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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ruffian who wrote (28443)	12/29/2008 9:03:26 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Respond to of 71588

Israel Pounds Gaza Again, Signals More on the Way DECEMBER 29, 2008 By MARGARET COKER and CHARLES LEVINSON TEL AVIV -- Israeli jets attacked Hamas targets in Gaza for a second day on Sunday, as the death toll in an aerial assault against the Islamic militant group escalated, along with international calls to halt the violence. The ferocity of the weekend offensive threatened regional diplomatic efforts just as Israel appeared to be making progress at peace-making with several of its neighbors. It poses a fresh diplomatic challenge for the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama, who has said he will pursue U.S.-brokered peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. (Please see related article.) The military action is also likely to sharpen the divide in the Middle East between moderate, Western-leaning Arab leaders such as Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and their Iranian-backed rivals, including Hamas and Lebanon's Hezbollah. Tehran has significantly increased its influence in the region through its proxies. Israeli officials on Sunday signaled that military operations would continue until Hamas was significantly weakened. The aerial bombardment, which began Saturday, was in retaliation for heightened rocket and mortar attacks in recent days from Gaza into Israel after a six-month cease-fire between the two sides expired last week. Israel's departing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and other officials girded Israelis for a prolonged campaign. The cabinet said on Sunday that it had authorized a call-up of reserves. And a spokesman repeated the government's assertion that a ground invasion may be necessary to create "a new security environment in the south" of Israel. Short of a full-scale invasion or another cease-fire, Israel has few effective measures for stopping the rocket fire into its southern communities. But ahead of a February general election, it's unclear if Israeli officials are simply saber-rattling, or whether they are ready to risk what would likely be a casualty-heavy ground incursion into Gaza. Senior Israeli officials, including Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, had urged restraint in recent weeks as the expiration date for a six-month cease-fire between Israel and Hamas approached. But the resumption of rocket fire on southern Israeli communities intensified political pressure to act forcefully. Ms. Livni, who is competing in the February elections to succeed Mr. Olmert, is backing the assault on Hamas. Polls show that she and her Kadima party are trailing former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-leaning Likud Party, which has called for tougher action against Hamas. The Gaza attacks so far are playing well among Israelis, though many view the timing with cynicism. A Dec. 26 poll published in Israel's largest newspaper showed that 55% of respondents felt that the government's actions in Gaza would be motivated by "political considerations," rather than other factors. The stakes for both sides are significant, and Palestinian and Israeli analysts said that neither Israel nor Hamas appeared interested in escalating tensions to a full-scale conflict when the cease-fire expired last week. However, a de-escalation now could be difficult because of the lack of a credible mediator. Hamas and Israel don't talk, even informally, so a cease-fire can only be reached via an intermediary. Egypt, which has played that role in the past, has lost standing with Hamas because of a protracted battle with its own Islamic opposition, the group from which Hamas was founded. Hamas also blames Egypt for exacerbating the economic blockade on Gaza. Hamas's Damascus-based leader Khaled Meshal, in an interview with Al Jazeera on Saturday, compared Hamas's struggle against Israel to Hezbollah's fight against the Israeli military operation in Lebanon two years ago. Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite organization, emerged militarily and politically stronger after repelling an Israeli attack in Lebanon in 2006. Earlier this year, it seized large swaths of Beirut in a show of military might that won it significantly broader leverage in a power-sharing government with Western-leaning politicians there. Israeli military analysts said the army would need to demonstrate clear results, without getting itself stuck in the sort of quagmire it was criticized for wading into during the 2006 war in Lebanon. "One of the problems in Lebanon was [the army] started the war but they didn't know how to get out. The question here is if Israel will know how to get out," said Eyal Zisser, director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies in Tel Aviv. Diplomats ratcheted up demands for both sides to cease hostilities. Mr. Abbas, the Palestinian president, called on his rivals in Hamas to renew the cease-fire with Israel. Hamas, which won Palestinian elections in 2006, overran the Gaza Strip in 2007, essentially splitting from Mr. Abbas's more moderate Palestinian leadership circle. The diplomatic stakes are particularly high for Israel. Earlier this year, Mr. Olmert initiated a flurry of talks with most of the country's biggest irritants: Israel agreed to the cease-fire with Hamas. It is engaging in indirect peace talks with Syria, mediated by Turkey. And it participated in a significant prisoner exchange with Hezbollah earlier this year. (Late Sunday, Turkey strongly condemned Israel for the attack, and a Syrian official told the Associated Press that Damascus had frozen its indirect talks with Israel as a result of the Gaza attacks.) "The temperature is again rising between the two polarized halves of the Middle East," said Nicolas Pelham, a Jerusalem-based analyst for the International Crisis Group. Gaza officials have reported some 290 deaths, and hundreds more injured. In response to the Israeli attacks, Gaza militants over the weekend fired dozens of rockets into Israel. No injuries were reported in the Sunday strikes inside Israel. One Israeli was reported killed in rocket attacks on Saturday. The heavy Palestinian death toll will also make it much more difficult for moderate leaders like Mr. Abbas and U.S.