Israel and Syria: Behind the Bombs

Israel & Syria: Behind the Bombs

Dispatches From the Edge

Feb. 17, 2013

Now that the dust has settled—literally and figuratively—from Israel’s Jan. 29 air attack on Syria, the question is, why? According to Tel Aviv, the bombing was aimed at preventing the transfer of sophisticated Russian SA-17 anti-craft missiles to Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon, which one former Israeli military intelligence officer said would be “a game-changer.” But there are major problems with that story.

First, it is highly unlikely that Damascus would turn such a system over to Hezbollah, in part because the Russians would almost certainly not have allowed it, and, secondly, because the SA-17 would not be terribly useful to the Lebanese Shiite organization. In fact, we don’t even know if an SA-17 was the target. The Syrians deny it, claiming it was a military research center 15 miles northwest of Damascus that was bombed, killing two and wounding five.  The Israelis are refusing to say anything. The story that the anti-aircraft system was the objective comes mainly from unnamed “western officials.”

The SA-17 is a capable, mid-range, anti-aircraft weapon. Designated “Grizzly” by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), it consists of four missiles mounted on a mobile launcher. It has a range of 30 miles, a ceiling of close to 50,000 feet, and can down anything from aircraft to cruise missiles. Introduced in 1998 as a replacement for the SA-11 “Gadfly,” the SA-17 has been sold to Egypt, Syria, Finland, China, Venezuela, India, Cyprus, Belarus, and the Ukraine.

It has a bite. During the 2008 Russia-Georgian War, the SA-17 apparently downed three Russian SU-25s close support attack planes, and an ancient long-range Tupolev-22 bomber. It appears Georgia acquired the anti-aircraft system from the Ukraine without the Russians knowing about it.

The SA-17’s manufacturers claim the system is immune to electronic countermeasures, but every arms maker claims their weapons are irresistible or invincible. The SU-25s and the bomber were downed in the first day of the fighting, before the Russians figured out that the Georgians had a trick up their sleeves and instituted countermeasures. Those apparently worked because the four planes were the only ones the Russians lost. Clearly, however, if one gets careless or sloppy around a “Grizzly,” it can make you pretty uncomfortable.

But “game-changer”? The SA-17 is big and vulnerable, a sitting duck for aircraft armed with long-range bombs and missiles and backed up by electronic warfare capabilities. Israeli counter warfare electronics are very sophisticated, as good—if not better—than the American’s. In 2007 Israeli warplanes slipped through the Syrian radar net without being detected and bombed a suspected nuclear reactor. Damascus acquired the SA-17 following that 2007 attack.

Given that there is open talk by NATO of establishing a “no-fly zone” over Syria, why would Damascus hand over one of its most modern anti-aircraft systems to Hezbollah? And what would Hezbollah do with it? It is too big to hide and is generally used as one piece of a larger anti-aircraft system, which Hezbollah does not have. In any case, it would have been a provocation, and neither Hezbollah nor Syria wants to give the Israelis an excuse to beat up on them. Both have plenty on their plates without adding war with a vastly superior military foe.

In brief, there is no evidence that the attack had anything to do with the SA-17, which, in any case, both Tel Aviv and Washington know would not pose any real danger to Israel. According to UPI, the attack was cleared with the U.S.

So what are some other possible reasons for the attack?

The most obvious target is the Assad regime in Syria, which at first glance would seem to be a contradiction. Wouldn’t Israel bombing Syria unite the Arab countries behind Damascus? Indeed, there were condemnations from the Arab League, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, and even some of Assad’s Syrian opponents—although the Gulf Cooperation Council, the league of oil-rich monarchies bankrolling the Syrian civil war, was notably quiet.

But the “protests” were mostly pro-forma, and in the case of Turkey, rather bizarre. Ankara has played a major role in supplying the anti-Assad insurgents, deploying Patriot missiles on its border with Syria, and demanding that the president of Syria step down. Yet Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu denounced Assad for not “upholding the dignity of his country” and retaliating against Israel.

According to press reports, Israel is strengthening its forces on the occupied Golan Heights that border Syria and preparing to establish a buffer zone on the Syrian side. Israel established a similar “buffer” in Lebanon following its 1982 invasion of that country, a “buffer” that eventually led to the formation of Hezbollah and a humiliating Israeli retreat in 2000.

Israel claims it has no dog in the Syrian fight and is supposedly worried about Islamic extremists coming out on top in the civil war. But for all the hype about Islamists leading a jihad against Israel, Tel Aviv knows that al-Qaeda and its allies pose no serious threat to Israel. It is good politics (and good theater)—in Washington, as well as Tel Aviv—to cry, “the turbans are coming” (quick, give us lots of money and your constitution), but religious extremism and Sharia law hardly pose an existential danger to nuclear-armed countries with large militaries. Fighters from the salafist Jabhat al-Nusrah will not get far marching on Jerusalem.

The bombing attack was certainly a slap in the face to Assad, but not the first, and seems less directed at the Damascus regime than adding yet another ingredient to the witch’s brew of chaos that is rapidly engulfing Syria and the surrounding countries. And chaos and division in the region have always been Israel’s allies. Divide and conquer is an old colonial tactic dating back to the Roman Empire. After World War I, the English used Jews and Arabs as pawns in a game to control the British Mandate in Palestine. In short, the Israelis have learned from the best.

The growing sectarian war between Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds stirred up by the Syrian civil war lets Israel stand on the sidelines. Who is going to notice the steady encroachment of settlements on Palestinian lands when the Syria war has killed some 60,000 people, created almost 800,000 refugees, and is destabilizing Lebanon, Iraq, and Jordan?

Lastly, there is Iran. Getting rid of Assad would remove one of Iran’s major allies in the region, and also weaken Shiite Hezbollah, the organization that fought Israel to a standstill in 2006.  Assad, says former Israeli Gen. Michael Herzog, “is a linchpin of the radical Iran-Hezbollah axis…his fall would therefore deal a major blow to Tehran, significantly weaken Hezbollah and dismantle the trilateral axis.”

Sectarian chaos in Syria is already washing over into Iraq, where a brutal bombing campaign by Sunni extremists is fueling talk about re-establishing Shiite militias to defend their communities. Islamists are also increasingly active in Lebanon and Jordan.

For several years the U.S. and the Sunni-dominated Middle East monarchies have warned about the dangers of a “Shiite crescent” of Iran, Iraq, and Hezbollah. But the idea of a “crescent” was always more hype than reality—Shiites make up about 15 percent of the region, and are majorities only in Iraq, Iran and Bahrain. Lebanese Shiites constitute a plurality. In general, Shiites are the poorest section of the Muslim community and with the exception of Iran and Syria, have long been marginalized politically.  Shiite “domination” has always been a bug-a-boo, not very real but useful for stoking the fires of sectarianism.

And sectarianism is on the march today in the Middle East, financed by the cash-rich Gulf monarchies and the hostility of the U.S. and its allies to authoritarian secular governments. While NATO overthrew the Libyan government and aids the Syrian insurgency in the name of democracy, it has no qualms about supporting the absolute monarchs that rule from Morocco in the west to Saudi Arabia in the east.

Was the ease with which the Israelis penetrated Syrian air space a message to Teheran as well? Certainly although the odds on Israel attacking Iran sometime this spring are rather low (though hardly non-existent). Israel could do a lot of damage to Iran, but it doesn’t have the weapons or the air power to take out Teheran’s nuclear program. Plus the Iranians, while angry about the onerous sanctions—and cranky as ever about negotiations—are carefully diverting their nuclear stockpiles into civilian use.

Israel would need the U.S. to really beat up on Iran, and that does not seem to be the direction that the Obama administration is moving. An attack on Iran would isolate Israel and the U.S. diplomatically, and deeply fracture NATO at a time when Washington is desperately trying to keep the alliance together.

In any case, Tel Aviv and Washington are well aware that Iran does not pose an “existential” threat to Israel. Even if Iran were to build several nuclear weapons—and there is no evidence that they have any intention of doing so—it would face an Israel armed with between 100 and 200 nuclear weapons, enough to destroy Iran as a society. Even Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak admits Iran does not pose a threat to Israel’s existence.

If there is one thing that the bombing has accomplished, it is to thicken the walls between Israel and the rest of the Middle East. Tel Aviv is deploying anti-missile systems on its northern border and handing out gas masks in the Galilee. It is beefing up its presence in the Golan Heights, and reinforcing its border with Egypt. In the meantime, the Netanyahu administration just announced yet another round of settlement building.

Whether division and chaos, along with those walls and missiles and gas masks, will keep the surrounding anarchy at bay is altogether another matter. Bricks and bombs never produce real security.

 

—30—

Turkey Haunted by Hubris

Turkey Haunted by Hubris

Dispatches From The Edge

Conn Hallinan

Nov. 1, 2012

Two years ago Turkey was on its way to being a player in Central Asia, a major power broker in the Middle East, and a force in international politics. It had stepped in to avoid a major escalation of the 2008 war between Georgia and Russia by blocking U.S. ships from entering the Black Sea, made peace with its regional rivals, and, along with Brazil, made a serious stab at a peaceful resolution of the Iran nuclear crisis.

