been forbidden from discussion in US intelligence and policy circles since the early 1990s. So an Israeli pre-emptive strike against Iran would generate disproportionately costly results for Israel.

Israel’s best policy, then, is to deter “irrational” Iranian actions which could spill over into a full Iranian missile (and therefore possibly nuclear) attack, even bearing in mind the limited number of heavy strategic missiles of the Shahab-3 type available to Iran. Thus, even Iranian Pres. Mahmud Ahmadi-Nejad has been constrained to undertaking a saber-rattling campaign while trying to bolster the credibility of Iran to operate militarily at a regional strategic level.

Equally, the US is in no position to sustain a new and wider conflict environment, even supporting a potential Israeli military strike at Iran. Washington has run out of political will, political allies, and, finally, it has run out of ordnance. Its arsenal is in grave need of restocking, and there is little chance for such budgetary surges in the present economic and political environment to rebuild its weapons, let alone its manpower.

And if Iran was to initiate such a conflict, it would seriously jeopardize the framework for energy and political influence which Russia and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have been striving to compile from Central Asia through the Caucasus to the Middle East and Europe. So there are serious constraints against Iran, as well.

Beneath all of this hyperbole-ridden sky there are US- and UK-led groups which favor the dismemberment of Iran as a means of resolving the issue. However, again with the long-term view, any further reduction of the historical Persian landmass — which has already shrunk by two-thirds over the past two centuries — would only benefit the strategic growth of Russia and the PRC, and possibly Turkey (although there are many other factors which gather around Turkey).

Little consideration has been given to mounting a classic psychological strategy to support the Iranian people in transforming the situation in Iran while keeping the state intact. Indeed, so “politically correct” has the US Defense Dept. become that the “psychological warfare” function of the US Army and Air Force — as tactical as these capabilities have been — has now become re-worded as “information management” and “information dominance” (specifically, military information support and/to operations [MISO]), etc.

The race, then, with the most chance of benefiting the great powers, the Iranian and Israeli people, and the region, would be for a “bloodless victory” of the type so favored by Sun-tzu, based around a popular and modernist approach to reshaping the governance of Iran. The strategic competition, then, would be between foreign sponsors to shape the outcome of such a bloodless revolution to the best interests of the sponsoring power.

But this, by its nature a covert and deniable process, lacks appeal in the technology-driven mindsets of the cyber-geeks who now dominate Western policy processes. Even absent their technology fixation, the corridors of power in the West do not resound to the footsteps of historians and grand strategists.

________________________________________

Footnotes:

1. Possony, Stefan T.: Strategic Air Power for Dynamic Security, Washington, DC, 1949: The Infantry Journal Press.
2. Meeting the Challenge: When Time Runs Out. June 2010: the Bipartisan Policy Center, Washington, DC. An update on reports in 2008 and 2009 by the BPC.
3. See Defense & Foreign Affairs Special Analysis, March 11, 2009: US Confirms Consistent Defense & Foreign Affairs Reporting Since 1992: DNI Noted He “Cannot Rule Out” That Iran May Have Already Acquired Nuclear Weapons.

Analysis By Gregory R. Copley, Editor, GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs.

(c) 2010 International Strategic Studies Association, www.StrategicStudies.org

Lebanon's leading Shia cleric who was the target of several assassination attempts

Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, who has died aged 74, was Lebanon's leading Shia cleric and one of the founders of Nouri al-Maliki's ruling Dawa party in Iraq. For some years after the creation of the Hezbollah movement – which emerged amid the chaos of the Lebanese civil war to resist the Israeli invasion of 1982 – the west believed Fadlallah to be its leader. He denied this, while admitting that many of the group's followers, such as the fiery resistance leader Sheikh Ragheb Harb, had been his former disciples. Based among the Shia poor in Lebanon, Hezbollah gained popularity for withstanding Israel and for its welfare system. Fadlallah's refusal to admit leadership may have been influenced by the fate of Mohammad Baqir al-Sadr, Iraq's most important Shia cleric, who was executed by Saddam Hussein in 1980, and with whom Fadlallah had once worked closely.

