STRATFOR
GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE BRIEF
10.04.2005
Iraq: Constitutional Maneuvers
Summary
Iraq's Sunni Arabs, the United Nations and the United States raised objections Oct. 4 to the move by Iraq's interim legislature to change the rules regarding the Oct. 15 referendum on the proposed Iraqi constitution. As a result of these objections, Iraq's Shia and Kurds likely will be pushed into making concessions on the thorny issue of federalism and/or the rules governing the referendum. In any case, the continuing negotiations involving Washington and Iraq's Shia, Kurds and Sunni Arabs eventually will lead to the constitution's Oct. 15 ratification.
Analysis
Iraq's Transitional National Assembly (TNA) issued an interpretative ruling Oct. 1 defining what constitutes a voter, and how many such voters are required to approve and/or reject Iraq's proposed constitution. The TNA said that for the referendum to pass, only half of those who actually turn out to vote would need to select "yes," but for the charter to be defeated, two-thirds of registered voters in three provinces would have to vote "no."
The TNA move has united Iraq's Sunni Arabs, Washington and the United Nations in opposition.
Ayad al-Samarraie, a senior official in the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party, referred to the move as "fraud" and said it constitutes a means of preventing the Sunnis from rejecting the charter. Saleh al-Mutlaq -- a key Sunni member of the parliamentary commission that drafted the constitution, but who later opposed the final text -- said Sunni Arabs could boycott the referendum because the new voting rules make the constitution plebiscite an exercise in futility. Meanwhile, Jose Aranaz, a legal adviser to the U.N. electoral team in Iraq, said, "We have expressed our position to the Transitional National Assembly and to the leadership of the interim government and told them that the decision that was taken was not acceptable and would not meet international standards."
In response to the criticism, Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish member of Parliament, said Oct. 4, "The Americans and the United Nations ... don't agree with the referendum law, and there are consultations between them and Iraqi parliamentarians to find a new formula." Othman added that a new formula could be agreed on by Oct. 5, and that it would go to the legislature for a new vote.
Considering the intense opposition to the TNA's move, it is likely that the Shiite- and Kurdish-dominated interim legislature will have to alter its decision. And ongoing negotiations regarding the proposed constitution probably will result in a last-minute agreement leading to the charter's Oct. 15 passage -- something that will require a concession on the voting rules or on the issue of federalism, or on both.
On the same day the TNA ruled on the voting law, another major crack opened in the Iraqi political system -- this time between the Shia and the Kurds -- when Iraq's Kurdish president, Jalal Talabani, called for the removal of its Shiite prime minister, Ibrahim Jaafari. Talabani accused the Shiite-led United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), which holds a majority in Parliament, of failing to distribute government positions fairly to Kurds, of neglecting ministries run by Kurdish officials and of refusing to move ahead on the resettlement of Kurds in the northern city of Kirkuk. Azad Jundiyani, a spokesman for Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, said the UIA and the Kurdish alliance needed to consider having Jaafari resign, but did not say how the Kurds would react if the demand was not met.
The prime minister can be removed by a vote of no-confidence, requiring a simple majority vote in Parliament -- but the Shia hold some 150 seats in the 275-member body, making such a majority unlikely. Jawad al-Maliki, a Shiite legislator and a leader in al-Jaafari's Hizb al-Dawah, denounced the Kurdish move. Jaafari himself responded by saying that he did not have the time to respond to the president's comments, as he was currently busy discharging his duties as premier. He said he would issue a rejoinder "forcefully" at the appropriate time. While on a visit to Prague, Czech Republic, Talabani sought to play down his earlier comments, saying, "We don't think this is the time to change the government now."
This development follows Shiite, Kurdish, and Sunni Arab negotiators in back-channel meetings facilitated by the United States, who have begun examining some half-a-dozen "additional refinements" to the draft constitution. Amendments to the charter were possible until the very last minute, or at least until the draft was printed in local newspapers. Humam Hamudi, a Shiite and constitutional committee chairman, said one proposal called for referring to Iraq as a "united country" and that this "unity was guaranteed by the constitution." He said a second proposal calls for making both Arabic and Kurdish official languages in the northern Kurdish region, instead of just Kurdish. A third, more controversial proposal, has to do with new autonomous regions subject to two-thirds approval of Parliament rather than just a simple majority.
Ultimately, the Sunnis are sure they can defeat the charter, but neither are the Shia and Kurds confident of victory. Perhaps the most worried party in this entire fiasco is the United States, which wants to keep the process going so the Dec. 15 polls elect a permanent legislature, giving rise to a permanent coalition government. The Bush administration wants to be able to demonstrate such a victory for consumption on the home front and to facilitate bringing some troops home.
The intense discussions taking place will either lead to a deal where the Sunnis will not seek to defeat the charter in the Oct. 15 vote, or alternatively, if they still insist on defeating the constitution, the charter will manage to pass anyway.The internal divisions within the community, lack of organization and confusion stemming from eleventh hour talks will prevent the Sunnis from gathering the required votes to torpedo the charter. Regardless of how the constitutional referendum plays out, the Sunnis will move quickly to participate in the Dec. 15 general elections.
Thursday, October 06, 2005
an important analysis from the analyst formerly known as Anonymous
Michael Scheuer: Al-Qaeda’s Next Generation: Less Visible and More Lethal
Michael Scheuer served in the CIA for 22 years before resigning in 2004. He served as the Chief of the bin Laden Unit at the Counterterrorist Center from 1996 to 1999. He is the once anonymous author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror and Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America.
Al-Qaeda's Next Generation: Less Visible and More Lethal
Jamestown Foundation
By Michael Scheuer
Experts speculate widely about the composition and tactics of the next generation of mujahideen. This speculation stems from the fact that transnational groups are harder collection targets than nation-states. Such ambiguity and imprecision is likely to endure indefinitely, and is particularly worrisome concerning "next-generation" terrorism studies.
Osama bin Laden has been planning for the next generation of mujahideen since he began speaking publicly in the mid-1990s. Bin Laden has always described the "defensive jihad" against the United States as potentially a multi-generational struggle. After the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden explained that, even as the anti-U.S. war intensified, the torch was being passed from his generation to the next. "We have been struggling right from our youth," bin Laden wrote in late 2001:
"We sacrificed our homes, families, and all the luxuries of this worldly life in the path of Allah (was ask Allah to accept our efforts). In our youth, we fought with and defeated the (former) Soviet Union (with the help of Allah), a world super power, and now we are fighting the USA. We have never let the Muslim Ummah down.
"Muslims are being humiliated, tortured and ruthlessly killed all over the world, and its time to fight these satanic forces with the utmost strength and power. Today the whole of the Muslim Ummah is depending (after Allah) upon the Muslim youth, hoping that they would never let them down." [1]
The question arising is, of course, what threat will the next generation of a
l-Qaeda-inspired mujahideen pose? Based on the admittedly imprecise information available, the answer seems to lie in three discernible trends: a) the next generation will be at least as devout but more professional and less operationally visible; b) it will be larger, with more adherents and potential recruits; and c) it will be better educated and more adept at using the tools of modernity, particularly communications and weapons.Religiosity and Quiet Professionalism
The next mujahideen generation's piety will equal or exceed that of bin Laden's generation. The new mujahideen, having grown up in an internet and satellite television-dominated world, will be more aware of Muslim struggles around the world, more comfortable with a common Muslim identity, more certain that the U.S.-led West is "oppressing" Muslims, and more inspired by the example bin Laden has set˜bin Laden's generation had no bin Laden.
While leaders more pious than bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are hard to imagine, Western analysts tend to forget that many of bin Laden's first-generation lieutenants did not mirror his intense religiosity. Wali Khan, Abu Zubaidah, Abu Hajir al-Iraqi, Khalid Sheikh Muhammed, Ibn Shaykh al-Libi, and Ramzi Yousef were first generation fighters who were both swashbuckling and Islamist. Unlike bin Laden and Zawahiri, they were flamboyant, multilingual, well-traveled, and eager for personal notoriety. Their operating styles were tinged with arrogance˜as if no bullet or jail cell had been made for them˜and each was captured, at least in part, because they paid insufficient attention to personal security. Now al-Qaeda is teaching young mujahideen to learn from the security failures that led to the capture of first-generation fighters.
"The security issue was and still is one of the aspects that most
influence the practical course of the conflict [with the West] and one of
the fronts that most affect the war's outcome. As long as the
Islamic movement does not take this aspect seriously, the promised victory
will continue to lack the most important means for its realization.
"What is required is that the security consciousness be present with a
strength that causes it to mix with the natural course of daily action.
However, a consideration of history and a study of events lead us to
conclude that the enemy's gain in the security conflict [with al-Qaeda]
basically cannot be due to the extraordinary strength of those
organizations or tothe superior skill of those in charge of them. They
are derived from the state of defenselessness caused by the sickness of
[security] laxity in Islamic circles!" [2]
The rising mujahideen are less likely to follow the example of some notorious first-generation fighters, and more likely to model themselves on the smiling, pious, and proficient Mohammed Atef, al-Qaeda's military commander, killed in late 2001 and, to this day, al-Qaeda's most severe individual loss. A former Egyptian security officer, Atef was efficient, intelligent, patient, ruthless˜and nearly invisible. He was a combination of warrior, thinker, and bureaucrat, pursuing his leaders' plans with no hint of ego. Atef's successor as military commander, the Egyptian Sayf al-Adl, is cut from the same cloth. Four years after succeeding Atef, for example, Western analysts cannot determine his identity˜whether he is in fact a former Egyptian Special Forces colonel named Makkawi˜or his location˜whether he in South Asia, Iraq, or under arrest in Iran. Similarly, the Saudis' frequent publication of lengthening lists of "most wanted" al-Qaeda fighters˜many unknown in the West˜suggests the semi-invisible Atef-model is also used by Gulf state Islamists. Finally, the U.K.-born and -raised suicide bombers of July 7, 2005 foreshadow the next mujahideen generation who will operate below the radar of local security services.