Today it is exchanging artillery rounds with Syria. Its relations with Iraq have deteriorated to the point that Baghdad has declared Ankara a “hostile state.” It picked a fight with Russia by forcing down a Syrian passenger plane and accusing Moscow of sending arms to the regime of Bashar al-Assad. It angered Iran by agreeing to host a U.S. anti-missile system (a step which won Turkey no friends in Moscow either). Its war with its Kurdish minority has escalated sharply.

What happened? The wages of religious solidarity? Ottoman de’je vu?

There is some truth in each of those suggestions, but Turkey’s diplomatic sea change has less to do with the Koran and memories of empire than with Illusions and hubris. It is a combination that is hardly rare in the Middle East, and one that now promises to upend years of careful diplomacy, accelerate unrest in the region, and drive Turkey into an alliance with countries whose internal fragility should give the Turks pause.

If there is a ghost from the past in all this, it is a growing alliance between Turkey and Egypt.

Population-wise, the two countries are among the largest in the region, and both have industrial bases in an area of the world where industry was actively discouraged by a century of colonial overlords (the Turks among them). Ankara recently offered $2 billion in aid to cash-strapped Egypt, and both countries have moderate Islamic governments. Cairo and Ankara have also supported the overthrow of the Assad regime.

“Apparently now Egypt is Turkey’s closest partner in the Middle East,” Gamel Soltan of American University in Cairo told the New York Times. But while Egypt was once the Ottoman’s wealthiest provinces, 2012 is not the world of sultans and pashas, and, in this case, old memories may well be a trap.

Egypt is deeply mired in poverty and inequality. Indeed, it was as much the economic crisis gripping the region as issues of democracy and freedom that filled Tahrir Square. Cairo is in serious debt and preparing a round of austerity measures that will sharpen that inequality. The government of President Mohamed Morsi announced it will slice gas subsidies, which will fall particularly hard on the poor, especially given a jobless rate of over 12 percent and youth unemployment running at more than double that.

At first glance, both governments have a lot in common, particularly because Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood are considered “moderately” Islamic. But many in the Brotherhood consider the AKP and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan far too “moderate”—in Turkey it is still illegal to wear a head scarf if you run for public office or work in a government office.   While the West considers Morsi’s and Erdogan’s government “Islamic,” some of the jihadists groups Cairo and Ankara are aiding in their efforts to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria consider the Egyptian and Turkish government little more than non-believers or apostates.  As Middle East expert Robert Fisk puts it, the jihadists are a scorpion that might, in the end, sting them both, much as the Taliban has done to its Pakistani sponsors.

Turkey apparently hopes to construct a triangle among Ankara, Cairo, and the wealthy oil monarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council—Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates (Jordan and Morocco, two other monarchies, have been asked to join). The combination of population, industry, and wealth, goes the thinking, would allow that alliance to dominate the region.

The Council does have enormous wealth at its disposal, but how stable are autocratic monarchies in the wave of the democratic aspirations raised by the Arab Spring? Bahrain’s king rules through the force of the Saudi Army. Saudi Arabia itself is struggling to provide jobs and housing for its growing population, while weighed down by inequality, high unemployment, rampant corruption, and a restive Shia minority in its eastern provinces. Jordan’s monarch is wrestling with an economic crisis and a political opposition that is pressuring king Abdullah II for a constitutional monarchy.

How this new alliance will affect the Palestinians is not clear. Turkey had a falling out with Israel in 2009, and Egypt and Qatar have been sharply critical of Tel Aviv’s treatment of the Palestinians. So far, however, it appears the Islamic group Hamas in Gaza will benefit more than the secular Palestinian National Authority in the West Bank.

With the exception of Bahrain, all the countries involved have large Sunni majorities that, at first glance, would put them on the same page religiously. But most the Gulf monarchs are aligned with radical Islamic groups, some of which have morphed into al-Qaeda-like organizations that have destabilized countries from Pakistan to Iraq. On occasion, these groups have turned on their benefactors, as Osama bin Laden did on Saudi Arabia.

Such Islamic groups are increasingly active in the Syrian civil war, where Turkey finds itself in a very similar role to the one played by Pakistan during the 1979-89 Soviet-Afghan war. Some of the groups Pakistan nurtured during those years have now turned on their patrons. Will Turkey become the next Pakistan? In an interview with the Financial Times, one Syrian insurgent said that many of the rebels were stockpiling ammunition for “after the revolution.”

Bulent Alizira of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told the Financial Times that Turkey is in danger of becoming “like Pakistan, which became the forward base for the Afghan rebels. If that were to happen, it could confront all the pressures that Pakistan faced and from which it has never recovered.”

And why would the Erdogan government pick a fight with Russia? Russia is a major trading partner, and Turkey is keen on establishing good relations with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) founded by Russia and China in 2001. The organization includes most of the countries in Central Asia, plus observers from India, Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan. The SCO accounts for 75 percent of the world’s energy resources and population, and coordinates everything from trade to oil and gas pipelines. Why would Ankara irritate one of the major players in the SCO?

Might it be pique at Moscow for blocking more aggressive measures by the UN Security Council to intervene in the Syrian civil war?  Russia, along with China, has consistently called for a political resolution to the Syria crisis, while Turkey has pursued a strategy of forcible regime change.  Erdogan has a reputation for arrogance and letting his temper get the best of him.

“His personal ambitions and overweening certainties may be eclipsing his judgment,” Morton Abramowitz of the Century Foundation told UPI, “and affecting Turkish interests.” Abramowitz served in the Carter and Reagan administrations and was appointed ambassador to Turkey from 1989 to 1991. He is also a director at the National Endowment for Democracy.

Relations between Turkey and Iran have also cooled, in part because of the U.S. anti-missile system, but also because Ankara is trying to overthrow one of Iran’s few allies in the region. In any case, backing Sunni jihadists against the Alawite Assad regime is hardly going to go down well in Shia Iran, or for that matter, in Shia Iraq. The Alawites are a branch of Shism.

Why, too would Turkey alienate major trading partners like Iran and Iraq? It is possible that the wealthy monarchies of the Gulf—who are anti-Shia and view Iran as their greatest threat— made Ankara an offer it can’t refuse. Whether the monarchies can deliver in the long run is another matter.

In the meantime, the Syrian war has unleashed the furies.

*Car bombs have made their appearance one again in Lebanon.

*The Kurds have bloodied the Turkish Army.

*Hundreds of thousands of refugees have poured out of Syria, and the fighting inside the country is escalating.

*Anti-aircraft missiles—the Russian SAM-7, or Strela, most likely “liberated” during the Libya war—have made an appearance. The hand-fired missiles may indeed discomfort Syrian aircraft, but if they get into the hands of the Kurds, Turkish helicopters will be in trouble as well, as will any number of other air forces, from Lebanon to Jordan. A Strela was fired at an Israeli aircraft in the Gaza Strip Oct. 16.

Turkey’s role in the Syrian civil war finds little resonance among average Turks. Some 56 percent disagree with the policy, and 66 percent oppose allowing Syrian refugees into the country.

“We are at a very critical juncture,” journalist Melih Asik told the New York Times. “We are not only facing Syria, but Iran, Iraq, Russia and China. Behind us we have nothing but the provocative stance and empty promises of the US.”

Four years ago Turkey set out to build strong ties with other countries in the region—“zero problems with the neighbors”—and decrease its dependence on the US. Today those policy goals are in shambles. But that is where illusion and hubris lead.

—30—

Moral Drones and the New York Times

Moral Drones and the New York Times

Dispatches From the Edge

July 8, 2012

 “…it may be a surprise to find some moral philosophers, political scientists, and weapons specialists believe unmanned aircraft offer marked moral advantages over almost any other tool of warfare.”—Scott Shane, national security reporter for the New York Times, “The Moral Defense For Drones,” 7/15/12

First, one should never be surprised to find that the NY Times can ferret out experts to say virtually anything. Didn’t they dig up those who told us all that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons? Second, whenever the newspaper uses the words “some,” that’s generally a tipoff the dice are loaded, in this case with a former Air Force officer (who teaches philosophy at the Naval Postgraduate School), a former CIA deputy chief of counterintelligence, and political scientist Avery Plaw, author of  “Targeting Terrorists: A License To Kill?”

Shane has a problem, which he solves by a nimble bit of legerdemain: he starts off by raising the issue of law, sovereignty, radicalizing impact, and proliferation dangers (in three brief sentences), then quickly shifts to the contention that “most critics” have “focused on evidence that they [drones] are unintentionally killing innocent civilians.”

He doesn’t present any evidence that most criticism has focused on the collateral damage issue, but this allows him to move to the article’s centerpiece: “the drones kill fewer civilians than other modes of warfare.”

Actually, critics have focused on a wide number of issues concerning drones. Is using drones in a country with which we are not at war, and one that opposes their use, a violation of international law? Is targeting an individual a form of extrajudicial capital punishment? Is killing American citizens a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of a trial by a jury of one’s peers? Is the use of armed drones by the White House bypassing the constitutional role of Congress to declare war? Does the role of the CIA in directing killer drones violate the prescriptions of the Geneva Convention against civilians engaging in armed conflicts?

But for argument’s sake, let’s focus on the point about civilian casualties. According to Shane, the professor of philosophy has found that “drones do a better job at both identifying the terrorist and avoiding collateral damage than anything else we have.” Shane adds that the drone operators “can even divert a missile after firing if, say, a child wanders into range.”

