Tag Archives: Saudi Arabia

Intelligence and the anti-Israel lobby

Ill winds are blowing out of Washington these days. On Thursday, The Washington Post headline blared, "Intelligence Pick Blames ‘Israel Lobby’ for Withdrawal."

The article, by Walter Pincus, described how former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia Charles "Chas" Freeman is blaming Israel’s Jewish American supporters for his resignation Tuesday from his post as chairman of the National Intelligence Council.

In a diatribe published on Foreign Policy‘s Web site on Wednesday, Freeman accused the alleged "Israel Lobby" of torpedoing his appointment. In his words, "The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency… The aim of this Lobby is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views… and the exclusion of any and all options for decision by Americans and our government other than those that it favors."

He continued, "I believe that the inability of the American public to discuss, or the government to consider, any option for US policies in the Middle East opposed by the ruling faction in Israeli politics has allowed that faction to adopt and sustain policies that ultimately threaten the existence of the State of Israel. It is not permitted for anyone in the United States to say so. This is not just a tragedy for Israelis and their neighbors in the Middle East; it is doing widening damage to the national security of the United States."

The Washington Post‘s article quoted liberally from Freeman’s diatribe. It also identified the Jewish Americans who wrote against Freeman’s appointment, and insinuated that AIPAC – which took no stand on his appointment – actually worked behind the scenes to undermine it.

While it described in lurid detail how one anti-Freeman Jewish blogger quoted other anti-Freeman Jewish bloggers on his Web site, Pincus’s article failed to report what it was about Freeman that caused the Jewish cabal to criticize his appointment. Consequently, by default, Pincus effectively endorsed Freeman’s diatribe against the all-powerful "Israel Lobby."

Pincus’s reportorial malpractice wouldn’t have been so problematic if his article had just been one of many articles in the Washington Post about Freeman’s appointment. But, like The New York Times, the first mention the Washington Post made of the story was on Tuesday, after Freeman announced his resignation.

The Washington Post’s news editor, Douglas Jehl, admitted that a conscious decision had been made to ignore the story. In an e-mail published in the Weekly Standard Jehl wrote, "We did initially elect not to write a story about the campaign against Mr. Freeman."

As the Standard‘s Stephen Hayes notes, Jehl’s statement is notable because it shows that he and colleagues never considered whether Freeman’s record was newsworthy in and of itself. That is, they never asked whether the controversy surrounding it was justified. Had they asked that question, perhaps they would have reconsidered their decision to ignore the story.

Freeman was a career US diplomat until his retirement in the mid-1990s. He served as ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the first Bush administration. In his memoirs, former secretary of state James Baker claimed that in that position, Freeman was afflicted by "clientitis." Instead of advancing US interests with the Saudis, Freeman championed Saudi interests to the US government.

In 1997, Freeman became president of the Saudi-funded Middle East Policy Council. There Freeman continued his outspoken support for Saudi positions against the US. In January 2009, for instance, he praised Saudi King Abdullah for coercing the second Bush administration into supporting Palestinian statehood.

Freeman castigated the Bush administration as "the world’s first genuinely autistic government." Then he bragged that it was only due to Abdullah’s "threat… to downgrade relations with the United States," that the administration finally announced its support for Palestinian statehood.

According to financial records made public in recent weeks, the Middle East Policy Council has received millions of dollars from the Saudi government and royal family over the past several years.

Saudi Arabia is not the only country with interests and values that conflict with US interests and values that Freeman has championed and earned a living from. Until accepting his appointment as chairman of the National Intelligence Council, Freeman was a paid member of the Chinese government-owned China National Offshore Oil Company’s international advisory board. CNOOC has been the target of a US Treasury probe due to its multi-billion dollar contract with Iran to develop the South Pars gas field.

As with the case of Saudi Arabia, Freeman’s political sympathies go hand in hand with his financial ties. In a list-serve e-mail in 2006, Freeman criticized the Beijing Politburo for being too lax with the pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989. As he put it, "the truly unforgivable mistake of the Chinese authorities was the failure to intervene on a timely basis to nip the demonstrations in the bud."

As Martin Kramer, Steven Rosen and other Jewish writers have noted in their reporting on Freeman in recent weeks, Freeman’s positions on Israel closely mirror the Saudi Foreign Ministry’s positions. So it is that in 2006, for instance, Freeman blamed US ties with Israel for the September 11, 2001, attacks. As he put it, "We have paid heavily and often in treasure for our unflinching support and unstinting subsidies of Israel’s approach to managing its relations with the Arabs. Five years ago, we began to pay with the blood of our citizens here at home."

Then, too, like the Saudi government, Freeman argues that Arab terrorism against the US is solely a consequence of US support for Israel. Were the US to abandon its alliance with Israel, all Arab terror against the US would stop.

DESPITE PINCUS’S attempt to hide it, the main reason Freeman’s appointment was controversial was not the opposition it garnered among pro-Israel American Jews. The main controversy surrounding his appointment as the Obama administration’s top intelligence analyst revolved around his financial and political ties to potential and actual US adversaries.

Indeed, according to Newsweek, it was these connections – and specifically Freeman’s ties to the Chinese Politburo – that scuppered his appointment. According to Newsweek, the White House withdrew its support for Freeman because House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was angered by his support for Beijing’s repression of Chinese democracy activists, which she described as "beyond the pale." Freeman’s animus towards Israel apparently played no role in the White House’s decision to show him the door.

Whatever the reason for his resignation, it is a good thing that Freeman was forced to resign. It is a very good thing that the man writing the US’s National Intelligence Estimates and briefing the president on intelligence matters is not a hired gun for the Saudi and Chinese governments who believes that Jewish Americans have no right to participate in public debate about US foreign policy. But while his appointment was foiled, the fact that a man like Freeman was even considered for the post tells us two deeply disturbing things about the climate in Washington these days.

First and foremost, Freeman’s appointment gives us disconcerting information about how the Obama administration intends to relate to intelligence. Freeman was appointed by Adm. Dennis Blair, President Barack Obama’s director of national intelligence. Blair stood by Freeman’s appointment even after information became known about his financial ties to foreign governments and his extreme views on Israel and American Jews were exposed. Blair repeatedly extolled Freeman for his willingness to stake out unpopular positions.

On Tuesday, Blair appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee. There he answered questions about Freeman and about Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Just as he defended Freeman, so Blair defended the Islamic Republic. He claimed that there is no way to infer from Iran’s satellite program that it is expanding the range of its ballistic missiles. He claimed that just because Iran is enriching uranium, there is no reason to believe that the mullahs are interested in building a bomb. That is, America’s top intelligence officer is willing to take Iran’s word on everything.

On the other hand, he isn’t willing to take Israel’s word on anything. Although he acknowledged that his nonchalant assessment of Iran was based on the same information as Israel’s dire assessment of Iran, Blair scoffed at Israel’s views, claiming that they are colored by the Jewish state’s fears. In his words, "The Israelis are far more concerned about it, and they take more of a worst-case approach to these things from their point of view."

What Blair’s staunch championing of Freeman’s appointment and his casualness regarding Iran’s nuclear program indicates is that like Freeman, he assumes the best of America’s adversaries and the worst of its friends. This approach to intelligence analysis will be destructive not just for the US’s relations with its allies, but for America’s own national security.

THE SECOND disturbing development exposed by Freeman’s appointment is the emergence of a very committed and powerful anti-Israel lobby in Washington. In the past, while anti-Israel politicians, policy-makers and opinion-shapers were accepted in Washington, they would not have felt comfortable brandishing their anti-Israel positions as a qualifying credential for high position. Freeman’s appointment shows that this is no longer the case. Today in Washington, there are powerful circles of political players for whom a person’s anti-Israel bona fides are his strongest suit.

In the weeks since Freeman’s appointment first came under scrutiny, his defenders have highlighted his hatred of Israel as the reason for their support for him. Just as Pincus’s post-mortem write-up of Freeman’s appointment and resignation barely mentioned his ties to Saudi Arabia and China, and focused on Jews who opposed his appointment, so in recent weeks, his defenders – both non-Jewish and Jewish – have highlighted his hatred of Israel and its American supporters as the primary reason for defending it. The likes of Steven Walt, M.J. Rosenberg and Matthew Yglesias didn’t try to explain why Freeman was right to support the suppression of freedom in China. They didn’t support his claim that the Saudi king is among the most profound and thoughtful leaders in the world. They didn’t repeat his assertion that the US had the September 11 attacks coming to it.

They felt that the fact that he raised the hackles of Americans who support Israel was reason enough to support him. Whether his views on other issues are reasonable or not was of no interest to them.

From September 11, to Russia’s invasion of Georgia, from Hamas’s victory in the 2006 Palestinian elections to the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that claimed Iran ended its nuclear weapons program in 2003, it is clear that in recent years, the US intelligence community has regularly substituted wishful thinking for true analysis. Freeman’s appointment and the emergence of the anti-Israel lobby as a major force in Washington policy circles show that turning the US away from Israel has become a key component of that wishful thinking.

But, as they say in the world of intelligence, forewarned is forearmed.

 

Are you proud to be a leftist?

In an interview with Teheran Times two weeks ago, Norman Finklestein, the notorious Hizbullah and Hamas supporter and all-purpose anti-Semite, called Israel a "vandal state," and "insane state," a "terrorist state," and a "satanic state."