-allied Arab states to support dialogue and compromise with Israel as part of U.S.-brokered talks between Israel and Palestinian leaders. For Hamas, the attack threatens to reduce its command and control capabilities in Gaza. The weekend bombings focused on Hamas's military and public-security installations, including a police graduation ceremony, an intelligence headquarters and a training base of the Al-Qassam brigades, Hamas's armed wing. It is unclear how the attacks affected Hamas's disciplined fighting units and their missile arsenals. Israeli jet fighters on Sunday evening bombed at least 40 tunnels running under the Egyptian-Gaza border. These tunnels, which number in the hundreds, allow Hamas to bring military parts and weaponry into the territory, which Israel has all but sealed off for months. The tunnels have also become the main commercial trading route for the 1.3 million Gazans, who are otherwise dependent on humanitarian aid for their basic needs. Swarms of Palestinians tried on Sunday to cross the barricaded Rafah crossing into Egypt. Witnesses said Palestinian bulldozers managed to break through small portions of the concrete wall marking the no man's land between the two territories, but that Egyptian officials were preventing Gazans from leaving. In recent weeks, Israeli intelligence officials have said they believed Hamas doesn't want a full-scale confrontation, but rather wants to make a show of force before seeking a renewed cease-fire on more favorable terms. There are indications that the Hamas leadership is divided on how forcefully to respond. When Hamas's traditionally hard-line Damascus-based leader Mr. Meshal urged renewed attacks against Israel earlier this month, local Hamas leaders in Gaza quickly distanced themselves from his statements. The initial strikes on Saturday caused widespread panic and confusion in Gaza, as thousands of Palestinians converged on local hospitals to check on relatives. A witness reported seeing dozens of bodies with limbs severed and heads decapitated from a Saturday attack at a Hamas police station. Hamas officials remained defiant. "The Israelis want us to wave the white flag, but we will keep on fighting," Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said on Saturday. Israel's regular infantry and armored forces took up positions near Gaza on Sunday. Across the road from the entrance to the Israeli farming village of Netiv Ha'asara, along the border with Gaza, trailers carrying Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers moved into a makeshift parking lot in the corner of a wheat field. Tractor-trailers towing armored vehicles filled the highways leading toward Gaza. Southern Israel was braced for further attacks on Sunday. Plumes of smoke rose from Gaza City's midrise skyline, visible from a hill at the southern edge of Netiv Ha'asara, just inside Israel. The town abuts a concrete wall along Gaza's northern border. After a distant explosion Sunday afternoon, the Israeli town's public announcement system robotically barked a warning of incoming rockets. "We've been experiencing this for eight years, so we've gotten used to it," said Tzur Segal, who despite the alert was working in his greenhouse, where he's growing cherry tomatoes. "This is something that should have happened a long time ago," he said of the Israeli attacks. Doctors at Gaza's largest hospital said that the situation in their emergency wards was desperate, with essential medical supplies, fuel and water all running out. —Joshua Mitnick in Netiv Ha'asara, Israel, contributed to this article. Write to Margaret Coker at margaret.coker@wsj.com and Charles Levinson at charles.levinson@wsj.com

To: Ruffian who wrote (28443)	1/28/2009 9:12:45 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 71588

Obama Tells Arabia's Despots They're Safe America's diplomacy of freedom is officially over. JANUARY 28, 2009 By FOUAD AJAMI "To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect," President Barack Obama said in his inaugural. But in truth, the new way forward is a return to realpolitik and business as usual in America's encounter with that Greater Middle East. As the president told Al-Arabiya television Monday, he wants a return to "the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago." Say what you will about the style -- and practice -- of the Bush years, the autocracies were on notice for the first five or six years of George. W. Bush's presidency. America had toppled Taliban rule and the tyranny of Saddam Hussein; it had frightened the Libyan ruler that a similar fate lay in store for him. It was not sweet persuasion that drove Syria out of Lebanon in 2005. That dominion of plunder and terror was given up under duress. True, Mr. Bush's diplomacy of freedom fizzled out in the last two years of his presidency, and the autocracies in the Greater Middle East came to a conviction that the storm had passed them by and that they had been spared. But we are still too close to this history to see how the demonstration effect works its way through Arab political