Nice touch about the kid, but according to London-base Bureau of Investigtive Journalists, *as of February of this year, drones have killed some 60 children, among between 282 to 535 civilians. Other estimates of civilian deaths are much higher.

But, points out the Times, the kill ratio suffered by civilians when Pakistan took back the Swat Valley from its local Taliban, and when Israel goes after Hamas, are much higher. And then, quoting the CIA guy: “Look at the firebombing of Dresden, and compare it with what we are doing today.” In short, civilians should be thankful they are not subjected to the brutality of the Pakistani and Israeli armies, or firebombed into oblivion?

Shane manages to avoid mentioning Part IV of the additions to the Geneva Conventions (1977) on the protection of civilian populations “Against the Effects of Hostilities.” Article 49 and 50 are particularly relevant. Essentially they boil down to the stipulation that only “military objectives” can be targeted.

The Time’s security expert also fails to mention the policy of “signature strikes,” which means anyone carrying weapons, or hanging out in a house used by “militants,” is fair game. “Signature strikes” are an explicit violation of Article 50: “The presence within the civilian population of individuals who do not come within the definition of civilians does not deprive the population of its civilian character.”

Of course, none of us know what criteria are used to identify someone as a “militant” or a “terrorist,” because the Obama administration refuses to release the legal findings that define those categories. In Yemen, many of the targeted “terrorists” are not Al Qaeda members, but southern separatists who have been fighting to re-establish the Republic of South Yemen. In any case, people are being killed and we have no idea how they ended up sentenced to death.

For instance, it is apparently a capital offense to try to rescue people following a drone strike, or to go to the funeral for those killed. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, some 50 rescuers have been killed, and more than 20 mourners. Many of these small villages have strong kinship ties, and helping out or mourning the dead is a powerful cultural tradition. Acting as a kinsman to someone the White House defines as an “enemy” may end up being fatal.

In some ways the civilian deaths are a straw man, not because they are not important, but because “critics” have focused on a wide number of issues brought up by the drones. Among them is the apparent dismantling of Congress’s constitutional role in declaring war. When some members of Congress raised this issue with respect to the Libyan War, and whether it fell under the rubric of the Wars Power Act, the Obama administration argued that it did not, because the Libya operation did not “involve the use of U.S. ground troops, U.S. casualties, or a serious threat thereof.”

But as Peter Singer of the Brookings Institute points out, the Libyan operation certainly involved “something we used to think of as war: blowing up stuff, lots of it.” The U.S. air war was the key to overthrowing Qaddafi. U.S. planes and drones carried out attacks and directed strikes by allied aircraft. The Americans also resupplied allied aircraft with bombs and missiles, and provided in-air refueling.

Given the enormous expansion of drones, the definition of war as limited to acts likely to lead to “casualties” opens up a Pandora’s box. The U.S. currently has more than 7,000 drones, many of them, like the Predator and the Reaper, are armed. The U.S. Defense Department plans to spend about $31 billion on “remotely piloted aircraft” by 2015, and the U.S. Air Force is training more remote operators than pilots for its fighters and bombers.

Fleets of armed drones could be released to fight wars all over the world, with casualties limited to mechanical failures or the occasional drone that wandered too close to an anti-aircraft system. Under the White House’s definition, what those drones did, and whom they did it to, is none of Congress’s business.

What in the Constitution gives the power of life and death over U.S. citizens to the President of the United States? The militant American-Yemini cleric Anwar-al-Awlaki was no admirer of the U.S., but there is no public finding that he ever did anything illegal. Never the less, a drone-fired Hellfire missile killed him last October. And a few weeks later, another drone killed his Denver-born 16-year old son, Abdulraham-al-Awlaki, who was out looking for his father. Ibrahim-al-Banna was the target of that strike, but as one U.S. official told Time, the son was in the “wrong place at the wrong time.” That particular statement is an explicit violation of Article 50 of the Conventions.

“The question is, is killing always justified?” asks University of Texas at El Paso political scientist Armin Krisnan. “There is not public accountability for that.”

The Yemen strike has sparked outrage in that country, as have other drone strikes. “This is why AQAP [Al Qadea in the Arabian Peninsula] is much stronger in Yemen today that it was a few years ago,” says Ibrahim Mothana, co-founder of Yemen’s Watan Party.

There are lots of critics raising lots of difficult to answer questions, and they focus on much more than civilian casualties (although that is a worthy topic of consideration). The “moral” case for drones is not limited to the parameters set by the NY Times. In any case, the issue is not the morality of drones; they have none. Nor do they have politics or philosophy. They are simply soulless killing machines. The morality at play is with those who define the targets and push the buttons that incinerate people we do not know half a world away.

—-30—-

Dear Conn,

Thanks for referencing the Bureau’s work in your International Policy Digest piece.

A quick correction – the drone data you cite from us is out of date (it looks like Obama-only numbers from a few months back)

Presently we report (for Pakistan alone) from 2004 to today

Total US strikes: 335 
Obama strikes: 283 
Total reported killed: 2,513-3,226 
Civilians reported killed: 482-835 
Children reported killed: 175 
Total reported injured: 1,198-1,324
http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/projects/drones/

Do let me know if you ever need numbers crunching for your work – we’re always happy to oblige,

best
Chris
–

Chris Woods
Senior Reporter
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

Twitter: @chrisjwoods

The Myddleton Building, 167-173 Goswell Road
London  EC1V 7HD
M (+44 (0)7711 633528
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Syria: A Way Out

Syria: A Way Out?

Dispatches From the Edge

There are two tales about the crisis in Syria.

In one, the vast majority of Syrians have risen up against the brutality of a criminal dictatorship. The government of Bashar al Assad is on the ropes, isolated regionally and internationally, and only holding on because Russia and China vetoed United Nations intervention. U.S. Secretary to State Hillary Clinton describes Assad as “a war criminal,” and President Barak Obama called him a “dead man walking.”

In the other, a sinister alliance of feudal Arab monarchies, the U.S. and its European allies, and al-Qaeda mujahedeen are cynically using the issue of democracy to overthrow a government most Syrians support, turn secular Syria into an Islamic stronghold, and transform Damascus into a loyal ally of Washington and Saudi Arabia against Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

Like most stories, there is truth and fiction in both versions, but separating myth from reality is desperately important, because Syria sits at the strategic heart of the Middle East. Getting it wrong could topple dominoes from Cairo to Ankara, from Beirut to Teheran.

There is no question but that last March’s demonstrations were a spontaneous reaction to the Syrian government’s arrest and torture of some school children in Deraa. What is more, that the corruption of the Assad family—they dominate the army, the security forces, and much of the telecommunications, banking and construction industry, coupled with the suffocating and brutal security forces, underlies the anger that fuels the uprising.

But is also true that outside players—specifically the monarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the U.S., as well as Sunni extremist organizations—all have irons in the fire. Indeed, there is the profound irony that, while the GCC condemns Syria for oppressing its citizens, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain are crushing homegrown democratic movements in their own countries. Or that Washington should be on the same page as Ayman al-Zawahiri, the current leader of al-Qaeda.

And while there is no denying the brutality of the Assad regime, or that some 7,500 to 8,000 Syrians have died over the past year, Israel’s 2008-09 invasion of Gaza—Operation Cast Lead—killed a greater percentage of Palestinians per capita. When countries in the region tried to stop the Gaza War, it was the U.S. who blocked any UN action. In the Middle East, double standards and hypocrisy are par for the course.

The Syrian crisis is not a simple “good guys vs. bad guys,” democrats vs. a dictator, with the overwhelming majority confronting an entrenched, thuggish elite.

First, while the current uprising represents a substantial number of Syrians, the Assad regime has domestic support. As Jonathan Steele of the Guardian (UK) points out, a recent You Gov Siraj poll on Syria commissioned by The Doha Debates and funded by Qatar found that, while a majority of non-Syrian Arabs wanted Assad to resign, 55 percent of Syrians wanted him to remain.

The poll was hardly a ringing endorsement of Assad—half of that 55 percent wanted free elections—but it reflects the fact that most Syrians fear a civil war. That is hardly a surprise. The U.S. invasion and subsequent civil war in Iraq flooded Syria with millions of refugees and terrible tales of murder, torture, and sectarian bloodshed. And Syrians had a front row seat for Lebanon’s 15-year civil war.

A Syrian dissident, Salim Kheirbek, told the New Yorker “No more than thirty percent of the people are involved in the resistance. The other 70 percent, if not actually with the regime, are silent, because it is not convincing to them, and especially after what happened in Iraq and Libya. These people want reforms, but not at any price.”

While the recent referendum on reforming the Syrian constitution was widely dismissed by the U.S., Europe and the GCC, it appears that close to 60 percent of the voters turned out to overwhelmingly endorse the proposals.

Part of the Assad regime’s support comes from minority communities, in particular Christians and Alawites, who, make up 10 percent and 12 percent respectively, of Syria’s 24 million people. Alawites are a variety of Shiite, and the sect dominates the government. Sunnis make up the majority. Syria also has Kurdish, Druze, Armenian, Bedouin, and Turkomen communities. It is estimated that the country has 47 different religious and ethnic groups.

Alawites and Christians have reason for concern. As a recent New York Times story reported, demonstrators in Hom, one of the centers of the uprising, chanted “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the grave.” Al-Qaeda routinely describes Shiites as “a bone in Islam’s throat” and targets Shiite communities in Iraq and Pakistan.

