Month: March 2004

Joshua Micah Marshall, in Talking Points Memo, analyzes the recent headlines indicating that the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza has been postponed until after the American presidential election in November. Speculation has been widespread as to what Sharon’s motives and plan may have been when proposing his “unilateral disengagement.” Because the proposed withdrawal and dismantling of the Gaza settlements was first accompanied by an announcement that Sharon would move the Gaza settlers to West Bank settlements, for which he requested the American taxpayers pay, the proposal could be seen as a way to negotiate fresh American aid and a blessing on the West Bank settlements, while allowing Israel to abandon the expensive and difficult to defend Gaza settlements. The Americans nixed the idea of relocating the Gaza settlers to the West Bank early on as well as declining to pay for what amounted to an increase of settlers and expansion of settlements in the West Bank.

It now appears that the Gaza withdrawal is entirely off for reasons unexplained. Yossi Alpher in a Media Monitors column asks why:

Within a few months after US endorsement of the roadmap it was clear to all that the administration never viewed that formula as much more than a means of leveraging regional and European support for its campaign in Iraq. Since election year began in America a few months ago, even the rhetoric has dried up.

Now along comes Ariel Sharon and requests Bush’s blessing for his disengagement plan. Sharon’s motives are not entirely clear. He is under a legal cloud that threatens his entire political career. He wants to exploit disengagement in Gaza to strengthen Israel’s grip on the West Bank. He has never endorsed the demographic argument and never told the public why all of a sudden in his view abstract “security concerns” mandate disengagement and dismantling of settlements he himself built. He has still not removed any outposts to speak of, and he allows settlement construction to proceed apace at a number of sites.

On the other hand Sharon is, here and there, moving the fence back to a more reasonable, green line-based location, and he makes the case that removal of settlements, coupled with the “new” fence, will dovetail nicely with phase II of the roadmap, thereby seemingly giving the president a solid Middle East accomplishment in an election year.

Sharon wants to wrap all this up in a triumphant visit to Washington. The administration is cautious, and repeatedly postpones the date. It is making considerable demands on Sharon regarding the fence, settlement expansion, and coordination of transfer of territory with the more moderate Palestinians. But it faces a situation close to chaos in Palestine, and presumably understands that Sharon’s political (and legal) position is increasingly shaky.

Bush knows he must get to election day in November with Iraq solidly on the way to a new era of democracy. But until now he apparently assumed that the best case he need make on election day for Israel-Palestine would be that American crisis management had succeeded in keeping that conflict from getting too far out of hand–pending a better, post-Arafat day. The American public right now is very interested in Baghdad, where its sons and daughters are serving, but not in what goes on in Jerusalem and Ramallah. The president was even able to ignore the Israeli-Palestinian conflict completely in his January state-of-the-union address.

Will this administration, with its sorry record of missed opportunities and non-action in the Israeli-Palestinian sphere and its huge gamble in Iraq, take an election year chance on Sharon and his disengagement plan? Can it safely assume that the transfer of power will work out smoothly; that Sharon will not exploit Bush’s preoccupation with elections to build more settlements and fences in the West Bank that hinder a solution; that the entire project will not collapse into an Israeli governmental crisis?

The payoff could be the first real progress in three and a half years; this would be good politically for both Bush and Sharon. Or it could be a major fiasco, laid by Sharon and Arafat at Bush’s doorstep.

The odds are that the hands-off approach will again win out. Sharon will be asked to postpone any withdrawal until after US elections, to keep his preparations low key until then, and meanwhile to keep the conflict from getting out of hand.

Reuters has “Israeli political sources,” laying the responsibility for the election-centered delay squarely on the Bush administration:

Bowing to White House pressure, Israel intends to wait until after the U.S. presidential election in November before uprooting Jewish settlements from Gaza, Israeli security sources said on Friday.

Israeli political sources also said that, in a further concession to his U.S. ally, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had dropped the option of moving settlers from Gaza to the West Bank, an idea that had enraged Palestinians seeking to set up a state on land occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war.

The security sources said Sharon recognised the Bush administration’s concern that implementing his unilateral pullout plan during the U.S. campaign could cause political problems by fuelling instability in Palestinian areas — although Washington denied any link with the election.

Sharon, battered by multiple scandals, suffered a fresh blow when an opinion poll indicated for the first time that a majority of Israelis want him to quit. A Sharon confidant blamed his woes on far-right politicians opposed to a Gaza pull-out.

The Israeli daily Maariv reported that U.S. officials had made clear in recent high-level talks in Washington that they wanted Sharon to hold off on his plan to evacuate most Gaza settlements until after the U.S. election.

In the same article, Bush administration spokesman Adam Ereli denies any linkage to the election:

“That doesn’t sound right to me,” spokesman Adam Ereli told reporters. “Our policy is not tied to an electoral timeline,” he said later. “To make some kind of linkage with an electoral cycle, I think, is really stretching it.”