Fadlallah was born in Najaf, Iraq; his parents had migrated in 1928 from the southern Lebanese village of Aynata to study theology in Najaf, a holy Shia city. Fadlallah remained in Iraq until 1966, when he returned to Lebanon and established his authority as a leading cleric. Long before the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, he had preached the doctrine of an Islamic state in Lebanon, although he remained sensitive to the wishes of Lebanon's 40% Christians, its Sunni Muslims and its Druze.

At times, he identified himself with Hezbollah, but at others opposed the movement's views. In contrast with Hezbollah, he rejected Ayatollah Khomeini's concept of the wali al-faqih (supreme spiritual leader or jurisconsult). He was, however, widely recognised by the Shia as a marja' al-taqlid – a source of (spiritual) authority to whom the faithful should turn for guidance. He regarded Ayatollah Abdul Qasim Musawi al-Khoei in Najaf as his marja'. After al-Khoei's death in 1992, he turned to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani as his spiritual guide.

The US considered Fadlallah responsible for the bombing of the multinational forces in Beirut in October 1983, in which 241 US marines and 56 French paratroopers were killed in two explosions. The journalist Hala Jaber says that most of the evidence in Lebanon suggested that the Lebanese Forces, an alliance of Christian militias, leaked Fadlallah's names to western intelligence and to Israel, making him a prime target for assassination. Some analysts believed that the Lebanese Forces had pointed the finger at Fadlallah in order to punish him for his call for war against Israel's occupation and for having condemned the treaty between Israel and Lebanon signed earlier that year. He denied any association with the bombings, or with the kidnapping of foreigners between 1982 and 1985.

In early 1985, a 440lb car bomb aimed at Fadlallah exploded at a building near his house in Beirut. It killed 85 people, including children and pregnant women, and injured nearly 200. Held up on his way there, Fadlallah escaped the blast. According to the Washington Post, CIA-trained Lebanese agents were behind the attack. Fadlallah's supporters called for revenge and placed a banner over the demolished building with the words "Made in the USA". Bob Woodward, in Veil, his 1987 book about the CIA, claimed that the attempt was a joint US-Saudi operation organised by a British mercenary.

The US administration of Bill Clinton froze Fadlallah's assets in 1995 because of his suspected involvement in terrorism. In 2006, Israel bombed his house, but he was not there. Nevertheless, as Tim Llewellyn notes in a recent book on Lebanon, a month before the 1985 bomb attack, Fadlallah had declared that Hezbollah had no intention of trying to impose its will by force within Lebanon. Llewellyn also notes Hezbollah's restraint, influenced by Fadlallah.

After the Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon in the spring of 2000, there were no reprisals against the many Lebanese, Christian and Shia who had co-operated or fought for the Israelis. Fadlallah was progressive on women's rights, arguing that women had the right to defend themselves against domestic violence. He allowed women to wear nail polish during prayers, forbade female circumcision and was opposed to the "honour killings" of women.

In an interview with Hezbollah's weekly newspaper, al-Ahed, in 1985, he said: "Israel cannot be viewed as a state with the right to security and peace just like any other state in the region." In 2002, he told the Daily Telegraph, "They [the Palestinians] have had their land stolen, their families killed, their homes destroyed, and the Israelis are using weapons, such as the F-16 aircraft, which are meant only for major wars. There is no other way for Palestinians to push back those mountains, apart from martyrdom operations."

When he was admitted to hospital a few days ago, a nurse asked him what he wanted. He replied: "For the Zionist entity to cease to exist."

On Fridays, Fadlallah would hold prayer meetings at the Hosseinein mosque in southern Beirut, which was funded by Iran. He was often accompanied by his eldest son, also a cleric. The building complex was owned by Fadl- allah and his foundation for orphans, al-Aytam, and stands opposite the central Hezbollah mosque.