Nor is Syria isolated regionally or internationally. While the Arab League has condemned the Assad government, not everyone in the organization is on board. Damascus has support in Lebanon and Iraq, and neutrality from Jordan (Amman also remembers the chaos of the Iraq war).  Algeria—North Africa’s big dog on the block—has been sharply critical of the League.

“The Arab League is no longer a league and it’s far from Arab,” Algerian State Minister Abdelaziz Belkhadam told Agence France Presse, “since it asks the Security Council to intervene against one of the [the League’s] founding members, and calls upon NATO to destroy the resources of Arab countries.”

On Feb. 15, the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly for Assad to step down, but countries like Brazil and India, while deploring the violence, have made it clear they oppose anything involving military intervention or arming the main opposition force, the Free Syrian Army (FSA). Even Turkey, while calling for Assad’s resignation, has begun hedging its bets, and dropped any talk of creating “safe zones” along its border with Syria.

Most countries fear that a Syrian civil war would spread to Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, and maybe into the Gulf states.

While the situation on the ground in Syria is hardly clear, the Syrian Army and security services appear to be sticking with Assad for now. If that continues, the rebels may keep the pot  boiling, but, without outside intervention by NATO, it is unlikely they can overthrow the regime. On the other hand, after a year of fighting, Damascus has not succeeded in ending the rebellion.

It short, it looks like a stalemate, in which case the current campaign to aid the rebels and force Syria’s president out is exactly the wrong strategy and one guaranteed to prolong the bloodshed.

Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and several U.S. senators have called for arming the FSA, a particularly bad idea because it is not at all clear who they are. There are persistent reports that the organization includes a goodly number of jihadists from Iraq, Libya, and Saudi Arabia. In any case, handing out weapons to people you don’t know, to fight people you don’t like is a formula for repeating the Afghanistan disaster.

Second, the demand for regime change—and threats to charge Assad and those around him with war crimes—makes this a war to the death. Why would the Damascus government compromise if the end game is exile and prison?

The only solution to a stalemate is negotiations. The Russians have offered to host such talks, but so far the fractious Syrian National Council says it won’t talk until Assad resigns. The U.S. and the GCC have similar positions. However, talks will only work if both sides have an incentive to enter them, which means dropping the regime change demand, ending the sanctions, and shelving any talk of aiding the FSA.

Maybe events have gone too far, but at this point that doesn’t appear to be the case. Instead of condemning them, the Russians and the Chinese should be encouraged to negotiate a ceasefire and the opposition should take up the Russian’s offer to host talks with the Assad government. The recent referendum can serve as a jumping off point for re-writing the constitution.

For this to happen, however, the regional players, the U.S., and the European Union will have to stop using Syria as a proxy battleground. As Dan Meridor, Israel’s intelligence Minister, told the New York Times, supporting the Syrian uprising was important because, “If the unholy alliance of Iran, Syria and Hezbollah can be broken, that is very positive.”

For whom? Is this about freedom and democracy, or a calculated move on a regional chessboard?

—30—

Lebanon: Roots of the Crisis

Lebanon: Roots of the Crisis

Dispatches From The Edge

Jan. 11, 2011

Viewed through the prism of the American mainstream media, Lebanon always appears a place that best defines the term Byzantine: a bewildering mélange of different religions, rival militias, cagey politicians, and shadowy regional proxies taking orders from Teheran, Tel Aviv, Damascus, Riyadh, and Ankara.

Lebanon is a complex place indeed, but it is not quite the labyrinth it is made out to be, and, if France, the United States, and Israel would stop putting their irons in the fire, the country’s difficulties are wholly resolvable.  But solutions will require some understanding of the pressures that have forged the current crisis, forces that lie deep in Lebanon’s colonial past. While history is not the American media’s strong suit, to ignore it in Lebanon is to misunderstand the motivations of the key players.

Lebanon, like a number of other countries in the region—Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Israel, to name a few—is a child of colonialism, created from the wreckage of the World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The colonial power in Lebanon was France, although Paris’ interest in the area goes back to 1861. In that year the French helped Maronite Christians establish a “sanjack,” or separate administrative region around Mt. Lebanon within the Ottoman Empire.

Christian Maronites and French Catholics were natural allies, and the French saw the potential of controlling traffic going from the Mediterranean coast to inland Mesopotamia. For their part, the Maronites had picked up a powerful ally for their dreams of creating a “Greater Lebanon” that would take in not only the mountains they lived in, but the fertile Bakaa Valley to the east and the rich coastline to the west.

Lebanon’s mountains are mostly Christian dominated, though not all Christians are Maronites. There are also Greek and Syrian Orthodox, Armenians, Copts, and Roman Catholics.  But the Bakaa—the northern extension of Africa’s Great Rift Valley—is mostly Muslim, as is much of the coastal plain.  The Muslims themselves are divided between Shiites and Sunnis. As in much of the Middle East, Shiites have been marginalized politically and economically.

Those divisions were set in stone when the great imperial powers carved up the corpse of the Ottoman Empire at San Remo in 1920. France got “Greater Lebanon,” while the British seized oil-rich Mesopotamia—modern Iraq, Kuwait, Jordan and Israel. Since Britain already had Egypt, it now dominated the Persian Gulf, and hence Iran’s oil, as well as the Red Sea. While Lebanon may have seemed small potatoes in that exchange, it was the gateway to Damascus and the easiest land route for land-based goods going east and west. It also became the banking capital of the Middle East, with the French skimming off the cream. Manufactured goods flowed east, raw materials and gold flowed west.

“Greater Lebanon,” however, was formed by slicing off a big hunk of western Syria. Indeed, many Syrians still think of Lebanon as “occupied.” Since the Maronites were France’s allies, they got to run the place, and the Sunnis and Shiites—particularly the Shiites—took the hindmost.  The latter became day laborers and peasants, squeezed by absentee landlords and taxed and exploited by the colonial government.

In many ways, Lebanon resembled Ireland, where religion was used to drive a wedge between landless Catholics and privileged Protestants. In reality, Protestants were also exploited, but the fact that they also had rights and privileges denied the Catholics—including the right to own land— kept the two communities divided and easily manipulated by the British.

And so it was in Lebanon. There the religious mix was more complex—it also included a sizable minority of Druze—but the strategy of divide and conquer through the use of religious and ethnic divisions was much the same. Those divisions pretty much defined the country until two great catastrophes befell Lebanon: the 1975-1990 civil war and the 1982 Israeli invasion and occupation.

It was the Israeli invasion that ignited the Shiite community and led to the creation of Hezbollah. And it was Hezbollah that finally drove Israel out of southern Lebanon, though it took 18 years of ambushes and roadside bombs to make the price of occupation unacceptable. And, for the first time in Lebanese history the Shiite community had a voice. It is the sound of that voice we are hearing these days.

Shiites are not a majority in Lebanon, but they may be a plurality. Christian communities likely make up about 32 percent of the population, and the Druze 5 percent, although no one actually knows how large each community is. There has not been a census since 1932, because the Christians, in particular, are nervous about what it would show. Political power in Lebanon is divided up on the basis of ethnicity.

The Israelis characterize Hezbollah as an Iranian proxy, and the Americans dismiss the organization as terrorist. Indeed, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently warned that the U.S. would cut off aid to Lebanon if a government friendly to Hezbollah emerges from the current crisis. The Americans are currently backing away from that threat.

But Hezbollah is not al-Qaeda, it is a homegrown organization that represents the long pent-up frustrations of the Shiite community, nor is it a cat’s paw for Iran, and any thought that the organization would go to war because Teheran ordered it to is just silly. For starters, Lebanese Shiites are very different than their Iranian counterparts. The latter come from a strain of Shiism that believes clerics and religious figures should govern directly. Lebanese Shiites think political power eventually corrupts religion, which is why they are backing Sunni Najib Mikati for the post of prime minister. Under Lebanon’s ethnic-driven system, that office must go to a Sunni.

As for the “terrorism” charge: That all depends on how you define the term. There is no question that Hezbollah has used assassinations and bombs to deal with its enemies, but then so have Israel and the U.S. In any case, Hezbollah is a major player in Lebanese politics, and any attempt to sideline it is the one thing that actually might touch off a civil war.

The current uproar was sparked by the refusal of former Prime Minister Saad Hariri to reject the findings of a United Nations-backed Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL)  investigating the death of Hariri’s father, Rafik al-Hariri, in a massive bomb attack in 2005. The bombing led to the so-called “Cedar Revolution” that pushed Syria out of Lebanon and brought Saad Hariri into power.

The  STL investigation is apparently ready to pin the blame for the attack on Hezbollah, and when Hariri backed the Tribunal’s findings, Hezbollah withdrew its allies and the government collapsed.

Reading U.S. press accounts, one would assume that an unbiased investigation found Hezbollah the guilty party and that the Shiite organization ignited the crisis to avoid getting blamed. But a closer look suggests that the STL’s case is less than a slam-dunk.  An investigation by the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) late last year found several key witnesses had apparently lied to the Tribunal, including the man responsible for Hiriri’s security that day, Lebanese Colonel Wisam Hassan.