Numbers
At the basic level, the steady pace of Islamist insurgencies around the world˜Iraq, Chechnya and the northern Caucasus, southern Thailand, Mindanao, Kashmir and Afghanistan˜and the incremental "Talibanization" of places like Bangladesh, Pakistan, and northern Nigeria, ensure a bountiful new mujahideen generation. Less-tangible factors will also contribute to this bounty.
- Osama bin Laden remains the unrivaled hero and leader of Muslim youths aspiring to join the mujahideen. His efforts to inspire young Muslims to jihad against the U.S.-led West seem to be proving fruitful.
- Easily accessible satellite television and Internet streaming video will broaden Muslim youths' perception that the West is anti-Islamic. U.S. public diplomacy cannot negate the impressions formed by real-time video from Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan that shows Muslims battling "aggressive" Western forces and validating bin LadenŒs claim that the West intends to destroy Islam.
- The adoption of harsher anti-terror laws in America and Europe, along with lurid stories about Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib prison, and the handling of the Qur'an will give credence to bin Laden's claim that the West is persecuting Muslims.
- The ongoing "fundamentalization" of the two great, evangelizing monotheist religions will enhance an environment already conducive to Islamism. The growth of Protestant evangelicalism in Latin America, and the aggressive, "church militant" form of Roman Catholicism in Africa, has and will revitalize the millennium-old Islam-vs.-Christianity confrontation, creating a sense of threat and defensiveness on each side.
Compounding the threat posed by the next, larger generation is the possibility that analysts underestimated the first generation's size. Western leaders have consistently claimed large al-Qaeda-related casualties; currently, totals range from 5,000-7,000 fighters and two-thirds of al-Qaeda's leadership. If the claims are accurate, we should ponder whether the West has ever fought a "terrorist group" that can lose 5,000-7,000 fighters, dozens of leaders, and still be assessed militarily potent and perhaps WMD-capable? The multiple captures of al-Qaeda's "third-in-command"˜most recently Abu Ashraf al-Libi˜and the remarkable totals of "second- and third-in-commands" from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's organization suggests the West's accounting of Islamist manpower˜at the foot soldier and leadership levels˜is, at best, tenuous.
Modernity
Recent scholarship suggests al-Qaeda and its allies draw support primarily from Muslim middle- and upper-middle classes [3]. This helps explain why bin Laden places supreme importance on exploiting the internet for security, intelligence, paramilitary training, communications, propaganda, religious instruction, and news programs. It also points to the West's frequent failure to distinguish between the Islamists' hatred for Westernization˜women's rights and secularism, for example˜and their openness to modernity's tools, especially communications and weaponry.
Several features of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's forces demonstrate that the mujahideen embrace modern tools. Two-plus years after the U.S. invasion, for example, Zarqawi's technicians continue building Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) and car bombs that defeat the detection/jamming technology fielded by U.S. forces. Indeed, each new iteration of defensive technology has been trumped by improved insurgent weaponry.
Zarqawi's media apparatus is likewise the most sophisticated, flexible, and omnipresent U.S.-led forces have encountered since 9/11. Al-Qaeda-in-Iraq's media produce daily combat reports, near real-time video of attacks on coalition targets, interviews with Zarqawi and other leaders, and a steady flow of "news bulletins" to feed 24/7 satellite television networks. In doing so, Zarqawi's media are telling the Muslim world al-Qaeda's version of the war professionally, reliably, and in real-time. So good has Zarqawi's media become since joining al-Qaeda that it is fair to assume the most important help he has received is from bin Laden's world-class media organization.
Conclusion
Despite satellites, electronic intercept equipment, and expanding human intelligence, the West does not understand al-Qaeda the way it knew the Soviet Union. Transnational targets are substantially more difficult collection targets than nation-states. We are, for example, unlikely to build an accurate al-Qaeda order-of-battle or recruit assets to penetrate the al-Qaeda equivalent of Moscow's politburo. As a result, Western analysts must closely track broad trends within al-Qaeda and its allies, and the trends toward greater piety, professionalism, numbers and modernity merit particular attention.
Notes
1. Osama bin Laden, "Message to Muslim Youth," Markaz al-Dawa (Internet), December 13, 2001.
2. Sayf-al-Din al-Ansari, "But Take Your Precautions," Al-Ansar (Internet), March 15, 2002.
3. See especially, Marc Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), and Robert Pape, Dying to Win. The Logic of Suicide Terrorism, (Random House, 2005).
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
Fouad Ajami on the insurgency in Iraq
This passage is from the article assigned at the beginning of the semester, "The Battle of the Experts": 'Born in Lebanon, Ajami is a distinguished social scientist as well as a commentator for CBS News. Ajami asks why the modern Middle East is the way it is, and he argues that the only people who can truly answer that question are its inhabitants. It doesn't do much good, he says, for Americans or Europeans to diagnose what ails Arabs or Afghans--first because Arabs and Afghans won't listen and second because Americans and Europeans are rarely able to fully understand. "Americans must accept," he wrote in a recent New York Times piece, "that they are strangers in the Arab world.""
See if you can see this perspective in this recent article from the Wall Street Journal.
AT WAR
Heart of Darkness
From Zarqawi to the man on the street, Sunni Arabs fear Shiite emancipation.
BY FOUAD AJAMI
Wall Street Journal
Wednesday, September 28, 2005 12:01 a.m.
The remarkable thing about the terror in Iraq is the silence with which it is greeted in other Arab lands. Grant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi his due: He has been skilled at exposing the pitilessness on the loose in that fabled Arab street and the moral emptiness of so much of official Arab life. The extremist is never just a man of the fringe: He always works at the outer edges of mainstream life, playing out the hidden yearnings and defects of the dominant culture. Zarqawi is a bigot and a killer, but he did not descend from the sky. He emerged out of the Arab world's sins of omission and commission; in the way he rails against the Shiites (and the Kurds) he expresses that fatal Arab inability to take in "the other." A terrible condition afflicts the Arabs, and Zarqawi puts it on lethal display: an addiction to failure, and a desire to see this American project in Iraq come to a bloody end.
Zarqawi's war, it has to be conceded, is not his alone; he kills and maims, he labels the Shiites rafida (rejecters of Islam), he charges them with treason as "collaborators of the occupiers and the crusaders," but he can be forgiven the sense that he is a holy warrior on behalf of a wider Arab world that has averted its gaze from his crimes, that has given him its silent approval. He and the band of killers arrayed around him must know the meaning of this great Arab silence.
There is a cliché that distinguishes between cultures of shame and cultures of guilt, and by that crude distinction, it has always been said that the Arab world is a "shame culture." But in truth there is precious little shame in Arab life about the role of the Arabs in the great struggle for and within Iraq. What is one to make of the Damascus-based Union of Arab Writers that has refused to grant membership in its ranks to Iraqi authors? The pretext that Iraqi writers can't be "accredited" because their country is under American occupation is as good an illustration as it gets of the sordid condition of Arab culture. For more than three decades, Iraq's life was sheer and limitless terror, and the Union of Arab Writers never uttered a word. Through these terrible decades, Iraqis suffered alone, and still their poetry and literature adorn Arabic letters. They need no acknowledgment of their pain, or of their genius, from a literary union based in a city in the grip of a deadening autocracy.
A culture of shame would surely see into the shame of an Arab official class with no tradition of accountability granting itself the right to hack away at Iraq's constitution, dismissing it as the handiwork of the American regency. Unreason, an indifference to the most basic of facts, and a spirit of belligerence have settled upon the Arab world. Those who, in Arab lands beyond Iraq, have taken to describing the Iraqi constitution as an "American-Iranian constitution," give voice to a debilitating incoherence. At the heart of this incoherence lies an adamant determination to deny the Shiites of Iraq a claim to their rightful place in their country's political order.
The drumbeats against Iraq that originate from the League of Arab States and its Egyptian apparatchiks betray the panic of an old Arab political class afraid that there is something new unfolding in Iraq--a
different understanding of political power and citizenship, a possible break with the culture of tyranny and the cult of Big Men disposing of the affairs--and the treasure--of nations. It is pitiable that an Egyptian political class that has abdicated its own dream of modernity and bent to the will of a pharaonic regime is obsessed with the doings in Iraq. But this is the political space left open by the master of the realm. To be sure, there is terror in the streets of Iraq; there is plenty there for the custodians of a stagnant regime in Cairo to point to as a cautionary tale of what awaits societies that break with "secure" ways. But the Egyptian autocracy knows the stakes. An Iraqi polity with a modern social contract would be a rebuke to all that Egypt stands for, a cruel reminder of the heartbreak of Egyptians in recent years. We must not fall for Cairo's claims of primacy in Arab politics; these are hollow, and Iraq will further expose the rot that has settled upon the political life of Egypt.Nor ought we be taken in by warnings from Jordan, made by King Abdullah II, of a "Shia crescent" spanning Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. This is a piece of bigotry and simplification unworthy of a Hashemite ruler, for in the scheme of Arab history the Hashemites have been possessed of moderation and tolerance. Of all Sunni Arab rulers, the Hashemites have been particularly close to the Shiites, but popular opinion in Jordan has been thoroughly infatuated with Saddam Hussein, and Saddamism, and an inexperienced ruler must have reasoned that the Shiite bogey would play well at home.