He is survived by his wife, Najat Noureddin, and 11 children.

• Muhammad Hossein Fadlallah, cleric, born 16 November 1935; died 4 July 2010

Rick Francona--

There were at least 20 incidents of "spontaneous" demonstrations this week against troops assigned to the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). UNIFIL is an ineffective multinational force assigned to southern Lebanon to oversee a series of ineffective UN resolutions. The force was constituted as part of Security Council resolutions 425 and 426 in March of 1978.

You read that correctly - this "interim" force has been there for over 32 years. I submit that they have not accomplished anything. Hizballah has not only remained the key power broker in southern Lebanon, they are fast emerging as the main power broker in the entire country. Arms flow freely into the area, in direct contravention of a series of UN resolutions - 425, 426, 1559 and 1701 to name but a few. UNIFIL reports what it sees, but has never used its fairly impressive arsenal to enforce any of the myriad resolutions that are violated on virtually a daily basis.

In 2006, I was surprised that the Israelis agreed to the provisions of UNSCR 1701 that expanded the role of UNIFIL to implement the terms of the ceasefire. UNIFIL has never been neutral - or effective - so it is just inane to hand them the mission of preventing Hizballah fighters from "returning" (they really never left) to the area south of the Litani River, as well as preventing the re-introduction of weapons into the area. It has failed miserably. Hizballah has a larger and far more capable - in terms of both range and lethality - arsenal than prior to the 2006 war, more capable than at any time in its history.

After the war, the Lebanese government was pretty much co-opted by Hizballah to the point that Hizballah not only now holds a significant number of seats in the Lebanese parliament, but exercises virtual veto authority over Lebanese government actions. Its militia could probably defeat the Lebanese army - they are probably one of the finest irregular military forces in the world.

The Lebanese government has legitimized both Hizballah's political status and its well-organized, Iranian-trained and equipped militia. The militia, in accordance with numerous international agreements, was to be disbanded when "all foreign forces" departed the country. Forget the Syrians, since no one on the Lebanese side would even broach the subject of 30,000 Syrians in the country - this was about the Israelis, who occupied the the south of the country from 1982 to 2000.

After the United Nations certified that the "foreign forces" - Israeli troops - had left Lebanon, the Lebanese government declared that Israel still occupied a small piece of Lebanon call the Shaba' Farms. They re-iterated that in the aftermath of the 2006 war.

The Shaba' Farms area is not even Lebanese, it is Syrian. It is occupied by the Israelis, yes, but it's not part of Lebanon. Both Lebanon and Syria claim that the small strip of land adjacent to the Golan Heights has been transferred from Syria to Lebanon decades ago. There is no basis for that claim. It is a manufactured excuse for Hizballah to maintain its militia. See my earlier The Shaba' Farms - Hizballah's Fig Leaf.

What I think we are witnessing now is a planned campaign orchestrated by Hizballah to force the United Nations to withdraw UNIFIL from southern Lebanon. It will start with these "spontaneous" demonstrations and escalate into larger rallies and protests. The Lebanese are very good at this sort of behavior - they forced the Syrians to withdraw with this same tactic.

Hizballah means to control Lebanon - they'll continue to move politically where they can, and militarily where they need to. UNIFIL, although effective, is a foreign force in their territory. These small, low-level demonstrations may the start of the effort to remove them.

In the end, whether UNIFIL remains deployed to southern Lebanon is really immaterial. They are ineffective to be sure, but allowing Hizballah force them out is yet another victory for Hizballah.

Lieutenant Colonel Rick Francona is a retired U.S. Air Force intelligence officer, a veteran of the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars, and service in the Balkans. His assignments include the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency, with tours of duty in Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia, and operational duties in virtually every country in the Middle East.

During the last year of the Iran–Iraq war in 1988, Rick was assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad as a liaison officer to the Iraqi armed forces intelligence service, where he served in the field with the Iraqi army and flew with the Iraqi Air Force.  