The Tribunal started off blaming the Syrians, then jailed four Lebanese generals—after four years, the generals were released for lack of evidence—and finally settled on the Shiite organization. Hezbollah presented documents to the STL this past summer indicating that the Israelis were monitoring Hariri the day of the assassination and may have been behind the bombing. If so it would notbe the first time that Tel Aviv has resorted to assassination in Lebanon. But the STL has not questioned any Israeli officials to date, nor has it examined Hassan’s alibi, one that the CBC called “flimsy, to put it mildly.”

Chief UN inspector Garry Loeppky considered Hassan a suspect in the murder, but the Tribunal refused to investigate his alibi because, according to the CBC investigation, he was considered “too valuable to alienate.” Hariri says Hassan’s loyalty is “beyond question.”

Hezbollah and its allies are also upset that the STL leaked its investigation to the Israeli Chief of Staff, General Gabi Ashkenazi, as well as the CBC, Der Spiegel, and the French newspaper Le Figaro.

It may be that Hezbollah—or a rogue element within the organization—is behind the bombing, but the STL’s consistent missteps have lost it a good deal of credibility, and many in the region view it as deeply politicized, and little more than a way for France and the U.S. to pressure Syria and Hezbollah.

In any case, the crisis in Lebanese politics is not over “terrorists” seizing a government. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said in a speech Jan. 23 that his organization wanted a national unity government and that “We are not seeking authority.” A U.S. effort to influence who governs in Beirut has not been well received. “Mikati is not coming to power by force of a coup or by civil unrest,” said Hassan Khalil, publisher of the Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar, “Mikati is coming to power by the parliamentary system of Lebanon.”

Nor is this a proxy war between Iran and Israel. It is an attempt by Lebanese players to rebalance and reconfigure a political system that has long favored a rich and powerful minority at the expense of the majority. The U.S., France and others may want to turn this into an international crisis—Israeli Vice Prime Minister Silvan Shalom called it an “Iranian government” on Israel’s northern border— but its roots and solutions are local.

Certainly there is a role for regional powers, including Turkey, Syria, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. But talk of proxy wars or a triumph for “terrorists” is the language of war and chaos, something the Lebanese are heartily sick of.

–30–

The ‘Uniquely’ Dangerous lebanon Border

The ‘Uniquely’ Dangerous Lebanon Border

Dispatches From the Edge

August, 31, 2010

While the Middle East—indeed, the world—is riveted by the on-going crisis around Iran’s nuclear program, the most immediate danger of a war may be on Israel’s border with Lebanon: “Exceptionally quiet and uniquely dangerous” was how the Independent’s Robert Fisk described it last month.

That quiet was broken Aug. 3 when the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) got into a firefight over tree trimming that ended up killing one Israeli and three Lebanese. Both sides backed off, but events over the past several months suggest Tel Aviv may be looking for a fight.

“Israel has to be ready for any sudden provocation or outbreak of hostilities, the same way the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war was triggered over Hezbollah capturing Israeli soldiers,” Dan Dicker from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs told the Inter Press Service.

The IDF has been smarting since Hezbollah fought it to a standstill in the 2006 war. While the Israeli air force inflicted massive damage on Lebanon’s infrastructure during the 34-day conflict, even Israel’s vaunted Golani Brigade could make little headway against Hezbollah’s tough and competent militia fighting on its home turf.

For the past two years the IDF has been training for a rematch: “Should another war break out—like the one with Hezbollah almost exactly four years ago—the Golani Brigade will not be unprepared,” reads a headline in the Israeli daily, Haaretz. At the Elyakim army base in northern Israel, soldiers are training how to take bunkers and fight in villages.

The IDF has also made it clear the next war will be vastly more destructive than the 2006 conflict that killed 1200 Lebanese and inflicted $10 to $12 billion in damage. The IDF has instituted the “Dahiya Doctrine,” named after the Shiite quarter of Beirut that the Israeli air force flattened in 2006. According to Amos Harel of Haaretz, the doctrine means the IDF will “respond to rocket fire originating from Shiite villages by unleashing a vast destructive operation.”

Over the past several months the Israelis—sometimes with Washington’s help— have unleashed a steady stream of accusations that Hezbollah is preparing for war, that Syria is smuggling arms, and that Iran is up to no good.

Israeli intelligence claims that Hezbollah has up to 40,000 rockets aimed at Israel, and in April Israeli President Shimon Peres charged Syria with supplying the Shiite organization with powerful Scud missiles. Syria vigorously denies the charge, and the United Nations says there is no evidence for the accusation.

Then the Wall Street Journal reported that a “U.S. defense official” told the newspaper that Iran had deployed” sophisticated” radar in Syria as an early warning device for a possible Israeli attack on Teheran’s nuclear sites. The U.S. State Department’s Philip Crowley chimed in that the radar was a “matter of concern” because of Syria’s relationship with Hezbollah.

Added to the growing tension on Lebanon’s southern border was the exposure of an extensive Israeli intelligence operation aimed at Hezbollah that had successfully penetrated Lebanon’s telecommunication system. More than 70 suspects have been arrested and some 20 charged with treason.

According to UPI, intelligence observers say the ring was uncovered because Israel could be gearing up for war and took some chances. “It may have been the Israelis drive to amass intelligence on Hezbollah’s military capabilities ahead of renewed conflict…that prompted the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, to pull out all the stops in Lebanon when it did.”

The tree-trimming incident is an indication of how volatile the Lebanese-Israeli border is. While the Israelis claim they were on their side of the border, the UN only drew that border in 2000, and Beirut has never fully accepted it. While the UN found the tree was on Israel’s side of the border, Lebanon’s Information Minister Tarek Mitri said the section is “Lebanese territory.”

One reason for Lebanon’s sensitivity over the border is that its placement may have relevance to the enormous natural gas deposits off the coast of Gaza, Israel, Lebanon and Syria. Extended out to sea, a matter of a mile or so in the land border could affect whether Lebanon has a claim on some of the gas.

The U.S. Geological Service estimates the fields could yield up to 122 trillion cubic feet of gas, and the Israelis have already laid claim to it. When the Lebanese protested, Israel’s Infrastructure Minister Uzi Landau said that Israel “will not hesitate to use force” to defend its claim on the gas field. Nabih Berri, speaker of the Lebanese parliament, responded, “Lebanon’s army, people and the resistance will be ready to thwart any attempts to steal its resources.”

Added to the tense border, natural gas deposits, and Israel’s cold war with Syria and Iran, is a UN investigation that, according to most reports, will charge Hezbollah with involvement in the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. Hezbollah claims the investigation is an Israeli plot and that Tel Aviv pulled off the hit, butit has yet to produce any evidence to support that charge.

The UN charge could have a destabilizing effect on Lebanon—Hezbollah is the country’s most important political and military force—and a destabilized Lebanon is in no one’s interest, with the exception of Israel and possibly the U.S. That is why long-time antagonists Saudi Arabia and Syria huddled in Damascus and then flew to Beirut July 30 to confer with the government of Prime Minister Saad Hariri on how to avoid a Lebanese meltdown.

In the middle of all this, Israel’s supporters in the U.S. Congress decided to stick their finger in the pie and hold up $100 million in military aid to the Lebanese army. “I am concerned that the training and equipment we have provided the LAF for the purposes of counter-terrorism may in fact be used by the LAF against the Israelis,” said House Armed Service Committee chair, Ike Skelton (D-Mo). Skelton went on to say that, since the LAF collaborated with Hezbollah, the latterorganization was an “indirect recipient of our aid.”

The U.S. started aiding the LAF after the 2005 “Cedar Revolution” put a pro-Washington coalition into power and forced Syria to withdraw following the assassination of Hariri. But the reality of Lebanon’s complex and fractious politics soon reasserted itself and what finally emerged from the last round of elections was a coalition government in which Hezbollah plays a prominent role. Regardless of what the Americans think of the Shiite group, marginalizing the largest ethnic group in the country is not an option.

That the military aid the U.S. is sending could pose a threat to Israel is simply silly. Most the aid consists of body armor, uniforms and unarmored Humvees. It includes neither warplanes nor anti-aircraft, and the tanks are M41 Walker “Bulldogs” designed for the Korean War. The Walker is an under-armored, gas guzzling light tank that wouldn’t last five minutes against the Israel’s modern armor or anti-tank weapons. Indeed, one military expert remarked that he was surprised there were any M41s—a weapon more “quaint” than threatening—that still ran.

If a war does break out between Hezbollah and Israel it might spread to Syria, and even Iran. In his recent report to the Council On Foreign Relations entitled “A Third Lebanon War,” former U.S. ambassador Daniel Kurtzer argues that Israel is likely to initiate the war, and that it might “also use the conflict with Hezbollah as a catalyst and cover for an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.” The former ambassador said Syria might also be a target. Kurtzer predicts a crisis sometime in the next 12 to 18 months, “but the situation could change or deteriorate rapidly.”

One explanation for Israel’s unwillingness to escalate the tree-trimming incident was because its antagonists were the LAF, not Hezbollah. Kurtzer—who was a Middle East advisor to President Obama during the last election—says Israel would rather “lure [Hezbollah] into a war.” In the tree trimming crisis the Shiite group stayed on the sidelines.

“Hezbollah is keen to avoid an escalation,” says Peter Harling of the International Crisis Group, “knowing how tough an all-out confrontation could be to the movement in Lebanon, and more broadly to the region.”

As analyst Jim Lobe points out, the Obama administration has little ability to prevent a war because it is hamstrung by its refusal to engage with either Iran or Hezbollah, and because it has allowed the Republicans to derail its efforts to improve relations with Syria.