Last week Finklestein was the keynote speaker at both Emory University and Fordham University during their weeklong annual anti-Israel hate festivals. Speaking to a cheering crowd at a packed auditorium on Emory’s Atlanta campus, Finklestein claimed that Israel conducted its recent Operation Cast Lead in Gaza for two reasons. These did not include Hamas’s deliberate targeting of Israeli civilians, Hamas’s alliance with Iran, its charter that calls for the physical eradication of the Jewish people, its illegal imprisonment of Israeli hostage Gilad Schalit, or its decision to renew its attacks against Israel after a six month period of relative restraint.

In Finklestein’s view, the first reason Israel launched Operation Cast Lead was because Hamas had begun expressing interest in peace. In his words, "Hamas were being too moderate, too reasonable. They wanted a diplomatic settlement to the conflict. To Israel, this is a recurring nightmare."

The second reason that Finklestein alleged that Israel launched its offensive was because, well, Israel is just plain mean. As he put it, the operation was Israel’s way of "reminding the Arabs who were [sic.] in charge." It was an attempt to "restore the Arab world’s fear of Israel."

Finklestein cited an unnamed "chief military analyst" to support his claim that Israel conducted a "massacre" in Gaza and did so with malice of forethought.

According to Emory’s student paper, for his libelous, wholly fallacious remarks, Finklestein received a prolonged standing ovation.

In 40 university campuses throughout the US and Canada as well as in Europe and South America, last week students marked what Palestinian terror apologists have dubbed "Israel Apartheid Week." This was the seventh such week in the US, and the fifth in Canada.

In the lead up to this annual Israel vilification week, pro-Israel students were physically assaulted at San Francisco State University and at York University in Canada by their anti-Israel counterparts. In both cases, university officials opened disciplinary proceedings against the pro-Israel students.

At SFSU, two students were arrested by police for assaulting college Republicans who held an anti-Hamas rally. The two – from the campus’s Palestinian student club and its Socialist union – now insist not only that the charges against them be dropped, but that the university re-educate its students to ensure that they understand that criticizing Hamas and other genocidal terror groups is a form of prohibited hate-speech.

THE LIBELOUS assertion that Israel – the only free, pluralistic, liberal democracy in the Middle East – is analogous to apartheid South Africa first took hold at the 2001 UN-sponsored anti-Jewish diplomatic pogrom at Durban, South Africa. In the action plan approved by the various non-governmental organizations that participated in the conference, activists were called on to bring about the international demonization of Israel as a racist state, and of Zionism – the Jewish national liberation movement – as a form of racism.

When Israel Apartheid Week was launched the next year, many local Jewish student and community activists in the US and Canada demanded that university authorities ban the clearly bigoted event from their campuses. To their chagrin, university presidents and administrators would do no such thing. Claiming that doing so would restrict academic freedom, the propaganda war against the Jewish state went forward and grew. And, in its wake, the freedom of pro-Israel students on college campuses throughout the West has become increasingly constricted and threatened.

Both through formal speech codes barring criticism of anti-Israel propaganda and violence, and through academic and physical intimidation of pro-Israel students by an increasingly vocal and aggressive coalition of pro-Palestinian professors, Muslim and leftist students, Israel’s supporters on university campuses find themselves under assault. Today, seven years after the Durban Conference, Israel Apartheid Week has become a mainstay on the academic calendar, nearly as taken for granted as Homecoming Week and mid-terms.

The use of the term "apartheid" to describe Israel was a deliberate move on the part of Israel’s enemies. It was aimed at neutralizing the capacity of Israel’s supporters to defend the Jewish state and attack its enemies. Case in point is the campus debate which preceded Israel Apartheid Week at the University of Toronto. The student paper published two topical opinion pieces on the upcoming events. One asserted that Israel is an apartheid regime. The other argued that Israel isn’t an apartheid regime.

On the surface, this seems fair enough. But it is nothing of the sort. Israel is the only free country and free society in the region. Pinning its defenders down by confining discussion of the region to the pros and cons of a complete lie serves to only obfuscate the depravity of Israel’s enemies, not to enlighten the public about Israel.

While Israel provides the full rights of citizenship to its Arab minority, Jews are denied the rights of citizenship in every Arab League member state, and the Palestinians’ fundamental demand is that no Jew be permitted to live in a future Palestinian state.

Then too, while Israeli women enjoy full equality under the law, women and girls in the Arab and Muslim world are systematically subjugated and enslaved. Muslim men who wantonly murder their wives, sisters, mothers and daughters can expect to receive little to no punishment for their crimes. The same holds for men who abuse their female relations. For their part, women in the Muslim world have either no legal rights to citizenship and civil rights or those rights are severely limited.

Gays, blacks, migrant workers, Christians, Hindus and Buddhists are systematically persecuted for their sexual preferences, their skin color and their religious beliefs. Even dogs feel the wrath of these societies where, since they are considered "unclean," children and adults alike routinely engage in their torture and killing.

But under the full protection of self-described liberal university professors, administrators and presidents, and due to the indifference of groups like the World Council of Churches, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Organization of Women, Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, anti-Israel propagandists have been allowed to co-opt the language of liberty to advance the political fortunes of terrorists who aim to destroy liberty.

THE ACTIVE and passive support conferred on anti-Israel leftists and Muslims by these officials and groups has provided them with the ideological cover to take their activism to the next level: anti-Jewish violence aimed at intimidating states, universities, businesses and private organizations into cutting off all ties to Israel. Evidence of the success of this campaign is rife throughout Europe today.

In just one notable instance, for the past week Israeli tennis players, Amir Haddad and Andy Ram have been suffering the consequences of the Left’s collusion with these anti-Jewish groups in Sweden. Haddad and Ram competed in the Davis Cup tennis championships in Malmo, Sweden.

In an article in Yediot Ahronot on Sunday, Ram wrote, "In my entire athletic career, I have never before experienced such hatred and such a mixing of sports with politics."

In spite of repeated entreaties by Israel, Swedish authorities refused to move the games from Malmo to Stockholm. With its enormous Muslim population, in recent years Malmo has been the site of some of the worst Islamic violence against non-Muslims – and particularly Jews, women and girls – in the Western world.

Due to threats of violence against Ram and Haddad, Swedish authorities barred fans from attending their tennis matches. As they played their opening match in an empty stadium on Saturday, thousands of violent Muslims and leftists rioted against police and attempted to break down the barriers protecting the stadium with the stated aim of killing Ram and Haddad.

The protesters claim that their desire to murder Israeli tennis players is due to Operation Cast Lead. But this is pure propaganda. Their desire to murder Ram and Haddad stems not from Israel’s military actions to defend its citizens from murder, but from the protesters’ hatred of the Jewish state. And that hatred stems from the same source as their misogyny, their hatred of the US and their support for the likes of Osama bin Laden and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

A 2005 Swedish government report indicated that in 2004, incidents of rape had increased 50 percent throughout the country. A Malmo police report noted that 68 percent of the rapists were minorities. As Islamic scholar Robert Spencer has noted, Islamic teaching views rape as a legitimate act against women and girls who behave in "non-Islamic" ways. In much of Scandinavia as well as in Muslim neighborhoods in France, women have begun wearing veils in order to protect themselves against roving gangs of Muslim young men.

The defilement of women and girls, like gay bashing, has nothing to do with IDF operations in Gaza. It has to do with the pathological nature of the cultures that condone and encourage the violence, and the Western governments and intellectuals who make excuses for it.

ALL OF THIS is hidden away from the public thanks to Western liberals’ willingness to accept the legitimacy of events like Israel Apartheid Week. Due to the complicity of leftist authorities, the international discourse about the Arab and Islamic world and the cultures they have produced is diverted to false allegations against Israel.

Any attempt to point out that Hamas is genocidal; that Iran stones women to death, and systematically executes homosexuals; that Saudi Arabia is the most repressive society on the planet; that Egypt permits and indeed encourages female genital mutilation; that Jordan does not prosecute fathers, sons, husbands and uncles who murder their female relatives; is attacked and delegitimized. Those who raise these issues are accused of hating Muslims and of being secret Zionist agents.

So too, Islamic violence in the West is swept under the rug. For example, to date, no mainstream US media organ has reported that in Buffalo, New York Muzzamil Hassan decapitated his wife Aasiya on February 12 after he stabbed her to death. Just a few years earlier that same mainstream media had embraced this murderer as a paragon of Islamic moderation after he established Bridges TV network, which was supposed to show the American public how moderate Islam is.

For some reason, the same media don’t consider it noteworthy that their moderate Muslim poster boy chopped off his wife’s head a week after she filed for divorce. Certainly, no connection can be drawn between her ritual slaughter and Islam.

Sunday was International Women’s Day. Throughout the West, feminists spent the day congratulating themselves for their great sacrifices for women’s rights.

Last Wednesday Saudi authorities arrested a woman for driving. Her arrest drew no protest from her Western sisters. Obviously, they were too busy defending Finklestein’s freedom to disseminate lies about Israeli women to ignorant college kids to care.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Soldiers of peace

Compare and contrast the following three events: At the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Board of Governors meeting on Wednesday, George Schulte, the US ambassador to the IAEA, pointed an accusatory finger at Syria. Damascus, Schulte said, has not come clean on its nuclear program. That program, of course, was exposed in September 2007 when Israel reportedly destroyed Syria’s North Korean-built, Iranian-financed al-Kibar nuclear reactor.