culture. The argument that liberty springs from within and can't be given to distant peoples is more flawed than meets the eye. In the sweep of modern history, the fortunes of liberty have been dependent on the will of the dominant power -- or powers -- in the order of states. The late Samuel P. Huntington made this point with telling detail. In 15 of the 29 democratic countries in 1970, democratic regimes were midwifed by foreign rule or had come into being right after independence from foreign occupation. In the ebb and flow of liberty, power always mattered, and liberty needed the protection of great powers. The appeal of the pamphlets of Mill and Locke and Paine relied on the guns of Pax Britannica, and on the might of America when British power gave way. In this vein, the assertive diplomacy of George W. Bush had given heart to Muslims long in the grip of tyrannies. Take that image of Saddam Hussein, flushed out of his spider hole some five years ago: Americans may have edited it out of their memory, but it shall endure for a long time in Arab consciousness. Rulers can be toppled and brought to account. No wonder the neighboring dictatorships bristled at the sight of that capture, and at his execution three years later. The irony now is obvious: George W. Bush as a force for emancipation in Muslim lands, and Barack Hussein Obama as a messenger of the old, settled ways. Thus the "parochial" man takes abroad a message that Muslims and Arabs did not have tyranny in their DNA, and the man with Muslim and Kenyan and Indonesian fragments in his very life and identity is signaling an acceptance of the established order. Mr. Obama could still acknowledge the revolutionary impact of his predecessor's diplomacy, but so far he has chosen not to do so. The brief reference to Iraq in the inaugural could not have been icier or more clipped. "We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people," Mr. Obama said. Granted, Iraq was not his cause, but a project that has taken so much American toil and sacrifice, that has laid the foundations of a binational (Arab and Kurdish) state in the very heart of an Arab world otherwise given to a despotic political tradition, surely could have elicited a word or two of praise. In his desire to be the "un-Bush," the new president fell back on an austere view of freedom's possibilities. The foreign world would be kept at an emotional and cultural distance. Even Afghanistan -- the good war that the new administration has accepted as its burden -- evoked no soaring poetry, just the promise of forging "a hard-earned peace." The nation had cast a vote for a new way, and had gotten the foreign policy of Brent Scowcroft. Where Mr. Bush had seen the connection between the autocratic ways in Muslim lands and the culture of terror that infected the young foot soldiers of radicalism, Mr. Obama seems ready to split the difference with their rulers. His embrace of the "peace process" is a return to the sterile diplomacy of the Clinton years, with its belief that the terror is rooted in the grievances of the Palestinians. Mr. Obama and his advisers have refrained from asserting that terrorism has passed from the scene, but there is an unmistakable message conveyed by them that we can return to our own affairs, that Wall Street is more deadly and dangerous than that fabled "Arab-Muslim Street." Thus far the political genius of Mr. Obama has been his intuitive feel for the mood of this country. He bet that the country was ready for his brand of postracial politics, and he was vindicated. More timid souls counseled that he should wait and bide his time, but the electorate responded to him. I suspect that he is on the mark in his reading of America's fatigue and disillusionment with foreign causes and foreign places. That is why Osama bin Laden's recent call for a "financial jihad" against America seemed so beside the point; the work of destruction has been done by our own investment wizards and politicians. But foreign challengers and rogue regimes are under no obligation to accommodate our mood and our needs. They are not hanging onto news of our financial crisis, they are not mesmerized by the fluctuations of the Dow. I know it is a cliché, but sooner or later, we shall be hearing from them. They will strip us of our illusions and our (new) parochialism. A dispatch from the Arabian Peninsula bears this out. It was learned, right in the midst of the news cycle announcing that Mr. Obama has ordered that Guantanamo be shut down in a year's time, that a Saudi by the name of Said Ali al-Shihri -- who had been released from that prison in 2007 to his homeland -- had made his way to Yemen and had risen in the terror world of that anarchic country. It had been a brief stop in Saudi Arabia for Guantanamo detainee No. 372: He had gone through a "rehabilitation" program there, then slipped across the border to Yemen, where he may have been involved in a terror attack on the U.S. Embassy in the Yemeni capital in September of last year. This war was never a unilateral American war to be called off by an American calendar. The enemy, too, has a vote in how this struggle between American power and radical Islamism plays out in the years to come. In another time, the fabled era of Bill Clinton's peace and prosperity, we were mesmerized by the Nasdaq. In the watering hole of Davos, in the heights of the Alps, gurus confident of a new age of commerce pronounced the end of ideology and politics. But in the forbidding mountains of the Afghan-Pakistan frontier, a breed of jihadists that paid no heed to that mood of economic triumphalism was plotting for us an entirely different future. Here we are again, this time led by our economic distress, demanding that the world abide by our own reading of historical challenges. We have not discovered that "sweet spot" where our economic fortunes intersect with the demands and challenges of an uncertain world. Mr. Ajami is professor of Middle East Studies at The Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies. He is also an adjunct research fellow at Stanford University's nonpartisan Hoover Institution. online.wsj.com