The truth of Jordan today is official moderation coupled with a civic culture given to anti-Americanism, and hijacked by the Islamists. In that standoff, the country's political life is off-limits, but the street has its way on Iraq. Verse is still read in Saddam's praise at poetry readings in Amman, and the lawyers' syndicate is packed with those eager to join the legal defense teams of Saddam Hussein and his principal lieutenants. Saddam's two daughters reside in Jordan with no apologies to offer, and no second thoughts about the great crimes committed under the Baath tyranny. Those who know the ways of Jordan speak of cities where religious radicalism and bigotry blow with abandon. Zarqa, the hometown of Abu Musab, is one such place; Salt, the birthplace of a notorious suicide bomber, Raad al-Banna, who last winter brought great tragedy to the Iraqi town of Hilla, killing no fewer than 125 of its people, is another. For a funeral, Banna's family gave him a "martyr's wedding," and the affair became an embarrassment to the regime and the political class. Jordan is yet to make its peace with the new Iraq. (King Abdullah's "crescent" breaks at any rate: Syria has no Shiites to speak of, and its Alawite rulers are undermining the Shiites of Iraq, feeding a jihadist breed of Sunni warriors for whom the Alawites are children of darkness.)
It was the luck of the imperial draw that the American project in Iraq came to the rescue of the Shiites--and of the Kurds. We may not fully appreciate the historical change we unleashed on the Arab world, but we have given liberty to the stepchildren of the Arab world. We have overturned an edifice of material and moral power that dates back centuries. The Arabs railing against U.S. imperialism and arrogance in Iraq will never let us in on the real sources of their resentments. In the way of "modern" men and women with some familiarity with the doctrines of political correctness, they can't tell us that they are aggrieved that we have given a measure of self-worth to the seminarians of Najaf and the highlanders of Kurdistan. But that is precisely what gnaws at them.
An edifice of Arab nationalism built by strange bedfellows--the Sunni political and bureaucratic elites, and the Christian Arab pundits who abetted them in the idle hope that they would be spared the wrath of the street and of the mob--was overturned in Iraq. And America, at times ambivalent about its mission, brought along with its military gear a suspicion of the Shiites, a belief that the Iraqi Shiites were an extension of Iran, a community destined to build a sister-republic of the Iranian theocracy. Washington has its cadre of Arabists reared on Arab nationalist historiography. This camp had a seat at the table, but the very scale of what was at play in Iraq, and the redemptionism at the heart of George Bush's ideology, dwarfed them.
For the Arab enemies of this project of rescue, this new war in Iraq was a replay of an old drama: the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols in 1258. In the received history, the great city of learning, the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate, had fallen to savages, and an age of greatness had drawn to a close. In the legend of that tale, the Mongols sacked the metropolis, put its people to the sword, dumped the books of its libraries in the Tigris. That river, chroniclers insist, flowed, alternately, with the blood of the victims and the ink of the books. It is a tale of betrayal, the selective history maintains. A minister of the caliph, a Shiite by the name of Ibn Alqami, opened the gates of Baghdad to the Mongols. History never rests here, and telescopes easily: In his call for a new holy war against the Shiites, Zarqawi dredges up that history, dismisses the Shiite-led government as "the government of Ibn Alqami's descendants." Zarqawi knows the power of this symbolism, and its dark appeal to Sunni Arabs within Iraq.
Zarqawi's jihadists have sown ruin in Iraq, but they are strangers to that country, and they have needed the harbor given them in the Sunni triangle and the indulgence of the old Baathists. For the diehards, Iraq is now a "stolen country" delivered into the hands of subject communities unfit to rule. Though a decided minority, the Sunni Arabs have a majoritarian mindset and a conviction that political dominion is their birthright. Instead of encouraging a break with the old Manichaean ideologies, the Arab world beyond Iraq feeds this deep-seated sense of historical entitlement. No one is under any illusions as to what the Sunni Arabs would have done had oil been located in their provinces. They would have disowned both north and south and opted for a smaller world of their own and defended it with the sword. But this was not to be, and their war is the panic of a community that fears that it could be left with a realm of "gravel and sand."
In the aftermath of Katrina, the project of reforming a faraway region and ridding it of its malignancies is harder to sustain and defend. We are face-to-face with the trade-off between duties beyond borders and duties within. At home, for the critics of the war, Katrina is a rod to wave in the face of the Bush administration. To be sure, we did not acquit ourselves well in the aftermath of the storm; we left ourselves open to the gloatings of those eager to see America get its comeuppance. Even Zarqawi weighed in on Katrina, depicting a raid on the northern town of Tal Afar by a joint Iraqi-American force as an attempt on the part of "Bush, the enemy of God" to cover up the great "scandal in facing up to the storm which exposed to the entire world what had happened to the American military due to the wars of attrition it had suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan."
Those duties within have to be redeemed in the manner that this country has always assumed redemptive projects. But that other project, in the burning grounds of the Arab-Muslim world, remains, and we must remember its genesis. It arose out of a calamity on 9/11, which rid us rudely of the illusions of the '90s. That era had been a fools' paradise; Nasdaq had not brought about history's end. In Kabul and Baghdad, we cut down two terrible regimes; in the neighborhood beyond, there are chameleons in the shadows whose ways are harder to extirpate.
We have not always been brilliant in the war we have waged, for these are lands we did not fully know. But our work has been noble and necessary, and we can't call a halt to it in midstream. We bought time for reform to take root in several Arab and Muslim realms. Leave aside the rescue of Afghanistan, Kuwait and Qatar have done well by our protection, and Lebanon has retrieved much of its freedom. The three larger realms of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria are more difficult settings, but there, too, the established orders of power will have to accommodate the yearnings for change. A Kuwaiti businessman with an unerring feel for the ways of the Arab world put it thus to me: "Iraq, the Internet, and American power are undermining the old order in the Arab world. There are gains by the day." The rage against our work in Iraq, all the way from the "chat rooms" of Arabia to the bigots of Finsbury Park in London, is located within this broader struggle.
In that Iraqi battleground, we can't yet say that the insurgency is in its death throes. But that call to war by Zarqawi, we must know, came after the stunning military operation in Tal Afar dealt the jihadists a terrible blow. An Iraqi-led force, supported by American tanks, armored vehicles and air cover, had stormed that stronghold. This had been a transit point for jihadists coming in from Syria. This time, at Tal Afar, Iraq security forces were there to stay, and a Sunni Arab defense minister with the most impeccable tribal credentials, Saadoun Dulaimi, issued a challenge to Iraq's enemy, a message that his soldiers would fight for their country.
The claim that our war in Iraq, after the sacrifices, will have hatched a Shiite theocracy is a smear on the war, a misreading of the Shiite world of Iraq. In the holy city of Najaf, at its apex, there is a dread of political furies and an attachment to sobriety. I went to Najaf in July; no one of consequence there spoke of a theocratic state. Najaf's jurists lived through a time of terror, when informers and assassins had the run of the place. They have been delivered from that time. The new order shall give them what they want: a place in Iraq's cultural and moral order, and a decent separation between religion and the compromises of political life.
Over the horizon looms a referendum to ratify the country's constitution. Sunni Arabs are registering in droves, keen not to repeat the error they committed when they boycotted the national elections earlier this year. In their pride, and out of fear of the insurgents and their terror, the Sunni Arabs say that they are registering to vote in order to thwart this "illegitimate constitution." This kind of saving ambiguity ought to be welcomed, for there are indications that the Sunni Arabs may have begun to understand terror's blindness and terror's ruin. Zarqawi holds out but one fate for them; other doors beckon, and there have stepped forth from their ranks leaders eager to partake of the new order. It is up to them, and to the Arab street and the Arab chancelleries that wink at them, to bring an end to the terror. It has not been easy, this expedition to Iraq, and for America in Iraq there has been heartbreak aplenty. But we ought to remember the furies that took us there, and we ought to be consoled by the thought that the fight for Iraq is a fight to ward off Arab dangers and troubles that came our way on a clear September morning, four years ago.
Mr. Ajami teaches International Relations at Johns Hopkins University.
A supporter of the Iraq invasion criticizes war effort and says "don't give up"
Don't Give Up on Iraq Yet
By David Ignatius
Washington Post
Sunday, October 2, 2005; Page B07
BAGHDAD -- Ask the generals and colonels who are running the war in Iraq what really worries them, and it's rarely a military problem. "We haven't lost a platoon in combat! We haven't lost a skirmish!" explodes one general when describing a recent poll that reported a majority of Americans think we are losing the war.
The problems that vex the military here are political -- above all, the difficulty of shaping an effective Iraqi government that can unite Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. That has been the real challenge since U.S. troops reached Baghdad in April 2003, and it's one that all of America's military and economic power hasn't yet been able to crack. Our vast resources haven't subdued the molten passions of what Winston Churchill in 1922 called the "ungrateful volcano" of Iraq.