Throughout the first Gulf War he served as the personal Arabic interpreter and advisor on Iraq to General Norman Schwarzkopf and later co-authored the report to Congress on the conduct of the war.  His is the author of  book, Ally to Adversary – An Eyewitness Account of Iraq’s Fall from Grace.

Following the Gulf War, Rick served as the first air attaché to the U.S. Embassy in Damascus, Syria until 1995.  In 1995 and 1996, Rick served in northern Iraq with the Central Intelligence Agency, where he narrowly escaped an attempt on his life by Iraqi agents.  In 1997 and 1998, he served in the Department of Defense counter terrorism branch and led a special operations team in Bosnia that captured five indicted war criminals.

From 2003 through 2008, Rick was a Middle East military analyst for NBC News.  You'll find Lt. Col Francona online at http://francona.blogspot.com/

MORE FROM RICK FRANCONA'S BLOG OF FAME

Copyright © 2006-2010, Basil & Spice. All rights reserved

Negotiating in good faith

Abba Eban, the most sophisticated foreign minister Israel ever had, is said to have declared in 1973, after the aborted Peace Conference that was convened in Geneva in December of that year: “The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” The saying accords with Eban’s speech at this conference when, after emphasizing that “a new opportunity is born,” he declared: “We have no way of knowing whether this opportunity will be fulfilled or wasted. … Israel for its part is resolved to seize the chance.”

Those were the times when Israel could present itself as a seeker of peace confronted by Arab governments and political forces that were still reluctant to negotiate with it, let alone conclude a peace. Syria indeed boycotted the Geneva Conference, although the gathering was cosponsored by its patron, the Soviet Union. Its attitude was not altogether negative, however, and soon after, in May 1974, Damascus signed a military disengagement agreement with Israel. In the following years, the boldest initiatives in seeking a Middle East peace agreement were indisputably taken by Arab leaders.

Whereas a maverick Abie Nathan had flown from Israel to Egypt on February 28, 1966, requesting to meet President Gamal Abdel-Nasser only to be deported back to Israel and arrested there, it was Nasser’s successor himself, President Anwar El-Sadat, who flew from Egypt to Israel on November 19, 1977, extending the hand of peace to the Israeli Knesset and power elite in scenes that looked almost unreal. The world watched Sadat descending the staircase from his plane in the same state of stupefaction, if not more, with which it had watched a few years earlier the first man walking on the moon.

And it was with similar astonishment that the world learned of PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat’s secret negotiations with the Israeli government of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres in Oslo, Norway, and their conclusion of a peace deal signed in Washington in October 1993 - in another surreal ceremony that raised much hope. In both cases, Israel conceded none of its fundamental interests: it gave back to Egypt the Sinai that it had occupied in 1967, while making sure that this vast stretch of semi-desert land remained under surveillance and devoid of Egyptian army troops. Sadat, for his part, broke with all Arab states as he violated their principles of collective negotiations and collective peace, undercutting fellow Syrians, Jordanians, Lebanese and Palestinians.

Likewise, Arafat concluded the Oslo deal behind the backs of most members of the PLO executive committee. He recognized Israel officially and accepted an outcome that did not provide for any of the basic demands of the Palestinians - not even a freezing of Zionist settlements in the Occupied Territories, let alone their dismantlement. The Israeli concessions that he obtained in return were only implementing the plan that Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon had designed for the perpetual control of the West Bank, shortly after Israel invaded it in June 1967. It was indeed during the early negotiations on the implementation of the Oslo accords, in 1994, that Rabin’s government started building what would become the Separation Wall.