A uniquely dangerous time, indeed.

T

The U.S. & Yemen:A “lethal blend”

The U.S. & Yemen: A “lethal blend”

Dispatches From the Edge

Conn Hallinan

Aug. 3, 2010

How involved is the U.S. military in Yemen, and is the Obama Administration laying the groundwork for a new foreign adventure?  According to several news agencies, including Agence France Presse, UPI and the Washington Post, very involved and likely to be more so in the future,

“U.S. military teams and intelligence agencies are deeply involved in secret joint operations with Yemeni troops,” says Dana Priest, the Post’s ace intelligence and military affairs reporter, including “the U.S. military’s clandestine Joint Special Operations Command, whose main mission is tracking and killing suspected terrorists.”

The quarry of these assassination teams are supposed leaders of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), but the deepening U.S. alliance with the authoritarian government of Yemen may soon entangle it in two complex civil wars—a rising by disenfranchised Shiites in the north, and an increasingly powerful succession movement in the country’s south.

According to UPI, the White House is quietly expanding “the footprint” of “elite forces inside Yemen.” One military official told the news agency, “The numbers are definitely going to grow.” The Obama administration increased “security” funds for Yemen from $67 million to $150 million.

Navy Seals, Delta Force troops, and intelligence units are working closely with the government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, providing weapons, training and intelligence. And sometimes more.

On Dec. 17, 2009, a U.S. BGM-109D Tomahawk cruise missile attacked the village of al-Maajala in south Yemen, killing 55 people, the bulk of them women and children. The Tomahawk—launched from a U.S. surface ship or submarine— was armed with a cluster warhead that spread a storm of razor sharp steel and incendiary material over 500 square feet.

Amnesty International’s Mike Lewis said his organization was “gravely concerned by evidence that cluster munitions appear to have been used in Yemen,” because “cluster munitions have indiscriminate effects and unexploded bomblets threaten lives and livelihoods for years afterwards.”

The target was a supposed al-Qaeda training camp, but the Saleh government draws no distinction between AQAP and the Southern Movement (SM), a group advocating an independent south Yemen. The SM has a long list of grievances reflecting problems going back to 1990 when North Yemen and the southern Democratic People’s Republic of Yemen were unified.

That merger between the conservative north and the better educated and socialist south was never a comfortable one and led to a particularly nasty civil war in 1994. The north won that war by using jihadists freshly returned from fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. Since the end of that four-month war, the SM charges that the north siphons off the south’s oil without adequate compensation, discriminates against southerners on access to jobs, and has cornered the country’s vanishing water supplies. Southern protests are met with tear gas and guns, and, according to SM leaders, some1500 “secessionists” have been imprisoned and more than a hundred killed.

According to UPI, “The [Saleh] regime’s heavy-handed response to the southerners has only fueled the demand for independence and encouraged the disparate southern groups to come together.”

Saleh claims the SM is closely tied to AQAP, which immediately gets Washington’s attention, and has allowed his government to tap into the resources of the American “war on terrorism.” Southern independence leaders, like Tariq al-Fadhli, deny any ties to AQAP and say the Southern Movement is non-violent. Whether it will remain so under the Saleh government’s continued assaults is an open question. The December cruise missile strike is not likely to encourage pacifism.

The fighting in the north between the Saleh government based in the capital, Sanaa, and the Shiite Houthi, who inhabit the north’s forbidding terrain, is long-standing. While Saleh and his supporters in Saudi Arabia say Iran is stirring up the trouble, there is no evidence for ties between Iran and the Houthi. The tensions between the Saleh government and the Houthi are local and generally have to do with access to political power. But by bringing Iran into the picture, Saleh can claim he is fighting terrorism, thus making his regime eligible for arms, intelligence, and training.

The U.S. is ratcheting up the use of Special Operations Forces (SOF) worldwide. The administration has increased the number of countries in which SOFs are deployed from 60  to 75, and upped the SOF budget 5.7% to $6.3 billion for 2011. The White House also added an additional $3.5 billion for SOFs to its 2010 budget.

One military official told the Washington Post that the Obama administration had given the military “more access” than former President George W. Bush. “They [the Obama administration] are talking publically much less but that are acting more. They are willing to get aggressive much more quickly.”

In a recent talk that sounded very much like the Bush administration’s doctrine of pre-emptive war, the White House’s counterterrorism expert John Q. Brennan said that U.S. strategy was not to just “respond after the fact to terrorism,” but to “take the fight to al-Qaeda and its extremist affiliates, whether they plot and train in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and beyond.”

If the U.S. does increase its military footprint in Yemen, it will be expending hundreds of millions of dollars in the poorest country in the region, a country where 40 percent of its 22 million residents are jobless and where water is becoming a scare commodity. The U.S. shares much of the blame for the current economic crisis in Yemen. When Yemen refused to support the 1991 Gulf War against Saddam Hussein, Saudi Arabia expelled 850,000 Yemeni workers, and the U.S. cute $70 million in foreign aid. The effect of both actions was catastrophic, and Yemen never recovered from the one-two blow.

U.S. support for the Saleh regime will inevitably draw it into the conflicts in the north and the south, with disastrous results for all parties.

“In Yemen the U.S. will be intervening on one side in a country which is always in danger of sliding into a civil war,” says the Independent’s Middle East reporter Patrick Cockburn. “This has happened before. In Iraq the U.S. was the supporter of the Shia Arabs and Kurds against the Sunni Arabs. In Afghanistan it is the ally of the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazara against the Pushtun community. Whatever the intentions of Washington, its participation in these civil conflicts destabilizes the country because one side becomes labeled as the quisling supporter of a foreign invader. Communal and nationalist antipathies combine to create a lethal blend.”

—30—

Yemen: Terrorist Haven, or Chess Piece?

Yemen: Terrorist Haven, or Chess Piece?

Dispatches From The Edge

Daily Planet

Conn Hallinan

1-19-2010

“The instability in Yemen is a threat to regional stability and even global stability”— U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“Yemen is a regional and global threat”—British Prime Minister Gordon Brown

“Yemen could be the ground of America’s next overseas war if Washington does not take preemptive action to root out al-Qaeda there”—U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn)

A few facts:

Yemen—a country slightly smaller than France with a population of 22 million—perches on the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula. It is the poorest country in the region, with one of the most explosive birthrates in the world. Unemployment hovers above 40 percent and projections are that its oil—which makes up 70 percent of its GDP—will run out in 2017, as will water for the capital, Sana, in 2015.

It is a bit of a patchwork nation. It was formerly two countries—North Yemen and the Democratic People’s Republic of Yemen (south), which merged in 1990 and fought a nasty civil war in 1994.

The current government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh is corrupt, despotic, and presently fighting a two-front war against northern Shiites, called “Houthis,” and separatist-minded southerners. Based in the north, Saleh’s government has limited influence outside of the capital. Whoever runs the place, according to The Independent’s Middle East reporter Patrick Cockburn, has to contend with “tribal confederations, tribes, clans, and powerful families. Almost everybody has a gun, usually at least an AK-47 assault rifle, but tribesmen often own heavier armament.”

To make things even more complex, Yemen’s northern neighbor, Saudi Arabia, has sent troops and warplanes to back up Saleh. According to Reuters, “The conflict in Yemen’s northern mountains has killed hundreds and displaced tens of thousands.” Aid groups put the number of refugees at 150,000. The Saleh government and the Saudis claim the Shiia uprising is being directed by Iran— there is no evidence to back up the charge—thus escalating a local civil war to a regional face off between Riyadh and Teheran.

And this is a place that Hillary, Gordon and Joe think we need to intervene?

In a sense, of course, the U.S. is already in Yemen, and was so even before the attempted bombing Christmas Day of a Northwest Airlines flight by a young Nigerian. For most Americans, Yemen first appeared on their radar screens when the USS Cole was attacked in the port of Aden by al-Qaeda in 1990, killing 17 sailors. It reappeared this past November when a U.S. Army officer linked to a Muslim cleric in Yemen killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Colorado. The Christmas Day attacker said he was trained by al-Qaeda, and the group took credit for the failed operation.

But U.S. involvement in Yemen goes back almost 40 years. In 1979, the Carter Administration blew a minor border incident between north and south Yemen into a full-blown East- West crisis, accusing the Soviets of aggression. The White House dispatched an aircraft carrier and several warships to the Arabian Sea, and sent tanks, armored personal carriers and warplanes to the North Yemen government.

The tension between the two Yemens was hardly accidental. According to UPI, the CIA funneled $4 million a year to Jordan’s King Hussein to help brew up a civil war between the conservative North and the wealthier and socialist south.

The merger between the two countries never quite took. Southern Yemenis complain that the north plunders its oil and wealth and discriminates against southerners. Demonstrations and general strikes by the Southern Movement demanding independence have increased over the past year. The Saleh government has generally responded with clubs, tear gas and guns.

When Yemen refused to back the 1991 Gulf War to expel Iraq from Kuwait, the U.S. cancelled $70 million in foreign aid to Sana and supported a decision by Saudi Arabia to expel 850,000 Yemeni workers. Both moves had a catastrophic impact on the Yemeni economy that played a major role in initiating the current instability gripping the country.