In its report to its Board of Governors, the IAEA stated that in analyzing soil samples from the bombed installation, its inspectors discovered traces of uranium. The nuclear watchdog agency also noted that the Syrians have blocked UN nuclear inspectors from the site and from three other suspected nuclear sites.

Reacting to the IAEA report, Schulte said that it "contributes to the growing evidence of clandestine nuclear activities in Syria."

He added, "We must understand why such [uranium] material – material not previously declared to the IAEA – existed in Syria, and this can only happen if Syria provides the cooperation requested."

On Tuesday, at a press conference in Jerusalem with outgoing Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, visiting US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the Obama administration is sending two senior envoys to Damascus. Their job, as she put it, is to begin "preliminary conversations" on how to jumpstart US-Syrian bilateral ties.

Clinton’s statement made good headlines, but she was light on details. On Wednesday, hours after Schulte accused Syria of covering up its illicit nuclear program, US Sen. John Kerry helpfully filled in the blanks about the nature of the Obama administration’s overtures to nuclear-proliferating Damascus. In an address before the left-leaning Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institute in Washington, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who just returned from a visit to Syria, Israel and the Palestinian Authority, said that the purpose of US overtures to Damascus is to appease Syrian President Bashar Assad.

If in the past, both American and Israeli policy-makers interested in engaging Damascus have made ending Syria’s alliance with Iran a central goal of their proposed engagement, Kerry dismissed such an aim as unrealistic. In his words, "We should have no illusions that Syria will immediately end its ties with Iran."

Indeed, as far as Kerry is concerned, Syria’s role in these talks is not to actually give the US anything of value. Rather, Syria’s role is to take things of value from the US – and of course from Israel.

Kerry proposed that in exchange for Syrian acceptance of the US’s offer of friendship and Assad’s willingness to negotiate an Israeli surrender of the Golan Heights, America should consider "loosening certain sanctions" against Syria. Doing so, he claimed, will also be good for the US economy because it will open new opportunities for US businesses.

ON THE surface, the disparate statements by Schulte, Clinton and Kerry present us with a puzzle. In Geneva, Schulte noted that Syria is a nuclear proliferating rogue state that has refused to cooperate with UN inspectors. And in Jerusalem and Washington, Clinton and Kerry ignored Syria’s dangerous actions, and advocated a policy of appeasement.

At the same IAEA Board of Governors meeting this week, the agency reported that Iran has produced more than a thousand kilograms of low enriched uranium – enough to build a bomb after further enrichment. That enrichment can be completed by year’s end with Iran’s 5,600 centrifuges. Moreover, between the Russian-built, soon-to-be-opened nuclear reactor in Bushehr and the illicit heavy water reactor in Arak, Iran will have the capacity to build plutonium-based bombs within two years.

Commenting on the IAEA’s report on Iran, Adm. Michael Mullen, the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged that Iran has enough uranium for a bomb. Seemingly contradicting Mullen, Defense Secretary Robert Gates claimed that there is no reason to worry about all that uranium because Iran won’t have a bomb for some time, given that the uranium it possesses is not sufficiently enriched to make a weapon.

For his part, US President Barack Obama is receiving guidance on contending with Iran from former Congressman Lee Hamilton, who co-authored the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group report published in December 2006. That report called for the US to coordinate the withdrawal of its forces from Iraq with Iran and Syria – the principal sponsors of both the Shi’ite and Sunni insurgencies in the country. It recommended that the US purchase Syria’s good will by pressuring Israel to surrender the Golan Heights to Damascus, and Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem to Hamas. It recommended that the US win Iran’s trust by accepting it as a nuclear power and pledging not to overthrow the regime.

In an interview last month with Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, Hamilton reiterated those recommendations. He claimed that the starting point for US-Iran discussions is for the US to "state our respect for the Iranian people, renounce regime change as an instrument of US policy, seek opportunities for a range of dialogue across a range of issues, and acknowledge Iran’s security concerns and its right to civilian nuclear power."

Hamilton assured Ignatius that these recommendations have been adopted by the White House.

ALL OF the above show that there is no contradiction between what the Obama administration understands about Iran and Syria and the policy it has adopted toward them. Specifically, as Schulte’s and Mullen’s statements make clear, the administration is aware of the dangers that both Iran and Syria constitute to global security. And as Clinton, Kerry, Gates and Hamilton all make clear, the administration’s policy for dealing with those dangers is to change the subject and hope the American public won’t notice or mind.

To this end, the administration is now asserting that Iran and Syria – the two most active agents of regional instability – share the US’s interest in a stable, democratic Iraq. And owing to their sudden devotion to stability, Obama’s surrogates tell us the Syrians and Iranians will support the new anti-Syrian and anti-Iranian Iraqi democracy and even protect it after the US withdraws its forces from the country.

Then, too, as both Kerry and Clinton made clear, the administration plans to ignore Syria’s support for Iraqi, Palestinian and Lebanese terrorism, its nuclear proliferation activities and its massive ballistic missile arsenal, as well as its strategic alliance with Iran. Rather than confront Syria about its bad behavior, the administration favors a policy based on making believe that in his heart of hearts, Assad is a liberal democrat who aspires to peace, and hope, and change.

But the core of the administration’s campaign to ignore Iran’s nuclear program – as well as Syria’s – is its unrelenting quest for the big payoff: Palestinian statehood.

This week Iran staged yet another "Destroy Israel" conference in Teheran, replete with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s trademark Holocaust denial, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s ritual castigation of the Jewish state as a "cancerous tumor," and the US as a treacherous enemy, and Ali Larijani’s threat to attack Israel’s suspected nuclear sites. The conference enjoyed a newfound sense of international legitimacy, taking place as it did just after burka-clad Annette Bening’s goodwill Hollywood celebrity visit to the mullocracy.

THE GENOCIDAL pageantry in Teheran elicited no significant response from Clinton and Kerry. They had bigger fish to fry. While the administration and its supporters seem to believe that the US has no right to make demands on Iran and Syria, which, they assert, are both just advancing their national interests, for them Israel is a completely different story. As Clinton and Kerry demonstrated this week, the administration and its supporters will not stop making demands on Israel.

Kerry justified Syria’s continued alliance with Iran by saying that Syria should be expected to "play both sides of the fence [with the US and Iran] as other nations do when they believe it is in their interests."

But Israel has no right to similarly take what action it deems necessary to secure its interests. In Kerry’s view, the time has come for the US to show that it is serious about Palestinian statehood, and the way to do that is to force Israel to block all Jewish building in Judea and Samaria.

In his words, "On the Israeli side, nothing will do more to make clear our seriousness about turning the page than demonstrating – with actions rather than words – that we are serious about Israel freezing settlement activity in the West Bank."

He also called for the US to compel Israel to open its borders with Gaza. And he said that from his perspective, it is unacceptable for the incoming Netanyahu government not to embrace establishing a Palestinian state as its most urgent goal.

Clinton joined Kerry in his efforts to compel the Jewish state to ignore its national interests in the cause of the higher goal of Palestinian statehood. Like him, she attacked Israel for not handing control over its borders with Gaza to Hamas. And like Kerry, she stated repeatedly that her greatest goal is to establish a Palestinian state.

Clinton’s unique contribution to that great "pro-peace" endeavor this week was her outspoken criticism on Wednesday of the Jerusalem Municipality’s decision to enforce the city’s building and planning ordinances equally toward both Jews and Arabs. That policy was made clear this week when city inspectors destroyed illegal buildings in both Jewish and Arab neighborhoods.

Since as far as Clinton is concerned, Israel will one day be required to throw all the Jews out of East, South and North Jerusalem to make room for what she believes is the "inevitable" Palestinian state, Israel has no right to treat Arabs and Jews equally in its soon-to-be-inevitably divided capital city. Arabs should be allowed to break the law at will. When Israel insists on enforcing its laws without prejudice, Clinton condemns it for being anti-peace.

Kerry argues that by forcing Israel to give its land to the Palestinians, the US will be promoting regional stability by doing the bidding of anti-Iranian Arab states like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. But even if putting the screws to Israel makes Cairo and Riyadh happy, their happiness will have no impact whatsoever on Iran’s nuclear weapons programs or on Syria’s proliferation activities. That is, Israeli land giveaways will have no impact on regional stability.

And that’s precisely the point. The Obama administration has no intention of preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power or Syria from maintaining its alliance with the mullahs. The White House seeks far more modest ends.

Through its policies toward Israel on the one hand and Iran and Syria on the other, the Obama administration demonstrates that it has already accepted a nuclear Iran. Its chief concern today is to avoid being blamed when the mushroom clouds appear in the sky. And it may well achieve that aim. After all, how could the administration be blamed for a nuclear Iran when it has wholly devoted its efforts to advancing the righteous cause of peace?

Originally published in the Jerusalem Post.

Pictures of Victory

On Sunday, Israelis were witness to a cavalcade of European leaders marching to Jerusalem to have their pictures taken with outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi came to Jerusalem from Sharm e-Sheikh, where they had their pictures taken with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. In both cities, they expressed their support for Israel’s decision to stop fighting the Iranian-armed, financed and trained Hamas terror regime in Gaza.

Olmert greeted the Europeans leaders as great friends of Israel and claimed that their presence demonstrated that Israel’s operation against Hamas enjoyed massive international support. Unfortunately, Olmert’s statements were wrong on both counts. The leaders who came to Jerusalem are not friends of Israel and their presence in our capital did not demonstrate that Operation Cast Lead enjoyed international backing.