Because the decisive battles here are political, not military, many officers feel the recurring debate in Washington over the proper troop levels in Iraq misses the point. "We've been pounding this with a military hammer, but we all agree that the solution will be political," says one infantry colonel on the front lines.
So what is the way forward in Iraq? I come to the question with a good deal of baggage. I thought the war made sense three years ago, not because of the putative weapons of mass destruction or the al Qaeda threat but because I hoped that toppling the Arab world's most repressive regime could open the door to positive change in the region. I still believe that, but I shudder at the administration's postwar mistakes and at the human cost of the war. And I sense that both Americans and Iraqis are running out of patience. We are at a crucial decision point, so here is what I think:
The right way forward now is exactly what it was in April 2003. The United States must foster a modern, secular Iraqi government that can bring together Sunnis and Shiites and, under that umbrella of national reconciliation, stabilize the country. Above all, that means finding a way to engage the people who feel most left out of the new Iraq -- the Sunni minority that held power under Saddam Hussein and now feels disenfranchised.
Here's how Gen. John Abizaid, head of the U.S. Central Command, who oversees the war, puts it, expressing what he says is a "personal" opinion: "You must have a viable Sunni engagement plan that distinguishes between people who participated in the old regime because they had no choice and those who committed crimes against their people." That means the current "de-Baathification" rules must be eased so that they aren't a score-settling mechanism for the newly ascendant Shiite majority.
Unfortunately, Iraq's first elected government, under Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari, has reinforced the sectarian tensions rather than the spirit of reconciliation. Most Sunnis boycotted the Jan. 30 election that brought this government to power; the decisive political figure was Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who told Shiites it would be sinful not to vote for Najaf's cleric-dominated list. Jafari's government has been weak and inefficient -- and it produced a draft constitution that reassured Shiite mullahs and Kurdish warlords but left Sunnis out in the cold.
Some analysts argue that the constitution is so flawed that this month's referendum to approve it should be delayed. I disagree; like most military officers I talked to here, I see the constitution as a work in progress. The current version is far from perfect, but it can be amended and adapted by a future government. As Abizaid says, "It's a workable document from which good things can flow."
Actually, I don't think it matters all that much whether the constitution is ratified. What's crucial is that Sunnis turn out to vote Oct. 15 and that they come back to the polls at year's end, when a new government will be elected. There are encouraging signs that's going to happen, with Sunni clerics now urging people to register. Every commanderI talked with said Sunni registration is up. That signals a recognition that Iraq's future will be shaped by ballots, not suicide bombers.
The real political milestone is the December balloting to elect a new, permanent government. The good news for people who want to see a secular Iraq is that the Sistani-backed clerical list is almost certain to get fewer votes than it did in the Jan. 30 balloting. And possibly, just possibly, enough Sunnis, Kurds and secular Shiites will vote for alternative lists to allow a new ruling coalition of secular parties, perhaps allied with religious ones, which might link arms across the Shiite-Sunni divide. Such a coalition might be headed by a secular Shiite politician, such as the wily Ahmed Chalabi or former prime minister Ayad Allawi.
Maybe I'm dreaming in imagining that a stable, secular government can still emerge. But the point is that we're finally approaching crunchtime. If the next six months don't produce something like the outcome I have described, there is every likelihood that Iraq will descend into the civil war that has been looming for two years.
What I cannot understand is the call for a quick exit from Iraq, before we've given the December elections and a permanent government a chance. Make no mistake, we are looking over the lip of Churchill's volcano, and there is a chance that -- if domestic political pressure for withdrawal carries the day -- the United States could suffer a major defeat in Iraq that would reverberate for a generation. We may fail in Iraq, but let's not rush it.
Attempt to make sense of US unpopularity among Muslims
The Washington Institute for Near East Policy is a think tank based in Washington DC that is usually considered pro-Israel
Survey Says: Polls and the Muslim World
By Robert Satloff
New Republic Online
September 30, 2005
The inaugural Middle East tour of Karen Hughes, America's chief public diplomat, has occasioned yet another round of hand-wringing over the crisis of Arab anti-Americanism. Reuters explained that "the sagging American image abroad needed a facelift," while The Christian Science Monitor predicted that Hughes "won't have to listen too closely to hear the widespread anger over perceived U.S. arrogance and heavy-handedness." At the same time, the just-leaked findings of the congressionally mandated Advisory Committee on Cultural Diplomacy state bluntly that "America's image and reputation abroad could hardly be worse." None of this comes as much of a surprise. After all, everyone accepts that America is widely loathed in the Arab world.
And yet it's worth asking: Is it true? The assumption that Arabs are enraged at America relies heavily on a single-source polling data. But there are two major problems with polls of Arab public opinion: the way those polls are generally reported; and the accuracy of the polls themselves. The indefatigable Israeli politician Shimon Peres once famously said that polls are like perfume--beautiful to smell, deadly to drink. At least where contemporary polls of Arab and Muslim public opinion are concerned, he was on to something.
For an example of the first problem, take the widely cited Pew Global Attitudes Survey. Guided by a stellar group of renowned statesmen and academic experts, the "Pew polls," as they are known, are regarded as the gold standard of international public opinion measurements.
One of Pew's most newsworthy polls was its March 2004 survey, "A Year After Iraq War: Mistrust of America in Europe Ever Higher; Muslim Anger Persists." The press advisory that accompanied the survey results highlighted a deepening divide between the United States and Muslim societies, a charge that was picked up in Cassandra-like headlines in newspapers across the country.
Evidently few reporters took the time to read the fine print in the poll itself. If they did, they would have found that the poll provided absolutely no evidence to support the charge that "Muslim anger persists." In fact, the word "anger" did not appear in a single poll question. Muslims did give high "unfavorable" ratings to the United States, but there is considerable difference between viewing something unfavorably and being angry at it. (Think of broccoli or Britney Spears.) Pew evidently recognized how problematic this was; in the 2005 version of the Global Attitudes Survey, released in June, references to such sensationalist (and unsubstantiated) terms as "anger" were nowhere to be found. But the damage was already done.
Pew's general pattern has been to downplay results that suggest America's standing is less bleak than commonly assumed. In 2004, for example, one question found that--in contrast to Europeans--Arabs and Muslims overwhelmingly endorsed America's role as the world's sole superpower, with huge majorities saying that international security would be endangered by the emergence of a global competitor to the United States. The press advisory made no mention of this. Similarly, the advisory avoided the fact that in three of four Muslim countries polled, there was a significant increase in the number of respondents who gave the United States a passing grade--that is, "excellent," "good," or "only fair"--for its performance in Iraq compared to the previous year's poll; in only one country, Turkey, did the percentage characterizing America's performance as "poor" rise, and that was just 2 percent. In Pew's summary of the 2005 survey, there is scant reference to a remarkable set of positive trends: Compared to previous results, all Muslim countries polled had a less critical image of President Bush; a more favorable view of the United States (here again, Turkey was the sole exception); a stronger sense that America truly favors democracy in their country; and a greater receptivity to implementing Western-style democracy. That certainly runs against the common wisdom regarding the political attitudes of Arabs and Muslims.
Aside from flaws in how these poll results are reported, there are structural factors that can chip away at the fundamental validity of polling in many Arab countries. These problems flow primarily from the difference between liberal democracies and the controlled authoritarian states that prevail in much of the Middle East. For example, should we take at face value data from countries where freedom of speech is highly circumscribed or where the populace has no experience in answering provocative questions from strange people promising to keep the replies secret? And shouldn't we look twice at results from countries whose rulers have an interest in Washington continuing to fear an allegedly outraged anti-American populace?
Then there is the less sinister problem of language. Polls in Arab countries are almost always done in Arabic, despite the fact that about one-quarter of the citizens of these countries--including Berbers, Kurds, Turcomans, Sudanese animists, and others--are not Arab and may not speak Arabic as their first language. Ask a Moroccan the same question in Arabic and a Berber dialect, for example, and there is a good chance of getting different results--for the simple reason that talking in each language is itself a political statement, with local, national, and international implications.
Lastly, there is the issue of sample. Pew pollsters, for instance, are able to work in four countries that alone represent about forty percent of all Muslims--the world's two most populous Muslim countries (Indonesia and Pakistan) and two with the world's largest Muslim minorities (China and India). In contrast, Pew operates in just three Arab countries (Morocco, Jordan, Lebanon) whose population amounts to less than 15 percent of all Arab states combined; importantly, none are among the region's political heavyweights and none are in the Gulf. One simply can't discern general trends about Arab public opinion from polls based on such a small and geographically skewed sample.
None of this suggests that all surveys of Arab opinion are bad. Undertaken professionally and disseminated dispassionately, they have a useful role to play in shaping understanding of Arab political dynamics. But a singular reliance on professed Arab attitudes--what Arab publics say--should not be enough. At the very least, this process ought to be complemented by a thorough assessment of what Arab publics do. This is the old fashioned method. In the pre-polling era, there were two reliable measures of anti-Americanism: state action (such as the Arab oil embargo) and mass action (especially street protests). Boycotts of high-profile American goods or companies cut across these two categories, as sometimes they represent decisions of government or state enterprises and at other times they reflect the collective action of thousands of individual consumers.