In 2002 the Bush administration used armed drones to assassinate several Yemenis it accused of being al-Qaeda members. The New York Times reported that the Obama administration launched a cruise missile attack Dec. 17 at suspected al-Qaeda members that, according to Agence France Presse, killed 49 civilians, including 23 children and 17 women. The attack has sparked widespread anger throughout Yemen that al-Qaeda organizers have heavily exploited.

So is the current uproar over Yemen a case of a U.S. administration overreacting and stumbling into yet another quagmire in the Middle East? Or is this talk about a “global danger” just a smokescreen to allow the Americans to prop up the increasingly isolated and unpopular regime in Saudi Arabia?

Maybe both, but at least one respected analyst suggests that the game in play is considerably larger than the Arabian Peninsula and may have more to do with the control of the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea than with hunting down al-Qaeda in the Yemeni wilderness.

The Asia Times’ M.K. Bhadrakumar, a career Indian diplomat who served in Afghanistan, Kuwait, Pakistan, and Turkey, argues that the current U.S. concern with Yemen is actually about the strategic port of Aden. “Control of Aden and the Malacca Straits will put the U.S. in an unassailable position in the ‘great game’ of the Indian Ocean,” he writes.

Aden controls the strait of Bab el-Mandab, the entrance to the Red Sea though which passes 3.5 million barrels of oil a day. The Malacca Straits, between the southern Malay Peninsula and the Indonesian island of Sumatra, is one of the key passages that link the Indian Ocean with the South China Sea and the Pacific Ocean.

Bhadrakumar says the Indian Ocean and the Malacca Straits are “literally the jugular veins of the Chinese economy.” Indeed, a quarter of the world’s sea-borne trade passes through the area, including 80 percent of China’s oil and gas.

In 2005 the Bush Administration pressed India to counter the rise of China by joining an alliance with South Korea, Japan, and Australia. As a quid pro quo for coming aboard, Washington agreed to sell uranium to India, in spite of New Delhi’s refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Agreement. Only countries that sign the Treaty can purchase uranium in the international market. The Bush administration also agreed to sell India the latest in military technology. The Obama administration has continued the same policies.

China and India have indeed beefed up their naval forces in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. Beijing is also developing a “string of pearls”— ports that will run from East Africa to Southeast Asia. India has just established a formal naval presence in Oman at the entrance to the strategic Persian Gulf.

According to Bhadrakumar, the growing U.S. rapprochement with Myanmar and Sri Lanka is aimed at checkmating China’s influence in both nations, and cutting off efforts by Beijing to reduce its reliance on ocean-borne energy transportation by constructing land-based pipelines. China just opened such a pipeline to Central Asia.

“The U.S., on the contrary, is determined that China remain vulnerable to the choke points between Indonesia and Malaysia,” writes the former Indian diplomat.

Checkmating China would also explain some of the pressure that the Obama administration is exerting on Pakistan.

“The U.S. is unhappy with China’s efforts to reach the warm waters of the Persian Gulf through the Central Asian region and Pakistan. Slowly but steadily, Washington is tightening the noose around the neck of the Pakistani elites—civilian and military—and forcing them to make a strategic choice between the U.S. and China,” writes Bhadrakumar.

This would help explain the increasing tension between China and India over a Himalayan border region that has sparked a military buildup in Chinese-occupied Tibet and India’s Arunachai Pradesh state. Former Indian Air Marshall Fali Homi told the Hindustan Times that China was now a bigger threat than Pakistan, and former Indian National Security Advisor Brajesh Mishra predicts an India-China war within five years.

“Energy security” has been at the heart of U.S. foreign policy for decades. The 1980’s “Carter Doctrine” made it explicit that the U.S. would use military if its energy supplies were ever threatened. Whether the administration was Republican or Democratic made little difference when it came to controlling gas and oil supplies, and the greatest concentration of U.S. military forces is in the Middle East, where 60 percent of the world’s energy supplies lie.

Except for using Special Forces and supplying weapons, it is unlikely that the U.S. will intervene in a major way in Yemen. But through military aid it can exert a good deal of influence over the Sana government, including extracting basing rights.

The White House has elevated the 200 or so “al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula” members in Yemen into what the President calls a “serious problem,” and there are dark hints that the country is on its way to becoming a “failed state,” the green light for a more robust intervention.

However, as Jon Alterman, Middle East Director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, argues, “The problems in Yemen are not fundamentally problems that military operations can solve.”

But then the “problems” of Yemen may be simply a prelude for a much wider and potentially dangerous strategy focused on China.

“The U.S. cannot give up on its global dominance without putting up a real fight,” says Bhadrakumar. “And the reality of all such momentous struggles is that they cannot be fought piecemeal. You cannot fight China without occupying Yemen.”

Bullets & Ballots from Beirut to Bolivia

Bullets & Ballots from Beirut to Bolivia

Dispatches From The Edge

Conn Hallinan

5-15-2008

May has been a month of upheaval, from the streets of Beirut, where the Bush Administration appears to have miscalculated disastrously, to Santa Cruz Province in Eastern Bolivia, where a continent’s new political realignment is trying to checkmate a slow motion rightwing coup.

The Lebanon explosion was touched off by people who forgot the first rule of warfare: don’t pick a fight with people who can kick your butts. One should also add, don’t listen to White House neoconservatives.

According to Nicholas Noe of The Guardian (UK), this particular debacle was the work of neocon prince, Elliot Abrams, Deputy National Security Advisor for Middle East Affairs, one of the architects of the disastrous invasion of Iraq.

Abrams is a big fan of civil wars. He helped design one in Nicaragua during the Reagan Administration (and was found guilty of lying to Congress about it). He worked diligently to set one in motion among the Palestinians last year by trying to pull off what he called a “hard coup” against Hamas. According to the Israeli daily Haaretz, Abrams arranged for guns and ammunition to flow to anti-Hamas militias through Egypt and Jordan. But Hamas beat their opponents to the punch and now control Gaza, as well as expanding its influence on the West Bank.

After the Iraq and Hamas debacles, why didn’t the White House rein in the Prince of Chaos? Because chaos is part of the Bush Administration’s designs for the Middle East. It is easier to dominate amid disorder, and the messier the better.

Iraq disintegrating. Check

Palestinians at war with one another. Check

So, on to Lebanon.

Abrams is a strong supporter of the current Lebanese government, an alliance of Sunnis, Christians, and some Druze that dominates the politics and economics of Lebanon. Left out in the cold are the Shiites who, though they make up a plurality of Lebanon’s complex ethnic landscape, have endured more than a hundred years of poverty and political marginalization.

That all changed when, after 22 years of occupation, Hezbollah drove Israel out of Southern Lebanon in 2000, letting the government in Beirut know that they would no longer accept third class citizenship.

The May 7 fighting was set off when the current government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora fired a Shiite general who commanded the country’s international airport and demanded that Hezbollah dismantle its private underground communication system. But it was Hezbollah’s secure phone system that allowed the Shiite organization to keep the Israelis off balance during their 2006 invasion of Lebanon. Israel tapped into the government’s wireless system with ease.

According to Noe, Siniora’s demands followed a series of meetings between the governing March 14 coalition and “U.S. officials.”

The government certainly knew the latter demand would start a fight and, in anticipation, brought in U.S.-trained Sunni militia from the northern city of Tripoli. Hezbollah and its Shiite ally Amal (which some reports say did most the fighting), wiped the floor with them, eventually talking over the Sunni stronghold of West Beirut before turning it over to the Lebanese Army.

Fighting is still going on in the country’s north and the east.

Did Abrams and Siniora really think they could push around an organization like Hezbollah that fought the Israelis to a standstill in 2006? Did they think the Lebanese Army would intervene in spite of the fact that the Army’s rank and file is mostly Shiite? Was there some kind of promise of U.S. support for the anti-Hezbollah coalition?

Was the Prince of Chaos sowing death and destruction in order to blame the turmoil on Hezbollah’s allies, Syria and Iran, thus creating a casus belli for going after the two regimes? President Bush told the BBC that Iran and Syria were behind the whole matter, and according to Andrew Cockburn in Counterpunch, the President has authorized a $300 million program to undermine Iran, including “operations against Iran’s hezbollah allies in Lebanon,” as well as “efforts to destabilize the Syrian regime.”

Or was is the recent fighting just a classic example of one of Karl von Clausewitz’s dictums about war: “Against stupidity, no amount of planning will prevail.”

Maybe Congress should get some answers.

*********************

Separatism hiding behind a veil of “autonomy” is what the Bush Administration is supporting in Bolivia, where a May 4 referendum to take local control of gas, water, and land in the eastern province of Santa Cruz passed by 82 percent.

Well not quite. While 82 percent of those who voted went for autonomy, 40 percent of the electorate rejected the proposal by heeding the central government’s call for a boycott, or just voting “no.”

Bolivia, the poorest nation in Latin America, is divided between the resource-poor highlands where most of the population is indigenous, and the east, where wealthy elites and landowners dominate the economy. Some of the landowners are Croatians who came after World War II, where many of them were associated with a pro-Nazi regime allied to Hitler’s Germany. .

The country’s current leftist government, led by Aymara Indian Evo Morales, has partially nationalized the nation’s energy industry, greatly increasing the government’s income. Earnings from national gas jumped from $180 million to $2 billion a year.