While sufficing with paying the most minimal lip service to Israel’s inherent right to defend itself, the leaders who came to Jerusalem have been outspoken in their criticism of Israel’s actual efforts to defend its citizens from Hamas aggression. None have publicly recognized that Israel has a duty to its citizens to defeat Hamas. To the contrary, all have claimed that there "is no military solution" to Israel’s military conflict with Hamas.

And while these leaders have repeated vacuous bromides about the "tragedy of both sides," their voters have been much less circumspect in telling the Jews what think of us. Over the past three weeks, all of their countries, and indeed, all the countries in Western Europe have hosted large-scale, violent, anti-Semitic demonstrations and riots. And rather than condemn the anti-Jewish violence and incitement at these events, the Europeans leaders who came to Jerusalem have either sought to appease the anti-Semites or ignore them.

German authorities for instance permitted Hamas supporters to wave Hamas flags at their hateful "peace demonstrations" while barring Israel supporters from holding Israeli flags or even displaying them in their windows.

In France, Sarkozy has equated his victimized Jewish community with the French Muslims who have been attacking them by claiming that his government "will not tolerate international tensions mutating into intercommunity violence."

Given their refusal to support Israel in its fight against Hamas and their publics’ growing hatred of Israel and the Jews, what made these Europeans leaders come to Jerusalem? As Gordon Brown and French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner made clear in their remarks in Jerusalem, they came here to advance a hostile agenda. They want Israel to acquiesce to Hamas’s demand to open its borders with Gaza and to support the opening of Egypt’s border crossing with Gaza. They also intend to start giving Hamas hundreds of millions of dollars in "humanitarian aid" to rebuild Gaza.

If Europe gets its way, any gains that Israel made in Operation Cast Lead will quickly be erased. So the question then arises, why did Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak agree to have them come to Jerusalem?

The short answer to this question is that Olmert, Livni and Barak view the European leaders as stage props. As they explained repeatedly since the outset of Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s leaders sought to end the campaign with a "picture of victory." A group photo with Olmert, Sarkozy, Brown, Merkel, Zapatero and Berlusconi was the picture that they felt they needed. The fact that the picture came with demands that Israel cannot agree to without squandering its hard-earned gains in Gaza, is beside the point.

WHICH BRINGS us to the main point. What the parade of hostile foreigners in Jerusalem demonstrated clearly is that while the campaign in Gaza was touted by our leaders as a way to "change the security reality in the South," for our leaders, its most important goal was to change the electoral reality ahead of the February 10 general elections. Indeed, for them, the operation would have more appropriately been named "Operation Cast Ballots."

Olmert, Livni and Barak claimed that by signing a memorandum of understanding with outgoing US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and due to Egyptian good will, Israel succeeded in building an international framework to prevent Hamas from rearming. But the MOU sets out no mechanism whatsoever for interdicting weapons shipments to Gaza on the high seas. And Egypt for its part has refused to agree to take any concerted action to prevent the weapons shipments from docking in its ports and transiting its territory en route to Gaza.

The other operational goal that Livni, Olmert and Barak set for the campaign was to restore Israel’s deterrence and so convince Hamas to stop firing its missiles on southern Israel. But, as Hamas’s continued firing of missiles at southern Israel after Olmert declared the cease-fire on Saturday night showed, Israel failed to deter Hamas.

But while they failed to accomplish either of Operation Cast Lead’s operational goals, they did accomplish – at least for now – their main strategic goal. They succeeded in not losing.

By waging Operation Cast Lead, Olmert, Livni and Barak hoped to turn the absence of military defeat into the building blocks of political triumph. The operation was supposed to secure their political futures in three ways. First, it was supposed to change the subject of the electoral campaign.

As Olmert looks ahead to retirement, and as Livni and Barak vie with Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu to replace him, all three politicians wanted the elections to be about something other than their failures to defeat Hizbullah, their failure to defend the South from Hamas’s growing arsenal, and their failure to contend with Iran’s nuclear weapons program. This goal was accomplished by Operation Cast Lead.

Their second goal – and perhaps Olmert’s primary objective – was to erase the public’s memory of Israel’s strategic failure in the Second Lebanon War. This goal was partially achieved. The IDF performed with greater competence in Gaza than in Lebanon. And Israel achieved its aim of not being defeated in Gaza. As a result, the nation feels much more confident about the IDF’s ability to defend the country.

THE MAIN difference between how Operation Cast Lead has ended and how the Second Lebanon War ended has little to do with how the IDF performed. The most important difference is Israel has not agreed to have an international force stationed in Gaza as it accepted (and in Livni’s case, championed) the deployment of UNIFIL forced in South Lebanon. Since Hizbullah has used UNIFIL as a screen behind which it has rearmed and reasserted its military control over South Lebanon, the absence of such a force in Gaza is a net gain for Israel.

But again, if Israel permits Europe and the UN to flood Gaza with aid money – which will all go directly to Hamas – it will be enabling a new mechanism to be formed that will shield Hamas from the IDF and enable it to rebuild its arsenals and strengthen its control over Gaza.

This prospect is made all the more dangerous by the fact that Israel ended the campaign without taking control over the Gaza-Egypt border. By leaving the border zone under Hamas control, Israel left the path clear for Iran to resupply Hizbullah’s armed forces with missiles and rockets. As Shin Bet Director Yuval Diskin explained on Sunday, under the present circumstances, Hamas can be expected to rebuild its arsenals in as little as three months.

THE THIRD political aim that Olmert, Livni and Barak sought to achieve in waging Operation Cast Lead was to convince the Israeli public that their worldview is correct. That worldview asserts that the world is divided between the extremist Islamic fundamentalists and the moderates. They claim that the latter group includes Arab dictatorships like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and democracies like Turkey, the EU, and Israel. The Kadima-Labor worldview also asserts that by surrendering territory to the Arabs, Israel will receive international legitimacy for any acts of self-defense it is forced to take in the event it is attacked from the territories it vacated.

Although the local media, with their sycophantic celebration of Mubarak and support for Israeli withdrawals have supported this view, it is far from clear that the public has been convinced of its wisdom. Between Turkey’s open support for Hamas and vilification of Israel, Egypt’s abject refusal to take any concrete action to end weapons smuggling to Gaza, and Fatah’s fecklessness and hostility, Israelis have been given ample proof this month that the moderate camp is a fiction.

Moreover, the massive anti-Semitic riots in Europe and the US, and last week’s anti-Israeli UN Security Council Resolution 1860 which the US refused to veto have made quite clear that Israel’s withdrawals have brought it no sympathy whatsoever from the "moderate" camp.

Just as the goal of not losing did not bring Israel victory over Hamas, so too, Livni, Olmert and Barak’s bid to use the operation to increase their political cache does not seem to have succeeded. Opinion polls taken in the aftermath of Olmert’s announcement of the cease-fire on Saturday night showed that Likud has maintained, and even expanded, its lead against Kadima and Labor.

IN SPITE of its obvious limitations, Israelis can be pleased with the results of Operation Cast Lead on two counts. Although Hamas was not defeated, remains in full control of Gaza and has the ability to rebuild its forces, it was harmed. The IDF’s operation did knock out its central installations, reduce its capacity to fight and killed some of its key leaders.

The second reason that Israelis can be pleased with the outcome is that it could have been much worse. The fact of the matter is that Operation Cast Lead was the most successful operation that Kadima and Labor are capable of leading.

With their capitulationist world view, they cannot bring Israel victory over our enemies. The most they can deliver is an absence of defeat. And so long as Israel doesn’t allow Europe and the UN to begin transferring hundreds of millions of dollars to Hamas, we will remain undefeated by Hamas.

Looking ahead to the challenges Israel’s next government will face, Operation Cast Lead gave Israel between three to six months of security in the south before Hamas will be able to renew its missile offensive. It is during that time that the next government will need to contend with Israel’s two greatest challenges – preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, and preventing the new Obama administration from undermining Israel’s strategic position by selling out Israel’s security to buy "pictures of victory" of its own with Iran and Syria.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Iran’s Gaza diversion

Since the IDF commenced its ground operations in Gaza on Saturday night, I have been hungrily eyeing my hat.

On Friday I argued that the Olmert-Livni-Barak government is following the same defeatist strategy in Gaza today that the Olmert-Livni-Peretz government followed in Lebanon two and a half years ago. In 2006, the government supported a cease-fire that empowered outside actors – in that case the UN and Europe – to enforce an arms embargo against Hizbullah and to act as Israel’s surrogate in preventing Hizbullah from reasserting control over South Lebanon.

In the event, as government critics like myself warned at the time, these outside actors have done nothing of the sort. The European commanded UNIFIL force in Lebanon has instead acted as a shield defending Hizbullah from Israel. Under UNIFIL’s blind eye, Iran and Syria have tripled the size of Hizbullah’s missile arsenal. And Hizbullah has taken full control over some 130 villages along the border.

In a similar fashion, today the government is insisting on the establishment of an international monitoring force, comprised perhaps of Egyptian, Israeli, Fatah-affiliated Palestinian, American and European officials that will monitor Gaza’s border with Egypt and somehow prevent weapons smuggling. Like the cease-fire deal in Lebanon, this plan does not foresee the toppling of the Hamas regime in Gaza or the destruction of its military capacity. It ignores the fact that similar, already existing, theoretically friendly monitoring forces – like the US-commanded Multi-National Force Observers in the Sinai – have done nothing to prevent or even keep tabs on weapons transfers to Hamas.