As for the only spectacular Israeli so-called peace initiative of all those years, the evacuation of Gaza ordered by Oslo-opponent turned into Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, in 2005, it was part of a ‘unilateral disengagement’ purposely avoiding striking a deal with the Palestinian Authority headed by Mahmoud Abbas. Sharon did not want a precedent that could be invoked for the West Bank. Indeed he never hid the fact that he was willing to concede to the Palestinian Authority much less of the occupied West Bank than the area his Laborite predecessors were willing to give up. In the same year as the unilateral Gaza disengagement, he revised the route of the Separation Wall, annexing de facto a larger portion of the West Bank to Israel. After consigning Yasser Arafat to forced residence under siege from 2002 until the Palestinian leader’s death in 2004, Sharon did his best to undermine the credibility of Abbas, thus facilitating the electoral victory of Hamas in January 2006 - the month Sharon went into a coma.

The truth is that it is Israel - not the Arabs - that never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity to conclude a real peace with its neighbors. And this has been true since the outset. Claims, like that of Abba Eban’s, about Arab intransigence are usually buttressed with a reference to the founding act of the creation of Israel in international law: the UN General Assembly’s vote on the partition of Palestine in November 1947, at a time when the majority of UN member states were western and western-dominated countries. The Arabs and the Palestinians are blamed for having rejected this partition, which would have granted them a larger portion of Palestine than the one they - more accurately the Jordanian accomplice of the Zionist movement, King Abdullah - ended up controlling after the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948. In other words, the Arabs are blamed for having rejected a deal that granted 56% of the territory of Palestine west of the Jordan River to Jewish inhabitants, who constituted one-third of its total population - most of them immigrants/refugees who had arrived from Europe during the previous fifteen years.

The UN 1947 partition resolution could not have been reasonably accepted by any Arab leader - or by any people in their shoes, for that matter. Accepting it would have amounted to capitulation without battle and relinquishment of fundamental rights. As for sympathy for the plight of Jewish Holocaust survivors, the Arabs, let alone the Palestinians, could legitimately say that they had already accommodated much more than their fair share of them, compared with the rest of the world, especially the victors of World War II. On the other hand, the League of Arab states had made a peace offer that is hardly mentioned in the propagandistic literature that prevails on this topic. Their proposal was summed up by the UN Special Commission on Palestine in September 1947:

            (a) That Palestine should be a unitary State, with a democratic constitution and an elected legislative assembly,

            (b) That the constitution should provide, inter alia, guarantees for (i) the sanctity of the Holy Places and, subject to suitable safeguards, freedom of religious practice in accordance with the status quo; (ii) full civil rights for all Palestine citizens, the naturalization requirement being ten years' continuous residence in the country; (iii) protection of religious and cultural rights of the Jewish community, such safeguards to be altered only with the consent of the majority of the Jewish members in the legislative assembly,

            (c) That the constitution should provide also for (i) adequate representation in the legislative assembly of all important communities, provided that the Jews would in no case exceed one-third of the total number of members [that is, the proportion of Jews in the Palestinian population in 1947, regardless of the date on which they immigrated]; (ii) the strict prohibition of Jewish immigration and the continuation of the existing restrictions on land transfer, any change in these matters requiring the consent of a majority of the Arab members of the legislative assembly; (iii) the establishment of a Supreme Court which would be empowered to determine whether any legislation was inconsistent with the constitution.

This proposal was congruent with the perspective of a binational state in Palestine as advocated by pacifist “cultural” Zionists - the likes of Martin Buber and Judah Magnes - and, officially at least, by leftwing Zionist organizations such as Hashomer Hatzair. It was flatly rejected by the Zionist leadership, dedicated to the project of a Jewish State in Palestine. In reality, the Ben-Gurion Laborite leadership of the Zionist movement was always much closer to its rightwing rivals of Revisionist Zionism founded by Vladimir Jabotinsky than to the “cultural Zionists” and the radical left. In essence, the statist project of Ben-Gurion matched Jabotinsky’s aspiration, albeit in a more ‘realistic’ and tactical fashion. Thus Jabotinsky said openly and loudly what the others thought as well, but did not want to proclaim lest it spoil their Machiavellian manoeuvering.