Oh? So, what is the withdrawal linked to?

For a President entering an election campaign with the specter of the illegitimate invasion of Iraq-turned-guerilla war quagmire hanging over his head, the prospect of being wholly responsible for continuation of the brutal Israeli occupation of Gaza can’t be a welcome development, but it seems clear that this is exactly what the inept crew of White House neocons has ended up stuck with, courtesy of the “Man of Peace” in Tel Aviv.

cross-posted at UnFairWitness

Knight Ridder reports:

The scheduled signing of Iraq’s interim constitution was indefinitely postponed Friday after five Shiite members of the Governing Council lodged 11th hour objections to some of its key provisions.

News that the deal over the document had fallen apart wrecked the U.S.-led coalition’s plans for an upbeat, made-for-TV signing ceremony that was to have taken place at 8 a.m. EST inside the heavily fortified coalition headquarters compound–and carried live on Arabic and English news networks.

More than an hour after the signing was supposed to have happened, the six piece orchestra hired for the occasion had stopped playing, and the antique desk that had belonged to Iraq’s King Faisal stood abandoned, 25 fountain pens sitting untouched atop it. A senior coalition official emerged to tell dozens of waiting journalists that “democracy is sometimes a messy thing.”

Want to bet Rove had some campaign ads ready to go with space reserved for clips from the Triumph of Democracy in Iraq?

Reuters/ABC

The US Army has cancelled a $US327 million contract to equip the Iraqi army, citing technical problems with the bidding process.

An Army official told reporters that new proposals for the work would be sought after a review found a huge spread in competing bids, an indication that competing suppliers had not understood the contract requirements in a uniform way.

He denied political considerations played a role in awarding the original contract.

Losing companies have claimed their bids were not properly assessed, that Virginia-based Nour USA had made an unrealistically low bid and that it did not have the experience to fulfill the contract.

Nour USA has said it stands by its proposal and insists it won the deal on merit.

Chairman Houda Farouki is a close friend of Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi.

OK, so let’s see. The US military is desperately trying to cobble together an army for Iraq, so they award the contract for the equipment to some fly-by-night Chalabi crony, and now are forced to concede that the crony can’t really produce. I wonder how Chalabi’s relatives guarding the pipeline are doing. Continue reading “US Army cancels $US327 million contract with Chalabi pal”

“The Saudi Paradox,” by Michael Scott Doran, published in the Jan/Feb Foreign Affairs is a good source of background information on the likely motivation for this week’s anti-Shi’ite terrorist attacks (though I don’t agree with all of his conclusions):

“To better understand how al Qaeda reads Saudi Arabia’s political map, one can turn to the work of Yusuf al-Ayyiri, a prolific al Qaeda propagandist who died last June in a skirmish with the Saudi security services. Just before his death he wrote a revealing book, The Future of Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula After the Fall of Baghdad, which gives a good picture of how al Qaeda activists perceive the world around them. … In its plot to denature Islam, al-Ayyiri claims, Zio-Crusaderism embraces three local allies: secularists, Shi`ites, and lax Sunnis (that is, those who sympathize with the idea of separating religion from state). …

“Radical Sunni Islamists hate Shi`ites more than any other group, including Jews and Christians. Al-Qaeda’s basic credo minces no words on the subject: ‘We believe that the Shi`ite heretics are a sect of idolatry and apostasy, and that they are the most evil creatures under the heavens.’ For its part, the Saudi Wahhabi religious establishment expresses similar views. The fatwas, sermons, and statements of established Saudi clerics uniformly denounce Shi`ite belief and practice. A recent fatwa by Abd al-Rahman al-Barrak, a respected professor at the Imam Muhammad bin Saud Islamic University (which trains official clerics), is a case in point. Asked whether it was permissible for Sunnis to launch a jihad against Shi`ites, al-Barrak answered that if the Shi`ites in a Sunni-dominated country insisted on practicing their religion openly, then yes, the Sunni state had no choice but to wage war on them. Al-Barrak’s answer, it is worth noting, assumes that the Shi`ites are not Muslims at all. …”

Doran also offers an explanation of why the Saudi state has funded jihadis critical of the monarchy:

“The Saudi state is a fragmented entity, divided between the fiefdoms of the royal family. Among the four or five most powerful princes, two stand out: Crown Prince Abdullah and his half-brother Prince Nayef, the interior minister. … Ever since King Fahd’s stroke in 1995, the question of succession has been hanging over the entire system, but neither prince has enough clout to capture the throne. …

“Saudi Arabia is in the throes of a crisis. The economy cannot keep pace with population growth, the welfare state is rapidly deteriorating, and regional and sectarian resentments are rising to the fore. These problems have been exacerbated by an upsurge in radical Islamic activism. …

“The Saudi monarchy functions as the intermediary between two distinct political communities: a Westernized elite that looks to Europe and the United States as models of political development, and a Wahhabi religious establishment that holds up its interpretation of Islam’s golden age as a guide. The clerics consider any plan that gives a voice to non-Wahhabis as idolatrous. Saudi Arabia’s two most powerful princes have taken opposing sides in this debate: Abdullah tilts toward the liberal reformers and seeks a rapprochement with the United States, whereas Nayef sides with the clerics and takes direction from an anti-American religious establishment that shares many goals with al Qaeda.