STILL, IN spite of the government’s continued diplomatic incompetence, there are reasons to think that Israel may emerge the perceived victor in the current campaign against Hamas (and I will be forced to eat my hat). The first is that Gaza is relatively easier to control as a battle space than Lebanon. Unlike the situation in Lebanon, IDF forces in Gaza have the ability to isolate Hamas from all outside assistance. The IDF’s current siege of Gaza City, its control over northern Gaza, its naval quarantine of the coast and its bombardment and isolation of the border zone with Egypt could cause Hamas to sue for a cease-fire on less than victorious terms.

Indeed, this may already be happening. Hamas’s leaders are reportedly hiding in hospitals – cynically using the sick as human shields. And on Monday morning, Hamas’s leadership in Damascus sent representatives to their new arch-enemy Egypt to begin discussing cease-fire terms. Taken together, these moves could indicate that Hamas is collapsing. But they could also indicate that Hamas is opting to fight another day while assuming that Israel will agree to let it do so.

THE SECOND reason that it is possible that Hamas may be defeated is because much to everyone’s surprise, Iran may have decided to let Hamas lose.

Here it is important to note that the war today, like the war in 2006, is a war between Israel and Iran. Like Hizbullah, Hamas is an Iranian proxy. And just as was the case in 2006, Iran was instrumental in inciting the current war.

Iran prepared Hamas for this war. It used Hamas’s six-month cease-fire with Israel to double both the range and the size of Hamas’s missile arsenal. It trained Hamas’s 20,000-man army for this war. And as the six months drew to a close, Iran incited Hamas to attack.

So too, in 2006, Iran incited Hamas to attack Israel. That war, now known as the Second Lebanon War, was actually a two-front war that began in Gaza. Ordered by Iran, it was Hamas that started the war when its forces (together with allied forces in Fatah), attacked the IDF position at Kerem Shalom on June 25, 2006 and kidnapped Cpl. Gilad Schalit. Israel fought a limited war against Iran’s Palestinian proxies in Gaza for 17 days before the country’s attention moved to the North after Hizbullah attacked an IDF position along the border and abducted Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser.

Israel’s leaders today warn against a possible Hizbullah attack. In the North, municipalities are readying bomb shelters and air raid sirens ahead of such a possibility. Most of the IDF reservists called up over the weekend are being sent to the North ahead of a possible Hizbullah attack.

But in contrast to the situation in 2006, today Iran seems to have little interest in expanding the war and so saving Hamas from military defeat and humiliation. Speaking on Hizbullah’s Al Manar television network on Sunday, Saeed Jalili, the head of Iran’s National Security Council, its chief nuclear negotiator and a close advisor to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, essentially told Hamas that it is on its own.

In his words, "We believe that the great popular solidarity with the Palestinian people as expressed all over the world should reflect on the will of the Arab and Islamic countries and other countries that have an independent will so that these will move in a concerted, cooperative, and cohesive manner to draft a collective initiative that can achieve two main things as an inevitable first step. These are putting an immediate end to aggression and second breaking the siege and quickly securing humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza."

In other words, Iran’s response to its great enemy’s the war against its proxy is to suggest forming a commission.

There are many possible explanations for Iran’s actions. First there is the fact that war is an expensive proposition and Iran today is in trouble on that score. In the summer of 2006, oil cost nearly $80 a barrel. Today it is being traded at $46 a barrel. Iran revised its 2009 budget downward on Monday based on the assumption that oil will average $37 a barrel in 2009.

Over the past several months, Iran has been begging OPEC to cut back supply quotas to jack up the price of oil. But, perhaps in the interest of weakening Iran, Saudi Arabia has consistently refused Iran’s requests. To date, OPEC’s cutbacks in supply have been far too small to offset the decrease in demand. And the loss of billions in oil revenues may simply have priced Iran out of running a two-front terror war.

Then too, Washington-based Iran expert Michael Ledeen from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies argued on Monday in his blog at Pajamas Media website that Iran’s apparent decision to sit this war out may well be the result of the regime’s weakness. Its recent crackdown on dissidents – with the execution of nine people on Christmas Day – and the unleashing of regime supporters in riots against the Egyptian, Jordanian, Saudi, Turkish and French embassies as well as the home of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi lends to the conclusion that the regime is worried about its own survival. As Ledeen notes Teheran may view another expensive terror war as a spark which could incite a popular revolution or simply destabilize the country ahead of June’s scheduled presidential elections.

THERE IS also the possibility that Iran simply miscalculated. It believed that ahead of Israel’s February 10 elections, the lame-duck Olmert-Livni-Barak government, which was already traumatized by the 2006 war, would opt not to fight. This would have been a reasonable assumption.

After all, in spite of Israel’s sure knowledge last summer that Hamas and Iran would use a cease-fire with Israel to increase the size of Hamas’s missile arsenal and expand the range of its projectiles while building up its forces, the Olmert-Livni-Barak government agreed to the cease-fire. And then, when Hamas announced that it would not extend the cease-fire past its December 19 deadline, Defense Minister Ehud Barak sent emissaries to Egypt to conduct "indirect" negotiations with Hamas in which Israel essentially begged the terror group to reconsider.

But then Israel responded with great force and Iran was left to make a decision. And for the moment at least, it appears that Iran has decided to let Hamas go down. As far as Iran is concerned, even a Hamas defeat is not a terrible option. This view is likely encouraged by Israel’s current suggested cease-fire. After all, international monitors stationed along Gaza’s borders will not serve as an impediment to future Iranian moves to rebuild Hamas.

ALAS, THERE is another possible explanation for Iran’s apparent decision to abandon a vassal it incited to open a war. On Sunday, Iranian analyst Amir Taheri reported the conclusions of a bipartisan French parliamentary report on the status of Iran’s nuclear program in Asharq Alawsat. The report which was submitted to French President Nicolas Sarkozy late last month concluded that unless something changes, Iran will have passed the nuclear threshold by the end of 2009 and will become a nuclear power no later than 2011. The report is notable because it is based entirely on open-sourced material whose accuracy has been acknowledged by the Iranian regime.

The report asserts that this year will be the world’s final opportunity to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. And, as Taheri hints strongly, the only way of doing that effectively is by attacking Iran’s nuclear installations.

In light of this new report, which contradicts earlier US intelligence assessments that claimed it would be years before Iran is able to build nuclear weapons, it is possible that Iran ordered the current war in Gaza for the same reason it launched its war in 2006: to divert international attention away from its nuclear program.

It is possible that Iran prefers to run down US President George W. Bush’s last two weeks in office with the White House and the rest of the world focused on Gaza, than risk the chance that during these two weeks, the White House (or Israel) might read the French parliament’s report and decide to do something about it.

So too, its apparent decision not to have Hizbullah join in this round of fighting might have more to do with Iran’s desire to preserve its Lebanese delivery systems for any nuclear devices than its desire to save pennies in a tight economy.

And if this is the case, then even if Israel beats Hamas (and I eat my hat), we could still lose the larger war by again having allowed Iran to get us to take our eyes away from the prize.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Israel and the Palestinians: Ending the Stalemate

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s July 30, 2008, announcement of his intention to resign from office and the recent upsurge in internecine violence between Hamas and Fatah eratives in Gaza has thrown a monkey wrench in the Bush administration’s goal of seeing and the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority sign a peace treaty laying out the borders and powers of a Palestinian state by the end of 2008. But even in the unlikely event that such an agreement is reached, far from stabilizing Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians, it will likely have either no impact on the Palestinian conflict with Israel, or a profoundly negative one.

Indeed, even if the outgoing Bush administration and the lame duck Olmert government manage to sign a peace treaty with the increasingly powerless remnants of the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, that achievement is liable to be quickly eclipsed by violence that will follow the signing ceremony. The likely upsurge in Palestinian violence against Israel, in turn, will demonstrate that the Administration’s stated aim of establishing a Palestinian state—an aim which is supported by the Israeli government—has little relevance to the nature of the Palestinian conflict with Israel.  Moreover, seeking such a state today will likely exacerbate, rather than ameliorate, the conflict.  Indeed, the aftershocks of such an agreement will make clear that both Israel and the United States are basing their policies towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on false assumptions about the nature of that conflict.

Role Reversal

In 1993, when Israel first recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian Arabs, the Israeli and American perception of the nature of the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation underwent a profound change—as did both countries’ chosen paradigm for resolving the conflict.

Prior to 1993, both Israeli and U.S. policies were based on the view that the root of the conflict was the Arab world’s rejection of Israel’s right to exist. That view was codified in United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, which asserted that two principles were to form the basis of any “just and lasting peace in the Middle East.” The first was an Israeli withdrawal from some of the territory taken over by the Israel Defense Forces during the June 1967 Six-Day War. The second was that the Arab states must accept Israel’s right to exist. While Resolution 242 was purposely vague about the extent of future Israeli territorial withdrawals, its language on the second component of a future Middle Eastern peace was explicit.

It asserted that a future Middle Eastern peace would be based on the “termination of all claims of states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every state in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized borders free from threats or acts of force.”

Since Israel has consistently demonstrated its  readiness to make territorial compromises for a lasting peace with its neighbors, it was this second condition that formed the foundation of both U.S. and Israeli policies towards the Palestinians specifically, and the Arab world generally, from the end of the Six-Day War until the onset of Israel’s peace process with the PLO in 1993.