Using these indicators, the situation does not appear quite so dire. On the state level, it's business as usual, and then some. Although Arab petroleum exporters could choke our economy by turning off the spigot, they appear more interested in reaping the gains of high prices. One after another, Muslim leaders are lining up to sign free-trade agreements with the United States and to shake the hand of Israel's leader at the United Nations. It doesn't look like many are fearful of anti-American backlashes at home.
On the mass level, the famed "Arab street" is largely inactive. Despite the high number of civilian deaths in Iraq, it is extremely rare for Arabs to gather in large numbers to protest the U.S. occupation. Indeed, the largest Arab protest this year--the Lebanese demonstration demanding the withdrawal of Syrian forces--was decidedly pro-American.
At the same time, recent Arab boycotts of high-profile American companies--if they had any traction at all--were short-lived and ultimately ineffective. McDonald’s sales in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa did fall in 2003, when U.S.-led forces invaded Iraq, but have rebounded strongly ever since. Even Caterpillar, under pressure for doing business with the Israel Defense Forces, appears to turn a handsome profit in the Middle East, with revenues for its division that include Arab countries up 50 percent in the past two years.
To be sure, none of this is proof that all is well in America's relations with Arab publics. But the truth of the situation is far more nuanced than the commonly held image of a region in which millions of Arabs rush out of bed each day to burn effigies of Uncle Sam before their morning coffee. The prime mission of post-9/11 public diplomacy is identifying, nurturing, and supporting Muslim allies in the ideological battle against radical Islamist extremism. That task is difficult--yet doable. But it will only seem impossible if we guzzle every fragrance in the department store.
Robert Satloff is executive director of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Survey Says: Polls and the Muslim World
By Robert Satloff
New Republic Online
September 30, 2005
The inaugural Middle East tour of Karen Hughes, America's chief public diplomat, has occasioned yet another round of hand-wringing over the crisis of Arab anti-Americanism. Reuters explained that "the sagging American image abroad needed a facelift," while The Christian Science Monitor predicted that Hughes "won't have to listen too closely to hear the widespread anger over perceived U.S. arrogance and heavy-handedness." At the same time, the just-leaked findings of the congressionally mandated Advisory Committee on Cultural Diplomacy state bluntly that "America's image and reputation abroad could hardly be worse." None of this comes as much of a surprise. After all, everyone accepts that America is widely loathed in the Arab world.
And yet it's worth asking: Is it true? The assumption that Arabs are enraged at America relies heavily on a single-source polling data. But there are two major problems with polls of Arab public opinion: the way those polls are generally reported; and the accuracy of the polls themselves. The indefatigable Israeli politician Shimon Peres once famously said that polls are like perfume--beautiful to smell, deadly to drink. At least where contemporary polls of Arab and Muslim public opinion are concerned, he was on to something.
For an example of the first problem, take the widely cited Pew Global Attitudes Survey. Guided by a stellar group of renowned statesmen and academic experts, the "Pew polls," as they are known, are regarded as the gold standard of international public opinion measurements.
One of Pew's most newsworthy polls was its March 2004 survey, "A Year After Iraq War: Mistrust of America in Europe Ever Higher; Muslim Anger Persists." The press advisory that accompanied the survey results highlighted a deepening divide between the United States and Muslim societies, a charge that was picked up in Cassandra-like headlines in newspapers across the country.
Evidently few reporters took the time to read the fine print in the poll itself. If they did, they would have found that the poll provided absolutely no evidence to support the charge that "Muslim anger persists." In fact, the word "anger" did not appear in a single poll question. Muslims did give high "unfavorable" ratings to the United States, but there is considerable difference between viewing something unfavorably and being angry at it. (Think of broccoli or Britney Spears.) Pew evidently recognized how problematic this was; in the 2005 version of the Global Attitudes Survey, released in June, references to such sensationalist (and unsubstantiated) terms as "anger" were nowhere to be found. But the damage was already done.
Pew's general pattern has been to downplay results that suggest America's standing is less bleak than commonly assumed. In 2004, for example, one question found that--in contrast to Europeans--Arabs and Muslims overwhelmingly endorsed America's role as the world's sole superpower, with huge majorities saying that international security would be endangered by the emergence of a global competitor to the United States. The press advisory made no mention of this. Similarly, the advisory avoided the fact that in three of four Muslim countries polled, there was a significant increase in the number of respondents who gave the United States a passing grade--that is, "excellent," "good," or "only fair"--for its performance in Iraq compared to the previous year's poll; in only one country, Turkey, did the percentage characterizing America's performance as "poor" rise, and that was just 2 percent. In Pew's summary of the 2005 survey, there is scant reference to a remarkable set of positive trends: Compared to previous results, all Muslim countries polled had a less critical image of President Bush; a more favorable view of the United States (here again, Turkey was the sole exception); a stronger sense that America truly favors democracy in their country; and a greater receptivity to implementing Western-style democracy. That certainly runs against the common wisdom regarding the political attitudes of Arabs and Muslims.
Aside from flaws in how these poll results are reported, there are structural factors that can chip away at the fundamental validity of polling in many Arab countries. These problems flow primarily from the difference between liberal democracies and the controlled authoritarian states that prevail in much of the Middle East. For example, should we take at face value data from countries where freedom of speech is highly circumscribed or where the populace has no experience in answering provocative questions from strange people promising to keep the replies secret? And shouldn't we look twice at results from countries whose rulers have an interest in Washington continuing to fear an allegedly outraged anti-American populace?
Then there is the less sinister problem of language. Polls in Arab countries are almost always done in Arabic, despite the fact that about one-quarter of the citizens of these countries--including Berbers, Kurds, Turcomans, Sudanese animists, and others--are not Arab and may not speak Arabic as their first language. Ask a Moroccan the same question in Arabic and a Berber dialect, for example, and there is a good chance of getting different results--for the simple reason that talking in each language is itself a political statement, with local, national, and international implications.
Lastly, there is the issue of sample. Pew pollsters, for instance, are able to work in four countries that alone represent about forty percent of all Muslims--the world's two most populous Muslim countries (Indonesia and Pakistan) and two with the world's largest Muslim minorities (China and India). In contrast, Pew operates in just three Arab countries (Morocco, Jordan, Lebanon) whose population amounts to less than 15 percent of all Arab states combined; importantly, none are among the region's political heavyweights and none are in the Gulf. One simply can't discern general trends about Arab public opinion from polls based on such a small and geographically skewed sample.
None of this suggests that all surveys of Arab opinion are bad. Undertaken professionally and disseminated dispassionately, they have a useful role to play in shaping understanding of Arab political dynamics. But a singular reliance on professed Arab attitudes--what Arab publics say--should not be enough. At the very least, this process ought to be complemented by a thorough assessment of what Arab publics do. This is the old fashioned method. In the pre-polling era, there were two reliable measures of anti-Americanism: state action (such as the Arab oil embargo) and mass action (especially street protests). Boycotts of high-profile American goods or companies cut across these two categories, as sometimes they represent decisions of government or state enterprises and at other times they reflect the collective action of thousands of individual consumers.
Using these indicators, the situation does not appear quite so dire. On the state level, it's business as usual, and then some. Although Arab petroleum exporters could choke our economy by turning off the spigot, they appear more interested in reaping the gains of high prices. One after another, Muslim leaders are lining up to sign free-trade agreements with the United States and to shake the hand of Israel's leader at the United Nations. It doesn't look like many are fearful of anti-American backlashes at home.
On the mass level, the famed "Arab street" is largely inactive. Despite the high number of civilian deaths in Iraq, it is extremely rare for Arabs to gather in large numbers to protest the U.S. occupation. Indeed, the largest Arab protest this year--the Lebanese demonstration demanding the withdrawal of Syrian forces--was decidedly pro-American.
At the same time, recent Arab boycotts of high-profile American companies--if they had any traction at all--were short-lived and ultimately ineffective. McDonald’s sales in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa did fall in 2003, when U.S.-led forces invaded Iraq, but have rebounded strongly ever since. Even Caterpillar, under pressure for doing business with the Israel Defense Forces, appears to turn a handsome profit in the Middle East, with revenues for its division that include Arab countries up 50 percent in the past two years.
To be sure, none of this is proof that all is well in America's relations with Arab publics. But the truth of the situation is far more nuanced than the commonly held image of a region in which millions of Arabs rush out of bed each day to burn effigies of Uncle Sam before their morning coffee. The prime mission of post-9/11 public diplomacy is identifying, nurturing, and supporting Muslim allies in the ideological battle against radical Islamist extremism. That task is difficult--yet doable. But it will only seem impossible if we guzzle every fragrance in the department store.
Robert Satloff is executive director of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Neo-conservative bemoans Bush's weakness
Perspective: American neo-conservative, disillusioned supporter of Bush Administration
Haaretz is a moderate well-respected Israeli news
Who Killed the Bush Doctrine?
By Michael Rubin
Haaretz
Publication Date: September 30, 2005
On January 20, 2005, George W. Bush outlined the goal of his second term. "It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world," he said. "All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you."
Less than a year later, the Bush doctrine is dead, the victim not of outside circumstances, but rather lack of will and ineptness. While Bush may be sincere, across the Middle East, his administration's willingness to sacrifice those seeking freedom has become legendary.