To: Ruffian who wrote (28443)	3/2/2009 6:23:59 PM
From: Peter Dierks	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

Iran Clenches Its Fist The danger is that direct talks may facilitate, not reduce, threats to U.S. interests MARCH 2, 2009 By JOHN R. BOLTON As Iran prepares to fire up its Bushehr nuclear reactor -- and as the International Atomic Energy Agency governing board meets this week, again confronted with further progress by Tehran's nuclear program -- it is worth asking how the Obama administration is responding. Well, the State Department recently named Dennis Ross, a seasoned Middle East negotiator, as a "special adviser" to the Gulf region -- a bureaucratic but important prerequisite for direct talks with Iran. Unfortunately, a new envoy and a new diplomatic tone cannot disguise the ongoing substantive collapse of U.S. policy and resolve in the teeth of the Islamic Republic's growing challenge. Tehran welcomes direct negotiations with Washington. Why not, given the enormous benefits its nuclear programs have accrued during five and a half years of negotiations with Europe? Why not, with America at the table, buy even more time to marry its impending nuclear weapons with its satellite-launching ballistic missile capability? We have yet to see any evidence that Barack Obama (any more than George W. Bush) knows how to stop Iran. Consider these four blunt threats to our interests that direct talks may only facilitate, not reduce. First, diplomacy has not and will not reduce Iran's nuclear program. Ironically, European leaders are belatedly feeling hollow in the pits of their diplomatic stomachs, now that their failed diplomacy has left us with almost no alternatives to a nuclear Iran. Imagine their dismay that President Obama is now "opening" to Iran, thus eviscerating their tentative efforts to "close" the diplomatic cover under which Iran has almost achieved the worst-case outcome, deliverable nuclear weapons. The West's collective failure to stop Iran's nuclear ambitions has persuaded Iran that it faces minimal risks in greater adventurism on other fronts as well. Mr. Obama's discovery of "carrots and sticks," after a half decade of European failure to make that mantra a successful policy, will lead Tehran's mullahs to one inescapable conclusion: They have won the nuclear race, absent imminent regime change or military action. Second, dealing with Hamas, Hezbollah and Syria as though they are unrelated to Iran's broader threat is exactly backwards. Mr. Obama is again following Europe's mistaken view that ending the Arab-Israeli conflict will help to resolve other regional problems. But concentrating on Gaza only increases Hamas's leverage, just as negotiating with Syria only enhances its (and thereby Iran's) bargaining power. We should deal instead with diseases, not symptoms. Changing Tehran's Holocaust-denying regime could end its nuclear program, as well as eliminate its continuing financing of and weapons supplies for Hamas and Hezbollah, reduce its malign hold over Syria, and strengthen Lebanon's fragile democracy. Taming Iran is not a magical cure-all, but surely addressing the central threat is more sensible than haphazardly dealing with the symptoms separately. Third, Iran opposes a freer, more stable Iraq, and U.S. diplomacy will not change that. Given the recent political and military progress in stabilizing Iraq, Tehran holds a weak hand. Accordingly, legitimizing Iran as a factor in Iraqi affairs via diplomacy is patently illogical and would only strengthen Iran at the very moment Mr. Obama has announced the reduction of America's presence and clout in Iraq. Iran's theocracy knows God's law without the help of mere voters, and it has no taste for the democracy to which Iraqis are growing increasingly accustomed. It is telling that Iran's Baghdad ambassador is a commander of the Revolutionary Army's elite Quds force. Lastly, Iran has no incentive to "help" in Afghanistan, especially on narcotics, despite a domestic narcotics problem. Tehran's approach to Afghanistan is more subtle and complex. Whatever the desire to reduce its own drug problem, why should Iran not welcome increased sales to the decadent West and a weaker Kabul government? Moreover, if Iran cannot have its own puppets in control, it will welcome a corrupt, divided and incompetent Afghan government, rather than help us achieve the opposite result. As with Iraq, weak and divided neighbors on its borders are assets not liabilities for Tehran -- and ample reason not to assist us in changing these realities. Hordes of U.S. officials with vague and overlapping mandates -- special envoys, ambassadors, cabinet officials, and, of course, the vice president -- are racing to be in the first photo-op with Iran. But what should focus our attention is the substantive risk that Tehran will use its opportunity to employ diplomacy to undermine U.S. interests. Iran has already made clear how it will proceed. By recently withholding visas for the U.S. women's badminton team, Iran symbolically dashed administration hopes to update "ping pong" diplomacy. Perhaps in Iran they still play badminton with a clenched fist rather than an open hand. Mr. Bolton, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of "Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations" (Simon & Schuster, 2007). online.wsj.com