In basing their policies on the need for the Arab world to accept Israel’s right to exist, successive American administrations and Israeli governments found themselves out of step with Western Europe, the Arab League, the United Nations and the Soviet Union. For these powers, the root of the conflict was not a refusal of the Arab world generally or the Palestinians specifically to accept Israel’s right to exist, but Palestinian statelessness itself.1

The difference could not have been more profound. The Israeli-American view placed the burden of change on the Arabs. The European-Soviet-UN view placed the burden for change on Israel. In the former case, the underlying assumption was  that the principal obstacle to peace was not Israeli claims to lands it took control of during the Six-Day War but the Arab world’s refusal to accept Israel’s existence. Until the Arabs changed their view, peace would be impossible.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Pakistan takes important step

by Salim Mansur








Musharraf’s defeat signals a new era for Pakistan.


The news from Pakistan following this week’s elections for the national and provincial assemblies tentatively is positive for a country awash in dread of escalating terrorist violence and political stalemate.


There was fear of an aborted election, or the results manipulated by the ruling party associated with President Pervez Musharraf, who was until lately a military dictator.


In murdering Benazir Bhutto, leader of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), the terrorists warned Pakistanis of their readiness to turn the election into carnage, and this partly explains why less than 40% of some 80 million eligible voters ventured to the polls.


[More]But the election turned out to be, by all accounts, relatively open and free. Musharraf’s party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid-i-Azam (PML-Q), conceded defeat and the main opposition parties — PPP and Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) – together emerged with a majority in the 342-member lower house of the National Assembly (NA).


The most noteworthy election result is the near elimination of the Islamic fundamentalist parties at the national and provincial levels.


In the NA the presence of religious parties was reduced from 59 members elected in 2002 to three members. In the provincial assemblies the results were similar, a repudiation by the voters of the religious parties insistent on enforcing Islamic laws (sharia) on the country.


Religious parties 


This news confirms what those most familiar with Pakistan’s political history have known for the longest time that religious parties — with their support for the Taliban, their affinity with the Arab world’s Muslim brotherhood and their ties to Saudi Arabia’s extremist Wahhabi sect — have only marginal electoral support in the country and even less political legitimacy.


There is a message here for the West that a majority of Muslims, when given an opportunity to vote freely, is unlikely to support fundamentalists with their ideologically driven commitment for sharia as the answer to problems of a broken and failed society such as Pakistan.


The transition of any society from authoritarian politics to the beginnings of democracy is fraught with uncertainty.


In Pakistan’s turbulent history the political class with secular leanings has been an abject failure in providing responsible and accountable government. Its past record of corruption and ineptitude may not bode well for the future, while military rule as the alternative to democracy has left Pakistan in worse shape politically to cope with demands of the modern world.


Yet the hope for Pakistan riding on the results of this election is that politicians will have learned some lessons from the past, and that they will do better in meeting the needs of the people.


Unnatural allies


The PPP and the PML-N are unnatural allies in their opposition to President Musharraf, and their divergent interests will open enough space for the PML-Q — the president’s party with the third largest bloc of members in the NA — to push back the temptation for politics of vengeance or break with the Bush administration over the war on terror, even as Islamist terrorists strive to create instability in the country.


This election could be the first halting steps for the building of democracy in Pakistan, for the distance Pakistanis have to go in repairing their country, in eliminating terrorists and in seeking peaceful neighbourly relations to secure for themselves a deservingly better future.

Mugniyeh’s true legacy

It is quite possible that terror master Imad Mughniyeh was not killed Tuesday night in Damascus for his past crimes, but to prevent him from carrying out additional attacks in the future.

On January 30, French security services raided a Paris apartment and arrested six Arab men. Three of the men – two Lebanese and one Syrian – were travelling on diplomatic passports. According to the Italian Libero newspaper, the six were members of a Hizbullah cell. Documents seized included tourist maps of Paris, London, Madrid, Berlin and Rome marked up with red highlighter to indicate routes, addresses, parking lots and "truck stopping points." The maps pointed to several routes to Vatican back entrances.

[More]Libero‘s report explained that the "truck stopping points" aligned with information the French had received the week before from Beirut. There, Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah had convened a conference of his senior terror leaders where he ordered them to activate Hizbullah cells throughout Europe to kidnap senior European leaders.

The day of the arrests, French Defense Minister Herve Morin was meeting with his American counterpart, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in Washington on a previously unannounced visit. During his public appearances, Morin criticized the US National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear program from November. Morin said, "Coordinated information from a number of intelligence services leads us to believe that Iran has not given up its wish to pursue its [nuclear] program," and is "continuing to develop" it.

Other recent reports relayed French concern that their embassy in Beirut is being targeted for attack by Hizbullah. On January 15 terrorists attacked a US Embassy car in Beirut, killing four and wounding 16. This week, French President Nicholas Sarkozy’s chief of staff told L’Express newsweekly that the threat of terror against France "remains quite high."

All of the feared terror attacks against French and European targets have the classic earmarkings of Hizbullah operations chief and Iranian Revolutionary Guards officer Imad Mughniyeh. Mughniyeh was the pioneer of embassy bombings and high-profile kidnappings.

Most of the reports of his death treated Mughniyeh as a has-been. Coverage was devoted to his attacks against American, Israeli and Jewish targets in the 1980s and early 1990s. Yet at the time of his death, Mughniyeh remained one of the most dangerous and prolific terror operatives in the world.

Mughniyeh’s broad-based leadership role in the global terror nexus was made clear by the reaction of seemingly unrelated terror groups to his death. Representatives of the reputedly nationalist, secularist Fatah terror group expressed their pride in his life’s work. "We’re very proud to have had a Palestinian holding such a high position in Hizbullah," a Fatah official who worked with Mughniyeh in the 1970s and 1980s told The Jerusalem Post. Every Palestinian terror group – from Fatah to Hamas to Islamic Jihad, to the Popular Resistance Committees, the PFLP and DFLP – mourned Mughniyeh as a hero and martyr and called for revenge against Israel and the US.

In Iraq, Shi’ite and Sunni terrorists alike bemoaned his death and called for revenge. Shi’ite militia leader Muqtada al-Sadr, whose forces were trained and organized by Mughniyeh and Iran, condemned Mughniyeh’s killing. Sadr’s supposed arch-foe, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, who leads al-Qaida in Iraq and whose operational commanders are in Iran, responded to his death by calling for attacks against Israel.

And of course, Hizbullah and its state sponsors Iran and Syria all condemned Mughniyeh’s death in the strongest terms and vowed to avenge his killing.

These condemnations were not nostalgic pinings for a has-been. These uniform reactions from across the terror spectrum were the cries of Mughniyeh’s soldiers for their commander. Through Iran, Mughniyeh was in effect the commander or godfather or both of all of these forces. His life’s work embodied the growth, development and modus operandi of the forces of global terror and jihad. And understanding his life’s work is a key to understanding the nature of the jihadist forces arrayed against the Western world and Israel.

Mughniyeh began his terror career in the 1970s in Fatah leader Yasser Arafat’s Force 17 in Lebanon. There, in addition to terrorizing Lebanese Christians, he and Arafat trained Iranian Shi’ite jihadists. These men arrived at PLO camps in Lebanon in the early 1970s to train to overthrow of the Shah of Iran and install their leader Ayatollah Khomeini as the head of a new Islamic state. In 1979 they became the backbone of the newly formed Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps.

When Israel forced Arafat and his Fatah terror army to flee Lebanon in 1982, Arafat gave Fatah’s arsenal to Mughniyeh, who at that time, as an officer in the new Revolutionary Guards Corps, was forming Hizbullah. As Fatah’s terror heir, Mughniyeh and his colleagues set out to throw the Americans, French and Israelis out of Lebanon and to disenfranchise Lebanese Christians and Sunnis. They accomplished their goals through a mix of terror tactics including car bombings, suicide bombings, airline hijackings, kidnappings, assassinations, missile and rocket attacks on civilians, and embassy bombings; and guerrilla warfare tactics like ambushes, RPG attacks on convoys, sniper fire, popular indoctrination and psychological warfare operations. Most of these operations were carried out in Lebanon.

In the 1990s, Mughniyeh and Iran took their show on the road. Not only did they reenact their car bombings in South America, they also expanded their terror nexus to the then nascent Sunni Wahabist al-Qaida organization. As Thomas Joscelyn documents in his short book Iran’s Proxy War Against America, Iran through Mughniyeh has been instrumental in training, arming and sheltering al-Qaida since the early 1990s.

As an Iranian agent, in the early 1990s, Mughniyeh built operational alliances with Osama bin Laden, Ayman Zawahiri and al-Qaida’s military chief Saif al-Adel when al-Qaida was based in Sudan. Adel, along with several hundred other al-Qaida operatives, travelled to Lebanon to undergo training at Hizbullah camps. Hizbullah trainers also worked at al-Qaida camps in Sudan and al-Qaida operatives also trained at Revolutionary Guard camps in Iran. From 1996 through 1998, 10 percent of bin Laden’s satellite phone calls were to Iran.

Operational cooperation between Hizbullah and al-Qaida quickly followed.

In 1996, Iran ordered Hizbullah to blow up the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia that housed US military personnel; 19 US servicemen were killed. Although al-Qaida was never officially tied to the bombing, Zahawiri phoned bin Laden to congratulate him on the attack.