The iron wall

The most commented-on essay by Vladimir Jabotinsky is certainly his 1923 piece entitled “The Iron Wall.” It is rightly regarded as a premonitory statement of what actual Zionist policies in Palestine/Israel would become and why they missed no opportunity of missing an opportunity to make peace with the Palestinians. While affirming that the Arabs are culturally “500 years behind us,” the man whom Laborite Zionists denounced as a fascist teased them by expressing more respect for the Arabs than he attributed to them:

Any native people - it is all the same whether they are civilized or savage - views their country as their national home, of which they will always be the complete masters. … And so it is for the Arabs. Compromisers in our midst attempt to convince us that the Arabs are kind of fools who can be tricked by a softened formulation of our goals, or a tribe of money grubbers who will abandon their birth right to Palestine for cultural and economic gains. I flatly reject this assessment of the Palestinian Arabs... Individual Arabs may perhaps be bought off but this hardly means that all the Arabs in Eretz Israel are willing to sell a patriotism that not even Papuans will trade. Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement.

Hence, Jabotinsky’s assertion of the Iron Wall doctrine:

Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population – an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.

Eventually, added Jabotinsky, the Arabs will come to peace under Zionist conditions, when they have no other choice left:

All this does not mean that any kind of agreement is impossible, only a voluntary agreement is impossible. As long as there is a spark of hope that they can get rid of us, they will not sell these hopes, not for any kind of sweet words or tasty morsels, because they are not a rabble but a nation, perhaps somewhat tattered, but still living. A living people make such enormous concessions on such fateful questions only when there is no hope left. Only when not a single breach is visible in the iron wall, only then do extreme groups lose their sway, and influence transfers to moderate groups. Only then would these moderate groups come to us with proposals for mutual concessions. ... But the only path to such an agreement is the iron wall, that is to say the strengthening in Palestine of a government without any kind of Arab influence, that is to say one against which the Arabs will fight. In other words, for us the only path to an agreement in the future is an absolute refusal of any attempts at an agreement now.

This view informed the action of Jabotinsky’s heirs in the Likud toward the Palestinians, ever since they took the helm of the Israeli state in 1977. Having secured Egypt’s neutralization, Menachem Begin thought he could force the Palestinians to capitulate by occupying their last stronghold in Lebanon in 1982. The occupation of Lebanon proved a very costly undertaking for Israel, which was compelled to complete the evacuation of the country 18 years after, in 2000. Meanwhile, squeezed financially by its traditional Arab backers among the oil states and facing what, after 1991, looked like a solid US hegemony in the Middle East, a Yasser Arafat who was both hopeless and naively hopeful seemed willing to make the “enormous concessions” that Jabotinsky foresaw. He had become hopeless about his goal of securing a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza as part of a regional deal under international auspices; and he lured himself into believing that his Israeli interlocutors would grant him such a state if he showed them, and showed their sponsors in Washington above all, how compliant he could be.

Successive Israeli cabinets from both Labor and Likud - Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu, Barak - took advantage of the Oslo framework and the end of the first Intifada in order to considerably intensify the building and expansion of settlements in the West Bank, thus enforcing on the ground a situation that they could present as irreversible in order to justify Israel’s annexation of a substantial part of that remaining 22% of Palestinian territory. As a result, the number of Israeli settlers on the West Bank - excluding the Jerusalem area, the largest settlement of all - which had build up to 112,000 in the 26 years from the beginning of the occupation until 1993, doubled in the six years between 1994 and 2000, the year the Oslo process came to its explosive end; and has increased to 305,000 since then. At the same time, these successive cabinets were building the Separation Wall, thus fulfilling literally Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall vision.