Take Libya: On March 12, 2004, Bush declared, "We stand with courageous reformers ... Earlier today, the Li
byan government released Fathi el-Jahmi. He's a local government official who was imprisoned in 2002 for advocating free speech and democracy. It's an encouraging step toward reform in Libya. You probably have heard, Libya is beginning to change her attitude about a lot of things.Actually, Libyan strongman Muammar Qadhafi had not changed. Two weeks later, Libyan security rearrested Jahmi. Across the Middle East, analysts saw Qadhafi's actions as a challenge to Bush. The President responded not by tying rapprochement to El-Jahmi's freedom, but with impotence. As El-Jahmi rots in prison, denied medical care for his diabetes, the U.S. Treasury Department grants waivers to allow billions of dollars of U.S. investment in Libya. According to the London-based Al-Hayat newspaper, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will endorse Qadhafi's reign with a November visit to Tripoli.
The liberation of Iraq demonstrated that after years of effete diplomacy, the White House meant what it said. Bush reversed that victory.
It should be no surprise that Qadhafi has since gone on a rampage. In May 2005, he imprisoned dissident writer Abdul Razzaq al-Mansouri. In June 2005, regime elements tortured to death dissident journalist Daif al-Ghazal. Hundreds of political prisoners remain in Libyan jails.
The Bush administration also fumbled Lebanon. On March 8, 2005, Bush spoke at the National Defense University. "Today I have a message for the people of Lebanon," he said. "Lebanon's future will be in your hands. The American people are on your side." Perhaps many Americans were, but not the State Department.
When Condoleezza Rice visited Lebanon on July 22, she met not only with the new Prime Minister Fuad Siniora, but also with pro-Syrian President Emile Lahoud, the man whose quest for an extra-constitutional third term began the cascade that led to the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and sparked the Cedar Revolution. Syrian television, Hezbollah's Al-Manar channel, and the Arabic-language satellite station Al-Jazeera all broadcast her handshake with the symbol of tyranny.
The Lebanese were not alone in their betrayal. Egyptians were aghast when, on September 11, new U.S. Ambassador Frank Ricciardone appeared on Egyptian television and declared, "Let me just reiterate the congratulations of the United States of America to Egypt for this g
reat accomplishment. As you know, President Bush has telephoned President Mubarak ... to congratulate him and Egypt on the accomplishments of this past election."Four days earlier, Mubarak had declared victory in elections marred by harassment of opponents, fraud, and the state's refusal to allow international monitors access. The Egyptian people, in protest, boycotted the polls. Voter turnout was only 20 percent. Rather than support the Egyptian people, the President's representative fawned on a dictator. Sometimes, silence can be the best response.
Embrace of autocracy has become the rule rather than the exception in U.S. foreign policy. At the request of the Palestinian Authority, the State Department banned Issam Abu Issa, a Palestinian anti-corruption activist slated to testify in the House of Representatives.
Bush declared during his 2005 State of the Union Address, "To the Iranian people, I say tonight, as you stand for your own liberty, America stands with you." But Rice appointed an ExxonMobil advisor who advised against aiding dissidents to cover the State Department's Iran policy planning portfolio.
Against the backdrop of Bush's indifference, Turkish democracy has taken a step backward. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has both ignored rulings of the Turkish Supreme Court and retaliated against plaintiffs. After Turkish businessman Mustafa Suzer won five lawsuits against the Turkish government for its illegal seizure of Kent Bank, Erdogan not only refused to abide by the court verdict, but he also ordered a travel ban on Suzer and, without any court order, sent bulldozers to demolish a restaurant on his property.
Emboldened by Washington's silence and frustrated at the constraints of an independent judiciary, the Turkish leader has used his parliamentary majority to lower the retirement age of judges so that he can replace nearly half of Turkey's 9,000 judges before the next election.
As they do with Bush, the chattering classes of Europe, Israel, and the American elite once criticized Reagan for his talk of the "Evil Empire" and his willingness to endanger detente for the sake of a few dissidents. Reagan was right, though, and more than two hundred million Soviets had a chance at freedom because of it.
Bush might have been equally successful. Images of Iraqis, Afghans, and Lebanese voting are more powerful than any terrorist car bomb or Al-Qaida video. Armchair experts may say Iraq's liberation emboldened terrorists. But the pages of Arabic newspapers like Al-Sharq al-Awsat and Al-Hayat now carry an unprecedented debate about democracy, which experts said could not happen. Liberals may be a minority in the Arab world, but they have begun to find their voice.
Rice may echo the President, but by embracing dictators, she has undercut the spirit of his message. Dissidents should not be treated as ornaments, to be displayed when convenient but kept at arm's length. They are the foundation of freedom. While Bush might once have been remembered for bringing freedom to 30 million Afghans and 25 million Iraqis, his legacy is fast becoming one of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Neo-conservative perspective on Iran
Perspective: Neo-conservative, American, close adviser to the Bush Administration
Testimony to US Congress
Clerical Iran
The Threat
By Reuel Marc Gerecht
TESTIMONY
House Armed Services Committee (Washington)
Publication Date: September 29, 2005
Before I describe the serious and growing problems we have with clerical Iran, let me state the obvious: America’s foreign policy toward the Islamic Republic since 1979 has largely been successful. America certainly should not take a lot of credit for the failure of Iran’s revolution--and let us be perfectly clear, for the vast majority of Iranians, including the clergy--the inqilab, as the revolution is known in Persian, has been a bust.
Credit should go first and foremost to Ayatollah Khomeini who established a theocracy at odds with Shi’ite history and the sensibilities of most Iranians, including those who are quite devout. Credit goes to the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War that eventually broke the back of Iran’s legions of die-hard holy warriors. But the United States, too, deserves credit for its consistent opposition to the regime. Although not all American administrations have been equally committed to countering the Islamic Republic and hammering it for its support of terrorism--both the first Bush administration and especially the Clinton administration wanted at one time to “engage” Iran’s ruling clergy--all American administrations since 1979 have overall realized that confrontation and containment were the only viable policies toward Tehran because the clerical regime gave them no choice. And like I said, this policy has been a success: We, not the Western Europeans, who’ve often wanted to engage the Islamic Republic even when Iran’s assassins and contracted-bombers were striking Western Europe in the 1980s, are the Westerners most admired. We are admired in great part because we have been seen by the people of Iran, and by the mullahs that rule over them, as the only serious antagonist to cl
erical power.
It is worthwhile to recall how badly the Clinton administration--in particular President Clinton--wanted “to give peace a chance” with Iran during the first term of President Mohammad Khatami. Both the President and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright tried to turn apologia into foreign policy: Secretary of State Madeleine Albright apologized for the 1953 coup d’etat (an odd position given how many clerics, including Khomeini, were quite pleased to see Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq fall from power) and President Clinton apologized for the supposedly bad behavior of the entire Western world toward Iran for the last 150 years in an effort to get Tehran to extend a friendly hand. If former FBI Director Louis Freeh is to be believed, President Clinton even tried to avoid confronting the Islamic Republic for its culpability in the attack on US forces at Khobar Towers in 1996 in an effort not to spoil the possibility of a dialogue with President Khatami. I don’t mention the Clinton years to embarrass the President or Secretary Albright--I suspect both still firmly believe they did nothing embarrassing; I mention it to underscore how awful official analysis of clerical Iran has often been in the United States government. American apologies in revolutionary clerical eyes means only one thing--weakness. And showing weakness to power-politic-loving Iranian clerics is not astute. This is 101 in Iranian political culture. Yet I’m willing to bet that most analysts dealing with Iran at the State Department and the CIA probably thought American soul-searching was a good thing, that the political elite in Tehran would respect us more.
The mirror-imaging of Western, especially Western European ethics, onto Iranians has been a constant problem in the EU3 nuclear negotiations with Tehran. I’m not going to spend much time on this affair--I consider the whole process now damaging to the United States since it should be obvious to all concerned--let us be frank, it was obvious when this process first started--that the British, French, and Germans are not going to implement crippling sanctions against Iran (the modern European idea of a sanction is to deny something you have not yet promised). Modern Western Europeans simply cannot play power politics anymore--they have, as Robert Kagan has trenchantly written, evolved beyond such things. The EU3 negotiations with Iran remain as they started: For the Americans it is a vehicle for transatlantic dialogue and for the Europeans it’s a means of controlling George W. Bush, the potentially Mad Bomber.
And it’s by no means clear the United States is willing to hit Iran with serious economic sanctions either when oil is around $60 per barrel. And there is little cultural reason to believe that even if the Americans and the Europeans could devise powerful sanctions over the objections of the Russians and the Chinese--and let us not deceive ourselves, the Russians, and now quite possibly the Chinese, view clerical Iran as a strategic asset (for the Russians, it is their Saddam substitute) in the Middle East--that the ruling clerics would relent. Former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani, the father of the Iranian nuclear-weapons program, whom the Western Europeans and, I hate to say, more than a few US officials and commentators, surreally viewed as our best bet for stopping the clerical regime’s acquisition of the bomb, started this program with broad clerical support in the late 1980s. As should be blatantly obvious by now, the ruling Iranian clergy intends to see this through to its completion. The only conceivable force that could make the ruling clergy
relent is the firm conviction that George W. Bush, the Mad Bomber, WILL bomb them if they don’t. And the United States by its firm embrace of the EU3 process and the pretty public signals senior U.S. officials have sent to the Europeans that they really don’t want to even conceive of preventive military strikes against the clerical regime have substantially undermined the image abroad that George W. Bush really means it when he says that a clerical bomb is “unacceptable.” The situation looks so bad that Patrick Clawson’s quip--trying to ban Iran from international soccer is a more serious threat than Western economic sanctions--seems to me like a serious foreign-policy goal. (Patrick Clawson is the always-thoughtful insightful Iran analyst at the Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy.)