Jim Schultz, Executive Director of the Democracy Center in Cochabamba, Bolivia, told Democracy Now, that the referendum “is the latest move by an elite in Santa Cruz to try to separate itself from what the national government under Morales has been trying to do.”

That program includes alleviating poverty and instituting land reform.

According to Benjamin Dangl of Upside Down World, recently declassified documents show that the Bush Administration has used the U.S. Agency for International Development and the National Endowment for Democracy to encourage separatist groups in Santa Cruz, including the openly secessionist Civic Committee.

The Bolivian Electoral Court, the Organization of American States, the European Union, and the Morales government all say the referendum was illegal.

Similar autonomy referendums are being held in Beni, Pando, and Tarija provinces in the coming weeks. Tarija Province contains 80 percent of Bolivia’s gas reserves.

The Santa Cruz referendum would give the province the right to negotiate separate agreements with private energy companies and to resist land reform.

Countries in the region have reacted sharply to the Santa Cruz referendum.

“Nobody is going to recognize this illegal referendum,” said Rafael Correa, president of Ecuador. “It’s a strategy to destabilize progressive governments in the region.”

Brazil’s Foreign Affairs Minister Celso Amorim said that South America would never accept “separatism in Bolivia.” The Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas said that it rejected “the destabilization plans that aim to attack the peace and unity of Bolivia,” and that none of its member nations would recognize any “juridical figure that aims to break away from the Bolivian national state and violate the territorial integrity of Bolivia.”

The group includes Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, Bolivia, Dominica, Antigua, and St. Vincent. Ecuador is in the process of joining.

Argentina has also condemned the vote.

One immediate impact of the vote may be to slow down or even halt land reform efforts in Santa Cruz.

Energy is a different matter. Since most Bolivia’s gas and oil currently goes to Brazil and Argentina, an as long as those countries refuse to do business with the separatist provinces, there is virtually no way that Santa Cruz and Tarija can get their oil and gas out.

On the other hand, the U.S. has a base in neighboring Paraguay, and it is beefing up its military throughout the region. On April 24, the U.S. Navy announced that it was re-forming the Fourth Fleet to give it “a naval presence” in the Caribbean and Latin America.

The original Fourth Fleet was dismantled in the 1950s.

The fleet, based in Mayport, Florida, will include an aircraft carrier and support ships, giving the U.S. a military arm that will be independent of land bases.

“The message is clear,” says Alejandro Sanchez of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs. “Whether local governments like it or not, the U.S. is back after the war in Iraq.”

The ramping up of the U.S. military in Latin America and Washington’s support for the “autonomy” movement in Bolivia might be a coincidence. So might the U.S.’s stepped up rhetoric about Syria and Iran and support for the Siniora government’s against Hezbollah.

Coincidence?

Dark Plots in Byzantine Beirut

Dark Plots in Byzantine Beirut

Dispatches From The Edge

Conn Hallinan

6-29-2007

According to the U.S. mainstream media and the Bush Administration, the fighting in Lebanon between Fatah al Islam and the Lebanese Army is really a proxy battle between the Lebanese government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora over efforts by Syria to destabilize Lebanon and snuff a UN investigation into the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005.

“Fatah Al-Islam is a terrorist organization that has been imported into Lebanon,” said Saad al-Hariri, a leader of the Sunni Future Movement, a supporter of the current government, and son of Rafik Hariri. “The side that stands behind it is known, and its aims are known.”

White House spokesman Tony Snow said, “We will not tolerate attempts by Syria, terrorist groups or any others to delay or derail Lebanon’s efforts to solidify its sovereignty or to see justice in the Hariri case.”

But writing in the Cairo-based, English language weekly Al Ahram, Beirut journalist Lucy Fielder says that Fatah al-Islam’s anti-Shiite ideology caused it to break from the Syrian-backed Fatah al-Intifada last November.

The Syrian government is dominated by the Alawites—a variety of Shiism—who make up only about 12 percent of Syria’s Muslim population. The rest are overwhelmingly Sunni. In short, Fatah al-Islam, with its extremist philosophy of Sunni Salafism, is an anathema to the Damascus regime.

According to Ahmed Moussalli, an expert on Islamic movements at the American University at Beirut, Fatah al-Islam’s rise is a direct outgrowth of the split between Siniora’s Sunni-dominated government and the Shiia organization, Hezbollah. The latter is closely aligned with Syria, which withdrew its troops from Lebanon shortly after Hariri’s assassination.

On May 29, the UN Security Council voted to set up an international court to try those suspected of involvement in Hariri’s death.

“In Lebanon in the last few months,” according to Moussalli, “it seems the Hariri group has been channeling funds and allowing weaponry to enter in order to create a Sunni militia…to bargain with Hezbollah.”

Back in March, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh found exactly the same thing. “American, European, and Arab officials I spoke to told me that the Siniora government and its allies has allowed some aid to end up in the hands of emerging Sunni radical groups in Northern Lebanon…these groups, though small, are seen as a buffer to Hezbollah; at the same time their ideological ties are with Al-Qaeda.”

Hersh interviewed Alastair Crooke, a veteran of almost three decades in the British intelligence service, MI6. Crooke told Hersh, “The Lebanese government is opening space for these people to come in. It could be very dangerous.” According to Crooke, when Fatah al-Islam showed up at the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp in Tripoli, the scene of the recent fighting, “within twenty four hours they were being offered weapons and money by people presenting themselves as representatives of the Lebanese government’s interests—presumably to take on Hezbollah.”

“The key players,” in the drive against Syria and Iran, according to Hersh, “are Vice-president Dick Cheney, Deputy National Security Advisor Elliot Abrams, the departing Ambassador to Iraq (and nominee for United Nations Ambassador), Zalmay Khalilzad, and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi national-security advisor.”

Hersh’s sources include current and former Bush Administration officials, and a “senior member” of the House Appropriations Committee.

Just prior to the outbreak of fighting in Lebanon, Cheney made an “off the radar” visit—no press—to Saudi Arabia.

In an interview with Democracy Now host Amy Goodman, Hersh called the U.S. charge of Syrian involvement in the current fighting “beyond belief.”

After a May 21 visit to Beirut, European Union (EU) Foreign Minster Javier Solana also said that he saw no evidence of Syrian involvement in the recent fighting.

Fatah al-Islam leader, Shakir al-Abssi, fled Syria for Lebanon when the Damascus authorities cracked down on militant Islamic groups, and, according to the New York Times, killed his son-in-law. It is no accident that almost a third of Fatah al-Islam’s fighters are Saudis. The Riyadh government has been bankrolling anyone who will join its Sunni alliance against Shiia Iran.

While the fighting has been situated in a Palestinian refugee camp, the Palestinians have kept at arm’s distance from Fatah al-Islam. “This is a gang, and only 3 or 4 percent of its members are Palestinians,” according to Sultan Abul Ainain, head of the Lebanese Fatah movement. “What they’ve done is an attempt to create a rift between the Palestinians and the Lebanese government.”

Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah accused the U.S. of trying to destabilize the country by importing its war against al-Qaeda to Lebanon, and called for a negotiated settlement rather than a military assault on the Nahr el-Bared camp. “Does it concern us that we start a conflict with al Qaeda in Lebanon and consequently attract members and fighters of al Qaeda from all over the world to Lebanon to conduct their battle with the Lebanese Army and the rest of the Lebanese?” Nasrallah asked rhetorically in a recent speech.

According to Robert Fisk of the Independent, Hezbollah has assured the French, Italian and Spanish governments that their soldiers stationed as peacekeepers in the South of Lebanon will be safe from attacks by Fatah al-Islam. The fact that Syria’s closest ally in the region has agreed to protect EU troops from the Sunni extremists in Tripoli suggests that Nasrallah and Damascus are on the same page in the current fighting. It is highly unlikely that Syria would sponsor a group from whom Hezbollah has agreed to shelter EU soldiers.

The Bush Administration is already gearing up to pump $280 million in military aid to the Siniora government. According to an anonymous U.S. official, “Lebanon will get whatever it takes to boost its internal defense capability to control its territory.”

Well, yes and no. The U.S. vetoed rockets for Lebanese Army’s Gazelle helicopters and Belgium Leopard tanks because of concerns that the weapons might be used against Israel in the future.

The flood of military hardware may well mean that when the Lebanese Army finishes off Fatah al-Islam it will turn its weapons on Hezbollah, possibly in conjunction with a new attack by Israel. The latter is openly being talked about in Israeli circles, and Gush Shalom founder Uri Avnery warns that a third Lebanon war is a real possibility.

According to Fisk, if the Israelis do attack, the results would be a “far fiercer war than the 34-day conflict last June and July.” Hezbollah has apparently been building a network of roads and bunkers north of Lebanon’s Litani River in preparation for just such an attack.

So, what happened? In their effort to isolate Iran and Syria, did Cheney, Abrams, Khalizad, and Bandar ramp up an anti-Hezbollah militia that went haywire and attacked the Lebanese Army instead? Or was that the plan from the beginning: use the fighting as an excuse to ship arms to the Siniora government, turn those arms on Hezbollah in conjunction with another Israeli invasion, and reignite Lebanon’s civil war?

“The dangers of a conflagration that could spread across the country are serious,” Professor Charles Harb of American University of Beirut wrote in the Guardian. “The U.S. once nurtured the mujahideen in Afghanistan, only to pay the price much later. In the dangerous game of sectarian conflict, everyone stands to lose.”