The al-Qaida terror cell in Kenya that carried out the Kenyan arm of the twin US Embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dars el-Salaam in 1998 underwent training in Hizbullah camps in Lebanon. That attack had all the markings of Mughniyeh operations. Like the 1983 attacks on the US Marine barracks and French paratrooper base in Beirut, the 1998 attacks were double car bombings carried out in disparate locations nearly simultaneously.

As Joscelyn recalls, the 9/11 Commission called for further investigation of Iran’s role in the September 11, 2001, attacks on America. Adel, a veteran of Hizbullah camps, was intimately aware of the bombing plans before it took place. Ramzi Binalshibh, the plot’s mastermind, travelled in and out of Iran several times in the months before the bombings. Then, too, eight to ten of the September 11 bombers transited Iran assisted by Hizbullah and Revolutionary Guard officials in late 2000. The Iranians did not stamp their passports. Several of the bombers transited Iran en route to Lebanon. Mughniyeh himself flew to Beirut from Teheran aboard the same flight as September 11 hijacker Ahmad al-Ghamdi.

Although Iran and the Taliban nearly went to war against one another in 2000, in the wake of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, according to jailed Taliban leaders, Iran pledged to assist the Taliban in their war against the US. Teheran opened its doors to fleeing Taliban leaders and senior al-Qaida commanders – including Adel and bin Laden’s son and heir apparent, Saad and Abu Musab Zarkawi. From Iran, Adel and bin Laden Jr. planned and ordered attacks in Saudi Arabia.

Moreover, from Iran, Adel and bin Laden worked with Zarkawi in planning the group’s insurgency in Iraq. Citing an extensive report from the German Cicero magazine, Joscelyn describes how Zarkawi set up his terror network under the protection of the Revolutionary Guards. Zarkawi had no problem operating in Iran in spite of his avowed hatred of Shi’ites who, after entering Iraq, he massacred at every opportunity.

Then, too, as Al Sharq al Aswat reported Wednesday, Mughniyeh played a central role in organizing and training Shi’ite militias in Iraq. He worked as the head of Iran’s intelligence directorate in southern Iraq, trained Sadr’s Mahdi army fighters in Iran, Iraq and Lebanon and set up shop in Basra to facilitate their entry into Iraq from Iran.

After the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO, Iran abandoned Arafat as a traitor. Mughniyeh was responsible for mending fences. In 1999 he brought Fatah back into Iran’s orbit when he acted as a middle-man in negotiating the Iranian sale of the Karine A weapons ship to the Palestinian Authority; the vessel was intercepted by IDF naval commandos in January 2002.

After Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, Mughniyeh worked as a middle-man bringing Hamas under Iranian control. That control was consolidated in a meeting between Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Syrian President Bashar Assad and Mughniyeh in Damascus in January 2001, after Hamas’s electoral victory in the PA’s legislative ballot.

Later in 2006, Mughniyeh returned to Lebanon to plan the kidnapping of IDF soldiers that was carried out on July 12, 2006, and precipitated that summer’s Second Lebanon War. Mughniyeh reportedly commanded Hizbullah forces during the campaign. After the war, he oversaw Hizbullah’s rearmament as well as the training of Hizbullah and Hamas forces in Iran. Saad bin Laden had reportedly travelled to Syria to oversee weapons shipments to Hizbullah during the war.

It is possible that Mughniyeh was irreplaceable. The pivotal role that he played in the nexus of global terror was unique. No one else had such wide-ranging accomplishments. But placing too much stress on Mugniyeh’s uniqueness would serve to obfuscate the basic reality that his life’s work embodied.

Mughniyeh embodied the fact that terrorists of all shapes and colors willingly collaborate with one another against their common enemies in the West. Mughniyeh personally bridged all the divisions within the world of Arab and Islamic terrorism. He showed that when it comes to attacking the West, there is no distinction between secular, nationalist, religious, Islamist, Sunni or Shi’ite terrorists.

His work revealed the inconvenient truth so fervently denied by policy-makers and politicians throughout the Western world. He showed that for the jihadists there is no distinction between terrorists who attack in Israel or against Jewish targets abroad and those who attack non-Israeli and non-Jewish targets. Moreover, his work as an Iranian agent demonstrates Iran’s central role in sponsoring jihad throughout the world.

Mughniyeh’s legacy is not simply a laundry list of massacre and torture. It is the nexus of global terror. While it is a great thing that he is dead, it must be understood that his death is insufficient. Hundreds of thousands converged in Beirut to celebrate his life’s work. The West must understand the significance of that work and unite to destroy it – layer after layer.

Globaloney

The President’s Middle East trip will likely only increase the radical threat. (AP Photo)

There is something surreal about the spectacle of President Bush touring the Persian Gulf.  It calls to mind the signature line of Mad Magazine’s mascot, Alfred E. Neuman: "What, me worry?"

Mr. Bush’s trip is, after all, premised on the notion that the Arab leaders he is courting there are reliable allies. Such a proposition should be subjected to the closest of critical scrutiny by Congress, the press and the American electorate since a number of highly debatable, and increasingly portentous, policies are predicated on this assumption.  These include:

 

  • Saudi Arabia and the other, smaller desert principalities are "moderates" who are as opposed as we to the totalitarian political agenda of fanatical ideologues such as Osama bin Laden.
  • The Gulfies share our concern about the rising power of Iran and therefore can be counted upon to join us in countering that region’s would-be Islamofascist superpower.  It follows not only that we can safely provide these autocracies with an array of advanced weapons, but we must do so.
  • The Arab regimes in the Persian Gulf will be helpful in brokering a peace between Palestinians and Israelis – if only the United States pressures the Jewish State to make territorial and other concessions that may imperil the latter.  And,
  • The willingness of the Gulf’s potentates to recycle the immense wealth they have accumulated in recent years – primarily through oil sales at exorbitantly inflated prices – to purchase big stakes in U.S. companies and capital markets is a welcome development.  Such investment is to be encouraged, and those who say otherwise should be condemned as "Chicken Little xenophobes" in the words of former GE chairman Jack Welch and his wife, Suzy. 

In fact, the Welch tag-team used a January 21 Business Week column to admonish a letter-writer worried about Arab and other sovereign wealth funds buying up American corporations:  "In trying times, U.S. companies always attract opportunistic, activist shareholders.  Sometimes they look like Carl Icahn or Nelson Peltz.  Sometimes they look like shiny-faced hedge fund managers just out of Wharton or Harvard Business School.  And sometimes – like now – they look Chinese or Saudi or whatever.  It doesn’t matter.  They’re all after the same thing: the opportunities in America’s capitalistic market."

Unfortunately, this confidence in the inexorable forces of "globalization" is as misplaced in the case of the so-called "pro-Western" Arab states as are the other assumptions driving American policy towards the region at the moment.  To be sure, at least some of those to whom President Bush has been paying court in recent days are genuinely desirous of American protection, arms, pressure on Israel and investment opportunities.  But to confuse such short-term, expediency-driven common interests with a durable strategic partnership is, for want of a better term, globaloney.

A litmus test of the true intentions of the Saudis and other oil-rich Arab fiefdoms  can be found in an initiative moving forward in Western capital markets – including, increasingly those of the United States – in parallel with their sovereign wealth investments in major financial institutions and exchanges: Shariah finance. 

As my colleague, Alex Alexiev, has noted in an important analysis of this phenomenon, Shariah finance is an invention of the Muslim Brotherhood, not the Koran; it dates back to the 1920s, not the seventh century.  This Islamist invention is designed to promote and underwrite that ideology’s political agenda of ghettoizing and dominating Muslim populations – and, in due course, non-Muslim ones. 

Forcing American enterprises to offer products Islamist "Shariah advisors" deem to comply with their political-religious-legal code is a Trojan horse for legitimating that code, Shariah, as practiced by the Saudi, Taliban, Sudanese and Iranian regimes.  It enriches and gives enormous influence to these advisor/ideologues and affords them new opportunities to drive millions (if not billions) in tithing and profits to so-called Islamist "charities" and other enemies of the West.

Encouragement of this cancer by Saudi and like-minded investors inside the West’s capitalist system is one of the ominous facts that belies the benign nostrums about globalization and the Persian Gulf served up by the likes of Mr. and Mrs. Welch, and embraced by the Bush Administration. Shariah finance is a prime indicator of why real care must be exercised about arming its proponents, weakening our ally – Israel – at their behest and encouraging their strategic penetration of our markets. 

With respect to the latter, this would seem to be an ideal time for increased scrutiny of Gulf states’ purchases of American companies.  Last year, in the wake of the firestorm concerning Dubai’s proposed take-over of American ports, Congress enacted legislation to strengthen the hand of security-minded federal agencies involved in the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS).  Heretofore, CFIUS has been a notorious rubber-stamp even for transactions involving deeply problematic foreigners, as long as they bring cash.  Incredibly, the Bush Administration is reportedly poised to adopt implementing regulations that will effectively gut this legislation – and compound CFIUS’ past, toothless oversight.

A Democratic-led Congress returns to work this week.  In 2006, its leaders promised that, if given a chance to run Capitol Hill again, they would restore the constitutionally mandated concept of checks-and-balances.  Arguably, the practice of that principle of divided government has never been more needed than with respect to the all-too-prevalent, "What, me worry?" attitude in Washington about the true nature, reliability and ulterior motives of our "friends" in the Persian Gulf.