Beyond the nuclear question, Iranian troublemaking will continue and possibly grow. A viable democracy in Iraq, where the Shi’ite clergy is an instrumental force for representative government, is an enormous nightmare in the making for Tehran. Contrary to so much bizarre commentary in the United States and Europe, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, an Iranian by birth and the spiritual leader of the Shi’ite community in Iraq, and other pro-democracy clerics are probably the most serious threat to theocracy in Iran. If Iran can cause trouble in Iraq--and fortunately I think the clerical regime’s capacity to do so has been greatly exaggerated (Iran’s allies inside the Iraqi Shi’ite community are still limited in their political maneuvering room by Sistani, the traditional clergy, and the democratic process)--it will certainly try to do so. Increasing Iranian aid to the Sunni rejectionist camp in Iraq is, however, not at all unlikely.
In Afghanistan, Iran again is no ally of the democratic process, but again, fortunately, its allies are not numerous outside of the province of Herat, and even in Herat among the Sunni Persian-speaking Tajiks who in the past took sanctuary in Iran, affection for Persians shouldn’t be overrated. Compared to Pakistani troublemaking in Afghanistan, Iranian nefarious activity will likely remain second-rate.
In Lebanon and Syria, Iran will try to cause trouble if it can. Tehran will certainly keep supporting Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s ruler, up until that moment it’s wise to transfer allegiance to another member of the Alawite ruling clan. In Lebanon, Tehran will back the Shi’ite rejectionist camp and its influence within the Hizbollah, Iran’s only true foreign child of the Islamic revolution, should not be underestimated. It will be fascinating to see how the Lebanese Shi’ite community breaks. It appears now that the majority of that community will move toward giving a new democratic Lebanon a chance, toward a new power-sharing relationship with Lebanon’s Christian Maronites. Iran has no interest in seeing this succeed, and it will be interesting to see how they try to play their friends among Lebanon’s Shi’a.
In Israel and Palestine, you can count on Iran to support whomever bombs the Israelis more. Iran has long supported the Palestinian Islamic Jihad--it could accurately be called a creation if not a tool of the clerical regime. The more violence in Israel the better. If Iran could get that violence to spill over into the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, which the clerical regime loathes, even better.
Concerning Islamic Sunni militants in general, expect a new ecumenical movement from Tehran. We should be especially sensitive to new dealings between the clerical regime and Sunni groups allied with al-Qa’ida. There is much that Tehran needs to explain about its contacts with al-Qa’ida, in particular with followers behind the Egyptian Ayman az-Zawahiri, al-Qa’ida’s number two, and a former Sunni militant poster-boy for the clerical regime in the 1980s. If the United States again intercepts transmissions from members of al-Qa’ida inside Iran to operationally-active members of al-Qa’ida outside Iran, then the Bush administration would be well advised to hit the clerical regime with something sharper than verbal warnings from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
The low point in discussing the clerical regime--and I have not yet reached the low point--is that the Bush administration hasn’t yet developed a coherent strategy for confronting and defeating the mollahs. It could be worse, of course: All we have to do is remember the Clinton administration. It’s unlikely George W. Bush will apologize to the clerical regime on behalf of the entire West. In that, at least, we may have some hope.
Testimony to US Congress
Clerical Iran
The Threat
By Reuel Marc Gerecht
TESTIMONY
House Armed Services Committee (Washington)
Publication Date: September 29, 2005
Before I describe the serious and growing problems we have with clerical Iran, let me state the obvious: America’s foreign policy toward the Islamic Republic since 1979 has largely been successful. America certainly should not take a lot of credit for the failure of Iran’s revolution--and let us be perfectly clear, for the vast majority of Iranians, including the clergy--the inqilab, as the revolution is known in Persian, has been a bust.
Credit should go first and foremost to Ayatollah Khomeini who established a theocracy at odds with Shi’ite history and the sensibilities of most Iranians, including those who are quite devout. Credit goes to the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War that eventually broke the back of Iran’s legions of die-hard holy warriors. But the United States, too, deserves credit for its consistent opposition to the regime. Although not all American administrations have been equally committed to countering the Islamic Republic and hammering it for its support of terrorism--both the first Bush administration and especially the Clinton administration wanted at one time to “engage” Iran’s ruling clergy--all American administrations since 1979 have overall realized that confrontation and containment were the only viable policies toward Tehran because the clerical regime gave them no choice. And like I said, this policy has been a success: We, not the Western Europeans, who’ve often wanted to engage the Islamic Republic even when Iran’s assassins and contracted-bombers were striking Western Europe in the 1980s, are the Westerners most admired. We are admired in great part because we have been seen by the people of Iran, and by the mullahs that rule over them, as the only serious antagonist to cl
erical power.It is worthwhile to recall how badly the Clinton administration--in particular President Clinton--wanted “to give peace a chance” with Iran during the first term of President Mohammad Khatami. Both the President and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright tried to turn apologia into foreign policy: Secretary of State Madeleine Albright apologized for the 1953 coup d’etat (an odd position given how many clerics, including Khomeini, were quite pleased to see Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq fall from power) and President Clinton apologized for the supposedly bad behavior of the entire Western world toward Iran for the last 150 years in an effort to get Tehran to extend a friendly hand. If former FBI Director Louis Freeh is to be believed, President Clinton even tried to avoid confronting the Islamic Republic for its culpability in the attack on US forces at Khobar Towers in 1996 in an effort not to spoil the possibility of a dialogue with President Khatami. I don’t mention the Clinton years to embarrass the President or Secretary Albright--I suspect both still firmly believe they did nothing embarrassing; I mention it to underscore how awful official analysis of clerical Iran has often been in the United States government. American apologies in revolutionary clerical eyes means only one thing--weakness. And showing weakness to power-politic-loving Iranian clerics is not astute. This is 101 in Iranian political culture. Yet I’m willing to bet that most analysts dealing with Iran at the State Department and the CIA probably thought American soul-searching was a good thing, that the political elite in Tehran would respect us more.
The mirror-imaging of Western, especially Western European ethics, onto Iranians has been a constant problem in the EU3 nuclear negotiations with Tehran. I’m not going to spend much time on this affair--I consider the whole process now damaging to the United States since it should be obvious to all concerned--let us be frank, it was obvious when this process first started--that the British, French, and Germans are not going to implement crippling sanctions against Iran (the modern European idea of a sanction is to deny something you have not yet promised). Modern Western Europeans simply cannot play power politics anymore--they have, as Robert Kagan has trenchantly written, evolved beyond such things. The EU3 negotiations with Iran remain as they started: For the Americans it is a vehicle for transatlantic dialogue and for the Europeans it’s a means of controlling George W. Bush, the potentially Mad Bomber.
And it’s by no means clear the United States is willing to hit Iran with serious economic sanctions either when oil is around $60 per barrel. And there is little cultural reason to believe that even if the Americans and the Europeans could devise powerful sanctions over the objections of the Russians and the Chinese--and let us not deceive ourselves, the Russians, and now quite possibly the Chinese, view clerical Iran as a strategic asset (for the Russians, it is their Saddam substitute) in the Middle East--that the ruling clerics would relent. Former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani, the father of the Iranian nuclear-weapons program, whom the Western Europeans and, I hate to say, more than a few US officials and commentators, surreally viewed as our best bet for stopping the clerical regime’s acquisition of the bomb, started this program with broad clerical support in the late 1980s. As should be blatantly obvious by now, the ruling Iranian clergy intends to see this through to its completion. The only conceivable force that could make the ruling clergy
relent is the firm conviction that George W. Bush, the Mad Bomber, WILL bomb them if they don’t. And the United States by its firm embrace of the EU3 process and the pretty public signals senior U.S. officials have sent to the Europeans that they really don’t want to even conceive of preventive military strikes against the clerical regime have substantially undermined the image abroad that George W. Bush really means it when he says that a clerical bomb is “unacceptable.” The situation looks so bad that Patrick Clawson’s quip--trying to ban Iran from international soccer is a more serious threat than Western economic sanctions--seems to me like a serious foreign-policy goal. (Patrick Clawson is the always-thoughtful insightful Iran analyst at the Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy.)Beyond the nuclear question, Iranian troublemaking will continue and possibly grow. A viable democracy in Iraq, where the Shi’ite clergy is an instrumental force for representative government, is an enormous nightmare in the making for Tehran. Contrary to so much bizarre commentary in the United States and Europe, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, an Iranian by birth and the spiritual leader of the Shi’ite community in Iraq, and other pro-democracy clerics are probably the most serious threat to theocracy in Iran. If Iran can cause trouble in Iraq--and fortunately I think the clerical regime’s capacity to do so has been greatly exaggerated (Iran’s allies inside the Iraqi Shi’ite community are still limited in their political maneuvering room by Sistani, the traditional clergy, and the democratic process)--it will certainly try to do so. Increasing Iranian aid to the Sunni rejectionist camp in Iraq is, however, not at all unlikely.