“The two camps divide over a single question: whether the state should reduce the power of the religious establishment. On the right side of the political spectrum, the clerics and Nayef take their stand on the principle of Tawhid, or ‘monotheism,’ as defined by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the eponymous founder of Wahhabism. …

“The doctrine of Tawhid ensures a unique political status for the clerics in Saudi Arabia. After all, they alone have the necessary training to detect and root out idolatry so as to safeguard the purity of the realm. Tawhid is thus not just an intolerant religious doctrine but also a political principle that legitimizes the repressiveness of the Saudi state. It is no wonder, therefore, that Nayef, head of the secret security apparatus, is a strong supporter of Tawhid. Not known personally as a pious man, Nayef zealously defends Wahhabi puritanism because he knows on which side his bread is buttered — as do others with a stake in the repressive status quo. … On the domestic front, Nayef indirectly controls the controversial Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (CPVPV), the religious police.”

From the typewriter of–gasp!– Bill Buckley himself:

It is being claimed, ever more widely, that neocon policies are determined by the advantages they bring, manifest or putative, to the State of Israel. Patrick Buchanan, in the current American Conservative, believes this ardently, while the most quoted advocates of neocon militancy, Richard Perle and David Frum, go further than merely to deny that neoconservatism is an Israel First world view. They insist that criticism of neocon policies is, at heart, anti-Semitic.

At this point, you’re probably thinking that Buckley is just going to stick it to critics of Frum and Perle. In fact, he does spend most of the essay arguing, none too convincingly, that neocon policy only advances Likud’s interests insofar as those interests coincide with those of the U.S. But check out Buckley’s conclusion:

It’s an unreasonable polarization of opinion: 1) everything a neocon advocates is animated by a concern for Israel, and, 2) every criticism of neocon policy is animated by anti-Semitism. That is straitened thought, and should be resisted.

Sounds like Buckley took Buchanan’s words to heart and decided to send Frum and Perle a rebuke, albeit one softened by some criticism of their detractors.

The Passion: Redemption through Pain, Not Anti-Semitism

Yes, The Passion is a jolting shocker of a movie. And my immediate reaction as a white, middle-class, non-religious American was pretty much that of Tikkun: If Jesus was about love, why focus on the violence and cruelty? But it is a stunning film, tells the Gospel story in a naturalistic, non-artificial way, completely unlike earlier “Bible” movies. Which include, to my mind, The Last Temptation of Christ, always a favorite book, that as a movie nevertheless remained an intellectual construct punctuated by telling details of brutal "realism." (In 1954, the Pope placed it on the Roman Catholic Index of Forbidden Books.)

Kazantzakis yearned to go beyond Tolstoy, to leave off writing for religion — but in the end he was a political person too much involved in the tumultuous events of Europe in the 20^th Century to remain aloof, who spent his entire adult life as a political activist (nationalist to communist to socialist) and passionate student of not just Christianity but the Buddha. Mel Gibson, too, is on a quest as a film-maker. We have seen his nationalistic concerns in Brave Heart and The Patriot, and now we see the expansion and explicit spiritualization of the quest to its most magnified form in The Passion. Gibson’s heroes seek freedom and redemption in a world where pain is the norm (also true of The Road Warrior and even Lethal Weapon). Given this predilection, what other kind of religious movie could we expect from him than the one we got, focusing on the last 12 excruciating hours of Christ’s life?

However discomfited my reaction The Passion may have been, most of the audience, which was Hispanic and therefore probably Catholic, was visibly moved by the experience, many in tears. While I was concerned that the Jewish temple priests were the political villains they probably actually were and that Pontius Pilate was portrayed as a thoughtful, sensitive kind of 2004 guy who really respected his wife’s opinion (unlikely given what we know about him), this is not the take-away of believers who see it as an uplifting reaffirmation of the willingness of God to manifest and share and redeem human evil. (Chatting with the Catholic family who own our favorite Mexican restaurant before the movie, this was also their opinion.)

So, I wondered about Gibson’s own views, and quickly discovered a large part of his inspiration came from a 19^th Century book written by a Catholic nun entitled The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, a retelling in first-person of more-or-less the same events as the movie. The Amazon reviewers, mostly Catholic, found the work inspiring and uplifting – not having read the book I can’t say what its attitude to the Jews or Romans was, but there was no mention whatsoever of either group in the comments. Rather these readers took it as an internal tale about a being who literally suffered in their stead.

My final thought about The Passion was that however imperfect the Christian church has been and is, it has helped shape the modern world in which we view with opprobrium what were in earlier time’s really quite ordinary forms of punishment and legal practices.