When Likud’s foremost firebrand Ariel Sharon came to power in February 2001, he reversed the Oslo process by bloodily reoccupying the territories under Palestinian control, and accelerated the construction of the wall while revising its route in order to expand the amount of territory annexed. This policy continued under Ehud Olmert, Sharon’s successor at the head of Kadima, the party that Sharon founded out of a split from Likud, and then under Likud’s Netanyahu, now heading a cabinet that brings together Zionist parties ranging from Labor to the racist far-right party of Avigdor Lieberman. Simultaneously, the Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza have been facing the most tragic period in their history, enduring the most desperate conditions since they came under Israeli occupation in 1967. The cruel assault on Gaza in December 2008-January 2009 moved the world’s conscience - a conscience that Judge Richard Goldstone admirably embodied, thus provoking the fury of Israel’s rulers.

Oslo contradictions

For all that, the Palestinians are not any closer to accepting Israel’s land grab in the West Bank and the less-than-Bantustan “state” that Israel’s rulers are offering them. If any of them were willing to make such ‘enormous concessions’, however, they know that they would be isolated and repudiated by the overwhelming majority of their people. That is where Jabotinsky got it wrong indeed: his vision foreshadowed the Zionists’ policies, but not the Palestinians’ stance. For behind the apparently higher consideration in which Jabotinsky held the Arabs, he still despised them too much to understand that their self-pride and sense of justice would never allow them to accept demeaning surrenders. His lack of realism combined with his racist view of the Arabs prevented him from facing the truth: given the sheer fact of numbers and geographic extension, there is no way by which Israel could subjugate the Palestinians and the Arabs to the point of getting them to accept its inflexible conditions.

Oslo was based on contradictory calculations. Israel’s rulers seem to have tried to test whether the Palestinians are “some kind of fools who can be tricked by a softened formulation of our goals, or a tribe of money grubbers who will abandon their birth right to Palestine for cultural and economic gains.” Confronted with the failure of this expectation, they increased their repression of the Palestinians - to little avail. Even the extremely ‘moderate’ Mahmoud Abbas - who is seen as a traitor by part of his people - proved unable to deliver what the Israelis wanted from him without substantial Israeli concessions in return. The increasing violence of Israel’s rulers in applying the Iron Wall doctrine, far from reaching its goal, only succeeded in increasing resentment and the desire for revenge among Palestinians, and beyond - far beyond.

Over the last decades Israel has managed to antagonize a formidable range of forces that were not part of its enemy spectrum until then. It has already lost quite a few teeth in attempting to subdue Lebanon, where it faced the firm resistance spirit of Hezbollah combatants resorting to their  ‘asymmetric’ advantage as guerrilla fighters in defending their land against a conventional army. The increasing levels of hatred sown in the whole Middle East by western invasions, as well as by Israeli violence, are fostering the rise of an ‘apocalyptic terrorism’ that contemplates resorting to weapons of mass destruction as another ‘asymmetric’ means of offsetting the overwhelming military superiority of its enemies. Last but certainly not least, Israel is now facing the prospect, in the short or medium term, of a nuclear-armed Iran - a development that would bring the region dangerously close to a nuclear holocaust if Israel keeps threatening to launch military strikes.

Coda

Jabotinsky should have remembered that the image of the wall is associated in the Jewish tradition with bad omens. His present disciples would be well advised to anticipate the impending catastrophe, before it is too late: they would be well advised to reverse their colonizing and aggressive policies, stop trying to dictate to the Palestinians who should represent them, and renew the kind of attitude that Israeli negotiators displayed in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that were held in Taba in early 2001. And, they should completely lift their criminal blockade on Gaza to start with. For they do not need a new interpreter of the writing on the wall that they are building on the West bank with so much hubris: the biblical Daniel’s interpretation has become relevant again.

Mene, Mene, Tekel u-Pharsin: the days of your kingdom are numbered; you have been weighed and found wanting; your kingdom will be divided and lost. The last word Pharsin carried a dual meaning: it was interpreted as referring also to the Persians, who took over Babylon when King Belshazzar was assassinated little after the writing appeared on the wall. Persia, of course, is the former name of Iran.