In Afghanistan, Iran again is no ally of the democratic process, but again, fortunately, its allies are not numerous outside of the province of Herat, and even in Herat among the Sunni Persian-speaking Tajiks who in the past took sanctuary in Iran, affection for Persians shouldn’t be overrated. Compared to Pakistani troublemaking in Afghanistan, Iranian nefarious activity will likely remain second-rate.
In Lebanon and Syria, Iran will try to cause trouble if it can. Tehran will certainly keep supporting Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s ruler, up until that moment it’s wise to transfer allegiance to another member of the Alawite ruling clan. In Lebanon, Tehran will back the Shi’ite rejectionist camp and its influence within the Hizbollah, Iran’s only true foreign child of the Islamic revolution, should not be underestimated. It will be fascinating to see how the Lebanese Shi’ite community breaks. It appears now that the majority of that community will move toward giving a new democratic Lebanon a chance, toward a new power-sharing relationship with Lebanon’s Christian Maronites. Iran has no interest in seeing this succeed, and it will be interesting to see how they try to play their friends among Lebanon’s Shi’a.
In Israel and Palestine, you can count on Iran to support whomever bombs the Israelis more. Iran has long supported the Palestinian Islamic Jihad--it could accurately be called a creation if not a tool of the clerical regime. The more violence in Israel the better. If Iran could get that violence to spill over into the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, which the clerical regime loathes, even better.
Concerning Islamic Sunni militants in general, expect a new ecumenical movement from Tehran. We should be especially sensitive to new dealings between the clerical regime and Sunni groups allied with al-Qa’ida. There is much that Tehran needs to explain about its contacts with al-Qa’ida, in particular with followers behind the Egyptian Ayman az-Zawahiri, al-Qa’ida’s number two, and a former Sunni militant poster-boy for the clerical regime in the 1980s. If the United States again intercepts transmissions from members of al-Qa’ida inside Iran to operationally-active members of al-Qa’ida outside Iran, then the Bush administration would be well advised to hit the clerical regime with something sharper than verbal warnings from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
The low point in discussing the clerical regime--and I have not yet reached the low point--is that the Bush administration hasn’t yet developed a coherent strategy for confronting and defeating the mollahs. It could be worse, of course: All we have to do is remember the Clinton administration. It’s unlikely George W. Bush will apologize to the clerical regime on behalf of the entire West. In that, at least, we may have some hope.
Friday, September 09, 2005
Volcker report on "oil for food" scandal
Paul Volcker's widely anticipated report about the abuses of the UN's "oil-for-food" program for Iraq (1991-2003) has been released. Critics of the UN (many of them Americans who support the invasion of Iraq and feel the UN was an obstacle to deposing Saddam) can quote plenty of lurid examples of corruption and malfeasance from the report. The report does say that the program worked to ease the suffering of Iraqi people; and as James Traub wrote in the New Republic in February, the program was designed for political reasons, to maintain support on the UN Security Council for the sanctions on Saddam, and in that sense the program worked relatively well.
The criticisms of UN secretary general Kofi Annan in the report are for his acts of omission rather than comission, for his poor oversight rather than his personal corruption. (Annan's son benefited from the program, but not apparently because of any strings his father pulled ... ask members of the Bush family about how possessing a powerful dad seems to open doors as if by magic.) The Economist calls it "a fair-minded report at a crucial time": a round of negotiations over UN reform starts next week, and this report certainly highlights the urgency of making major changes. It's interesting that the report that criticizes his management of the UN thus strengthens the hand of Kofi Annan, the most vocal proponent of meaningful reform ever to head the UN.
For more information about the oil-for-food program, go here. For a copy of the report, go here. Want a chance to hear Paul Volcker talk about "Ethics and Leadership"? Go to DePauw on September 15 at 8:00 PM.
Thursday, September 08, 2005
Egyptian election: perspectives from all over
Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak surprised no one by winning a fifth term in office by a large margin, perhaps winning 80% of the vote. Typical overviews from the Financial Times, and the New York Times. Everyone agrees that fraud and manipulation were widespread. At a charitable interpretation, Egypt is reviving an imperfect democracy that was mobibund for a very long time, glitches such as fraud are to be expected. Mubarak probably would have won a completely free and open vote. But as we saw in Ukraine last year, its what happens after manipulated elections happen that is sometimes most interesting. No coincidence that one of Mubarak's opponents chose orange as his campaign color, an explicit reference to the "Orange Revolution" that eventually toppled the apparent winner of Ukraine's rigged election. I don't think you'll see a replay of Ukraine in Egypt: in Ukraine the fraud clearly swung the outcome of the election, in Egypt most Egyptians assume ubarak would have won anyhow; the opposition to the government in Ukraine was able to unite behind a single candidate, Yushchenko, while the Egyptian opposition is badly fragmented; and Ukraine came under heavy pressure from the EU and eventually moderate pressure from the US to rerun the election, the US isn't going to do that with Egypt.
But this election will have consequences inside Egypt, in the Arab world, and in the future. The excellent Middle East Media Research Institute translates coverage from the Egyptian press, some of it quite critical of Mubarak and his government. Check out the "Arabic CNN" al-Jazeera for a taste of the news being beamed to Arab countries around the region. The former Israeli ambassador to Egypt probably has it right when he writes: "a process has begun, and it is doubtful whether the train can now be stopped. Mubarak will have to keep his promises, of further democratization, and an improved economy."
A look at the modern electoral history of Egypt:
- 1922-52: Egypt is ruled by a king and parliament. British influence is strong, and the king interferes in politics, but elections are free. Political scientists regard this as Egypt's only experience of real democracy.
- 1952: King Farouk overthrown by military group called the Free Officers.
- 1953: Free Officers proclaim a republic, dissolve political parties and appoint Gen. Mohammed Naguib as president.
- 1954: Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's leading Islamist group, is banned. Naguib is ousted and effectively replaced by Gamal Abdel Nasser, the leading Free Officer.
- 1956: Nasser elected president in a referendum in which he is the only candidate.
- 1957: Parliament restored but as a rubber-stamp institution.
- 1970: Nasser dies, succeeded by Vice-President Anwar Sadat.
- 1976: Sadat reintroduces political parties but under strict controls.
- 1981: Sadat assassinated by Islamic militants. Vice-President Hosni Mubarak, a former air force commander, succeeds.
- 1983-87: Mubarak allows limited political liberalization. Elections still rigged, but opposition increases its share of parliament. Newspapers criticize the government.
- 1992-97: Islamic insurgency erupts. Political control strengthened, reforms halted.
- 2005: Mubarak introduces multi-candidate elections for president, seen as response to U.S. calls for democracy in Egypt.
Source: Associated Press 7 September 2005
unraveling the motives of suicide bombers
You should take a look at a challenging and controversial book about suicide bombers: Robert Pape's Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Bombers. You can get more information about Pape's book (as well as others on terrorism) from The New York Review of Books. Pape analyzes all suicide boimbings from 1980-2003 and concludes that most of them are inspired by nationalist rather than religious motives and are parts of campaigns of national liberation directed against democracies that are occupiers. Among other implications, this indicates that we should withdraw from Iraq. For an example of how defenders of the US invasion of Iraq views Papes arguments, see this article from the conservative magazine Commentary.
I'll be talking more about Pape's arguments this weekend when I have a chance to finish his book.
I'll be talking more about Pape's arguments this weekend when I have a chance to finish his book.
News sources for Iraq
The best way to track Iraq is to read news from all over the world and from a diverse range of opinions. Here are some good English language sources:
Arab News comes out of Saudi Arabia: www.arabnews.com/
The Command Post collects military news from “bloggers”: www.command-post.org/
The Daily Star is based in Beirut: www.dailystar.com.lb/
Dawn is the leading Pakistani English paper: http://www.dawn.com/
DebkaFile, dedicated to Mid-East conflicts and terrorism, is based in Israel: www.debka.com
The influential Al-Jazeera has an English language website: http://english.aljazeera.net/
For a perspective from Iraq’s Kurdish minority, go to Kurdish Life: www.kurdishdaily.com/
The Middle East Media Research Institute is the best source of translations from Arab language press: www.memri.org
The Guardian in the UK is very good: www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/
Turkish Daily News: www.turkishdailynews.com/
The Tehran Times provides an Iranian perspective: www.tehrantimes.com/
Stars & Stripes is the US military’s newspaper: www.estripes.com/index.asp; the Department of Defense is www.defenselink.mil/
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Arab News comes out of Saudi Arabia: www.arabnews.com/
The Command Post collects military news from “bloggers”: www.command-post.org/
The Daily Star is based in Beirut: www.dailystar.com.lb/
Dawn is the leading Pakistani English paper: http://www.dawn.com/
DebkaFile, dedicated to Mid-East conflicts and terrorism, is based in Israel: www.debka.com
The influential Al-Jazeera has an English language website: http://english.aljazeera.net/
For a perspective from Iraq’s Kurdish minority, go to Kurdish Life: www.kurdishdaily.com/
The Middle East Media Research Institute is the best source of translations from Arab language press: www.memri.org
The Guardian in the UK is very good: www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/
Turkish Daily News: www.turkishdailynews.com/
The Tehran Times provides an Iranian perspective: www.tehrantimes.com/
Stars & Stripes is the US military’s newspaper: www.estripes.com/index.asp; the Department of Defense is www.defenselink.mil/
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