How not to help “moderates”

According to the commander of Military Intelligence, Maj.-Gen. Amos Yadlin, Israel’s raid in Syria on September 6 against what was reportedly a North Korean-supplied nuclear installation in eastern Syria restored Israel’s deterrent posture which was so weakened in last summer’s war in Lebanon.

Yet as the execution of anti-Syrian Lebanese parliamentarian Antoine Ghanem in a Christian suburb of Beirut on Wednesday indicated, Israel’s successful raid did not derail Syria’s and Iran’s pursuit of their strategic goals. Those goals involve achieving regional domination through their proxies in Lebanon as well as in Iraq and the Palestinian Authority.

In Iraq, the Americans pursue a policy of military confrontation against Shi’ite and Sunni forces that are supported and directed by Iran and Syria. In contrast, in Lebanon and the PA, the Americans and the Israelis have avoided decisive confrontations, opting instead to advance a diplomatic course aimed at bringing about the political defeat of Iranian and Syrian proxies. In Lebanon this involves supporting Prime Minister Fuad Siniora’s government against Hizbullah. In the PA it involves supporting Fatah against Hamas.

It is still too early to know how the American strategy of military confrontation against Iranian and Syrian proxies in Iraq will pan out. But it is already clear that the American-Israeli strategy for contending with Lebanon and the PA has failed.

Ghanem was a member of the Christian-Phalange party. He had announced his intention to run in the presidential elections that will take place next week in the Lebanese Parliament. With his assassination, the Syrians and Iranians effectively completed their campaign of murder and intimidation aimed at anti-Syrian Lebanese politicians.

With Ghanem out of the picture, the anti-Syrian forces lost the parliamentary majority of 72 out of 128 seats that they won in the 2005 general elections. Today, the anti-Syrian coalition has only 64 sure votes. A presidential candidate needs a 65 vote majority to be elected. Now the pro-Syrian forces have the ability to force their presidential candidate on the country.

Led by Hizbullah, the pro-Syrian parliamentary bloc demands that a "compromise" candidate who will bring "national unity" be elected to the presidency next week. Their demand is openly supported by France, the UN and Saudi Arabia. The Americans have not weighed in on the issue and so it can be assumed that they, too, support it.

Although the demand for "compromise" and "unity" sounds like a call for fairness and even stability, just the opposite is the case. In the Lebanese context, "compromise" and "unity" can only serve to bring about the election of yet another Syrian and Iranian puppet to the presidency. Like outgoing President Emile Lahoud, such a leader will work to prevent Lebanon from extricating itself from Iranian and Syrian influence and control.

That the inclusion of pro-Syrian and Iranian elements in the Lebanese government renders the government, regardless of its members’ actual desires, an effective tool of Syria and Iran was made clear in last summer’s war. During the war, Hizbullah’s membership in the Siniora government worked to transform the Siniora government into a mouthpiece of Hizbullah and, through it, of Iran and Syria.

Many had hoped that Hizbullah’s entry into Lebanese politics would signal its integration into Lebanese society and force its leaders to dismantle Hizbullah’s military force. But the opposite occurred. Hizbullah’s entry into Lebanese politics – and into the Siniora government – consolidated its position as a Syrian-Iranian state within the state in Lebanon. Rather than distance itself from Hizbullah after Hizbullah launched its war against Israel, the Siniora government actively assisted it both diplomatically and militarily. With Hizbullah in the government, the Lebanese military openly assisted its forces in attacking Israel and IDF troops.

Hizbullah used its governmental power to increase its influence over the Lebanese military. With Shi’ites comprising 40 percent of the Lebanese army and with army commander Gen. Michel Suleiman being touted by pro-Syrian forces as a "compromise" candidate for the presidency, it is impossible to trust the Lebanese army’s loyalty to the elected government. Indeed, since the war, the Lebanese army has enabled Hizbullah to reassert its control over southern Lebanon and has turned a blind eye to massive arms shipments to Hizbullah coming across the Syrian border.

During last summer’s war, in a bid to protect the ostensibly pro-Western Siniora government, the US, France and the UN pressured Israel not to attack Lebanese infrastructures. By so acting, the US, France and the UN ignored the actual status of the government. While it talked the anti-Syria talk, it walked the Hizbullah walk.

Siniora’s inability or unwillingness to confront Hizbullah and to end its status as an independent political and military force in Lebanon engendered a situation where, through their support for Lebanon’s "unity" government, the US, France and the UN effectively protected Hizbullah and preserved its ability to maintain its independent position in Lebanon as a Syrian and Iranian proxy against Israel. Since the cease-fire went into effect last August, that protection has been maintained by UNIFIL forces stationed along the border with Israel.

Last October, Iran and Syria determined that Hizbullah had nothing more to gain from remaining in the government and so they ordered it to resign. Ever since, they have worked steadily to overthrow the government by politically paralyzing it in Parliament and, of course, by assassinating its supporters. At the same time, they have poured arms and cash on Hizbullah and ordered it to expand its territorial control north of the Litani River, while enacting an ethnic cleansing of southern Lebanon by preventing Christians who fled their villages during the war from returning home.

Commentators warn that if the Lebanese Parliament does not elect a pro-Syrian presidential candidate next week, then Lahoud is liable to call general elections. Those elections, in turn, are liable to give rise to a situation where two separate governments operate in competition. That, we are warned, will almost certainly foment a new civil war.

But given the fact that Hizbullah together with Iran and Syria already wield enormous power over the Lebanese army, it could be reasonably argued that a renewed civil war is the least bad option. The more likely option – that Iran and Syria will consolidate their domination of Lebanon – would be far more destabilizing for the region and for Lebanon itself.

The fact of the matter is that the West’s unconditional support for the anti-Syrian forces in Lebanon has always been problematic. Even if Hizbullah had not entered the government, Siniora and his colleagues never had sufficient political or military will or power to fight Iran, Hizbullah and Syria effectively. Indeed, many members of the anti-Syrian coalition are anything but pro-Western.

Aside from the Siniora government’s inherent inability to assert its control over the entire country by defeating Hizbullah and its sponsors, the government’s regional supporters have never been interested in a confrontation with Hizbullah or Iran and Syria. Specifically, the Saudi government, which acts as the Siniora government’s primary supporter in the Arab world, has consistently encouraged it to reach an accommodation with Hizbullah rather than fight it. When the Saudi view is contrasted with the consistent Iranian and Syrian goal of dominating Lebanon through Hizbullah, it is clear that the political victory of the anti-Syrian and Iranian forces in 2005 was insufficient to defeat Hizbullah or free Lebanon from the influence of Syria and Iran. It is, after all, impossible to accommodate an opponent charged with destroying you.

The situation in the PA is strikingly similar to that in Lebanon. But it is also far more problematic. As in the case of the contest between Hizbullah and the Siniora government in Lebanon, so in the PA, the US, Israel and the West in general have decided to support Fatah in its contest against the Iranian and Syrian proxy Hamas.

Militarily, the desire to "strengthen" Fatah has led to a situation where Israel has almost completely stopped its operations against Fatah terror cells. Furthermore, it has abstained from taking action against Hamas’s new army in Gaza, lest an Israeli offensive somehow weaken Fatah.

Politically, Israel and the US are bending over backwards to appease Fatah in the hope that doing so will strengthen it against Hamas. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived in Israel on Wednesday to advance the peace process with Fatah. En route to Israel, Rice told reporters, "We can’t simply continue to say we want a two-state solution. We’ve got to start to move toward one."

For its part, the Olmert-Barak-Livni government already made clear through official statements and leaks that it is ready to withdraw from Judea and Samaria and to partition Jerusalem and surrender the Temple Mount.

The reason that the situation in the PA is worse than the situation in Lebanon is because Fatah is not analogous to the Siniora government. For all its weaknesses, the Siniora government truly seeks Syrian and Iranian disengagement from the country. The same cannot be said of Fatah. As the fighting this week between Fatah terrorists and the IDF in Nablus indicates, far from objecting to terrorism and the war against Israel, Fatah fights side by side with Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Consequently, the massive concessions that the Olmert-Barak-Livni government is now offering Fatah will redound directly to Hamas’s (and Iranian and Syrian) benefit. This will be the case both if Israel actually implements those concessions and if they are merely offered formally at Rice’s summit in November.

Since Hizbullah quit the Siniora government in October, the Lebanese leadership has rejected all of Hizbullah’s demands for "unity." In contrast, both before and since Hamas took over Gaza in June, Fatah has sought to join a Hamas-dominated "unity" government. And while in Lebanon, Iran and Syria actively undermine Siniora and his colleagues, in the PA, they assist both Hamas and Fatah. Both serve Iran’s and Syria’s purpose of expanding and consolidating their control over Gaza, Judea and Samaria.

In their handling of the situations in Lebanon and the PA, the US and Israeli governments are implementing a strategy predicated on their refusal to acknowledge the nature and significance of regional power struggles in these theaters both for the West and for the Syrians and Iranians. As is the case in Iraq, so in the cases of Lebanon and the PA, the possibility of forming a "moderate" government will only materialize after the Lebanese and Palestinian Iranian and Syrian proxies – Hizbullah, Hamas, Fatah and Islamic Jihad – are defeated.

Moreover, in spite of the IDF’s bravado, as long as these proxy forces continue to exist and augment their powers, and as long as the Syrian and Iranian regimes remain in power, no single military operation – no matter how successful – can rebuild Israel’s deterrent strength or ensure its security.